RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - May 10, 2009

“Growing Grapes and Making Wine”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 15:1-8

Back in January, Joe began making his own wine. You see, a wine-making kit had rocketed to the top of his December wish list – and so a large box from The Hop Shop in Gray awaited him on Christmas morning. His first attempt was a chianti, an Italian red wine, which turned out really well. Good thing because we have 26 bottles of it!

Just last weekend, he clarified a large vat of Tempranio, a Spanish red. For the foreseeable future of his newfound hobby, Joe will use grape concentrate and dried grapes, which he can order on the internet.

However, Joe dreams of the day when, if scientists are correct in their predictions about global climate change, Maine will emerge as the perfect location for growing grapes. California will be too hot and dry, but Maine will be just right.

And so he imagines having a grape arbor with vines solidly planted in the earth, their branches entwined with one another, providing support and strength for the whole. He imagines the central vine giving forth the nourishment from which life itself is fashioned. He fancies himself to be the vine grower, tenderly nurturing and pruning until the branches are laden with the best of grapes.

Joe is perhaps not unlike many of those earliest Christians who listened to the passage we just read from the Gospel of John. Though they may not have owned their own expansive vineyards, many of them did possess at least a vine or two and were certainly familiar with the image.

This passage about vines is the last of seven “I am” sayings that the writer of John’s Gospel includes in his narrative. Jesus uses those diverse sayings to proclaim who he is and what the realm of God is like. That was because no single image could convey the necessary depth of meaning.

Jesus shared this image of the vine immediately following the Last Supper he shared with his disciples. Rather than immediately going to the Garden of Gethsemane, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the story, in John’s version, Jesus shared several chapters’ worth of parting instructions and words of wisdom to his disciples, known as the Farwell Discourses.

And as Jesus had done time and time again, he introduced an idea that challenged the faith of his Jewish contemporaries. For many, his statement about the vine would have been considered blasphemy because Jesus linked it to one of the most treasured concepts in all of Judaism.

Jesus used the image of the vine as more than a visual aid. You see, the vine was one of the most common symbols for Israel, God’s chosen people – and both the disciples and the earliest Christians would have known that because references abound in the Jewish Scriptures. For example, the prophet Isaiah once created a beautiful poem about God’s vineyard. And the lesser prophet Hosea spoke of God finding Israel like grapes in the wilderness.

However, in each case, as N.T. Wright points out, something went badly wrong. In the Psalms, we read that foreigners ravage God’s vineyard and wild beasts uproot it. In Isaiah, the vine that should have produced good grapes bore wild grapes instead. And so on and so on.

But now, in this passage in John’s Gospel, the young rabbi on whom the hope of a nation rested, the one whose followers believed that he was the long awaited Messiah was telling his closest friends that he is the vine, the real and true vine. “He was and is the true Israel, summing up in himself God’s age-old purpose for the chosen nation and bringing that purpose at last to fulfillment.”

And the branches, the disciples and followers, then and now, are to be “joined to him and so to become…the people through whom at last God’s plan for the world will be fulfilled.” By likening himself to a vine, Jesus is saying that what God intended to be achieved through Israel actually comes to pass in and through him. In Jesus, that sacred call to be the light to all the world is fulfilled.

“I am the vine,” Jesus proclaims. “I am not the ancient and gnarled olive tree, not the might cedar of Lebanon, but the lowly vine – and you are the branches. I am part of you, and you are part of me.”

Imagine being that connected to God. Imagine being grafted to the Tree of Life because that is what this is all about. And as they sat around the table in that upper room in Jerusalem, perhaps the disciples remembered wandering with Jesus across fields and byways and past arbors, the heady scent of the grape in the air.

Perhaps they imagined themselves as vines, basking in the warm sun, intertwined with Jesus and with one another, laden down with lush red grapes. They saw themselves as entwined branches, winding their way around one another in delicate and complicated patterns of tight curls that made it impossible to tell where one branch started or another one ended. They saw this pattern as not just intricate but intimate, for the vine shared with its branches the nutrients that sustained it (Kate Huey).

With Jesus’ prompting, the disciples imagined the vine grower inspecting the rows of grapes, touching them now and again lovingly, but also pruning, cutting away the old and unproductive branches. And Peter, James, John, and the others thought of all the times that God had cut off the old and worn out ways they had of thinking about things. And they silently wondered if they would easily surrender themselves to the pruning hook, knowing they were being challenged to readily admit that at least some of what they had produced was really only unproductive greenery.

“Abide in me, and I will abide in you. Make your home in me, and I will make my home in you,” whispered Jesus. Hang in there. Hold on. Endure because I will be there to sustain you always. We will be entwined together, facing all that life dishes out as one.

What is important here in the image of the vine is the relationship that Jesus offered. Surely the disciples realized that the branches had to be connected to the vine to prosper and bear good fruit.

For the Gospel writer of John, salvation itself is this marvelous and intimate relationship that you and I can have with God. It is the sacred enfolding, the holy entwining, and the nurturing from which emerges a peace that passes all our understanding.

And at the heart of the relationship is love. Giving and receiving love is what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Just as we need air to breathe, so we need love to really live. As Nancy Blakeley writes, “Here, close to the vine…we find all the things that we pray for: When we remain that close to Jesus, we are attuned to him and he to us, and the remarkable result is that what we want will be what God wants, and it will surely come to pass."

Is Jesus talking about a personal and individual relationship with God? I don’t think so. I believe strongly that this magnificent connection is so much more than that.

When Jesus likened himself to a vine, he was speaking to the close knit family of his disciples. At its core, the image is one of community – not a single branch sucking dry the vine but innumerable branches nourished by the vine and supporting one another.

In short, Jesus reminds us that we are connected in powerful “ways that do not allow us to be extracted from each other. We belong to each other and the well being of one of us is related to the well being of another. And we belong to God.”

Doesn’t this sound like the church at its very best? Isn’t the vine a wonderful image for the small church that is built on relationships? Isn’t that what we trust we have here at RVCC?

“I am the vine, and you are the branches.” If that is an image fit for the small church, then what does it mean for how we function as a community?

It is interesting that Jesus spoke about the vine soon after the disciples had washed one another’s feet, again, a story found only in the Gospel of John. In many ways, the love lived out in that simple familial act would be the fruit the disciples would bear in the future – and the legacy of servant hood that is handed down to us.

As Kate Huey noted, as we abide in Jesus and he abides in us, there is a staying power that keeps us connected to the One who planted us here and who takes care of us, pruning as necessary, until this plant grows into what it was created to be. We abide in him, and he in us together. He is the vine, we are the branches. Together we are the church.

Sermon - May 10, 2009

“Growing Grapes and Making Wine”

By Rev. Nancy Foran John 15:1-8

By Rev. Nancy Foran
John 15:1-8