by CCW | 19 July 2026 10:00
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.
They go together. This is in accord with classical Anglican teaching. As Richard Hooker puts it: “we receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner, in the eucharist often as being by continual degrees the finisher of our life” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch.LVII). This is, as he says, a basic Christian understanding: “nevertheless touching Baptism and the Supper of the Lord, we may with consent of the whole Christian world conclude they are necessary, the one to initiate or begin, the other to consummate or make perfect our life in Christ” (Lawes, Bk.V, ch.LXVII, my italics).
A branch is grafted into a living vine without which it is but a dead stick. It lives not from itself but from the vine. The branch lives from the vine. It is no longer dead or dying but alive and growing. Imputed, put into the vine, the vine then infuses, pours into the branches its life-force. A branch lives from the vine to bring forth what belongs to the truth of the branch in the vine, namely, its blossom and fruit. The branch does not cease to be itself by being grafted into the vine; rather it becomes its living self, a living branch. Apart from the vine, it would be dead. “Apart from me,” Jesus says, “ye can do nothing.” Apart from God, we are the walking dead.
But what does it mean to be grafted into “thy Name”? What is “thy Name”? In Scripture, in Liturgy and in Prayer, the word “Lord” is frequently the circumlocution, literally, a way of speaking around, for the holy name of God revealed to Moses in the Burning Bush (Ex.3). The Holy Name is “I am who I am”. It is not an arbitrary, conventional or nominalistic appellation, a term which we simply agree among ourselves to use; in short, a human construct. Rather it conveys an understanding that is universal and spiritual which goes beyond the more particular tribal forms of association, such as “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,“ even as it arises from them.
There is a metaphysical understanding to this Hebraic story which points to what is known that is altogether beyond the ordinary, beyond the natural, beyond empirical or scientific verification: a burning bush which not only is not destroyed but out of which God ‘speaks’. It is one of the great classical images of revelation. It symbolizes what is wholly spiritual and metaphysical. God reveals himself as “I am who I am,” as that upon which everything else depends. Everything else – the phenomenal, natural, empirical world – is secondary, is a product of what is self-complete and self-contained.
But what exactly is the relation of everything else to that principle of origin? Jesus intensifies and clarifies the understanding of God as “I am who I am” into the spiritual relationship of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. God in his perfect self-relation is the basis of his relation to all else. The division between God and what is other than God is brought into the life and unity of God himself. Such is the meaning of the Word and Son of God, Jesus Christ, the divine mediator between God and Man. As such the analogies or metaphors about grafting and nurturing do not just point us to something greater but participate in that which they signify.
The challenge is to think our way into the images of salvation, and into what they signify, not to think away from them or to think them away. Our own self-identity is bound up in the identity of God revealed to us in all its fulness of understanding in Jesus Christ. We are grafted into this living truth and continue to grow into it unto perfection.
“Increase in us true religion.” It would be hard to say which term is more misunderstood, ‘science’ or ‘religion’ in contemporary culture. Their modern use is bound up with each other following centuries upon centuries when they both referred to habits of mind or soul before becoming ‘reified’, turned into things, Science and Religion, and often set in opposition. What does religion mean? One meaning of the word religion comes from religo, religere, to bind. Religion is what binds the soul and God. True religion is about that true bond between God and Man in Jesus Christ into which we have been grafted so that from him we might live and grow as branches in the vine. In Christ we are nourished with all goodness even in the barrenness of our wilderness lives. Grafted into him, we have our life and our growth and our abiding in him who has compassion upon us in the wilderness of our lives.
Another meaning of religion derives from Cicero’s suggestion about relego, relegere, meaning, literally, to re-read, to be constantly reading through or into things (de Natura Deorum). Both meanings complement one another in relation to what Paul calls “the pattern of teaching” which sets us free from sin and makes us servants of righteousness, bound to God in the living and sacramental dynamic of constantly reading and rereading the living Word of God. This second meaning is a feature of the world’s religions in terms of the reading and re-reading of Sacred Texts. It is particularly important for Christians. The only thing which stands in the way of this understanding is ourselves in our refusals and our forgetfulness of the Word revealed in the images of Scripture through these metaphors of existence.
Christianity without the living Word is not only mindless; it is brain dead. When we forget to live from the Word, we are dead because we have despaired of the understanding. We have despaired of the understanding in our idolatry of the practical, in our adolescent adulation about the merely technological, in our willing the wilderness of despair, our will to nothingness. Yet, here in the wilderness of our bewilderment, Christ has compassion on us. His love reaches out to us so that it may live and abide in us. Thomas Aquinas recalls “that pattern of teaching” signalled in the Collect and the reading; in short, to our inhabiting and abiding in the Word.
He who does not nourish himself on the word of God is no longer living. For, as the human body cannot live without earthly food, so the soul cannot live without the word of God. But the Word proceeds from the mouth of God when he reveals his will through the witness of Scripture.
Simply put, it is what Jesus says.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 7, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/07/19/sermon-for-the-seventh-sunday-after-trinity-11/
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