Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity
“I am the vine, ye are the branches … Abide in my love”
The Collect, Epistle and Gospel for today offer an extended commentary on the last of the so-called “I Am” sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel; hence my text for this morning. “I am the vine,” Jesus says, “ye are the branches … Abide in my love.” This expresses in a concrete and dynamic fashion the theme of sanctification that belongs to the Trinity season through our abiding in the images of Scripture; our inhabiting their meaning.
Through a set of images which are essentially organic in character, the Collect gathers us into an understanding which is spiritual and substantial, that is to say, it concerns the quality of our lives with God as abiding in the truth of God revealed. The organic, agricultural images of grafting, growing, nurturing, and preserving follow upon a doctrinal, metaphysical understanding of God as the “Lord of all power and might, who art the author and giver of all good things.” That understanding belongs to the meaning of these images. They are profoundly sacramental. Without such an understanding we are but the accidents of desire and the fall-out of circumstance; in short, radically unfree.
The Collect prays the understanding which the Scriptures reveal, particularly in the inter-relation between the Epistle and the Gospel. The Epistle suggests the meaning of the sacrament of Holy Baptism: we are grafted into the life of God without which we are dead in ourselves. We pray that we may ever be kept in this living relationship. The Gospel speaks about the sacrament of Holy Communion for there is our growth and nurture in the goodness of God, “the author and giver of all good things.” Through the compassion of Christ, we are fed in the wilderness and set upon our way, “he in us and we in him.” If we have been grafted into “that pattern of teaching whereunto you were delivered,” then we must also live from the Word of God revealed. “I am the vine, ye are the branches … abide in my love.”
We are grafted not simply into the name of God but into “the love of thy name.” Thus baptism marks the beginning of a dynamic relationship which has its continuing in the eucharist. The fruit of these organic, spiritual, substantial and sacramental relationships is holy lives and a holy end. “But now being made free from sin and become servants to God, you have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life.” The Epistle and Gospel show the intimate connection between baptism and communion. They are gemina sacramenta, “twin sacraments,” as Augustine notes.
