Community Parson: Jesus is our Mother Vine

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Jesus is our Mother Vine

Easter 5 B May 6, 2012

Acts 8:26-40; Ps. 22

1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

Who knows what the Mother Vine is? It is an enormous grape vine, discovered by early European settlers to North Carolina. It was cultivated by the native people for centuries. English and German farmers took grafts from it, grew new vines from it – it truly is the root and branch of North America. As the 16th explorers reported, Roanoke Island was

“so full of grapes, as the very beating and surge of the Sea overflowed them. . . .” … “in all the world the like abundance is not to be found.”[i]

St. John did not make up the vine as a symbol of connection. From the beginning of time, of course, humans have received sustenance from vines, cultivated them, cared for them, pruned them, carried them as precious goods when they moved to new homes and new lands. Mysterious and powerful, vines connect us not only to each other but to the source of all life. The true vine, as Jesus would say, connects us to God. Jesus is our Mother Vine.

As a metaphor for the Christian life, this one of the vine and branches runs the risk of being over-done – perhaps we are so familiar with it, that it loses some of its evocative power. To say that “I am the vine, you are the branches” is a simple description of Christian community is like saying that “love one another” means “let’s be nice.” Let’s not sell these phrases short just because they are familiar.

Being connected to the vine can be hard work. We are in relationship with Jesus, the Mother Vine, and we are in relationship with the other branches, with each other. We all know, from an early age, that not all relationships are easy. Even connections that cannot be easily severed can be difficult. As a friend of mine said,

… we can all name some strange branches: a crazy aunt, the rigid co-worker, odd and peculiar saints.[ii]

Being connected to the vine can be hard work, in that Jesus expects us to … produce! I always find it kind of shocking to read about non-producing branches being lopped off and thrown into the fire – what happened to the part about Jesus being nice??? -- but of course all gardeners know the value of pruning, how a diseased limb can threaten a whole plant, how a vine that becomes straggly and dry can sap the life right out. Jesus, the nurturing mother vine, becomes Jesus the ruthless vintner. God has a stake in this vine, these branches. God wants us to do something more than just reach our tendrils up to the sky.

There is another word in this passage, and from the passage from the first letter of John, that is also deceptively easy: abide. Jesus expects us to abide him, as he abides in us. “Abide” conjures up kind of a passive relationship, but look: this abiding comes in the same paragraph as the admonition to bear fruit. Produce or be lopped off is hardly the cozy “snuggle down under the comforter with me” kind of abiding. This word “abide,” scholars tell us, implies activity:

… to abide in a relationship means to be steadfast, to endure, to carry on despite challenges and changes. … [God] remains our rooted vine and asks us to sustain each other, not in a superficial ‘have a nice day” way but in communion with each other, to be present to each other, to be in solidarity with each other.[iii]

So here: let’s pretend that this is the mother vine, the vine that connects from the heart of God out into the world. Take hold of this vine. And if you can’t hold on to the vine, hold on to the person next to you, who is connected to the vine.

This is the vine. We are the branches. Jesus calls us to abide with each other, to do the hard and sustaining work of staying connected to each other. Jesus expects each of us, holding on to this vine, to bear fruit. To be productive. To be active participants in the reign of God, in the world as God has created it to be.

Think of it: St. David’s is part of the mother vine. What fruit do we bear – here, in this community, in this place – that helps bring about the reign of God? What are the things that we do that need to be lopped off, that do not produce the fruit, that do not help us to abide in God, that do not help us to connect to this mother vine?

This vine does not stop at the church door. The fruit we bear is not just for ourselves, for our own comfort and enjoyment. It is very easy in a church community to regard these four walls as the known universe. But the vine keeps growing. It bursts the boundaries, cracks the windows, breaks open the doors. If we are holding on, as we are supposed to, the vine will take us with it, out into the world, out into that big, risky world.

As a parish community, we are about to enter into our own big, risky venture: the Celebration of the Arts. Hold on to this vine, and think about that branch. Think about the Celebration of the Arts in relation to this Mother Vine. Think about when the Celebration of the Arts first sprouted from this vine. Think about the fruit it has borne over the years. Think about what has been good and precious and life-giving about the Celebration of the Arts, about how it has connected with the love and the glory of God. What do we have to prune from this branch, what do we have to change, in order to keep growing those good and precious and life-giving things into a sustainable future?

Where is this vine taking us? What is God calling forth from us, in the Celebration of the Arts? How will God abide in us this week?

[i] http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/122/entry

[ii] Chris Murphy, from a sermon preached Easter 5-B 2009

[iii] Bren Murphy, from a sermon preached Easter 5-B 2009

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Missional church and the arts

What if we thought about church in another way, as "a small community that [moves] into a particular area (often one with a lot of deprivation and poverty) ... seeking to follow Christ but their focus is simply helping transform their community -- in arts, environment, in social needs, with youth and so on."

These are churches, as the English church missioner named Jonny Baker, "are not focused on growing big -- but more like the yeast of the kingdom that Jesus talked about infecting the wider batch of dough. ..." Such churches, Baker says, face "the challenge of weaning members off their addiction to consumer approaches to church where they get their fix of worship and teaching and meeting with friends before they could properly engage in this more local, outward-focused community approach (maybe we need a 12 step detox programme for leaving consumer church!?)"

We may benefit from thinking this way, as we explore how to connect our treasure, which is the Celebration of the Arts, into parts of the community that could use more art.

Thanks to the Patheos blog for sending this thought my way ...

"A prayer book even an atheist would love"

It does seem a teensy bit arrogant for a 21st century author to claim that he "edited" The Book of Common Prayer, but Brian Cummings seems to have added considerable value to familiar red book we find in our pews. In this 2011 volume (Oxford University Press), we can find the full texts of the 1549, 1559 and 1662 Prayer Books, along with introductions, explanations, notes and glossary. The review in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, gives the book a glowing recommendation -- both in its edited and "explained" form and in the original, which as the book upon which all prayer in our language is based "shaped the inner life and branded the tongue of the English-speaking peoples. Its phrases and rhythms did not merely enter the language. They largely defined the language. " Read more of the review here, and if you read it, let us know how you liked it!!

What I read - 2012

FINISHED:

At Simon's INSISTENCE I read The Hunger Games. Some parts I had to skim through, because the depictions of these young people fighting each other to the death was at times too gruesome, but it was overall well worth the read. NOW I have to get on with # 2 in the series

Dennis Lehane's A Given Day. Everything comes together in a slightly staged but effective way in 1919 Boston: anarchists, molasses, racism, repression and the Boston police strike. J. Edgar Hoover makes some unflattering cameos. I must say it is kind of Ragtime as it would be dramatized by Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Ben Affleck. It was in the days when you could tell what Boston block someone grew up on by the accent. The Irish don't come off all too well. Southie is a place to avoid in this prelude to The Depahted. It's good, though a little too graphically violent and written like a movie script. Let's just say Whitey Bulger came by his proclivities naturally.

Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

quite charming and lovely; a peek into the modest domestic life and extraordinary yearnings of a summer community of Orthodox Jews in the Catskills

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Also saw the Swedish version of the first book.

The reminders of domestic terror in the most intimate sense are deeply unsettling. The author reminds of the percentage of Swedish women who are abused, beaten, left for dead, even. It is an all-too-steady drumbeat beneath human society.

Meanwhile, I found a new collection of stories, that is easier to read before bed. I heard the most astounding story on Selected Shorts: "The Mappist" by Barry Lopez. You MUST read it. Before you know it, you are in another world, that shines the most wonderful light on this place we inhabit and how we live in it.

I had a brief flirtation with a few of Joyce Carol Oates short stories. Bracing. I am always on the look-out for her perceptive comments about upstate New York.

Done with Cheever, and LOVED it. Again. If you read nothing else, read "The Death of Justina." Then again, I also like, "Goodbye, My Brother." Cheever; the chronicler of a world falling apart.

This summer ...
Middlemarch by George Eliot. This wonderful story of the intertwined lives of villagers contains the requisite English characters of pompous rectors, impoverished strivers and beautiful young women. It's like reading Trollope: you'll find someone you know in Middlemarch.
and
The Collected Stories of John Cheever. A perennial favorite. Poignant stories of families in mid-century middle America. Reading it again is a bit like Mad Men, where you are glued, almost in horror, at the train wreck you know is about to happen in these people's lives.

Responding to the Unspeakable

The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in the days right before Christmas, with the deaths of small children and the people trying to protect them, wrench our hearts like nothing else. However we respond to this tragedy -- with silence, with weeping, with anger, with resolve to work so that something like this will never happen again -- all of our reactions are understandable. We need ways to regain our footing and imagine how we will live in the world as it is now, in this world in which we experience yet more grief and sadness.

On Sunday, December 16, the Prayers of the People at St. David's Church were in the words of parishioners and preachers, some from the very day of the tragedy. Find the text of those prayers on our Forming Disciples blog.