5 Easter B - "I am the vine"

5 Easter B

Transcribed from a sermon given on May 6, 2012

At St. Barnabas, Arroyo Grande CA

By The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

The image that Jesus uses in the Gospel today of the grape vine would have been very familiar to his listeners. Back in Jesus’ time, much like in the Central Coast today, the growing of grapes for wine was one of the major cash crops - maybe the major cash crop for that area. So whether they were farmers or not everyone would have been familiar with the grape vine and on how grapes on grew on a vine. Just like around here. 

I imagine most of us have seen a grape vine or at least gone wine tasting at a vineyard and saw them out through the window, right? The vine is the foundation of the grape plant. The grape vine is the root system that is larger than the vine itself. The roots travel out and down, and the bigger the roots, the deeper the roots, the healthier the vine is. And in fact for some of the grape vines the roots system are ten, fifteen, twenty years old because the longer they have been there the more secure and deeper they are. Sometimes when they are growing grapes they will take one kind of grape as the root system and take another kind of grape and attach that to those roots because the roots bring a certain kind of strength and certain types of wine are better with a different root system. 

Then we have the branches. Usually if you see a grape vine that has been around for a while you see a few really thick branches Those are the ones that haven’t gotten pruned back. They have little ones that are coming off of it. Good pruning of a grape vine is really important to keep it healthy. You have the branches that come off of this sort of like a tree. It’s like a trunk and branches with little branches that come off. 

Now in order for those branches to survive they have to get the water they need and the nutrients they need in the water that is brought up by the roots, then through the trunk and then it goes out to the branches. So if something happens to one of those branches, if it gets broken off from the vine, we know what happens. You can watch it when there is a wind storm and a branch is broken from a tree. It withers and within a few days all the leaves turn brown and it dies. It needs that moisture, it needs those nutrients. Sometimes when there is a big windstorm a large branch will break off and fall down but it hasn’t completely separated. There is just a little bit that is still attached. Such a branch might live for a while because it is still getting a little bit of nutrients through that connection, but it is not getting the full amount, and it will, over time, get weaker and weaker. The same goes if you are going to take a new branch and put it on to an existing vine, when you do that it is really important that the connection is secure, that it is done right, so that all the moisture in the vine can get into the branch. Without that the branch may survive, but not be healthy, and it won’t bear fruit. 

This is the imagery that Jesus uses to describe himself.  That he is the vine. The imagery of the vine and the vineyard is something that comes up many times in the Old Testament. You will find in the Psalms and some of the prophets the idea that the people of Israel are God’s vineyard; God has planted them in the land. God tends them and cares for them. So this image is something that would be very meaningful to the people listening to Jesus. 

So let’s think about this imagery. What is Jesus saying? He is saying that he is the vine and that his roots go deep, they go deep into God. And what is the moisture, the water and nutrients that the vine pulls up and brings to the branches. Well it is pretty clear in the letter from John that we read today that it is love. That it is all about love. John writes, “God is love.” And he adds that you abide in love, and are called to express that love to others. 

So we can imagine Jesus as having deep roots in the love of God and that he takes that love of God and brings it up through him and gives it to us as the branches. That we are nurtured by that love, that we are strengthened by that love, that we are given the power and the strength and everything we need to become that which God intends for us to become. We have all the nutrients, all the love, all the strength that we need. And not just to grow into a healthy branch and have leaves, but to have buds and flowers and eventually to bear fruit.

The wonderful thing about fruit is that fruit feeds people - fruit feeds others. So what is the fruit of all this energy and power and love that Christ gives us? Well if you read Paul, he talks about the fruits of the spirit, but he always at the end says, “And the greatest of these is love.” So the fruit that we are to bear is love. This is agape love. It’s not about nice pleasant emotional feelings, its not abstract, it is a love in which we care for one another. 

If you cannot love your neighbor that you see how can you say you love God that you can’t see? The fruit that Christ is looking for is the fruit of love. Love expressed in giving to others, and caring for our brothers and sister. 

The take away for me of this is twofold. One is a reminder of the incredible abundance of love that Christ gives us. That we are richly fed with everything that we need in order to be whole and healthy and spiritually true. That that abundance, like rain on us, comes through Christ. Secondly it is a reminder that we need to be grafted well onto Christ because if we are just barely connected we can’t get the nurturance, we can’t get what we need in order to thrive. We might survive, but not to thrive. So the more we abide in Christ, the more connected we are to the vine, the more fully we can live our lives and express God’s love in the world and be instruments of God’s love for others.