5 Easter B
Transcribed from a
sermon given on May 6, 2012
At St. Barnabas,
Arroyo Grande CA
By The Rev. Valerie
Ann Hart
John 15:1-8
1John 4:7-21
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 foundations of them 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 So we have the roots that bring up the moisture and with the water all
the nutrients that the vine needs.
Then we have the branches and
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 and
then it has little ones that are coming off of it. Good pruning of 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 and you have the
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 by
the water that is brought up by the roots and then through the trunk and then
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 falls down and it withers and within a few
days all the leaves turn brown and it dies. Because it needs that moisture, it
needs those nutrients, or you may have seen a large tree, sometimes there is a
big windstorm and a large branch will break off and it has fallen down and 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 by 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.
So this is the imagery that Jesus
uses to describe himself. That he
is the vine. And that 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. And God tends them and cares for them. So this image
is something that would be meaningful to the people listening.
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 that moisture, that 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 things 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 about any
kind of abstract sense, it is a sense of love in which we care for one another.
If you cannot love your neighbor
that you see, you can’t love your brother of sister that you see, how can you
say you love God that you can’t see? And so 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 and 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 that
instrument of God’s love for others.
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