Back when I was still trying to prove how much of a man I could be I decided try my hand at rewiring the kitchen one day.  Not that I knew anything about electricity.  But, I knew that rewiring was the kind of thing real men did and that’s all it took to spark my interest.  So, in the middle of a remodeling project, I tried changing a three-switch light switch into a two-switch light switch.

Everything went well until I got near the end of the project and discovered that I had one little wire that was now hanging loose in the switch box with nowhere to go.  I looked around in the box and thought I found a nice place to attach it.  You can guess the rest of the story.  When I attached the loose wire to what looked like the most logical place to connect loose wires, something went seriously wrong.  Lots of sparks, an instantaneous flash-flame, plenty of smoke and most of all, darkness.  Before it was all over I not only had to call an electrician but also had to call the city utilities department to come replace the cable that connected the house to the utility pole because it was now, to say the least, fried.  The only reason no one had to dial 911 was because, by sheer luck, I happened to be using a plastic-handled screwdriver.  To this day, I am still amazed at what a difference that one little wire made. 

Simply put, if you don’t keep the circuit open, nothing flows through.  If nothing flows through, you stumble in the darkness.  Which, interestingly, is something of what Jesus is saying in our gospel lesson for the morning.  “I am the true vine . . . Abide in me as I abide in you.  Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.  I am the vine, you are the branches.  Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 

What Jesus is talking about here is keeping the circuit opens that allows his life to flow into and through us.  The only alternative is futility.  Living a life, regardless of the zeal, intelligence or energy involved, that ultimately does not count for anything.  Literally, Jesus is making a little bit of an overstatement.  It’s not that people who don’t believe in him can’t do anything.  You can do a great deal without God.  You can live and die, albeit by his gift of life to you.  You can learn.  You can work and get wealthy.  You can reproduce your own kind and so on.  You can do a great deal without any intention of honoring Christ as Lord of your life.  In many, many ways, without Jesus as Lord, you can accomplish a great deal in life.  But, the one thing you cannot do apart from him is produce anything for which you were ultimately created and which has eternal value.  What Jesus called “fruit.”  Disconnected from Christ it is as impossible to live a life of eternal value as it is to expect three-switch power to flow through a two-switch box. 

So, taken in the context of the vine-dressing lesson, Jesus is telling the literal truth.  What he is after here is the kind of living that results in eternal worth.  And, that kind of life happens only when his life is flowing, as sap through a vine to its branches, from him through us.  Disconnected, we stumble in the darkest of darkness, futility.  Connected to him, the possibilities are as limitless as eternity itself and we discover, as he promised, the very “joy” of God becoming ours.  “Those who abide in me . . . bear much fruit . . . if you keep my commandments you will abide in my love . . . and your joy (will be) complete . . . this is my commandment that you love one another.”

There are two fundamentals here that we cannot miss.  First, that joyful and meaningful living are by-products of other choices we make not experiences we can seek in their own right.  Jesus has spoken of both in this text.  He has described them as the “fruit” a life produces as the result of other choices and actions.  Joy and meaning elude us when we seek them but come quietly alongside to join us as we journey down the road of faithful obedience to the call of Christ.  Put another way, meaningful feelings always follow meaningful living.

The athlete knows this.  The scholar knows this.  Parents know this.  People married and still in love know this.  We don’t feel our way into meaningful living.  We live meaningfully and feelings that have meaning follow.  As the caboose is to the engine on a train, so good and meaningful feelings follow good and meaningful choices and actions.  You can almost always trace miserable feelings back to miserable choices.  You wake up feeling hung over?  What did you eat or drink the night before?  You can’t bear to look at your spouse?  How have you been treating her?  Students, you feel sick when you look at your report card?  How hard did you study for finals? 

Immaturity always looks for someone else to blame for the way it feels.  Maturity accepts responsibility for poor personal choices and actions that led to the misery in which it finds itself.  Bearing eternal “fruit,” Jesus says, means believing and behaving in spiritually meaningful ways.  This is the first great truth.  And, the second is like unto it. 

The most meaningful of all spiritual choices and behaviors is the choice to love those with whom God has given us the privilege of living.  So, let’s review the sequence.  Let’s trace the caboose back to the engine pulling it.  We bear “fruit,” experience meaningful living, as we “abide” in Christ, choose behaviors, that keep us intimately related to him.  Now, listen to what Jesus says sustains that intimacy.  “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love.  This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

We are the ones who make knowing the will of God the mystery of all mysteries.  We anguish over it.  We grieve over it.  Sometimes, people actually give up following Christ using as their excuse their absolute confusion over what God wanted them to do with their lives.  But, when you really get honest about those things that confuse us, more often than not they are self-centered.  What college?  What career?  What person to marry?  Jesus has just given us the clearest of all instructions.  The will of God is that we love those with whom God has given the privilege of living.  More often than not we find the will of God for everything else that matters by being obedient to what matters most, loving one another.  Conversely, what difference does it make if we put all the pieces of the puzzle in the right place but fail at loving one another?

So, caboose back to engine again.  Meaningful living can be traced back to the most meaningful of all behaviors, the choice to love the ones with whom God has given us to live.  To live in self-sacrificial ways toward our fellow man.  There is no joy and no meaning any other way.  Joy and meaning in life are not inalienable rights.  They are the results of lives lived in the pursuit of something more significant.  Specifically, Jesus says, living a life of love toward others.  Self-sacrificial love. 

Jesus isn’t saying that we are to love just those we find most lovable.  Any time we find it impossible to love someone else it is because we are making our choices based on their worthiness.  We have it backwards.  We’ve got the caboose trying to pull the engine.  Loving someone in a Christ-like way means making that choice based on our responsibility to do what Christ said whether the person, in our estimation, is worthy or not.  This is agape love Jesus is talking about here.  That is the specific word he uses.  It is self-sacrificial love.  It is love that is measured more by duty than by taste or feel or pleasure.  This isn’t boyfriend-girlfriend love.  This isn’t eighth grade I’ve got a crush on you love.  This isn’t love that comes naturally like the love of two good friends who just happen to enjoy each other’s company.  This is love that is measured by the commitment of one soul to pour itself out in self-sacrificial ways towards others who need it.  This is love that is measured more by the needs of others than by the sense it makes to meet those needs.  This is love, scourged and bleeding, nailed to a cross and dying.  That is what Jesus is talking about.  And, loving like that is the obedience Jesus demands.

With more sincerity than I can possibly explain in words I believe this is the key to our church’s future.  To pull into ourselves out of fear that we’ll perish becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy.  To give ourselves away in self-abandonment and sacrificial ways is our only hope.  This needy neighborhood around us is God’s greatest gift to us because it presents us with the single greatest opportunity we have to actually do something about being obedient to God’s call on our lives. 

The highest form of humility is to admit our inability to do that kind of loving on our own.  Humility submits itself, as branch to vine, in total recognition that, disconnected from a source greater than itself, there is no hope of producing that kind of sacrificial giving.  The highest form of humility is to admit what we cannot do, to say, “We can’t love that way on our own,” and to obediently surrender ourselves to Christ so that he can love through us.  The highest form of arrogance and rebellion is to say, “We won’t love that way.”  Obedient surrender to the will of God keeps the circuit of joy and love flowing through us.  Arrogant disobedience breaks the circuit and makes as useless to the Kingdom of God as branches cut off from the vine.  Good for nothing, Jesus says, but to be “thrown into the fire and burned.”  Churches only die when they stop loving.There will always be a place in the Kingdom of God for churches absolutely committed to loving at whatever cost.

Bill Curry came to see me this week.  I found myself humbled in his presence as he told me of emotional scars he still bears from having gone ashore on Iwo Jima with the 3^rd Marines World War II.  Here is a man, eighty-one years of age, still trying to put that time in his life in perspective.  A perspective very few of us can grasp.  Iwo Jima is an eight-square mile island of volcanic ash in the South Pacific.  From February 19, 1945 until March 16, 1945, 110,000 Marines battled 22,000 Japanese for control of that island in one of the most ferocious battles in American history.  Before it was over, every single Japanese was a casualty and one in three Americans was either killed or wounded.  More Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded for bravery in that battle than in any other single battle in American history.  The raising of the American flag on the 550-foot summit of Mt. Suribachi on the fourth day of the battle produced the single most reproduced photograph in history.  And, Bill witnessed it all.  And, he was coming to me to ask me to help him deal with some of the pain he still feels. 

Quite frankly, I found myself at a loss for words.  Here was a man, like David Severen and Roy Hallmark and so many others in our church without whose sacrifice we wouldn’t be worshipping in freedom today.  People who still bear the pain of our freedom for us.  A freedom that we may believe to be an inalienable right but a right purchased, nonetheless, at great cost by people like that who personally paid the price for it.  People who didn’t measure their choices and actions in terms of what felt good or made the most personal sense to them but in terms of the very love of which Jesus spoke when he said, in this very text,  “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  True patriots and heroes, these are, who kept the circuit of life and freedom and hope flowing from our forefathers to us.  Long after they are gone, millions who never knew their names will breath free air purchased with their blood.

Now it’s our turn.  Souls are dying who will never know freedom if we don’t choose to love them into the Kingdom.  And, just in case we’ve forgotten, a Kingdom is not a democracy.  Jesus didn’t ask us to simply consider this one option among many.  He commanded us to love one another the way he loved us.  Disobedience to that command will break the circuit of his love and purpose flowing through us and we will find ourselves stumbling in the darkness on the way to some kind of very miserable death.  His joy and the very meaning of our existence are things we will discover along the way to spending ourselves out in obedience to his command to love.  It’s our only hope.  But, it’s also our choice.