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You Are the Branches - The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
In her sermon for the fifth Sunday of Easter, the Rev. Barbara Ballenger admits to some hesitancy to be in the powerless and vulnerable position of prune-able branch of Christ the vine. She also reminds us that our job is to stay with the vine and that, "Our role as disciples of Jesus, as branches of the vine of Christ, is to help people find God's love right at hand."
Today's readings are:
1 John 4:7-21
Psalm 22:24-30
John 15:1-8
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net
Transcript:
[Introductory Music]
[The Rev. Barbara Ballenger] Let us pray: Lord Christ, help us to recognize you in the love that flows through us, in the way we bloom and bear fruit. Amen. Please, be seated.
This past Earth Day the Climate Action Team led a sunset compline walk along Forbidden Drive down by the Valley Green Inn. Between evening prayers, parishioner Sue MacQueen invited us to tune into the sounds and the sights of the vast network of life that we were part of. At one point she called our attention to a dead tree. A living tree might hold a hundred different species of life within it, she said. But a seemingly dead tree is teaming with life, housing and nourishing thousands of species of all kinds.
That shouldn't have been a very hard concept for me to grasp, given how complex and interconnected a species we ourselves are, how reliant we are on systems upon systems of relationships. But at that moment I felt a little like an outsider staring at a city from a great distance. It can be very hard for me to shake the great myth of individualism that shaped me, the sense that I'm a free agent, self-made by myriad individual choices. It can be very hard for me to see myself in the bigger picture, how I'm shaped by what I'm a part of and what is part of me.
The NIH reminds me that the micro-organisms that my body hosts outnumber my human cells 10 to 1. I don't like to think about that all that much.
But even if I set dead trees and gut flora aside, today I'm faced with the story of the Vine and the Branches, in which I'm invited to see myself as a small, prune-able part of something that's largely out of my control, while channeling within me the generative power of God's love.
"Abide in me as I abide in you," Jesus says in today's Gospel from John. "Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me."
How exactly do God and I abide in one another? Abide, it's a word that means to remain with or to stay with. And it means to live. Remain in me as I remain in you. Live in me as I live in you.
The vine is a brilliant metaphor for this. In Jesus, God plants the divine self in creation, and the Christ, the Word of God, emerges in our world like a vine -- reachable and knowable and believable. The life-sap of that vine is the love that the author of First John is talking about, bursting out in branches and flowers and fruit. Who are those branches? You are those branches, Jesus tells his disciples. We are those branches, he tells us. And our job - allow that love to bloom, bear fruit.
The Scripture writers knew that this cooperation with God may seem simple, but it's certainly not easy. You don't usually get admonitions to love one another if everyone is already doing a great job of it. Moses gave us the 10 commandments after all, not the Top 10 list of Israel's best qualities.
The health and wellbeing of the vine as a metaphor for the health of Israel's relationship with God is found throughout Scripture. Isaiah points out how much tending a vineyard requires - a bit different from those seeds that are thrown willy nilly on all sorts of ground. Vineyards are planted very intentionally, protected with walls. Watchtowers are built to guard the harvest so it isn't stolen. The vineyard master waters and tends the vines.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Israel is the vine that God plants and tends. God often laments the quality of harvest when God's people produce wild, inedible grapes and the wood of their vine isn't good for anything but burning. Until Jesus himself becomes the vine in John's Gospel. Jesus is Israel at its most faithful -- fully covenanted, abiding completely in God. And in Jesus, the ancient promise of the wider world coming to God through Israel occurs.
But this didn't prevent the strife that grew up among the members of the early Christian communities, especially the ones for whom this Epistle and Gospel were intended. Their disagreement over teachings about Jesus threatened the whole faithful enterprise they were part of.
The advice the Epistle writer gives them is: let God love through you. Let that love push out the fear that causes communities to split apart. The Gospel writer would say: remain a living branch on the bigger vine that is Christ.
To participate in the generative work of God in the world, one has to stay with the vine. Disciples who have lost access to the love that flows from that divine relationship will not bear fruit, and their faith will die, and they will fall away, or be trimmed away by the vine grower.
I have to admit the metaphor of the vine and branches makes me a little uncomfortable when I really think about it. First, being a branch is a pretty passive role - not like being the hands and feet of Jesus or heading off to pasture with the flock. Being a branch feels more like letting everything happen through me, without my complete control. In the metaphor of the vine and the branches, there's a whole lot of pruning going on, and I'm not in control of the clippers.
Maybe it's easy to lose sight of who we are in metaphors like these - perhaps we confuse God's role with ours.
Throughout John's Gospel, Jesus explains who he is in a variety of ways, many of which start with an I am statement. Now in biblical language, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures, I Am refers to God. When Moses asks the voice in the burning bush what name to give it, God replies: I AM Who I AM. So whenever you run into the phrase "I AM" in the scriptures, pay attention, because God is near.
So Jesus says in various places in John's Gospel: I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the door or the sheep gate; I am the good shepherd; I am the resurrection; I am the way, the truth and the life; I am the vine. Each one of these statements describes not only who Jesus is, but who God is in relation to humanity - each describes how God reaches out to humanity through Jesus.
That begs the question: who are we then in these descriptions? We are table guests; we are travelers on a path following a light; we are receivers of truth; we are sheep who are led and protected; we are the dead restored to life; we are branches that bear the fruit of God's love in the world.
Without this dynamic mutuality, this systemic life in God, Jesus becomes just a historical figure, or worse yet, an idol. Belief becomes an argument and the church becomes a discriminating club. I wonder sometimes if people's distaste for Christianity is really a distaste for those things - the idol, the apologetics, the club. I have to believe that the world does have a taste for, in fact a deep thirst, for the love of God that is described in First John.
Who doesn't want life, and a deliverance from and a righting of the world's evils? Who doesn't want to be free of fear? Who doesn't want to be forgiven instead of punished? Who doesn't want to be included and accepted rather than despised and hated? Who doesn't want the boldness and confidence and courageous relationships that come from that kind of love?
Our role as disciples of Jesus, as branches of the vine of Christ, is to help people find God's love right at hand.
In these demanding and exhausting times, there is something almost restful about being a branch on Christ's vine. What would it take for me to ease up a bit, let go of my fear of getting it wrong, and just let God's world-changing love flow through me and out to others who need it.
Parishioner Scott Robinson put it this way in a Facebook post recently:
It occurs to me the vine is not separate from the branches; in fact, they are made of the same stuff--they are all of a piece. When I am having trouble tuning in to the divine presence, I can remind myself that I am already a branch of the vine.
What if we saw ourselves as already teaming with the life and love of God? What if we stopped wrestling with God for control of the clippers and just let God be the vine grower?
What greater yield might we bear? And who out there might finally find what they've been hungering for: Love right at hand, fruit ripe for the picking.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org
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By St. Martin-in-the-FieldsIn her sermon for the fifth Sunday of Easter, the Rev. Barbara Ballenger admits to some hesitancy to be in the powerless and vulnerable position of prune-able branch of Christ the vine. She also reminds us that our job is to stay with the vine and that, "Our role as disciples of Jesus, as branches of the vine of Christ, is to help people find God's love right at hand."
Today's readings are:
1 John 4:7-21
Psalm 22:24-30
John 15:1-8
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net
Transcript:
[Introductory Music]
[The Rev. Barbara Ballenger] Let us pray: Lord Christ, help us to recognize you in the love that flows through us, in the way we bloom and bear fruit. Amen. Please, be seated.
This past Earth Day the Climate Action Team led a sunset compline walk along Forbidden Drive down by the Valley Green Inn. Between evening prayers, parishioner Sue MacQueen invited us to tune into the sounds and the sights of the vast network of life that we were part of. At one point she called our attention to a dead tree. A living tree might hold a hundred different species of life within it, she said. But a seemingly dead tree is teaming with life, housing and nourishing thousands of species of all kinds.
That shouldn't have been a very hard concept for me to grasp, given how complex and interconnected a species we ourselves are, how reliant we are on systems upon systems of relationships. But at that moment I felt a little like an outsider staring at a city from a great distance. It can be very hard for me to shake the great myth of individualism that shaped me, the sense that I'm a free agent, self-made by myriad individual choices. It can be very hard for me to see myself in the bigger picture, how I'm shaped by what I'm a part of and what is part of me.
The NIH reminds me that the micro-organisms that my body hosts outnumber my human cells 10 to 1. I don't like to think about that all that much.
But even if I set dead trees and gut flora aside, today I'm faced with the story of the Vine and the Branches, in which I'm invited to see myself as a small, prune-able part of something that's largely out of my control, while channeling within me the generative power of God's love.
"Abide in me as I abide in you," Jesus says in today's Gospel from John. "Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me."
How exactly do God and I abide in one another? Abide, it's a word that means to remain with or to stay with. And it means to live. Remain in me as I remain in you. Live in me as I live in you.
The vine is a brilliant metaphor for this. In Jesus, God plants the divine self in creation, and the Christ, the Word of God, emerges in our world like a vine -- reachable and knowable and believable. The life-sap of that vine is the love that the author of First John is talking about, bursting out in branches and flowers and fruit. Who are those branches? You are those branches, Jesus tells his disciples. We are those branches, he tells us. And our job - allow that love to bloom, bear fruit.
The Scripture writers knew that this cooperation with God may seem simple, but it's certainly not easy. You don't usually get admonitions to love one another if everyone is already doing a great job of it. Moses gave us the 10 commandments after all, not the Top 10 list of Israel's best qualities.
The health and wellbeing of the vine as a metaphor for the health of Israel's relationship with God is found throughout Scripture. Isaiah points out how much tending a vineyard requires - a bit different from those seeds that are thrown willy nilly on all sorts of ground. Vineyards are planted very intentionally, protected with walls. Watchtowers are built to guard the harvest so it isn't stolen. The vineyard master waters and tends the vines.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Israel is the vine that God plants and tends. God often laments the quality of harvest when God's people produce wild, inedible grapes and the wood of their vine isn't good for anything but burning. Until Jesus himself becomes the vine in John's Gospel. Jesus is Israel at its most faithful -- fully covenanted, abiding completely in God. And in Jesus, the ancient promise of the wider world coming to God through Israel occurs.
But this didn't prevent the strife that grew up among the members of the early Christian communities, especially the ones for whom this Epistle and Gospel were intended. Their disagreement over teachings about Jesus threatened the whole faithful enterprise they were part of.
The advice the Epistle writer gives them is: let God love through you. Let that love push out the fear that causes communities to split apart. The Gospel writer would say: remain a living branch on the bigger vine that is Christ.
To participate in the generative work of God in the world, one has to stay with the vine. Disciples who have lost access to the love that flows from that divine relationship will not bear fruit, and their faith will die, and they will fall away, or be trimmed away by the vine grower.
I have to admit the metaphor of the vine and branches makes me a little uncomfortable when I really think about it. First, being a branch is a pretty passive role - not like being the hands and feet of Jesus or heading off to pasture with the flock. Being a branch feels more like letting everything happen through me, without my complete control. In the metaphor of the vine and the branches, there's a whole lot of pruning going on, and I'm not in control of the clippers.
Maybe it's easy to lose sight of who we are in metaphors like these - perhaps we confuse God's role with ours.
Throughout John's Gospel, Jesus explains who he is in a variety of ways, many of which start with an I am statement. Now in biblical language, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures, I Am refers to God. When Moses asks the voice in the burning bush what name to give it, God replies: I AM Who I AM. So whenever you run into the phrase "I AM" in the scriptures, pay attention, because God is near.
So Jesus says in various places in John's Gospel: I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the door or the sheep gate; I am the good shepherd; I am the resurrection; I am the way, the truth and the life; I am the vine. Each one of these statements describes not only who Jesus is, but who God is in relation to humanity - each describes how God reaches out to humanity through Jesus.
That begs the question: who are we then in these descriptions? We are table guests; we are travelers on a path following a light; we are receivers of truth; we are sheep who are led and protected; we are the dead restored to life; we are branches that bear the fruit of God's love in the world.
Without this dynamic mutuality, this systemic life in God, Jesus becomes just a historical figure, or worse yet, an idol. Belief becomes an argument and the church becomes a discriminating club. I wonder sometimes if people's distaste for Christianity is really a distaste for those things - the idol, the apologetics, the club. I have to believe that the world does have a taste for, in fact a deep thirst, for the love of God that is described in First John.
Who doesn't want life, and a deliverance from and a righting of the world's evils? Who doesn't want to be free of fear? Who doesn't want to be forgiven instead of punished? Who doesn't want to be included and accepted rather than despised and hated? Who doesn't want the boldness and confidence and courageous relationships that come from that kind of love?
Our role as disciples of Jesus, as branches of the vine of Christ, is to help people find God's love right at hand.
In these demanding and exhausting times, there is something almost restful about being a branch on Christ's vine. What would it take for me to ease up a bit, let go of my fear of getting it wrong, and just let God's world-changing love flow through me and out to others who need it.
Parishioner Scott Robinson put it this way in a Facebook post recently:
It occurs to me the vine is not separate from the branches; in fact, they are made of the same stuff--they are all of a piece. When I am having trouble tuning in to the divine presence, I can remind myself that I am already a branch of the vine.
What if we saw ourselves as already teaming with the life and love of God? What if we stopped wrestling with God for control of the clippers and just let God be the vine grower?
What greater yield might we bear? And who out there might finally find what they've been hungering for: Love right at hand, fruit ripe for the picking.
Amen.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved.
Video, photographs, and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466. https://www.stmartinec.org