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St. Andrew's Church
An Anglican Church • Grimsby, Ontario, Canada
Preached by
Stuart Pike
Rector
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Easter 5B - The Vineyard
St. Andrew's Church, Grimsby
13 May 2006
What a wonderful part of the world to live in this is and to read today's Gospel message. It was last week when I was going to pick up Louisa from a Girl Guide cook out at Beamer Conservation authority that I caught the sight of rows and rows of grape vines alongside orchards of white apple blossoms. God is great, I thought, and how often do we fail to notice. I thank God that we live in Niagara and that we can experience the beauty of grape and apple and cherry and peach growing together.
I appreciate good gardens, but I don't suppose that I will ever be a good gardener myself. I must have realized this early on when I was a young boy and my maternal grandmother, who could and did grow anything, was teaching my brother and me how to weed the beds. Well, you see, I felt sorry for the weeds! Still to this day whenever I get the chance to weed our garden, my sense of accomplishment is alway tinged with a hint of regret for the unwanted green refuse simply cast aside and thrown into the compost bin. If you know how I felt about weeding, you can imagine what the concept of pruning did to my psyche!
Between the ages of 11 and 14 years, I lived in England where my father was teaching at a Royal Air Force staff college. We lived in a marvellous house with two sets of french doors that opened out into a beautiful back garden which was filled with about 15 rose beds. There were more rose beds in the front. My father, like most of the officers at the staff college, hired a gardener to care for it all.
Mr. Jenkins was very old and bent and kind and he would show my brother and me how he pruned the roses and cared for the rest of the garden. He seems kind, I thought, but he certainly was vicious with a set of pruning shears!
After watching me cut a quarter of an inch off the ends of a couple of branches, he explained to me that pruning was good for the plant. It allowed it to flourish and to produce far more flowers. Short term pain for long term gain.
When Luke was writing the book of Acts and John was writing the Gospel of John the Church was going through persecution. Many were imprisoned and tortured and executed just for being Christians. Many believers believed that God was in control of their lives and many must have found it difficult to understand how they could be experiencing so much evil while they had such a strong faith in God. Many would have been tempted to renounce their faith, or to simply keep it a very personal faith, and not to proclaim it publicly.
It is within this context that we must hear the story of the vineyard. This image of the vineyard was one which was very familiar to the Hebrews. In much of the Old Testament the children of Israel were compared to a vineyard which was tended by God.
In today's Gospel lesson, Jesus tells his followers that God will prune the faithful to make them produce even more fruit. I think that the early followers of Jesus who were so persecuted understood that it was through their suffering that they became even stronger in their faith. I remember my other grandmother, my father's mother, explaining to me that her great faith hadn't been grown when everything in her life was going smoothly. It had grown during the struggles in her life which were many.
And in remembering our time at the Royal Air Force staff college I am reminded of the motto of the RAF and of the Commonwealth air forces, including our own. "Per Ardua ad Astra." which can be translated as "Through struggle to the stars."
Many people here know this truth about struggle and growth. Still, many others find that life's challenges cause them to doubt their faith and some seem to lose their faith in adversity. How can the bad in our life possibly cause us to be more fruitful?
We can only understand it if we experience the other aspect of gardening which we hear in today's Gospel. More gardening lessons! Mr. Jenkins showed my brother and me how to graft a shoot of one rose onto another rose bush. He especially liked to do this if there was a problem with the root system of a rose bush and it was dying. He could not only keep the shoot alive, but it could flourish growing on a healthy bush even if its original rose bush died. We had all kinds of rose bushes with roses of different colours blooming from them. We even had an apple tree which had small green apples on one half and small red ones on the other.
Jesus tells us that he is the true vine, and that we have been grafted into him. It is he who provides us with our spiritual life. He gives us spiritual food that we might not only survive, even in adversity, but that we will thrive and produce fruit.
The way in which we are grafted into Jesus, the true vine is by our baptism. It is through baptism that we become full members of the body of Christ. Remaining rooted in Christ is the only way in which we can live out our baptismal covenant. It is not something which we can do alone. It is the only way in which we can flourish. That is why we are baptized into a Church community. Just as a vine has many branches, so we are grafted into a community with many members and we support each other and are all fed by Christ.
Today there are three people who will be baptized into Christ's Church. Although they will be living out their baptismal covenant through Grace Church-on-the-Hill in Toronto, we welcome them and celebrate with them that they are grafted into the true vine, Jesus Christ. As we welcome them into the faith we are aware that being a Christian isn't going to make their lives easier. There will still be times of difficulty. There will be times when they are pruned. But, if they stay rooted in Christ, the true vine, they will grow through adversity and will flourish and bear much fruit. They will need to wear their Christianity in public to do this. And that fruit will be what brings others into Christ's Church. It is the ultimate purpose of their lives and it will give it meaning. It is their call and it is the call of each of us here who are grafted into Christ, the true vine.
I pray that we will each remain rooted in Christ, that we will continue to grow in faith and that we will bear much fruit. Amen.
