Pruning for Better Quality Vintages

John 15: 1-8

Once upon a time, before I was a minister, before I moved to PA, before I went to seminary, before I even was a Christian, really, I worked in the Napa Valley as a winery cellar worker and tour guide. I attended school at Napa Valley College, and majored in enology. Enology is the biological and chemical science of fermentation, and as part of that program, there was a class in viticulture, the agricultural science of the growing of grapes. I still have many of the books I used for those classes, as well as gifts of books that friends have given me.

So it was with great interest that when I saw this particular scripture this week, al about the pruning of vines, I went and pulled out my old copy of the book General Viticulture, published by the University of California, 1974. Page 287 begins the chapter on pruning. Yes, the chapter. For 47 pages, plus two pages of notes at the end, you can read about how to prune fines if they stand independent of each other in the old world style, or whether they are tied to a stick and spaced out in regular even rows.

There is a lot of scientific proof that support the concept that the grapes you get depend a lot on the way you prune. If you go through a vineyard and cut too severely, you won’t get much fruit, but what you get will be very rich, because all of the grapes’ vigor will be concentrated into a few “units’ of growth. Conversely, if you don’t prune at all, the vine will send all of it’s energy into leaves, growing just enough blooms to propagate itself, which turn into grape berries, which then fall to the ground or get eaten by birds, and who will drop the seeds to grow where they are planted. This assures that the whole vine will continue to survive.

For the vine grower interested in a harvest of good fruit, a balance is needed. You want enough leaf cover to generate photosynthesis, and to protect the berries from birds, but you also want a reliable amount of grapes grown so you can make wine.

While this is a modern science, taught at the highest levels at schools around the world, the particulars debated over and over again, the general concept was known to ancient Greek philosophers, and it was known to Jesus. In verse two, when he says “every branch that bears fruit, he prunes to make bear more fruit”, he’s showing basic sound viticultural theory. And anyone who grows grapes outside their houses for jelly or to make homemade wine, this is not news to them either.

A good shoot produces good grapes because it has been trained, and because it receives good energy and growth from the leaves and the trunk of the vine, the roots of which can sometimes grow down 20-30 feet, if the soil bed is deep enough.

The image is pretty clear—you’ll know a good follower of Jesus by the fruit they produce. If they yield a good harvest year after year, they will be pruned and trained so as to continue to produce good fruit, year after year after year. They will prune away all of the deadwood, all of last years’ growth, and burn it, so that what is left will be set for success.

To abide in God, as Jesus says, is to be closely connected to the system of leaves and trunk that produce the sugar that allow the whole vine to exist and produce fruit. When one abides in God (Jesus refers to “me”, most of the time, but in John the sense of Jesus as God is the most strongly claimed), one receives all one needs to produce good fruit.

Now this is just a metaphor, of course, but it is a good one—the closer are with God, the more we will naturally resemble Jesus. The more we read the Bible, the more we pray, the more we are here with each other, it is like sugar that is generated by the leaves of a grapevine through photosynthesis. It is how fruit is produced.

Where the metaphor falls apart is that a vine cannot prune itself. A vine grower must come through and prune the vine for the vine to be good and healthy and to last over time. We do have the ability to improve ourselves, to choose how we will follow Christ, to discern where it is we are being led by God.

We also have the choice available to us whether we will even take the “sugar” that is made available. We choose whether we will make time for Bible study, for prayer, for time together as the people of God.

We live in a busy time. There are demands placed on us that we never placed on those of earlier ages. Specifically, those among us who are in the midst of the ministry of raising children, we are pulled so many different ways. There are so many more opportunities for kids today than there were when we were kids, but to take advantage of those opportunities, one has to decide between them and time with God.

No one is saying that the only way to follow God is to quit all extracurricular activities and only come to church. Remember, a good vine grower prunes for balance between leaf growth and fruit production, with an eye toward the longevity of the vine. And the environment in which we are planted is different than it was a generation ago. So a new balance must be struck, one in which our children can take advantage of all that is laid before them in this great and wonderful world, but God and the things that bring us close to God are still also at the center of our lives.

As parents, our primary job is to provide for the physical and emotional needs of our children. Proverbs says it this way “train them up in the way that they will go, so that when they are old, they will not depart from it”. We are doing no less than giving God; not to our children, but to our great grandkids through our children. And sports and music can be great tools with which we can do so, but it must always be done with an eye toward how they are being trained and pruned and fed, the goal always being what fruit they are producing.

It is often said that the best vintages of wine are those that started with superior fruit. You can make a bad wine from good grapes. You can’t make a good wine from bad grapes. It’s all in the fruit.

How good is your fruit? How well are you pruned?

The Lord is My Cowboy, I Shall Not Want

John 10:11-18


I am not very familiar with shepherds. The image of a shepherd doesn’t work for me. Born where I was born (Napa, CA), to parents who were where they were from (New Mexico), living where I have lived (Texas), reading the books that I have read, and living in a country that has idealized the cowboy, the image of livestock that primarily pop into my head are pictures of cattle. I’ve read my share of Louis L’Amour, and one of my favorite books of all time is Lonesome Dove. I think it’s probably the same for many of you. Sheep don’t enter into the picture much. I have only eaten Lamb a couple of times, and half of them I didn’t like. I don’t even wear much wool.

Cowboys got their image, the undying American icon, during a 30 year stretch in the late 1800’s when the railroads were growing, but had not yet spread into every nook and cranny of America. Cattle had to be sent to market, usually in Chicago, and driving the cows to Chicago seemed a little excessive. But you could drive them to Wichita, or to Topeka, and they could be loaded onto railcars and sent to Chicago. So the cattle drive was born. And the guys who were hired to help with the cattle became known as cowboys. You needed quite a few people to run cows, because you needed to surround the herd. Cows are an independent proposition—you needed a guy to lead, and set the path, guys who would line down the sides of the herd, and one poor guy to ride in the back, called riding “drag”, the dustiest and messiest place to ride in the whole drive. The guy back there may have been the youngest, or the one who was in trouble, or sometimes they rotated the position.

What seems to be the same between cowboys on cattle drives and shepherds is that the people who did the job were not seen as moral upstanding characters. In movies and books, cowboys would come to a town and shoot up the place, go into saloons and conduct business in them, and then move on to the next town. Shepherds spent most of their time away from towns, too, but not in the same way. They didn’t move around as wide a space as cowboys. It’s true that, as one commentator writes about this passage, “shepherds were rough around the edges, spending time in the fields rather than in polite society.” The same is true of cowboys.

Cowboys were generally not guys who had an education, or if they did, they hid it. The American West was not yet populated, and that meant it also had very few laws, very few people to enforce the laws, very few schools, very few churches, very few women, frankly. It was a perfect situation for a guy to disappear into. They then became cowboys because that was the job that was at hand.

Cowboys were among the first migrant workers, and just as we have societal issues and prejudices about migrant workers now, so did they then.

For Jesus to say “I am the Good Shepherd” doesn’t mean much to me. Oh, I know from reading that shepherds are in every bit the same amount of danger as cowboys, they have the same social status, and the good ones take care of their livestock the same way as good cowboys. It’s just that my culture doesn’t do shepherds. Here it is, the 21st century, and for most of us, the image shepherd still conjures up some guy with a cloth on his head, a robe and a stick, sitting on the hillside as sheep graze around him. An image that’s probably 2000 years old or older. It’s old, and it’s foreign to our experience. They still have shepherds in Europe, they even have a few in the US, but there is not a lot we know about modern American shepherding.

When Jesus talks about being the good shepherd, it’s pretty clear that we are the sheep. Even me. But for me, it works just as well to say that we are the cattle.

If Jesus were to have said “I am the good cowboy”, OK, now I can hear that in my own language. That means he won’t bail when the weather gets too hot, or too cold, or rainy, or snowy. He does what the trail boss says, even rides drag. He goes looking for the cattle that get sidetracked down gullies and ravines, and brings them back to the herd. He finds the best ford to cross the river, and when it’s flooded, he waits until it’s reasonably safe. He protects the cattle against coyotes and other critters. When it’s time to go into town, he’s the guy who brings all the other cowboys home to sleep it off. He knows more than he lets on. In a crowd of knuckleheads, he’s the competent one.

So lets read through John’s passage again, substituting as we need to:

‘I am the good cowboy. The good cowboy lays down his life for the cattle. The hired hand, who is not the cowboy and does not own the cattle, sees the coyote coming and leaves the cattle and runs away—and the coyote snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the cattle. I am the good cowboy. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the cattle. I have other cattle that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.’

The livestock changes, but the message is the same. We are being taken care of, and our safety is assured by a protector, a capable, knowledgeable, and trustworthy protector. Jesus is with us in all of our travels, and we cannot go wrong when we follow him.