May 3, 2015

Linda Murphy

Easter 5     John 15:1-8

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As many of you know Peter and I have a large garden and since Easter I have been doing a lot of pruning. I have had experience pruning a garden before however this year I am pruning our newly planted orchard of olive and fruit trees. It’s no longer about getting rid of cross-over branches and letting the light In it’s about encouraging new season fruit. I have found this both challenging and scary, a cut with my secateurs in the wrong direction or on the wrong part of the branch will mean no fruit next year. John’s gospel today may resonate on a practical level, however this reading also provides us all with much more to think about.

Cynthia Bourgeault describes Eastertide as a time of continuing training for the disciples. This was a time of reassuring and gaining confidence. It was a time of learning to go out into the world with the message of the “Way”. In today’s vernacular the disciples were on an intensive training programme or more like a boot camp of the 1st century.

Given that all the gospels give the disciples bad press prior to Easter, we must admire how they found their courage and resolve with the assistance of Jesus’, through the unnerving but nevertheless reassuring appearance and presence of the Holy Spirit.

The text today has a political and social dimension. The way of Jesus has already begun. Fruit is being produced, which means that hierarchies are being challenged and all people are welcome and affirmed as they travel on the way. Producing fruit is the whole purpose of the community of faith. To produce fruit means to follow the way of Jesus.

John’s use of the vineyard metaphor has a great deal to do with the context in which he wrote between 90-95 CE. This was a time in the early followers’ community’s life, of painful separation from their Jewish roots to which many of its members belonged. The followers of the Way were being expelled from the synagogues. These were uncertain times with the loss of connection, loss of family, loss of homes and loss of land.

This metaphor of the vineyard relies on Hebrew Scripture’s images of God’s people being part of God’s vineyard, Israel. This image in John develops in a new direction. Together ‘believing’ and ‘abiding’ point both to the reality of “life in Christ” and to the characterisation of that life not in some hope of a future reunion in heaven, but to the promise of that abundant life in the here and now.

“I am the vine” in that promise we are transformed by a new reality in which we are empowered through our baptism where we are commissioned as disciples. Just as Jesus is intimately related to God, so the branches can do nothing unless they abide in relationship with Jesus. “I am the vine, you are the branches are not words of command or judgement they are words of invitation and promise.

Jesus envisions and promises a dynamic and changing life for the disciple community. The vines are pruned and cleansed. The branches that wither and die are removed. These actions all point to a constantly changing community that is called to be involved, energised and doing.

Everything that God does including his work of pruning and cleansing the branches is tempered and understood through the ‘word’ that Jesus is and has spoken to his disciples.

In our garden we have a grape vine which has been neglected for many years and it is an unruly tangled mess. It is so tangled and unruly any fruit is very small and generally uneatable although the wasps seem to like it. My grape vine reminds me that being a member of the Christian community is a vine-y, branch-y jumbled mess of us and Jesus and others. Being part of the Christian community means being involved and dealing with the messy bits and working towards cleansing and pruning which may involve challenging authority or just getting involved and making change happen for the better of our local community or our world. Nevertheless for change be achieved courage and vision for a better world needs faith and lots of it.

This image of course is contrary to our Western Individualism and consumer culture. We live in a world that upholds the false promise of the self. We can stave off the insult of sin and even aging with the right combination of exercise, self-care and a particular diet. But Christianity is different. Jesus reminds us that we are dependent on God and on one another.

To abide in Jesus means the how is more important than the where or even the why and when that happens you experience a kind of freedom. A freedom from the grips of targets, objectives, goals and everything else that stops us realising that the kingdom is here and now.

For many of us in this congregation St Matthew’s is our abiding place we feel at home and connected. The vine image is another way of talking about abiding places (places where one is deeply at home), and both the vine and the abiding places are ways of expressing love and connection.

This week we have seen more riots in the US expressing a divide between the black community and their police force. This situation is a far cry from Martin Luther King’s dream for racial equality in the United States. In New Zealand especially in Auckland we have many families living in garages or cars. At the Mission we have many on the Housing New Zealand waiting list who have been sleeping rough for months. This is not the image most of us want in our own community or country. The messy vineyard needs pruning and cleansing. This is the continuing message of this gospel for us.

The early church used the Greek term “mystagogy” that translates as mystery to refer to the period that we’re now in: these Great Fifty Days between Easter and Pentecost. For the early church this was a time for the newly baptised, along with the entire church community to become immersed in the mysteries of the Christian faith. This is the period of time in which we are all invited to intentionally reflect on the mysteries of God’s grace alive in the world and to respond to these mysteries with our full lives, to live abundantly.

Today in our first reading from the Book of Acts were heard of Philip the disciple and a deacon baptising the Ethiopian Eunuch. After our service This morning I will be baptising Evelyn and we welcome her parents and brother into our community of faith here at St Matthews. Amanda and Scott were married here some four years ago and I had the pleasure of verging their marriage ceremony. Today I have the double pleasure and honour of baptising their daughter and welcoming them all into our community of faith.

Our lives express our relationship with Christ as the vine for which we are the branches. Our fruit bearing comes from that relationship. Jesus’ promise to us is that he will be with us abide with us. He asks that we make the same promise to him and bear fruit for his loving kingdom.

Amen.