John 15: 1-8

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.  He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.

The Vine

This past November, I sat right out there at a table with a man who made faces that my kid found hilarious.  He had a grandson about the same age as her and clearly had some experience in the kind of silliness that speaks to the preschool set.  This man was, at the time, unhoused, experiencing homelessness, and staying here at the church in a program for Congregations for the Homeless.  I look back at this moment as a blessing.  Often I think of doing as an “ought” or a “should,” one of those deep obligations of weight upon a person.  But this moment flowed so surely from the life of this church.

When I came here I was grafted on the relationship and deep roots of this church that has been hosting the rotating homeless shelter for the month of November for over twenty years.  I have become part of this community that was so moved that there was no safe space for women experiencing homeless to sleep on the eastside that Sophia Way was founded by a member of this church and incubated within these walls.  And so, when Pastor Cristina went out of her way to create spaces for families to participate, then its natural outgrowth is that I get to be here with my kid at this table, in the midst of this blessing that I wouldn’t have known how to create.  And I know that this experience takes me somewhere else, too, as our wider community asks questions on housing and homelessness and our solutions together, that I have been changed by this experience and somehow invited into this outgrowth of a love that I didn’t expect.  I sometimes think of doing good as a burden, as an obligation, as a thing that is separate from who I am.  But what a beauty it is when it seems to come from the other way instead and the reaching down to the connections we have and the reaching up to the place where love is stretching us, that what flows seems to come so naturally as day follows night, reaching out once more into what we will be.

The Scripture reads:  “I am the vine and you are the branches.”  For me, who is not with a green thumb, it meant that I had to spend a lot of time this week looking up grape vines.  Here is what the internet has taught me:  that grape vines have at their base roots and then a trunk that rises up and then (and this is a word I have learned) a cordon that goes this way.  And then from that comes little spurs or canes that spring up this way and that is where the green leaves grow and hopefully, eventually, fruit.  Each year these canes that grow up need to be removed and brought down to just a spur for, if you keep all of the old growth, you will get a lot of leaves and no so much fruit.  A very comfortable grape vine makes a lot of leaves and no fruit.  Then how is it that cultivated grapes grow?  They grow because they are cared for.  I was fascinated to learn that intimately a plant’s ability to grow is connected to how it is cared for, even today predominately by hand, because its old growth needs to be pruned away because fruit will