Year B

John 15:1-8

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Life Giving Vine

If you have ever watched the Wizard of Oz of which I have many times through the years, you may remember hearing Dorothy say these famous words during her quest to return home, “There’s no place like home.” I remember how powerful those words left me feeling when she tells her Aunt, at the very end of the movie after returning home and her grand adventure-“Oh, Auntie Em-there is no place like home! Having a sense of home is an important basic feeling for us. We care deeply about having a place where we belong. Card stores, gift shops, and refrigerator doors are full of knickknacks with sayings about home like: “Home is where the heart is,” and “There is no place like home.”

For most of us the image of home leaves us with a feeling of love and being cared for but this is not so for some, and our culture does have a tendency to paint an image of home that is not always the reality or what we may see in the movies, even in loving homes. Today we hear Jesus explain to us the home he makes in us and asks us to make our home in him. Our lives he tells us can only be fulfilled and make sense, and his resurrection will be what we need when God’s home is where our heart is. When our lives are rooted in Jesus he extends the power and life of the resurrection to us and as we abide in him, as we live in him, the home he makes in us becomes life itself which brings a settled peace to the sometimes unsettled times in our lives.

We see this Easter truth in all the lessons today, but especially in the verses from our gospel text which is taken from Jesus’ final words with his disciples on the night before he died to prepare and help them for what is to come. In these verses, the home or connection between Jesus and God, as well as our connection to one another and God through Jesus is compared to a vine and a vine grower. This image of home that Jesus gives us is not one of houses and buildings. It is a living, growing intertwined grapevine. This idea of God as vine grower is common to both the Old and New Testaments. In Isaiah 5 and Psalm 80 God is the one who plants Israel as a vine, takes care of the vine and expects a rich harvest from it.

Jeremiah used the vine image to illustrate how Israel had failed to fulfill the purposes for which God had planted and nurtured it; the vine had grown wild and rank. Israel proves not to be the true vine. When Jesus proclaims he is the true vine, he is pointing to himself as the one who embodies the purposes for which God had chosen Israel. He is now the life-giving vine to his disciples who are the branches. An effective branch needs to be firmly connected to the heart of the vine. So we have this powerful image of abiding: “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. The moment we move our home to something or someone else we can become severed from the vine and begin to wither away.

Vines from time to time need to be pruned by a gardener to cut away dead wood or anything that would make the vine less than fully alive. To be fully alive and produce fruit, the branch needs to be firmly connected. Jesus makes it clear that he exists for the life of the branches attached to him. It is through the vine that we receive what we need to bear fruit. What a wonderful picture, Jesus, the root and main vine, sustaining and nurturing all the diverse, going-off-in-all-directions branches.  We stay connected to the vine by prayer, study of God’s word, and by the work God calls us to do. By abiding in Jesus we are given the power to serve and love God and our neighbor.

Jesus invited his disciples that night in the upper room to abide in him not only prepare them for what was coming but also that they would became fruitful branches of the vine, and we see them bearing much fruit in the book of Acts and in the Epistles. In the reading from Acts today, we see the transforming power of the Holy Spirit working through the apostle Philip. Luke’s purpose in today’s conversion story of the unnamed eunuch from Ethiopia who becomes a new branch grafted into the vine through baptism, and the conversion of the Jew Saul from Tarsus in chapter 9, and the gentile centurion Cornelius from Rome in chapter 10 is to show that the Gospel is not only for all nations, but also for all sorts of branches.

The church’s preaching of the good news of Jesus Christ, beginning in Jerusalem, is to spread to “all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Our Easter readings from the book of Acts show us how those first century Jewish Christians began to view their relationship, their connection and home with God, based on their relationship with Jesus, and how they responded. Walls of prejudice and prohibition that had stood for generations came tumbling blown down by the breath of God’s Spirit, and like the eunuch those who felt lost and humiliated were found and restored by God’s love in Jesus Christ.

This restoring, redeeming love of God is a theme that flows through all the gospels but reaches its richest meaning in the book of 1 John, in the phrase “God is love.” All things begin in love, flow from love, are perfected through love and return to love. With beautiful words, John tells us what God is and what God is not. Love we read about here is not erotic love, nor friendship love, but agape love, self-giving love, that is centered in the well-being of others. We learn about the meaning of this love from Jesus who laid down his life for us to show us God’s love.

We can only love in this way by an act, by a voluntary act of will, an act of wanting to be connected to the main vine. We are not able to have self-giving love on our own. We cannot muster up a feeling of love for others. We can only be channels of that love to others, by abiding in the love of God. In union with Jesus…there will be life and fruitfulness. Love is of God. Only God can love even sinners without reserve. Only God could stick with God’s purposes throughout all the ages.

Jesus spells it out to us today that without God he has no life, no ministry, no mission and either do we. No harvest will be abundant without the vine grower who tends to the vine and the branches that are firmly attached. God the master gardener offers us a better plan for our lives. Let us find our home in God and place our lives in the true vine. The harvest will be bountiful. The love that the scriptures speak to, will be active in those who understand that the loving heart lives in the love of God, and roots in Christ become what we need to find meaning, value and a bountiful harvest.