Canopy Management
John 15:1-8 (Epistle Reading: Isaiah 5:3-9)
When Bob and Patty Brower traveled to France in the 1970s, they fell in love with two things: the wineries and the French Country chateaus. I have to admit, that’s two more things than I fell in love with when we visited France!
At any rate, they came home and packed up their belongings on the East Coast and headed for California, looking for a spot to start a winery of their own. They settled on 16 acres tucked away in the hills of Monterey County, near Carmel. They built an estate building, called Chateau Julien, modeled after an actual chateau on the Swiss/French border. And, in 1982 they started making wine. Today they have more than 240 acres of grapes.1
But there have been some problems. People who know the business say, “If you want to go broke fast, go into the wine business.” But finances are not the only challenge facing your average winemaker. Of the many issues that must be addressed in making good wine, one that’s frequently overlooked is what is known in the trade as “canopy management.”2
The topic is quite relevant to the discussion of our Scripture passage in John 15. Jesus said, “He [the Gardener] cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit” (John 15:2). That, believe it or not, is canopy management. It was known and practiced in Jesus’ day just as it is in ours.
Here’s the problem canopy management deals with runaway growth. Grapevines, left to themselves, will sprawl out all over the place and produce huge canopies of shoots, leaves and branches; unless that canopy is controlled, the vine won’t yield much fruit or top shelf grapes. And a first class winery needs all of the top shelf grapes it can get.
Cutting back the canopy seems to be a counter-intuitive activity, because all the greenery, all those leaves suggests that what you’ve got here is a very healthy vine. But the fact is, 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 then any more than he’s interested in showy churches or showy Christians today. What he’s interested in is fruit — and not just any 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 put on your very best impression of Frasier and Niles Crane, take a sip. Daniel Sogg, editor of Wine Spectator magazine, says that if you catch a flavor “reminiscent of onion skin and jalapeño peppers,” you’ve just encountered the problem of canopy management.3
A vine with a huge canopy may be looking good, but it isn’t doing the grapes any good.
The whole situation reminds me of the great BBC comedy, Keeping Up Appearances, which you can see on PBS. In the show, a dowdy woman, Hyacinth, has only one concern in life – to maintain the illusion that she is well-bred and in touch with the upper crusts of British society and the lower layers of England’s nobility. In reality, she’s very much a Commoner like us and all her neighbors. But to strengthen the illusion, she pronounces her last name “Bouquet” when it’s really Bucket – Hyacinth Bucket not Hyacinth “Bouquet.”. But the canopy – appearances – is what really counts for Hyacinth.
That’s why, when her neighbor drives Hyacinth to her sister’s house, she instructs the neighbor to park the car in front of a fine-looking home on one street, and after proclaiming it’s her sister’s home, leaves her neighbor in the car, dashes to the door, but 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 home — a rundown building the next street over.
Hyacinth is concerned about her “canopy,” the outward show. It’s all she thinks about and it drives her long-suffering husband, and everyone else she knows, nuts!
The canopy needs to be controlled.4
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 the passage from Isaiah (5) I read earlier; 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 a single purpose: bearing fruit.
The individual branches are important, to be sure, but 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 in some grocery store in Iowa.
God, like any good winemaker, understands the need to control the canopy. There are three goals in canopy control:
First, you want to develop a vine structure that makes picking the crop and controlling for disease relatively easy. With a huge covering of branches and large leaves, it’s difficult to see the fruit, let alone pick it.
Now here’s a problem for the church and for all of us. Sometimes the external paraphernalia, the rules, and other superficial characteristics of the church get in the way — not necessarily of growing the fruit — but of picking it. We used to call it legalism. Our conventions and traditions sometimes keep the world from seeing the real fruit and if you can’t see the fruit, well – you can’t pick fruit that you cannot see.
The Church and each of us as Christians grow under the watchful eye of the community, the world, around us. We don’t exist in isolation. The world is full of people searching for the truth, for a sense of meaning for their lives. And we have the Good News, or so, at least, we say we do. The fruit’s hanging from our branches. But, too often, we tend to hide it behind the very showy and meaningless appearances of nonessential issues. Using another metaphor, Jesus called it “hiding our light under a bushel basket.”
And the church has some great baskets. But the world doesn’t need baskets; it needs light. The world doesn’t need shoots, leaves and branches; it needs fruit. And God has called us, as Christians and the Church, to be one of the providers of that light and that fruit.
One of the more difficult tasks for the Church in the 21st century is to allow God to pare back the canopy, to let our fruit be visible to the world that’s walking by. That’s hard, because some of the canopy that should be trimmed is probably what many of us cherish the most.
Second, in canopy management, you want to regulate the size and quality of the fruit. Daniel Sogg tells us that “a huge crop buried under a dense thicket of vegetation translates into lousy wine.” God is concerned about the nature of the wine. He wants a superior product.
The mantra of the church for over a generation now has been “church growth.” It seems to be the only thing we’ve been concerned about – like Hyacinth and her “appearance.” But notice that Jesus doesn’t call the vine to grow, he calls it to bear fruit. So, maybe our slogan ought to be “church fruit” not “church growth.”
When God takes the pruning shears to our life, or to the church, it’s not an issue of whether we are growing; it’s an issue of what we are growing. Of course there will always be some fruit, but the larger issue is the quality of the fruit we’re bearing. A sour grape is fruit, but it’s still a sour grape.
As one pastor has noted, if we get discouraged and disillusioned when we compare our church size to the megachurches, maybe we’re looking at the wrong thing. Instead of concerning ourselves with big congregations, maybe we should be asking ourselves, “Are we growing big people” in our Church? That’s the issue that seems to be important to God.
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. As Christians, we’re not people without a life — and it’s in the context of a well-disciplined life that the fruit grows. God wants us to have a life. God tells us not only to get a life, but to get “an abundant life.” But it must be a life that’s under control, a life that’s best suited to produce the fruit of the Spirit.
Where would the fruit be today without the church? God established the church. But you’ve got to admit that there’s a lot of canopy nonsense going on in the church these days that does little to produce good fruit, or fruit that is available for the picking.
So what do we 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 have to abide in him. And if we try to go it alone, we’ll dry up, become so much dead wood, and we’ll be hauled away to the trash bin. Not a pleasant picture!
But what if we looked at all of life’s irritations as a form of pruning from God? Consider for instance: traffic jams, long lines, misplaced keys, cold food, answering machines, nosy neighbors, cell phones in restaurants, road construction, flat tires and cleaning house, to name just a few. Now think of how our perspective might change if we viewed each of these irritations as an opportunity to become more like Christ.
We should remember that at the end of the day, while God may be pleased with the accomplishments we’ve achieved, God is far more interested in forming the character of Christ within us.4 That’s a much more complex achievement.
Experts tell us 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.” Fruit that can be seen and picked.
Maybe at the end of the day we should be more concerned about growing and being “big people” than about “keeping up appearances.”
Amen.
Footnotes:
1For the Web site of Bob and Patty Brower’s winery, Chateau Julien, visit ChateauJulien.com.
2“Canopy management.” Adelaide.edu.au/school/Wine/canopy.html.
3 Sogg, Daniel. “Inside wine: Taming the vineyards.” Wine Spectator. May 31, 2001. WineSpectator.com. Retrieved November 26, 2002.
4 Nancy McGuirk, “God’s pruning can be painful,” Women’s Community Bible Study, christianity.com. Retrieved December 5, 2002.
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