Easter 5

Back when I lived in Fredonia, I knew several grape farmers.  Believe it or not, far Western New York, in a strip running close to Lake Erie, is grape-growing country.  But it’s not for the faint of heart.  The weather, of course, can wreak havoc with the vines.  Too much rain (and snow) and the brix (that is, the sugar content) of the grapes will go askew.  You need just the right amount of dry and wet weather during the season in order to produce great grapes.

So if you want to make wine, you have to have grapes with the right sugar content. But there are other challenges facing winemakers as well. One of those challenges is canopy management.

This topic is germane to any discussion of today’s Gospel from John. Jesus said, “He [the Gardener] cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes” (John 15:2 NIV). That’s canopy management.

Here’s the problem canopy management addresses: runaway growth. Vines left to themselves will sprawl out all over the place and produce huge canopies of shoots, leaves and branches, and unless that canopy is controlled, the vine won’t yield much fruit or topshelf grapes.

It’s a counter-intuitive activity, the cutting back of the canopy, because all the greenery, all those leaves, suggests that what you’ve got here is a very healthy vine. In fact, it’s all show and no tell.

Jesus is afraid that the disciples might face this same problem. He wasn’t interested in showy disciples any more than he is interested in showy churches and showy Christians today. What he is interested in is fruit – and not just fruit – excellent fruit.

For example, pick up a glass of California Sauvignon Blanc, and after sniffing the bouquet, swirling it around in the glass, examining the claret and performing other tests that help you to effect your best Frasier Crane impression, take a sip. Daniel Sogg, of Wine Spectator, says that if you catch a flavor “reminiscent of onion skin and jalapeño peppers,” you’ve just encountered the problem of canopy management.

A vine with a huge canopy may be looking good, but it isn’t doing any good.

It reminds one of the old BBC comedy, Keeping Up Appearances. Here, a matronly woman, Hyacinth Bucket (or Bouquet, as she likes to pronounce it), has but one concern in life, and that is to maintain the illusion that she is well-bred and in touch with the upper crusts of British society and the lower layers of nobility.

That’s why, when her neighbor drives Hyacinth to her sister’s house, she instructs her neighbor to park the car in front of a well appointed home on one street. Then, after asserting it is her sister’s home, she leaves her neighbor in the car, dashes to the door, then ducks around to the side, climbs a six-foot brick wall in her dress, heels, flowered hat and all, falls to the ground, brushes herself off and marches to her sister’s actual abode – a rundown tenement building the next street over.

Hyacinth is concerned about her “canopy,” the outward show.

The image of the vine is used several times in Scripture as a metaphor for the relationship between God and God’s people. Israel is described as the “vineyard of the Lord Almighty” in Isaiah 5, and Jesus picks up this image in John 15 in describing his relationship to his disciples. A grapevine is really a community – many individual branches interconnected and intertwined, but all designed for the sole purpose of bearing fruit.

While the individual branches are important, it’s the collective quality of the whole crop that determines whether the wine will be labeled as excellent, mediocre or simply sold by the box.

God, like any good winemaker, understands the need to control the canopy. The goal of canopy control is threefold:

First, you want to develop a vine structure that makes picking and disease control relatively easy. With a huge covering of branches and large leaves, it is difficult to see the fruit, let alone pick it.

Herein lies a problem for the church and all of us. Sometimes the external paraphernalia, rules, accoutrements of the church get in the way – not of growing the fruit – but of picking it. We used to call this legalism. Our conventions and traditions sometimes keep the world from seeing the fruit, and seeing no fruit it is therefore unable to pick the fruit that it cannot see.

We grow under the watchful eye of the community around us. The world is full of people searching for the truth, for a sense of meaning for their lives. And we have the Good News. The fruit is hanging lush from our branches. But we tend to hide it behind the very showy and meaningless appearances of nonessential issues. Jesus called it, using another metaphor, “hiding our light under a bushel basket.”

The church has fine baskets. But the world doesn’t need baskets; it needs light. The world doesn’t need shoots, leaves and branches; it needs fruit.

Are we going to allow God to pare back the canopy, to let our fruit be visible to the world walking by?

Next, you want to regulate the size and quality of the fruit. Wine expert Daniel Sogg tells us that “a huge crop buried under a dense thicket of vegetation translates into lousy wine.” God is concerned about the appellation of the wine. He wants a superior product.

The mantra of the church for over a generation has been “church growth.” Notice that Jesus doesn’t call the vine to growth, he calls it to fruit. Our mantra ought to be “church fruit.” When God takes the pruning shears to your life, it’s not an issue of whether you are growing, but of what you are growing. Of course there will be some fruit, but the larger issue is the quality of the fruit you are bearing. A sour grape is fruit, but it’s still sour.

Finally, the aim of canopy control is to strike a balance between growing leaves and growing fruit. Without shoots, leaves and branches, you can’t have fruit. We are not people without a life – and it is within that well-disciplined life that the fruit grows. God wants us to have a life. He tells us not only to get a life, but to get “an abundant life.” But it must be a life under control, a life that is best suited to render the fruit of the Spirit.

What to do? Jesus says that we must “abide” in him. He says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” God is the one who watches over the whole process. But we must abide in him. And if we go it alone, we’ll dry up, become so much dead wood, and we’ll strangle the life out of those around us. Sogg, the wine man, concludes that with proper canopy control, a winemaker is able to produce a wine that is a “friend to food.”

What Jesus is saying to his disciples is that with proper canopy control, they can produce fruit that is a “friend to faith.” How is your canopy management?