Live in Me

John 15:1-8

I have a garden with three orange trees, one lemon, an askidinya tree and an olive tree and two baby fig trees. I also have a gigantic geranium that looks like a burning bush when it’s in bloom and some grape vines. I have just started to plant a vegetable and herb garden between the trees where the sun is brightest. I am learning the difference between sowing seeds and planting plants; I am learning about how clay like the soil is here compared to the soil in Jericho; I am learning to be patient, to be ok with the fact that growth takes time---needs the dark and the light. I am becoming a gardener.  

Each morning before the sun comes up I water the little plants and pray over the lightly buried seeds in their homemade pots in hope that one or more of them will sprout. I also water the trees and monitor the rapid growth of the grapevines that are looking for something to crawl up and twist themselves around. If I don’t provide them some kind of structure, trellis, or wire soon their branches will touch the ground and the fruit will become inedible or edible to the ground creatures only. I observe that the vine and its branches and its tendrils live intertwined reaching out.

Our scripture passage this morning from the Gospel of John draws on a staple network of images to talk about life in community---vine, vineyard and gardening similar to Isaiah 5: 1-7. Explicit in Isaiah is that we are to choose God’s lovingly cultivated vineyard and be his “pleasant planting” or else. In John we don’t have to choose so much as recognize our interconnected relationship, recognize that we have already been “cleansed by the word” so we can bear lots of fruit.

In John the language “I am the vine, you are the branches” is a way of saying that the revelation that God made through Jesus (the vine) will continue out to the Johannine community (the branches and the fruit). The vine and the branches abide in each other; they indwell together.

Another metaphor for indwelling, for living in “the depths” comes from the German poet Rilke who when contemplating the vineyard writes about being the night, the hut and the watchman:

Just as the watchman in the vineyards
has a hut, keeps vigil there,
I am that hut, Lord.
And I am night, Lord, within your night.

Wine garden, meadow, apple orchard,
field that no springtime forgets,
fig tree that yields a thousand figs
though rooted in ground as hard as marble:

fragrance exudes from your rounding branches.
You never ask if I am keeping watch.
Fearless, dissolved in juices,
your depths rise quietly around me.

        The Book of Hours I, 5

God abides in us even if we don’t keep watch because God already abides in Jesus. Therefore Jesus reveals God’s self and heaven through his ministry and later his resurrection. I like the way Eugene Peterson puts it:

Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way a branch can’t bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you cannot bear fruits unless you are joined with me.

This is the heart of what it means to be a Christian, to be in an intimate relationship with Christ and each other, the other branches. The mark of a faithful community then in not who are the members, the ones who come to church, or believe in doctrines, or even the sacraments, but those who love each other. Those who love each other will bear fruit. Listen to how Catherine of Siena[1] describes this relationship ob being engrafted onto the vine:

You, then, are my workers.  You have come from me, the supreme eternal gardener, and I have engrafted you onto the vine by making myself one with you. Keep in mind that each of you has your own vineyard.  But everyone is joined to the neighbor’s vineyards without any dividing lines.  They are so joined together, in fact, that you cannot do good or evil for yourself without doing the same for your neighbors.

Each of us has our own vineyard but everyone is joined to the neighbor’s vineyard without any dividing lines. We cannot do good or evil for ourselves without doing the same for our neighbors. We are all connected in what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together in a single garment of destiny.In injustice to one is an injustice to all.”

This network of mutuality means that what happens in someone else’s vineyard matters. Last spring Daoud Naser and his family up at Tent of Nations outside of Bethlehem had 1,500 fruit trees destroyed by Israeli authorities. Many of the trees were mature fruit bearing trees. His loss is our loss as this injustice affects our sense of justice. And it is out of this sense of connection or love that individuals and organizations spent the spring helping the family replant. Cornell West says “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Planting fruit trees this cold spring was a labor of love, for keeping hope alive.

So if we are all connected, joined, inter-dependent how do we deal with those branches who wish or do harm?  How does God’s love abide in those who have destroyed someone else’s fruit? Have cut them down? Bulldozed them into the ground? And how does God’s love abide in those who see a sister or brother suffering and refuses to help or stop the oppression? How does God’s love abide in those who follow human commands but not God’s command to love one another, who forget that “justice is what love looks like in public.”

And then there is the issue that abiding in Jesus can also lead to persecution.  We know that being connected to the vine can also lead to danger. Our biblical stories tell us this as do historical accounts of the early Christians being martyred for their faith. And even today, those who profess Jesus as their Lord and Savior are being persecuted and killed throughout the Middle East and now Africa. Why is this vine so threatening?

And finally being identified as a Christian, a branch of the vine, also means becoming the fruit for another’s hunger and thirst as the Poet Pablo Neruda says:

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.

There was grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

We are commanded to become fruitful so we can become nourishment and refreshment for each other, so that we may bear the fruit of love for one another.

Oh vine of truth, in you we flourish.

May your word live among us,

inside us, below us, above us, behind us.

May our branches intertwine and tangle

with other fruit bearing vines until

all dividing lines, all vineyards are ripe

for your harvest, bounty for your table here

and the banquet to come.

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[1] Catherine of Siena  (1347-1380) Dialogue, The Vines That Are Tended by the Divine Gardener  (quoted from Mystics Visionaries and Prophets, Shawn Madigan, CSJ, editor)