Already thinking of harvest

I love the image of the vine that Jesus shares in the Gospel of John (15:1-8).  Jesus says that he is the vine, God is the vine grower and we are the branches.   It's multilayered and not without it's challenges, but to me, that just reminds me of how vines work: long stems, busy tendrils, clingy roots, dense leaves.  It speaks to a relationship, a connectedness that is deeply rooted, nurturing and mutually beneficial.  Health and wholeness in this image is a dense, complicated, bushy plant.

At least, that's how I imagine it.  I'm not much of a gardner (not at all, even - I have a "black thumb") and I wouldn't really know what to do with a vine.  I know that when I prune the lilac bushes and fruit trees around our house, my wife usually reacts with horror and disappointment that I "killed" them.  To be fair, it sure looks like it, too, but they seem to survive and occasionally thrive.  Probably luck, though, because I don't really know what I'm doing.

Good thing it's God that's the vine grower.

I wonder if "pruning" isn't in those moments when we are challenged by life and, with God's loving presence, Jesus' living example and the Spirit's inspiration, we learn to grow and live past the challenge.  God knows us and God's love and grace is for us, helping us to know where to cut or graft, tie up, let go or reshape.  Remembering that God is the life gardener might also help us to better understand that our role, as branches, is about relationship with others, not judgement of others.  You and I don't get to "prune" others off the vine: we get to grow with them, because the vine is the living example of the love which is at the heart of our own living.

Good thing it's Jesus that's the vine.

The message of Jesus is about love and grace.  And we can talk, teach, sing and preach about it as much as we want, but Jesus' message is "do."  Health and wholeness comes with doing the life of Jesus, not talking about it or telling others how they should do it.  Doing Jesus means being vulnerable in offering love and receiving love, remembering that God is with us when it's time to prune, just as much as in the sun and rain, the warm weather and gentle breezes.

See, it's a great image to explore the relational nature of our existence, our connectedness in community, our complex, intimate living together in creation.

And we so often stop right there.  It's just about the relationship or the system or the structure.  But it's not, it's about fruit.

The fruit is the gift of the vine beyond itself, the thing it offers to the world.  The individual benefits to the branches and the vine, the things we gain by being in relationship with each other and Jesus, these are part of the nurture of the vine.  The fruit doesn't feed the vine, the fruit feeds the world of which the vine is a part.

All communities of faith should see in this image that the goal of the very community they build is beyond itself: it's to be fruitful in ways that feed all.  Perhaps the first two questions we ask ourselves should be "where is the journey taking us today" and "how can we be fruitful as we travel that journey?"

Of course, we are planted in a vineyard and there are many vines.  Communities built on positive, nurturing relationships bear fruit.  Communities of all shapes and sizes, families, friends, lovers, communities of people, communities of faith, aren't they all vines that could bear fruit to feed others?

So what fruit is your vine offering the world?