Abiding…4 - Abiding in vineyard country

As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, but only as it abides in the vine, no more can you, except you abide in me.  I am the vine, you are the branches.  Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit…  Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away… and withers…  [John 15:4-6]

Well, we live in wine country.  In the Mahurangi district vines are tended, grapes are harvested, wine is made… samples of which are solemnly tasted by the high priests of wine and writers of purple prose… and some of it, I believe, appears as exotic boutique wine sold for eye-watering prices in Stockholm or San Francisco.  I don’t know how Mahurangi compares with Martinborough, Marlborough or Otago.  I do know that much of the ancient world depended on wine -- it was about all that was safe to drink.  The cultivation of vines was a high art from ancient times, and everyone knew about the flow of life between the soil, the sunlight, the vine, the branches and the fruit.  That  vital flow is what Jesus sees in abiding.  He says, if the branch abides in the vine, it is nourished and it bears fruit.  The branch will not bear fruit apart from the vine – if the branch is detached, alienated, or tries to go it alone, it withers of course, and as Jesus vividly describes, these branches are simply thrown away.

Now we might ask:  What then is the fruit, since it matters so much?  I am helped in this question by Sarah Bachelard’s four talks to the NZCCM annual retreat in Hamilton, and especially the third talk.  She bravely suggests that all our anxiety, activism and agitation for justice and change may not be what Jesus builds in us as we abide in him and he in us.  She says: 

Perhaps a willingness to stop for a while, to risk being fully present both to the depths of the world’s need and our experience of impotence in the face of it.  Perhaps a willingness to undergo the distress of that, rather than rushing ever more agitatedly with more supposed solutions and joint statements.  I reflected that, just as in pastoral care, we can so easily bustle in, primarily concerned to lessen our own anxiety and discomfort, so in social action we can end up embroiled in the same dynamic.

This, she says, is to insist that the clarity and energy we need for doing justice requires us (first) to make space for the truth, for God’s reality to come through.  Otherwise our search for justice or for peace becomes another exercise of human will, undermined by human self-deception.

So… our abiding place is needed because it is what Sarah Bachelard calls space for the truth.  In the silence and stillness, and as I have set aside self-concern as best I can, there is then space for discernment, for perceiving reality, painful often, as we know – and she adds -- accepting my own impotence to do anything much.  We start then, humbly and quietly, to share what Jesus shares, know what Jesus sees, pray what Jesus prays.  I think there is much more to be said about this, and so we will pick it up again in a week.