The Fifth Sunday of Easter

Sermon

The fifth Sunday of Easter

28 April 2024

The Reverend Dr James Gardom

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower.

John 15.1–8

I am not a good vine grower, although I have had a vine in my garden for many years. They reward careful stewardship and I am too slapdash.

It is very clear from this parable that Jesus and his disciples were familiar with vines. In the ancient Near East, they were hard work and precious crops. Alongside honey, one of the few sweet things – something to bear in mind when we think of Naboth’s vineyard, the parable of the vineyard, or the image of Israel as God’s vine.

There are three major phases in the annual pattern of a flourishing vine.

There is the winter phase, when the vine looks like nothing so much as a dead stick, and certainly gives no impression of life, energy or value.

There is the spring phase, which we are in at the moment, when there is an extraordinary explosion of growth and energy, and the tendrils grow almost before your eyes, putting out leaves and tiny precursors of grapes, climbing up anything there is to climb. There is a special green to this phase, and it is lovely.

Then there is the settled fruitfulness of full to late summer as the grapes develop – in a mature vine, well-tended, a living symbol of bounty.

I am the vine, you are the branches.

In today’s parable Jesus connects the image of the vine with the idea of abiding. (Meno – the same root word as remain). This is important. In John, over and over again Jesus talks about the abiding and mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son. Over and over again Jesus talks about the love that passes between the Father and the Son and urges the Disciples to abide in that love. If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me.

Often this idea can seem abstract. The parable of the Vine, by contrast, it is very concrete. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Anyone who has seen the extraordinary energy in growth of the vine in spring will have a vivid sense of the teeming, greening, transformation and growth that comes on that dead stick of the vine, and the glories of fruitfulness which crowns that miracle.

So, what does the parable of the vine tell us on Stewardship Sunday.

There has been bleakness, for this church, no question. As I was preparing for this sermon, I went online to look for images of vines, and photographers love to present images of the Vine in Winter – leafless, silent, abandoned, snow bound, without any obvious signs of life or hope. Jerusalem abandoned. That has been a feeling in many hearts at St Bene’t’s at times in this past year, even if we knew it was not really true. But beyond doubt there has been a real freshness of new growth. As I looked through the list or Church activities last weekend, I though how much is taking place, and how much is planned and hoped for.

And even all this shared and public activity is only a tiny part. The real work of the church is the prayer and action and faithfulness that we know to be working through the Christian lives of the congregations of St Bene’t’s. And there is a real growth and flourishing and fruitfulness.

One pleasure for me has been working with young Christians who are finding in the faith the compass and structure of their lives. Another pleasure for me this year has been praying with and listening to mature Christians, who have been guided in their spiritual lives through the years and have found such riches and wisdom and patience and courage.

These are good things, and We all know that these good things do not come from us, but from our abiding in Christ. It is the flowing of the life of Christ through us as the branches of the true vine, the abiding of Christ in us, which makes it possible, once in a while, to find the words to say and the actions to do which show Christ as our Lord.

So, the growth, the fruitfulness, the flourishing are the work of Christ. But always and forever Christ does his work in us and through us. Christ chooses us to be grafted in, to be branches. And we are called to be, almost forced to be fruitful because of the way that he abides in us. And that is the point of Stewardship Sunday.

It is really not a wholly comfortable thing to be grafted into the True Vine, to have the energy and the work of God being undertaken through our lives. You can almost hear the complaints of the fresh young leaves and tendrils as the energy and the sap of the Vine course through them, always pushing on and up and out. You can almost hear the complaints of the bunches as they grow and ripen wait for completion, for harvest. Being grafted into the True Vine, is exhilarating and exhausting, and it is exactly as full of demands as it is full of blessings. That should not come as a surprise, because we are talking about the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Christ asks us to participate, to abide, to be a part of the life of the True Vine, to be fruitful and to continue to be fruitful. That vine can only grow and be fruitful with our engagement, with our faith, with our resources.

Because the incarnate Christ makes himself real in the world through us and through this vine, this church, made real through the Time, the Talents and the Money that we give to make it real, visible, actual. The choice is always ours – we do not have to allow this life to flow through us, and we do not have to allow that life to transform our use of our time, the deployment of our abilities, and our spending priorities. But The faith and the church that are so important to us have come to us because generations before us, in their time, have not stinted with Time, Talents or Money.

This week, we stand on the edge of new hopes and new possibilities, with a new incumbent to be appointed and a new era for the community. If we can respond with generosity, then the power of God in Christ for transformation will not fail us. If we do not then I am afraid we might wake up a few years, and wonder what it was that seemed so special, so exciting, so hopeful…