Life in the Vine (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

Sermons on YouTube…

When I was on internship, I served a congregation in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.  They had two parsonages on the property of the church.  One of them was the former home of the people who had originally donated the property for the church to be built upon.

And by the time I was there, the congregation had turned that house into the residence for the intern – the “vicarage.”  So, I had probably the nicest housing of any of my classmates.  The vicarage was a really cute two bedroom fieldstone house which had a great view which overlooked the Lehigh Valley.  It had a nice yard, and a garage for my car.  And in the backyard, it also had a couple of grape trellises, which had clearly been planted decades before by the original owners.

So, I had my own little vineyard that year!  And I figured I should do something with all these grapes.  I ate some.  I gave some to my intern supervisor.  But then I got creative.  I figured I should turn some into jam.  And I should turn some into wine.

So I got on the phone with my grandmother, who had made both jam and wine when I was a kid, and she told me how to make both.  I got some wine making equipment from the chair of my intern committee, and I produced several jars of jam, and several bottles of wine which I named “Chateau Vicar 1989”!

Internship unexpectedly gave me the opportunity to learn about making jam and wine.  But that experience also taught me some things about vineyards, which I learned as I tended those vines throughout the year.

And I think about those vines every year when I read Jesus’ words about being the vine.  And those words make more sense to me now because I learned at least three things about vines and vineyards from those vicarage trellises.

• The first thing is that the whole enterprise depends upon the vine itself.  And the “vine” is the part that’s firmly planted in the soil.  I learned that these trellises were old, because the “vine” was a big, old knarly thing that looked almost like a tree stump.  It wasn’t much to look at, but that was the thing that fed everything else.  Without it, there would be grapes, no leaves, no branches and no life…

• The second thing I learned was that branches of the vine produce a lot of leaves.  And you need leaves, but if you have too many the grapes don’t get sun.  So you have to prune the leaves.  But the leaves are pretty, and at first I didn’t want to prune them off.  Eventually, though, I was taught that if you DON’T prune the leaves, even though they look nice, the whole fruit producing enterprise is in danger…

• And the third thing I learned was that the quality of what I produced was due in large part to the quality of the grapes, and not my great skill!  I actually got a lot of compliments on my jam and even the wine … (in fact, at the end of the year, all vicars got “roasted” and I was sure I’d get roasted for the wine…)  But in the end, I had to admit that the quality of the products was largely based on the quality of the grapes that was the result of the quality of the vine, and my simply following the directions of people like my grandmother who knew what they were doing…

And because vineyards were much more common things in ancient Israel, I suspect Jesus’ first hearers knew all these things as well.  And so when Jesus started using the vine as a metaphor, his disciples understood that Jesus was actually talking to them about how they should live and grow as his disciples in the world around them.

For those first disciples, and for us, living as Jesus’ disciples, like being connected to the vine, means:

• Being rooted in Jesus, not in ourselves or in the world around us… in some ways, that means simply staying grounded in some basic things like worship (whether in person or online, because it keeps us focused on praising God, instead of focusing on ourselves…); prayer and reflection (so that we can listen for what Jesus is calling us to do through scripture stories and through meditation…); and being rooted is about asking what we should do, or not do, because we’re followers of Jesus, instead of because we’re liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats, or any of the other “tribal” identities we so often get caught up in…

• Being willing to prune ourselves and be pruned … like the leaves, sometimes the stuff we get caught up in spending our time and energy on can be really pretty; and some of those things are necessary to a degree.  But sometimes, they keep us from the essential mission of producing the fruit that matters… (I remember a conversation a few years ago about a youth program we used to have.  And this one person said to me, “I wish we still had that because it had such a big impact on my kids.”  And it did!  But in the intervening years, it had stopped working for the kids who came later on.  And this person knew that, too.  But often, it’s hard to prune things that have stopped working, even when you know it’s time to prune…

• Recognizing that, while we’re called to be people who bear good fruit, ultimately the quality of what we do depends upon God and not on us.  We are supposed to see ourselves as “branches” – that is, as vehicles through whom God works to make his love known in the world around us.  And that does require cooperation on our part if we’re going to be part of bearing that fruit.  But it also requires the liberating attitude that finally the success depends upon God and not on us…

So, the other thing I learned about vines was that at certain times of the year, especially in the middle of the winter, everything appeared dead.  There were no leaves, there was no fruit, and that old, knarled vine didn’t look like it would ever live again.

But in the spring, everything came back because of the life that was in the vine, even when things looked dead.  And that’s perhaps why we always read these words during Easter.

Jesus’ Resurrection reminds us that new life is possible, even when things appear dead.  Jesus’ Resurrection promises us that that new life depends upon Jesus, and not on how good our fruit is.  And Jesus’ Resurrection calls us to live in the new life of the vine, no matter what season it feels like we’re in.

Amen.