I want to make both a confession and an apology. I’m going to be a little more abstract in my preaching than I usually am, but I’ve struggled with this text and I think it’s the appropriate thing so I hope you will bear with me.

It has often been said that in Europe they developed many philosophies and they continue to do so, but that in the United States we only developed one philosophy. Does anyone know what that philosophy is? Pragmatism. And what that means is, that we Americans have to get from here to there and we find the most efficient and quick way to do it and then we do it. It means that things either make sense to us, or they don’t, and we are not about to tolerate fools very easily. One of the strengths of our culture is that flexibility that comes with that kind of pragmatic view of life. And so it should not surprise us, that when we look at the history of religion in this country that it too has been marked by a heavy sense of that pragmatism, and that sense of discovering God in ways that make sense and when it doesn’t, to look at people like they might be crazy. Now I want you to hold onto that thought because I have to move over to something else for a moment.

 I read an article the other week about the controversy that is taking place in the Catholic Church over the sex scandals that we hear about on a daily basis. Now I want to say to you that I have a deep respect for the Catholic Church, and there are many good things about it. But this recent sex scandal has shown weaknesses in the Catholic Church that are much broader than that one narrow problem. As a matter of fact most people that have really thought the problems through of what the Catholic church is facing, will tell you that in many ways there is a mind set within that huge denomination that has been attributable, not only to that problem, but to the fact that in the past two decades on a yearly basis nearly one million Americans are leaving that church because they feel so upset over the way the church handles things. What might be some of those things that the Catholic Church struggles with that run counter to some things that we Americans just take for granted in our view of how the world is? Well, for hundreds of years the assumption of many religious institutions has been that the only way we can get through to God was through their structure and their hierarchy.  Unless you were to go through their mediators, you could never find or discover God in your own life. By the way, that is not just a problem with the Catholic Church; that is a problem in many places. And I would say that even we, as broad minded Methodists, from time to time, might assume that God is truly Methodist and may even be John Wesley himself. That may not be so; I want to point that out to you. The article went on to say that one of the difficulties facing the Catholic church is that we are looking at third, fourth and fifth generation Catholics, who are truly as American as they are Catholic, and that they too buy into what is referred to as, in a technical term, volunteerism, but I wont get into that, but essentially that we have the right of conscious to associate with whom we will and not associate with whom we don’t want to and there is no human authority outside out lives that can force us to do that. You notice much of the controversy over what has happened in the sex scandal is a hierarchy that may not be as American as it is worldwide. That hierarchy continues to try to speak of the authority of the church as resting in the hands of those far removed from the events that this scandal has brought. And a continued desire to see the world as it was in the Middle Ages that have passed away a long time ago.

Now in the 1600’s there were many people who pulled and tugged against that. And with the great reformation that occurred in that time, one of the hallmarks and foundations of that reformation is the notion of the priesthood of all believers. And the cornerstone of that belief system was that you and I have the responsibility and the freedom to open our hearts totally to God or not to God at all. And that there is no one that stands between you and God. You are as much a priest as the people who wear funny robes like me. Now what I want to say is that we are fickle about that as Americans. We have been given the freedom and we have our own free will, but you know that is an awful lot of responsibility. It might be nice if we could lean on somebody else to tell us what to believe and what to think and maybe to be our direct connection with God. I think I told you the first Sunday that I was here, that of all the people in this church you shouldn’t trust me. Even though I am your senior pastor, I get paid to be a Christian. The rest of you have to do it on your own. And the point I want to make to you is that the freedom that we live both as Christians and as Americans demands not only that we get to do what we please, but that we take responsibility for that freedom in our lives. We live in a culture that has become so obsessed with the privileges that are in freedom that we often forget the responsibility that needs to be balanced with that freedom. And by the way, it’s not just the Catholic Church but every religious institution, even ours, that wants that institution to be so important in life to others so that maybe people can control other people.  It needs to be careful that it never comes to the place where it steps between God and peoples direct relationship with God.

 Now I want to get back to Johns text. John is the most philosophical of the gospels, written around 110 AD. It was written almost three generations after the first generation of Christians. There had been a lot of time of reflection and musing about who Jesus was. We remember that great passage in the beginning of the Bible: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. That is what was known as the pre-Christ. I won’t get into that and bore you with it. My second most favorite passage was the one we read today. My favorite by the way was the story of the woman at the well, and that is another sermon for another time. But this powerful metaphor speaks directly to where our religious faith is. And it speaks eloquently of what we see in American religion when it’s at its best. Jesus says I am the vine and you are the branches. We live in a society where choices become more and more varied and where our ability to make those choices is sometimes maddening. You don’t even want to go to a restaurant that has 50 choices. You just want someone to throw food in front of you sometimes… right? That is the world that we live in. And we see people in the religious world as well making choices about what makes sense, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I’m not going to be condemning but what I’m going to say is that often that can become confusing. If we rely back on that notion of free will that is so powerful in American culture and the pragmatism, which drives us, and in the times is the best and worst part of who we are. What we notice is several things from this passage that make sense to us. Jesus reminds us of the intimacy that we need to have with God and he says he has shown us the Way. We see this in his life, his preaching, his teaching, his healing, and his feeding. We see some way that Jesus was trying to tell people of the kingdom of God of which they were being called in his day to live, reflected in his life and in his death and in his resurrection. We see the hope of a new life even against the greatest of human anguish and tragedy that Jesus spoke to, that he might redeem us. And he reminds us of this connection as a vine and branches that we need in our lives to be sustained. We know innately that we as humans need the sacred in our lives. And the gospel of John warns us that if we do not live connected as well to the sacred as we need to and do not bear fruit, anyone will tell you the painful pruning that their life is when that happens. But if we find ourselves connected with God, and with the Christian faith that is clearly through the redemptive love of Jesus then we will see the fruits of our faith.

 Now let me tell you how this next batch of pragmatism will be in America. If the fruit is there, we know that we are connected. Look at your life. Is it a life that bears the fruit of gratitude for what God has done for you? Is it a life that reflects self-giving love to others and a proper love of ones self? Is it a life that focuses on the sacred and on that which God would have you do? Or is it one that focuses instead on what you would have your own life to be. As we look at our life as a family of God within this congregation we must also ask ourselves how well is the vine and the branch connected? What are the fruits of our lives as a congregation? Are we bearing the fruits of God’s redemptive love in a kingdom that is in the here and now? And do we need to continue to challenge ourselves against that which would say to us that the authority of how God tells us what to do does not come from some human place. It comes directly from God and the responsibility that we have of insuring that we use the freedom that God has given us, not for ourselves but for God and God’s kingdom. I am the vine and you are the branches, Jesus has said. We seek to bear the fruits that the kingdom has given us.