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Abide with me

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Abide with me

28 April 2024

Series: Easter

Topic: Fruitfulness, Inclusivity, Pruning

Book: Acts, John

Abide with me

Ian Banks

Last week’s Gospel was about Shepherding – rather appropriate, don’t you think, for Harvie’s first Sunday with us at the Joint Service? This week it’s the Vine and the Branches – which would be a good name for a Christian Wine Shop, if there is such a thing. We’re still in Easter Season and still getting a sense of who this Jesus is that was crucified and then resurrected.

Our Gospel reading is set just before the crucifixion and is part of Jesus giving his final download of important information to the disciples before his arrest. It’s like one of those TV programmes which goes back and forth in time to give some past context to what’s happening now. Here, we’re in the few hurried hours between the last meal and the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is telling them all the critical stuff that they need to know – and they may well be walking and talking at the same time.

Abide with me

In these verses, Jesus is taking an OT image of God’s people being God’s vineyard. You’ll find it in the Psalms (80:8-16), Isaiah (5:1-7; 27:2-6) and Ezekiel (15:1-6). If Jesus and the disciples are on the move, then it’s entirely possible that they paused at the Temple at this point since there was a sculpted vine decorating the entrance to the Sanctuary.

And Jesus links the idea of the vine with that of ‘abiding’. John uses abide or abiding a lot. 64 times if you add-up its use in the Gospel and in the 1st letter of John. John clearly likes to abide! The thought of dwelling, resting or settling.

‘Abiding’ implies that our life in Christ starts here and now, not some distant point in the future, because a few verses earlier Jesus says: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” So, if you prefer to keep your God remote and at a distance, then this isn’t for you. This is a God that makes his home with us.

I am

Twice Jesus tells the disciples, and us, that: “I am the vine”. I am. Like God said to Moses at the Burning Bush. I am. Jesus too says I am. And we are the branches. It’s more than an image to help us think about things. This is a promise to us. If we abide with him and he abides with us, then we are his branches. No-one else’s. And we are being nourished by our connection to the vine.

In a vine, it’s the sap which carries nutrients and minerals, throughout the whole plant. It carries energy from the trunk into the branches when new buds are formed at the start of the growing season. That’s how we’re to think of the connection and connectedness between us and Jesus.

But we are branches that need to bear fruit. We’re not here for the sake of it. Repeatedly in this passage we’re reminded about bearing fruit. And repeatedly we’re told that pruning will take place. That pruning may be to remove parts that aren’t working properly or to make the good even better.

Pruning

The Royal Horticultural Society website says about pruning grape vines: The main pruning season is when the plant is dormant but they need regular pruning and maintenance throughout the growing season to keep them manageable and productive. No matter where you grow your vines, you will need to put up some sort of support system, either against a wall or wires & posts if in open ground.

And if you think about a real vine, then too much pruning means too much sun getting to the fruit and too little means not enough sun. It has to be just right. We have to trust that the Father and Son, who make their home with us, who abide with us, get that difficult degree of pruning on us just right too.

So, we’re being called to be part of a community that’s always being pruned – constantly changing and being adapted to make the best of us. Perhaps when we are at our most dormant there will be a main pruning of us too. But we should expect some regular care and attention throughout the season to keep us manageable and productive! How manageable and productive are we?

But we also need to think about what the RHS called the support system. What support, locally or as a wider church, do we give, or do we get, to allow each other to grow and be fruitful?

One commandment

The passage is telling us that we won’t grow or thrive as individuals or as a congregation unless we abide, hold closely, to the teachings of Christ. And in John, Jesus keeps it simple. He has just one commandment – to love. Love God and love our neighbour. So, we should be out there, doing, showing that love.

Afterall, the fruit on the vine is for the benefit of others, it’s not for the benefit of the branches. And it’s hard to believe that any church would struggle for numbers if every congregation and each individual abided with the Father and the Son and followed that commandment to love.

How we are called to love, to bear fruit, may be very different for each individual here today. And it’s helpful to look at the passage in Acts because we may get asked to do things that we hadn’t expected.

Completely different

Here, we have Philip and the court official from Ethiopia. They are from completely different parts of society and in normal circumstances the two of them would probably never have met. The royal official is in his chariot and reading from the prophet Isaiah and he doesn’t understand it. Philip comes along and not only explains about Isaiah but about Jesus too. The official asks to be baptised, which Philip duly does – and then Philip is whisked away.

On the face of it, this is a meeting of the wrong people in the wrong place. They’re in the wilderness. A dangerous place to be. The Ethiopian Treasury official is presumably well-off and well-dressed. A prime target for any robber or bandit in the area.

We’re guessing that he is interested in the God of Israel since he’d gone to Jerusalem to worship and was reading from Isaiah. But, being a eunuch, he couldn’t fully participate in worship since it was forbidden in Leviticus (21:20) and Deuteronomy (23:1). He wouldn’t have been allowed to take part in Temple rituals or be accepted into the community of Israel.

Time of restoration

However, a few chapters on from where the Ethiopian is reading, Isaiah (56: 3-8) has a vision of a new future where God embraces the eunuch and the foreigner and gives them a place within his house, within his walls. Dare I say, in a place to abide with God. Our Ethiopian is both a eunuch and a foreigner. And, so, this encounter with Philip indicates that the prophesied time of restoration, a brand-new way of looking at things, has already begun to dawn.

And Philip shouldn’t have been there – he was supposed to be in Jerusalem doing a very specific task. He’d been given the job of looking after the distribution of food and diplomatically navigating some cultural difficulties with the new believers. Yet here in Acts 8 he first of all heads north from Jerusalem to preach to the Samaritans. And now he goes south to meet up with our man in the chariot. And then at the end he’s taken off west to the coast, and a place which is around 30 miles north of Gaza.

Philip and the Ethiopian would have looked very different, dressed differently, spoken differently, had different family situations. Yet they shared an interest in God. That sounds to me like church – or how church should be.

What prevents me?

As the two of them are rolling along the road in the chariot, it says: ‘Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus’. There’s an echo here of Jesus talking to the two disciples as they walked along the road to Emmaus.

The eunuch says: “What prevents me from being baptized?” Well, nothing. They do it there and then. If he was to ask that question now, then he would probably need to be interviewed by the Vicar first.

The gospel runs off

Our passage in Acts tells us that God is no respecter of job descriptions or established religious norms. We may think that we have pinned down who does what in the church – many of us are on at least one rota for something – but whilst we’re doing that the gospel runs off in a different direction in the hands of those initially given other jobs to do.

This is a wonderful story of the Kingdom of God bursting through, both in the way that it includes the previously excluded eunuch but also in the way that someone designated to tend table at home finds himself out preaching and teaching in a desert place to the last person that he’d expect to meet there.

Which takes us back to being fruitful. Sometimes we just have to roll with what life serves up. To get on with it. To be flexible and adaptable and to give what’s needed to whoever God puts in our path. It might not be doing what we thought we would be doing or with whom we would expect to do it. But, if we’re abiding with the Father and the Son, then we’re to do it anyway.

A link in the chain

John Henry Newman said this: ‘God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught.’

Or, as Timothy Radcliffe put it: ‘We get up each day and try to respond to whomever we encounter, not knowing what fruit it will bear or what role it will have in God’s plan. But God knows, and that is enough.’ Amen.

‘Abide with me’ was delivered by Ian Banks at Christ Church Walmersley on April 28th 2024. It was based on John 15:1-8 and Acts 8:26-end.

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