Christ the true vine

Short sermon preached at 8am Eucharist at St Alphege, Solihull on Sunday 10th May 2009, Easter 5 (Year B)

Readings Acts 8: 26-40 1John 4: 7-21 John 15: 1-8

As an eighteen year old, between school and university, I worked as a cook, gardener and housekeeper in the Diocesan House in the Southwark Diocese, South of London. The house is know as Wychcroft. One of the jobs I was given to do was to remove the ivy that was growing up the side of the brick incinerator. I made a start on this, but it was very difficult to pull the ivy off the incinerator. Every stalk had little hair like shoots that bound it onto the brickwork. The stalk would break easily enough, but when you tried to pull off a whole stalk it would immediately break again. I found I had to scrape the stalks off inch by inch.
When the warden came round to see how I was getting on he was surprised how little progress I had made. He tried the job himself and immediately found it just as difficult as I did. So he made a suggestion. “Let’s cut the ivy stalks at the bottom. This will kill off all the ivy above them. We will let it dry out for few weeks and then pull it all off.” And that was exactly what we did. When I returned to the job three weeks later the ivy on the incinerator wall had died and dried out and the hair like shoot that bound it to the brickwork had shrivelled. It was easy to pull the ivy off the wall in sheets, like loose wallpaper, and it all went straight on the fire and burnt very well. It was very satisfying!
Jesus’ parable “I am the true vine” always reminds me off this incident. If the branches of the vine are not bound into the true vine then, without its sap, they soon dry out and shrivel and die. In the same way we Christians must be bound into to Christ who gives life to our souls. Without Christ our souls shrivel and die. They are good for nothing accept the fire. However, if we do abide in Christ and Christ in us then our souls will be healthy and will bare much fruit. Further, we are told, we may ask what ever we wish and it will be done for us.
And what does it mean to abide in Christ, and have him abide in us? [Well clearly our baptism is important here because baptism binds us into Christ; into his death and resurrection. And coming regularly to the Eucharist is important too. When we receive Holy Communion we receive Christ’s presence into our physical bodies; this surely helps us to have Christ abiding in us.]
How in our everyday lives do we abide in Christ? Well, printed on our pewslip today is a passage from 1 John 4 which includes several suggestions about abiding in Christ. It is well worth reading and reflecting on. In particular it says, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 John 4: 16). To me this is the very best suggestion for abiding in God. There are two sides to it. Firstly, we must learn to recognise and trust in God’s immense love for us. We must learn to give thanks to God for all things. We must recognise that even when God prunes the branches, which is painful and can leave us with a real sense of loss, this is actually God’s love for us, forming us more closely to his great designs for us, and enabling us to bear more fruit. Secondly we must make God’s love in us grow by loving other people, by seeking to serve them and help them in the most practical ways possible. It is Christ in others that we serve; we do our best to ignore their bad points and we concentrate on serving Christ.
In this way love grows in us. We abide in love and so we abide in Christ. This ensures that we are properly grafted on to Christ the true vine. It ensure that we can bear much fruit. Amen
[Now what is this fruit of which Jesus talks? Well, in the first instance it is the personal benefits of holiness; the love and joy and peace, the patience and kindness and goodness, the faithfulness and gentleness and self-control that we think of as the fruits of the spirit (Gal 5). But more than that, it is about the good works that we do (Col 1:10), the effects that we have in our families, our communities and our nation. Our fruit is our contribution to help those who are downtrodden, our contribution to the good of society, to justice, to peace. And then more than that, fruit is about restoring, renewing and growing the body of Christ, the Church. It is about loving other people so as to help them on their Christian journey. It is about being full of mercy, so that people are helped to repent of their sins. It is about being full of faith, so that faith spills over and many may turn to Christ. Notice that all these fruits depend not so much on us, but more on our co-operation with God. It just like the fruit on a vine depends just as much on the sap from the vines roots, as it does on the vine itself. We need to abide in Christ and Christ in us.]