Easter 5B

John 15:1-8

¹ "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. ² He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. ³ You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. ⁴ Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

⁵ I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. ⁶ Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. ⁷ If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. ⁸ My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.

The Four Gospels

Despite each having some unique content and a particular perspective, synoptic gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke all bring us law and gospel—God's holy demands and God's merciful, loving grace. We roughly can place the synoptics in the Torah/Pentateuch and Prophets traditions of the Old Testament.

John is very much about the here and now of the Reign of Heaven on Earth. In John, Jesus first act of public ministry is a wedding feast, a party! With a focus on God's ongoing presence and on the commandments, especially encapsulated in the charge to love, John's community offers ways to live faithfully and fruitfully with speech and action, rather than the articulation of law and gospel we find in the synoptics. To continue the OT parallel, we can locate the Gospel according to John in the tradition of the Wisdom literature.


I Am the Vine

The fifth Sunday of Easter is the 29^the day of Easter, so we still can wish people "Happy Easter," yet as the church's year of grace eases into the Season of Pentecost, Time of the Church, today's I Am the Vine – You are the Branches passage comes from Jesus' farewell discourse on Maundy Thursday, after he washed the disciples' feet, before his death and resurrection. But we are hearing it during the Great Fifty Days of Easter, after we've experienced Jesus death and resurrection.

This is the seventh and last of Jesus' I Am declarations where Jesus places himself within YHWH/God's Old Testament identity I Am—pure being. unmediated presence. Scholars identify two sources used by John's community: Signs and I Am (and suggest there may have been a third).

Jesus lived and served in a somewhat agrarian setting, so he often used farm images and parallels. Today? Grapevines! Most Californians get the importance of soil, sunshine, shade, and pruning in vineyards-grapes-harvest. We understand how critical time, temperature, cask, and added ingredients are to wine production. Methods of wine transport and storage, too! In addition, grape vines are one of the seven agricultural gifts of the promised land, and we find God's people as branches of the vine in the Old Testament scriptures.

In this trinitarian passage, God the Father is vine planter and grower, Jesus the Son is the vine itself, the people of God in the power of the Holy Spirit are branches of the vine—Jesus tells us to abide in him in order to bear fruit. How do we abide? By obeying, especially by loving God, neighbor, and self. Although we primarily abide in Jesus the vine, we remain interconnected with all the other branches.


Where we Live: Vine and Branches

Do we always abide in Jesus, or do we sometimes settle deeply into family, social, cultural, and church traditions, customs, and habits? As people of history and people with histories, we need to stay connected with our pasts, with the identity-forming histories and practices of communities and groups we belong to. We also need to contextualize the gospel so newcomers will relate Jesus to their own geography and history.

But what do we make most important? For starters, Jesus commanded us to take, bless, break, and give bread, to bless and share the cup of the fruit of the vine(!), to baptize. But do we insist on a particular type of bread, brand of wine or grape juice? Does the baptismal venue need to be the same every time?

Does Strawberry Festival always need to be on the Second Sunday in June? Do we even need an annual Strawberry Festival?

Our own knowledge of grape-growing and wine-making gives excellent counsel regarding Jesus' reminder on this Fifth Sunday of Easter to stay connected to him and to each other.

Easter 4B

Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us,
we have confidence before God.
1 John 3:21
1 John 3:16-24

¹⁶ We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and sisters. ¹⁷ How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

¹⁸ Little children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth. ¹⁹ And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him ²⁰ whenever our hearts condemn us, for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. ²¹ Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God, ²² and we receive from God whatever we ask, because we obey the commandments and do what pleases God.

²³ And this is God's commandment, that we should believe in the name of God's Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. ²⁴ All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

If anyone has the world's goods
and sees his brother in need,
yet closes his heart against him,
how does God's love abide in him?
1 John 3:17

Easter 3B

They gave him a piece of broiled fish. Luke 24:42

Luke 24:36b-48

³⁶ While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." ³⁷ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. ³⁸ He said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? ³⁹ Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." ⁴⁰ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.

⁴¹ While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" ⁴² They gave him a piece of broiled fish, [and of a honeycomb] ⁴³ and he took it and ate in their presence.

⁴⁴ Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." ⁴⁵ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, ⁴⁶ and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, ⁴⁷ and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. ⁴⁸ You are witnesses of these things.

Easter

• As the day after the Sabbath, the Day of Resurrection is both the eighth day of the old week and the first day of a new week. As the first day of a new week, Easter is the beginning of a new creation. The third Sunday of Easter is the fifteenth day of the fifty days of Easter.

• The new creation contains evidence of old, deadly pasts. Today Jesus proves his humanity by displaying his hands and feet. On this side of Easter we often find ourselves in the "Yes, already!" of resurrection and the "No, not yet!" of Holy Saturday, that apparently motionless time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday

Though we often refer to Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, he wasn't a ghost, an apparition, a stained glass likeness, or a digital rendering. Just as when he lived on land from infancy through childhood into adulthood and onto his death and burial, after being raised to new life Jesus had a substantial body. People who met Jesus after the resurrection touched flesh and blood and bone; in the Creed we confess, "I believe in the resurrection of the body."


Bread, Fish, Fellowship

Throughout Jesus' ministry we meet Jesus eating with friends, strangers, and outcasts; his first act of public ministry in John's gospel is turning plain water into finest wine at a wedding party. In the upper room of Maundy Thursday Jesus says the cup is his life blood, the bread is his body.

The meal in Emmaus is about the presence of the risen Lord in word and sacrament; it sometimes is considered the first Eucharist because unlike the Lord's Supper founding meal of Maundy Thursday, Eucharist is a meal with the Risen Christ in the midst of a fully redeemed creation.

In this broiled fish incident and before this on Emmaus Road, Jesus twice identifying Moses, prophets, and psalms with his own life recalls the Exodus story of the God who sees the suffering of enslaved people and calls Moses to liberate them, along with later prophets who called people back to faithful obedience.

Like Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of God, we read both Hebrew Bible /Old Testament and New Covenant /New Testament scriptures through the lens of Jesus' birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension.


Where We Live

So… Jesus again shares a meal with friends, in a culturally congruent way, of course:

"While in their joy they disbelieved and still wondered, Jesus said to them, 'Have you anything here to eat?' They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence." vv. 41-43

Most English bibles translate verse 43 to say Jesus took the fish and ate it in their presence, but more recent scholarship says they all ate the fish together.

Jesus' first followers fished for a living! Fish was a more abundant and therefore less expensive protein source than sheep or goats. They may not have had stationary BBQ pits as we do on beaches and other places, but I love to imagine there were dedicated areas in their meeting spaces where people cooked food they brought to share.

This also is about Christ with us whenever we welcome strangers to our table as Jesus did. Welcoming others often opens our eyes so we recognize Jesus—sometimes in retrospect, like the travelers on the Emmaus Road. As in Emmaus, at times we will find ourselves hosted and made comfortable by people we imagined were our guests.

The Christ of God and Christianity always are incarnate (embodied, enfleshed) and contextualized into right here and right now. With the current plethora of spoken languages, cultures, and cuisines (these days isn't almost everything almost everywhere some kind of culinary fusion?), contextualizing all aspects of our service to others can be a fun creative challenge.

Easter 2B

Lo, how wonderful it is, how pleasant,
for God's people to live together in harmony.
Psalm 133:1

Acts 4:32-35

³² Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. ³³ With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. ³⁴ There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. ³⁵ They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

The second Sunday of Easter concludes Bright Week, the first day of the New Creation—celebrated as a single day. For a long time the church has commemorated especially important festivals in octaves of eight days.

Easter is 50 Days – 7 x 7, a week of weeks. The Day of Pentecost is the 50th day of Easter.

Every year on Easter 2, we hear the account of Jesus bestowing the Holy Spirit on Easter evening from John 20:19-31.

This conversation is about our calling:

Acts 1

⁶ When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?
⁷ And Jesus said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.
⁸ But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

During these Sundays of Easter our first readings from the Acts of the Apostles show the style and substance of the post-resurrection, post-pentecost church. The approximately forty days between Jesus' resurrection and his ascension are especially important for us because Jesus calls and in the power of the Holy Spirit enables us to be his crucified and risen presence in the world after his ascension. Jesus doesn't ask us to do anything he hasn't already done!