RCL Easter 5B
28 April 2024
Saint Stephen the Martyr
Burnaby BC
“(Jesus said to his disciples,) ‘I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. 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.’” [1]
In January of 1988 my wife, son and I moved to faculty housing at Vancouver School of Theology. Over the next ten years our family grew by the addition of two more children and my wife studied and graduated from VST and was ordained in May of 1995. For my children life at VST was very good. There were always a lot of children and, in the summers, the experience of spending time with Aboriginal adults and children who attended the then-named Native Ministry Summer School.
But I think that my children would agree that the best years were when Art Van Seters was Principal of the School. He lived in the Principal’s residence with an extensive garden between the house and Saint Andrew’s College. The garden was Art’s joy, and it was filled with flowers, vegetables and berries. He welcomed the children at the School to come and pick fruit and vegetables with only one rule: He had to be at the house when they were in the backyard. My kids used to keep a close eye on the house during raspberry season. More than once Art had barely arrived home before all three Porter Leggett kids were at the door – and he never turned them away.
There was one fruit you would never find in Art’s garden: blackberries. He would root them out as soon as they popped their vines above the ground. When asked why, he would simply point out that there were plenty of blackberries to be found elsewhere on the Endowment Lands. But anyone who knows blackberries knows that they are an invasive, aggressive species that will choke out any other plant. Their thorns are an effective defence against any efforts to root them out and it requires constant vigilance to prevent the vines from taking over one’s garden. Their fruit is delicious, but their presence is deadly to the diversity and life of a garden.
When I was growing up in Colorado and in the early days of ordained ministry, I heard Jesus’ words in today’s gospel differently. There are very few vines on the Front Range of the Rockies and the only plants that I knew required regular pruning were roses that always seemed the better for the effort. But now having spent thirty-seven years in Canada, I hear Jesus’ words differently. Pruning is not only desirable but necessary, even if it evokes a sense of loss and causes some pain. As sweet as blackberries are in the short term, their long-term harm sours their sweetness.
It’s helpful to pause for a. moment and consider what it means to be ‘fruitful’ or ‘to bear fruit’ as these phrases are used in today’s readings. The story of the Ethiopian eunuch and Philip is a challenge to those who would limit God’s loving grace to a select group. At the times Acts was being written, there was a conflict between those who believed that being a disciple of Jesus meant also strict adherence to Jewish law as then existed and those who believed that a wider path was being established. The Ethiopian eunuch may well have been a ‘God fearer’, a non-Jew who strove to follow the way of Moses even if not eligible for full membership. To him Philip opens the way to full membership in the way of Jesus and the eunuch has no hesitation in accepting the offer. Philip prunes the tradition in order for new fruit to emerge.
In 1 John the author seeks to prune his community from religious belief based on fear to a life-giving faith based on agapē, the love that gives without expecting a return. “Fear cannot generate love, sympathy, tenderness, or compassion. We cannot scare people into tolerance, or terrify them into kindliness. The fruit of fear ends up being distrust, suspicion, and resentment. A joyless religion is fruitless and loveless, and at best is beneath the Christian ideal.” [2]
One way to look at the events of the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first is to them as evidence of God pruning the Anglican Communion in general and the Anglican Church of Canada in particular of those ‘branches’ which are no longer fruitful. When I use the term ‘branches’, I am not only talking about congregations but about attitudes that were unfruitful.
- Over the past fifty years we have wrestled with the question of how Christians are to conduct their loving relationships.
- Over the past fifty years we have wrestled with the question of how we celebrate and use the gifts of all God’s children regardless of gender.
- Over the past fifty years we have wrestled with the question of how we respect the dignity of all the cultures and religious communities that share the earth.
- Over the past fifty years we have wrestled with the question of how we respect this ‘fragile earth, our island home’ so that all humanity can thrive.
Our struggles to prune the church of values and structures and attitudes which inhibit our witness to God’s gracious generosity as shown to the Ethiopian eunuch and which diminish our capacity to live in agapē rather than fear have been painful. We have seen our numbers decline, although the rumours of our death have been greatly exaggerated. We have experienced public critique of our past and efforts to render our present irrelevant, even though governments continue to ask us to provide resources for the needs of our communities. We wonder whether we have a future, even though there are signs of new growth in many and various places.
When I was first ordained, I was part of a youth ministry movement called ‘Happening’ based on the model of Cursillo, a renewal movement created originally to reach out to unchurched men in Spain. There was a song that we used frequently on our retreats, a popular song not a religious one, but a song that I still believe spoke about what we were trying to nurture, what we are still trying to nurture.
Some say love it is a river
that drowns the tender reed.
Some say love it is a razor
that leaves your soul to bleed.
Some say love it is a hunger,
an endless aching need.
I say love, it is a flower
and you its only seed.
It’s the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance.
It’s the dream afraid of waking
that never takes a chance.
It’s the one who won’t be taken
who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying
that never learns to live.
When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long,
and you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows,
lies the seed that with the sun’s love
in the spring becomes the rose.
The late Phyllis Trickle, an influential Episcopal writer and theologian and publisher who died in 2015, thought that the Christian movement undergoes periods of upheaval and reformation every five hundred years or so. In her mind – and in the minds of many other, including mine – that is what we are experiencing now, a period of pruning which, though painful, has the potential to bear fruit for our proclamation of the good news of God in Christ.
Friends, we are not blackberries to be eradicated but roses to be pruned in order to bear more fruit. Pruning may or may not be painful to roses, we do not know, but it is painful to us. But, as we heard in 1 John two weeks ago, we are God’s children now. What we shall become is not yet clear. But what we do know is that we shall be like Christ and shall bear much fruit. So, even as we are being pruned, we pray to the Vine Keeper, the Holy One, “Keep us firm in the hope you have set before us, so that we and all your children shall be free, and the whole earth live to praise your name; through Christ (who is your living Vine and of whom we are the branches).” Amen.
