What Did You Hear from the Grapevine?

5 Easter  Cycle B        May 6, 2012

Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30

1 John 4:7-21  John 15:1-8

 Lectionary Link

  A parable: There was a coastal city that had marvelous sandy beaches and each year they had a sand sculpture contest in the summer.  And each year they chose a theme for the sand sculpture contest.  One year they chose the theme of “lakes” and so each sand sculpture had to incorporate water in their created sand cities, castles or villas.  So this meant running to the ocean and fetching buckets of ocean water to fill their miniature lakes.  At the end of the day the entire beach was filled with marvelous sand structures of every sort, all incorporating miniature bodies of water.  And so it was time for the judging to begin.  There were judges from every age group and one judge happened to be a six year old girl.  And the judges were reminded that they were to judge based upon the best incorporation of a body of water into their sand creation.  When it came time for the young girl judge to render her decision, they ask her to go and point to her winner.  And they were startled to see that she ran past all of the sand creations toward the ocean and she pointed at the ocean and said, “This is the winner!”

  Sometimes we spend our time in religion filling our little human made lakes from the abundance of the ocean and we take those little lakes so seriously that we forget the plenitude from which they came.  We do the same in our religious metaphors about God; sometimes we let the metaphors serve as a replacement for the plenitude of God, who is grander than even the ocean.  Riddle: The water of the little beach lakes is and is not the ocean.
  Every metaphor in our lives is and is not God.  Each metaphor is divine in its derivation from plenitude, but it is not in its limited contextual use.

  And with that as a prelude, we might infer a question from the Gospel metaphor that we’ve read today:  What have you heard from the Grapevine?  In legal terms, hearing something from the grapevine is not admissible in the court;  it is called hearsay.  The famous Motown song, “I Heard it through the Grapevine” popularized this expression.

  The Gospel of John is a type of grapevine message; it is the hearsay that was passed within the early Christian communities.  And though hearsay may not be admissible in court, the Gospel is addressing our hearts and minds to see if a grapevine message about Christ as the Vine and us as the branches is a metaphor that can yield for us some insights about our lives of faith.

  This metaphor of the grapevine and branches is right down our alley here in California where we presume to have developed viticulture and enology to levels surpassing the French or so we like to think.

  The ocean of plenitude known as God is too big to understand and the interrelationships of an infinite number of particulars is too complex to understand; we but can reduce the complexity to metaphors of insights to help us live in our day to day lives.

  The vine and branch metaphor addresses the age old question of which is more telling, nature or nurture?  And it is a “what comes first the chicken or the egg”  type of question.  What makes for good grapes, the hybrid of the plant stock or the environment and vine dresser’s skill?   What makes for fruitful lives of faith, our interior heritage or the environment wherein we live our lives that includes our mentors and care givers?

  In the nature and nurture question there is no easy answer or either/or answer.  Sometimes we just choose an answer that is convenient for the moment.  And so when our children were misbehaving, my dear wife referred to them as “my children” as though the Cooke side of the family was responsible for the “misbehaving.”  Or I would retort, “Can’t you control “your” children?

  What is it that the writer of John is trying to teach us regarding our lives of faith?  In the midst of human nature we can find another more profound Nature with which we can learn to abide and gain strength.  By the presence of God’s Spirit we can access within us the Christ Nature; this nature  is a profound source of inspiration and a continuing vision of what we can yet become in our lives.  The Vine or the Christ Nature is a source of freedom and why do we need to access such a source of freedom?

  We need a seeming transcendent source of freedom as an empowerment for our lives.  And why do we need such empowerment?  In our lives we can experience the downside of our human nature.  We can come to think that our own resources are very limited in empowering us beyond such challenges of despair, despondency, disillusionment and a sense of being over-whelmed by some tasks of our lives that seem to require success.  We can experience our human nature as leading into addictions.  We often find ourselves in need of a seeming transcendent source of empowerment? 

  What makes for good grapes?  Good care and good climate and propitious weather conditions.  These conditions affect the quality of the grape no matter what kind of hybrid the plant stock is.  In our lives we can find ourselves in very imperfect conditions for us to develop the optimal responses for living.  Sometimes we can come to believe that our human nature and our environment totally determine us toward losing or unsuccessful outcomes.   When we feel as though we are helpless against our nature and the challenges of our environment we can be living lives of dread and anxiety.

  Certainly we should not minimize the environmental factors in healthy living and healthy lives of faith.  And even though we can find heroes who have overcome great odds to triumph in seemingly hopeless situations, we know that such stories may just make us in middle class and upper middle class setting feel guilty about our lack of triumphs.

  I believe that the message from the Grapevine today is something akin to the Serenity Prayer:  God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change; the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

  Taping into our Vine being branches that can grow from the Christ Nature means that we first look for wisdom to assess and choose our battles.  The majority of our problems in life are caused by environments that have presented us with unrealistic vision of who we think that we should be and so we are invited to perpetual failure involving futile attempts to be richer, smarter, more acceptable to other people, or more beautiful than we think we currently are.

  A first sign of abiding in our Christ Nature is to have the wisdom of realistic vision of our lives and the current setting of our lives.  With this realistic vision, we can then deploy the limits of our freedom in effective ways to make actual incremental choices towards what the next step in excellence means for us today.

  What do you hear through the grapevine of John’s Gospel today?  Abide in Christ; abide in the Christ nature that we can access in our lives, not to escape the imperfections of our human nature or the imperfections of the nurture of our situations, but to have the power and authority to orchestrate new excellent outcomes for this day.  And if we practice doing this each day, then we find in ourselves a habit of faith, a habit of abiding in our Christ-nature who is the true vine of our lives.  Amen.