The last frost date has come and gone, two weeks past. Around here that is April 15th. That means it is time to plant. It is time for things to grow, to flower and fruit.
I started a new raised bed. We’ve been composting so I added two bins of homemade soil.
I planted some tomatoes and sweet peppers.
Right by that bed I have a row of muscadine grapes up on a wire trellis strung across five poles. In the summer it grows like crazy, a wild stormy green cloud suspended in the air. The vines reach out and snag at you as you walk by trying to catch you and reel you into their sticky sweetness. One time it ate the neighbor’s cat.
Over the winter I pruned back last year’s growth so that it will hopefully bear more fruit.
It is a long-term project, growing these vines and learning to prune them. When the sap rises the cut vines drip the watery juice until they crust over. Sometimes when the sap was running it looked like a gentle rain dripping down the length of the trellis. That wild tumble of spiky twigs is now filling out with fresh green leaves. Soon it will be claiming and climbing over everything that wanders past.
Vines and Branches and the pruning of the vinegrower.
Jesus, the Church and the Father.
A wild tumble of branches pruned back to bear fruit for the vine.
What needs pruning that we may bear much fruit?
When I think about it, it is an amazing thing that we bear the fruit of God in the world. Wow! Of all the things, the fruit of God. Us. We do that!
So often life feels fruitless. What a thing to be reminded that there is more going on than our own agenda. What a thing to trust in, especially during those barren times when nothing seems to grow.
God cares so deeply about this, so much so that God works carefully and attentively with us to bear that fruit for the Jesus vine.
What is it like to bear the fruit of God?
What does abiding in the Jesus vine bring forth from the wild branches of our lives?
I try to over think these things. John’s first letter that we also heard today along with John’s Gospel, says that it is love for one another and love for those who are without. That simple.
The Jesus vine bears the fruit of love, love that cares, love that gives.
It is sticky. It draws us together and it holds us, returning us to the life-giving communion with God, of abiding in the Jesus vine.
Our culture tries to define us in terms of usefulness as consumers of goods and ideologies. We are to be users or we are to be used.
Bearing the fruit of love is a foreign concept to mainstream consumer culture.
The Gospel brings a change and a challenge to no longer live and look at the world in those terms of users and used.
The vine converts us to a new frame of mind that begins with being loved and precious to God.
Jesus is God’s muscadine embrace of love.
And we in turn love because we are loved.
We embrace because we are embraced.
We reach out because we have been reached.
The cross takes the users heart and turns it to the heart that lifts others up, just as Jesus was lifted up, we raise each other up because Jesus has risen.
The frost is past. The season of God is upon us.
Muscadine and Jesus vines growing, branching, greening, reaching.
Bearing the fruit of God. What an amazing and wonderful thing to be happening.
Muscadine and Jesus vines they just grow and grow and grow.