John 15:1-8 Dear Partner in Preaching, I will confess right up front that I find preaching from the Farewell Discourses (John 14-16) seriously challenging. The combination of significant metaphor; a palpable sense of, but nevertheless elusive, original context; and strange mixture of promise, exhortation, and warning have always prompted me to walk – and preach – gingerly when tarrying in this particular portion of John’s Gospel. It feels like the Fourth Evangelist was writing to a community in pain, struggling with their identity in relation to former friends and synagogue members and a host of losses and fears that are...