I am continuously amazed at how we can take something so simple and make it monumentally difficult and confusing and the writer of the Scripture passage we heard this morning is no different.  The Gospel of John lays out the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ. Of all the Gospel writers this is John’s singular focus and is why this Gospel is often referred to as the Spiritual Gospel. For John, the incarnation of God in Jesus happens throughout his entire life from his birth, to his miracles, to his ministry, and even his death and resurrection.  For John, and therefore for us, we cannot separate these realities, and we need to continually remember that Jesus was both human and divine.

Jesus starts us off by telling us that his father, God, has loved him and therefore he loves those who were listening and by extension us as followers of Jesus.  He says that we are to abide in his love as he has abided in God’s love. What does it mean to abide in something?

We are told that we have to abide by the rules and regulations of the various organizations and societies we belong too. So we follow, we obey, we conform to these rules and regulations, and by doing so, we keep the order of the organization or group. But to abide in God’s love goes a little deeper than that. Yes, we follow, obey, and conform to God’s love but we also dwell in God’s love, we hang around, we sit with it, it becomes a part of us. We do not conform God’s love to fit us; we conform ourselves to God’s love. It is a deep sense of feeling that only comes over time.

Jesus then goes on to tell us how we will abide in his, Jesus’ love, and consequently God’s love; we do this by keeping his, Jesus’ commandments just as Jesus has kept God’s commandments.  Now, just so there is no confusion Jesus tells us what his commandment is, also keep in mind that due to our Trinitarian theology, Jesus is God, Jesus commandment is to “love one another as I have loved you.” There it is, it is written right there, my commandment = “love one another as I have loved you.”

Many people struggle with this concept of loving as Jesus has loved us.  You have heard me say before, and I will continue to say, that the love Jesus is speaking of is unconditional love and I come to this understanding by reading John 3:16, we all know it, God loves the world, notice the passage does not say the Christian world, those who believe in him world, the Middle Eastern World, the passage simply says God loved the world, the whole world. Because he loved the world and desired that all be reconciled to him, he sent Jesus, not to judge, but to show us the way. This is a difficult concept and hard to understand.

This love concept of Jesus is all about inclusion but we have taken this to mean we can exclude some folks, we can judge them no longer worthy of God’s love, and we can cast them out. It has become fashionable for some to believe they have the authority to decide who gets God’s love and who does not and for those folks I simply will say, you need to read and understand this passage we heard this very morning and if you desire to abide in God’s love then you need to obey his commandments and that is, “to love one another as I have loved you.” Without conditions.

I will admit that it is difficult to love those we have judged not worthy of our love. It is even more difficult to love those who do not love us back or who are our “enemies,” but the bottom line is we have no other choice if we hope to abide in God’s love. The very act of thinking we are doing God’s will by casting people out of God’s love as in fact cast us out, although I believe that God continues to love us no matter what we do. We have placed such a narrow definition of who deserves God’s love and who does not want that often we exclude ourselves.

Back in the 1970’s Coca-Cola introduced a commercial around the season of Christmas. The commercial began with a shot of a single candle burning against a dark background. The shot fades to a woman who begins to sing about buying the world a home and furnishing it with love. As the song continues the focus shifts to different people of different races, an Asian woman a black man. The shot widens, and we get a glimpse of a chorus of people, of all races and nationalities all sitting and singing together about bringing love into the world. The song goes on to say that all of these folks would like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Harmony requires different parts to make it work. If everyone sang the same note, we would all sound the same, but if we sing different, complementary notes, a beautiful melody will be born. The idea is we celebrate the diversity because when brought together we produce something beautiful.  Oh, and we have to buy a coke as well. In other words, we love everyone.

Jesus then goes on to say that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for a friend. Now, this has been interpreted in many different ways over the years, but I would like us to focus on the spiritual aspects for just a moment.

Right after Jesus says that the most excellent show of love to lay down one’s life for a friend, Jesus says, “You are my friends,” and we all know that Jesus lays down his life for us. But he says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And what is that?  Se previous verse, “love one another.” So if we love one another, we are Jesus’ friends, and it is us that he is laying down his life for. But, it goes deeper than that.

If we follow the example of Jesus, and that is the entire point of the Gospel, then we have to lay down our lives as well for a friend, now, keeping this on the spiritual plane, we are to lay down our lives for Jesus. We are to die to self, to self-desire, to self-interest, to using people as objects to get what we want, we have to die to “looking out for number one” and focus on the greater whole of humanity. We are to take up one’s cross and follow him. We have to die so we can live. We have to die to conform our lives to that of Christ.  Too often today we try and conform Christ’s life to us, but the way is narrow, many are called, but few are chosen.

In the end, Jesus reminds us that we did not choose him he chose us and he has appointed us to go and bear fruit, not for our own glory, but for the glory of God. Nothing Jesus did was for his own glory but always brought glory to God.

And he finishes off with, “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” That is it, that is all we have to do, love others unconditionally. That’s the word, and that is the example. Now go, and do.

“I am the vine, and you are the branches.” This is another of the great “I am” statement by Jesus. Last week Jesus told us he was the shepherd and we are his sheep. We discovered that the sheep know the shepherd’s voice and will only go where the shepherd has gone before out of fear of what lies ahead, and we are reminded that we have to place our trust in God all along the journey of our life.

A good preacher and teacher will use illustrations that the people hearing the sermon or lesson will understand. Jesus uses examples for the lives of the people listening to him, and so he uses a lot of illustrations around fishing, sheep herding, and now gardening or vine growing. Growing anything that to produce the maximum yield is difficult in the best of circumstances, and today we get gardening tips from Jesus, the master grower. The soil conditions need to be right, there needs be to the right amount of water, too much and the plant will drown, not enough and the plant will dry up. Conditions need to be perfect.

Jesus uses the illustration of the vine, the vine grower, and the branches of the vine. Jesus is apparently the vine as he says so in the passage.  God is the vine grower and we, of course, are the branches. There is an assumption that the soil is perfect since God is the grower God would have already prepared the ground.

An excellent vine grower knows that the best grapes are produced closest to the central stalk on the vine. The best fruit is produced there because that is where the nutrients are the richest. The further away from the central stem the lesser the yield and taste. With careful pruning, the vines are made to produce the best fruit possible but, if the vine grower prunes too much it will destroy the plant. So caution is always needed.

I am not the best gardener in the world.  I like the idea of gardening and often think of myself as the victory gardener, but that is often not the case. I prepare the soil, select the appropriate plants for my area, stick them in the ground, and hope they produce. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t, but that is farming. But I learned a valuable lesson a few years ago regarding tomato plants; they have to be pruned to produce the best yield. Sure, one can let them grow wild, and they will provide, but for the best return one needs to take the pruning shears to the plant.

Okay, but what does this have to do with our spiritual life?  Jesus was not making a Saturday afternoon gardening show after all, and he was not telling them anything that they did not already know. But, he was using the illustration of the vine to point us in an essential direction regarding our spiritual life.

As we have already established, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. We are commanded in the Gospel to go and make disciples. The gospel command is not to go and create programs or sit and wait for people to come to you. No, the gospel command is to GO! Action, we have to do something. But we cannot make disciples until we are disciples right?

So if Jesus is the vine and we are the branches, and we want to produce the best fruit we have to stay close to the central stem of the vine meaning Jesus. If we desire a fruitful spiritual life then the closer we are to Jesus the better off we will be. So we have to spend time every day, with Jesus. It does not matter how much time we spend as long as that time is quality time and produces fruit. Daily scripture reading, meditation, and prayer are the best ways to make this happen in our daily lives. I get that we are busy but we make space for all sorts of things that we find necessary in our lives, and this is very important.

But today’s gospel also speaks of pruning the vine and throwing those branches into the fire. Now, like many other passages of scripture, this one has been used to point to other and call them the withering vine and saying that they will be cast into the fire.  Well, I guess that is one way of looking at it, but I want us to look at it from a personal perspective keeping in mind that to make disciples we first have to be disciples.

So the pruning Jesus is speaking of is not other people, although that can be part of it, it is all of those things that prevent us from having a fruitful spiritual life, all of those distractions that call us in another direction and pull us further and further away from the central stem of our spiritual life. These are the things that we need to prune out of our lives, and yes, sometimes those things are people.

In last week’s sermon, I spoke of the sheep, us, knowing and understanding the shepherd’s voice. I mentioned that in all of the craziness of the world a sheep could distinguish between their shepherd’s voice and another shepherd’s voice and they know who to follow. But I also mentioned that sometimes, if the sheep is sick, they will stray off and follow another voice that is not their shepherd’s voice. The same is true in this illustration today.

The world is pulling us in many different directions, and there are so many voices all vying for our attention. They give us advice and tell us what we should and should not believe. Those voices want us to exclude others from the vine, or the heard because they are different then we are or think differently then we do. Sometimes those voices make us afraid of the other and draw us away rather than towards, and it is up to us to know the genuine voice over the false voice, and that happens when we stay close to the central stem, Jesus, and pray for guidance.

I have a rather extensive collection of bibles. English language Bibles, Romanian language bibles, Gaelic, Scots, Russian, and I even have one in Sanskrit. I have study bibles with extensive footnotes that help me drill down on a verse, and I have the Good News for Modern Man version for those days when I just want to read. But some of my favorite bibles are the ones with the red letters in them, you know, the red letters are the passage when Jesus speaks, and the editor of that particular version put those verses in red, so they stand out.

Those are the actual words that Jesus spoke, and there are a lot of them, and I tend to gravitate to those words, not the words about the words that Jesus spoke but the actual words. In historical language, this is what is called a primary source, the words right from Jesus. I guess I would consider myself a Red Letter Christian and only focus on what Jesus has said, the essentials of the faith if you will. When I encounter a contradiction in Scripture, and there are many, my default is to head to the red letters and see what Jesus has said about it. Why do I mention all of this? Because in the world of competing voices the red letters are the voice we need to hear, and we need to understand, all of the others need to be pruned off the vine. When we hear something that calls us away from the red letters, prune it off the vine and throw it in the fine.

In the end, if we stay close to Jesus we will produce the most fruitful spiritual life, and we will be fed with love, joy, and peace that we can bring to the whole world and that is the goal.

One of my first jobs after joining the community at Glastonbury Abbey was to work with the guys that cared for the animals at the Abbey. There were not as many animals at that time as there had been and most of them were strays that one person or another had dropped off over the years. Nevertheless, the animals needed caring for. There were some ducks and geese who were very nasty, and there were sheep and one goat. I used to walk the goat on a leash around the Abbey property.

I hated working with the ducks and geese, they always tried to bite me, so I worked mostly with the sheep and the one goat. Sheep are skittish at first if they do not know you but after you have worked with them the warm up to you. Our small flock of sheep was dependent upon us for everything. We did not have a significant pasture for them, and the pen they were in was rather sparse on grass for them to eat so we had to feed them each day, twice a day, rain, shine, snow, sleet, and the rest. I learned a lot working with sheep.

This Sunday is the Sunday we call Good Shepherd Sunday. All of the Scripture readings from the lectionary, including the Gospel passage we heard this morning, have this theme of the Good Shepherd. But, this passage is not always what it seems at first glance.

Show of hands, how many of you work as shepherds? How many of you know someone who works as a shepherd? How many of you have ever really been around sheep for an extended period? As I figured, not many of us have so the imagery of the shepherd and sheep is somewhat lost on us. Perhaps we have an idealized image of rolling fields and puffy white sheep scattered about and the shepherd standing high on a hill watching over them. As pretty as that picture might be it is not reality.

The life of a shepherd was anything but ideal. It was dangerous, risky, and menial. Shepherds were rough around the edges, spending most of their time in the fields rather than in polite society. When Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd.” This would have been an affront to the religious elite and educated. The claim he was making had an edge to it. If we were to put this in modern day language, we might hear Jesus say, “I am the good migrant worker.”

But, as Jesus usually does, he takes things a little bit further. In this passage, we hear Jesus speak of the false shepherds, the hired hands that did not care for the sheep but ran away at the first sign of trouble. In this statement, we hear echoes of the Old Testament Prophets who spoke out against the religious leaders who were neglecting their people. This image of the shepherd is meant to remind us that God is chiefly concerned with those at risk, and those who are vulnerable. As I learned, sheep are lost without constant, vigilant care by their shepherd.

So if Jesus is the shepherd, we must be the sheep.  How do you feel about being called sheep?

There is a myth that sheep are stupid this is anything but the truth. It seems this myth of sheep being stupid was started by cattle ranchers.  Cattle are herded from the back. The cowboys, on horseback, ride behind the cows pushing them forward. Other cowboys ride alongside to keep the stragglers in line. Sheep are herded from the front.  You can stand behind sheep and make noise, and all they will do is turn around and run behind you. Sheep will not go anywhere that someone else – their true shepherd- has not already gone. The shepherd is out in front of the sheep showing them that everything will be okay and that there is nothing there that is going to harm them. Cattle, on the other hand, will walk right off a cliff if the cowboy pushed them in that direction, so who is the stupid one?

In her sermon, “The Voice of the Shepherd,” Barbara Brown Taylor says that “Sheep seem to consider their shepherds part of the family, and the relationship grows up between the two is quite exclusive. They develop a language of their own that outsiders are not privy to.”

The shepherd’s voice is critical in the relationship. Jesus says, “I know my own and my own know me.” Not only that but Jesus gives his life for the sheep. The shepherd intentionally becomes the sacrificial lamb. But Jesus makes it clear that he is doing this willingly.

But the message today gives us hope. Sometimes we go astray, just like sheep do. Sheep that are ill might follow the voice of a stranger. Sheep wander off and fall in ravines and get caught in all sorts of things. There are many voices that are trying to get our attention, and many distractions lure us from the right path. But Jesus promises that he will never let us go, and his voice will bring us back. We belong to him. This is the word of assurance to us that in life’s struggles, and they will come, we have to remain faithful. In the choices that we make each day we practice our faith by saying yes to some voices and saying no to others. Jesus is right there, going before us, to lead us.

Jesus seeks out the lost, those in need of rescue, the often forgotten in our society. Those lowly shepherds, keeping watch over their flocks by night, were the first to hear the good news of the birth of the savior. The relationship between the sheep and the shepherd is based on what the shepherd does and not on what the sheep do. It’s all about who the shepherd is rather than who they are. The sheep feel secure just to hear the shepherd’s voice. Our job is to let that voice speak through us as we reach out an encounter the lost and hurting along the way.

I always feel sorry for Thomas. I mean, the poor guy asked an honest question, and he raised some doubts, and he gets tagged with the name Doubting Thomas. This man of great faith brought the message of Jesus Christ to India, but he will always be remembered as the one who doubted that Jesus appeared. But Thomas you are not alone.

I have long been leery of Christians who seem to have it all together. They walk around smiling all the time as if their belief in Jesus has taken away all of their problems. What they are afraid to show people is that behind that smile they are filled with doubt and uncertainty. We have been brainwashed into thinking that when we “accept Jesus into our hearts” all of our doubts and problems will simply vanish. That when we are “washed in the blood” all the crap in our lives gets washed away. That just is not the truth, and I believe, it is doing tremendous harm to the Body of Christ.

When we have this belief, the struggle becomes worse, and we feel that if we speak of the struggle then somehow the “fix” did not happen.  Somehow my faith is not strong enough, and I am weak. And more often than not they quietly fade away from the congregation because they are so filled with shame at their doubts they are afraid to ask for help.

So the solution is we have raised generations of fake Christians that walk around like the department store mannequins smiling all the time. We have to keep the façade that everything is okay because if we let a crack show, then the truth will be revealed. And that just cannot happen.

What this story of Thomas highlights is that we should ask questions and not just believe it because someone told you so. It is okay to have doubts, and it is okay not to understand. What’s not okay is to not seek those answers.

Not to a party pooper but even Jesus had doubts, yes, you heard me right, Jesus had doubts.

The night he was arrested, Jesus was in the garden praying. Scripture tells us that so profound were his prayers that drops of blood came from his forehead. There are few instances in Scripture that we see that human side of Jesus and this is one of them. Jesus knew what was about to happen and he was scared, and he had doubts about it all.  He prayed that God would remove this “cup” this pain and agony that he was about to endure. But, in the end, he submits, just as Thomas does, to the will of God.

Doubts and skepticism are all a natural part of the faith journey, and I would argue an essential part of that journey. Part of the Christian walk is the struggle and to hide that is not be your genuine self. I struggle with my faith every day, and it is in the struggle the Dark Wood as Dante called it, where we come into contact with the Holy.

If I had to point to one thing, and only one thing, that is wrong with the modern church is that we are not authentically who we are supposed to be. Those of us who attend church on a regular basis sit in the seat every week, and we hide. We hide what is honestly going on in our lives and the struggle that we have.

Each week, during the congregational prayer time, I ask if there are any prayer requests from the congregation. Sometimes we hear the request for payers for so and so with health issues or traveling mercies for this one. But, we never get the request from someone, including myself, for help with the struggle.

My friends the struggle is real, and we must face the fact that the struggle is real. The journey is not easy, and there is no quick fix to problems and doubt. Jesus left us an example of prayer and fasting as well as work to alleviate the suffering of others. It is through authentically being yourself and working on our doubts and fears, which makes the journey a little more comfortable. Part of that walk is an understanding of humility, and through humility, we can be like Thomas and have doubts and have fears.  God does not call the equipped; God equips the called.