Sermons from St Faith's
Pruning Time
Revd Sue Lucas, May 3rd, 2015
‘Everyone under their own vine, everyone under
their own fig tree.’ It’s an image of
contentment, of plenty, of flourishing; a sense
of well-being, of Sabbath rest – for me, it’s
more often to be found at the business end of
pint glass in a still sunny garden at the end of
a working day! It’s an image of what God
wants for the people of Israel in the Hebrew
scriptures – a very real, material, down to
earth peace and plenty, in which people have
enough not simply to survive or get by, but
enough to dream, to know the kids are alright,
to hope for the future.
The vine was an image of this well-being because
it was a luxury crop – a crop that took many
years of careful tending, of pruning and
cutting, to fruit. If you’ve ever had one
in your garden – you’ll know!
So in the Old Testament it is sometimes an image
of judgement as well – vines must be pruned,
unfruitful branches sometimes thrown into the
fire.
It is the image at the heart of our Gospel today
– an image that, itself like a vine, is given
extraordinary new shape, and full fruition in
Jesus.
First, whilst the idea of pruning is there – it
is an image of the most extraordinary
generosity; to be in Christ is to be fruitful –
to be fruitful in quantity and quality beyond
what we can imagine.
Second, it is worth meditating on I AM the vine
and you are the branches; for, if you imagine a
vine, it is not that it is a tree with a central
trunk with branches emerging out of it; no the
vine IS the branches, the branches just ARE the
vine. The extraordinary, audacious
challenge here is – WE are branches, so we ARE
Christ –
We are, as in Teresa of Avila’s famous prayer –
now Christ’s body on earth; now the hands to do
his work, now the feet to go his way, now the
eyes through which to see the world.
It is, in one sense, a commonplace of being the
Church; we ARE the Body of Christ, we say at the
peace, by one Spirit we were all baptised into
one body – yet, perhaps today’s Gospel brings
home to us how extraordinary and challenging
that is.
What then, does it mean to be the branches of
the vine in this sense?
Well, in Acts – we are reminded that we are made
into the Body of Christ in baptism; in fact,
some scholars think that the words of the Eunuch
‘what is to prevent me?’ are in fact words from
an early baptismal liturgy – a bit of liturgy
coming at us out of scripture, just as, of
course, liturgy is itself scripture enacted.
What is significant here is there is nothing to
prevent the baptism of an Ethiopian Eunuch – a
stranger, a gentile, an outsider; to be in
Christ is to welcome the stranger – above all to
welcome those who make us most uncomfortable,
those who challenge our most cherished beliefs,
those we make into ‘the other’ –
And to be in Christ is to be pruned – and that
means, to have our corners knocked off, our most
treasured preconceptions challenged; it is to
let go of the urge to control, to fix, to be
only amongst those we like, and to allow
ourselves to be open to the fiery love of God
that will have none of our puny preoccupations.
And above all – as our Epistle says quite
clearly – to be in Christ is to love one
another. And that doesn’t mean just loving
those like us, those we like – it means loving
those we like, yes, but also recognising our
call to love those we dislike, those we despise,
those who seek to do us wrong, those we perceive
have hurt us.
An impossible seeming vocation? Well –
yes, for us; yet our Gospel insists we ARE
branches of the vine – touched by the grace of
our baptism even when we can’t see it.
That grace is at work in us constantly; and
sometimes, by grace, we even catch a glimmer of
it at work, and begin to work with it – and we
realise we begin to love the stranger, the odd,
the mad, the bad, the dangerous to know when we
pray for them; and in praying realise that God
loves them with the same relentless committed
love, the love that in Christ did not even
shrink at the Cross, that God loves us.
And it is in this relentless committed love that
we begin to perceive the truth about ourselves –
that there are bits of us that need
pruning! And yet we need not fear this –
for when we fear that truth condemns us, we
learn we are indeed branches of the vine – the
true Vine in whom truth and love are one.
Amen.
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