John 15:1-11
Vine and Branches
Moving with the Spirit
James Sledge May
31, 2015
Back
in the early 1990s, before going to seminary, I lived in Charlotte, NC, not too
far from my grandparents’ home. The city was beginning to surround them, but
they still had seven acres of land, a barn, a pond, and a big garden plot. And
there were grape vines.
As
a child I ate muscadines and scuppernongs from those vines and helped my
grandmother make jelly from them. But by the early 90s there hadn't been grapes
in a while. Some vines had been lost to a road widening. Other vines still grew
on the metal and wire trellises my grandfather had constructed years earlier,
but no grapes.
Our
daughter Kendrick was a toddler then, and I often took her to visit her great
grandparents. On one visit, I reminisced about grapes and making jelly. Too bad
there we no grapes any more, and Kendrick would never get to do that, but my
grandfather quickly corrected me. “Nothing wrong with the grapes,” he said.
“They just haven’t been tended in recent years.”
Grandad
had suffered a mild stroke that affected the vision processing part of the
brain, leaving him nearly blind. He could no longer do gardening or yard work,
but he told me that if I pruned the vines early next spring, there would be
grapes.
So
it was that he and I went out to the vines one day with pruning shears. He sat down
in an old, metal lawn chair as I began to prune branches. He couldn’t see much,
but he quickly realized that I was being far too timid. “You’ve got to cut them back hard,” he said. “Get rid of all that growth from last year,
all the way back to the main vine.” That seemed extreme to me, cutting off lots
of perfectly healthy growth. But with his encouragement, I pruned them way
back, leaving what seemed to me very little.
Time
passed, and just as Granddad promised, the wires supports filled with branches. Then tiny grape clusters began to form. Later that year, Kendrick and I ate grapes and
made a batch of jelly with my grandmother’s supervision.
It’s
a special memory for me. I don’t know if Kendrick remembers it, but I cherish that
she got to make jelly with my Grandmother, just as I had once done. It’s a
small link to a rural past that has vanished. A drug store now sits where my
grandparents’ home once was.
That
memory also helps me understand when Jesus says he is the vine and his Father
the vinegrower who prunes the healthy branches so they will bear more fruit.
And I have to admit, I find that image both comforting and disturbing at the
same time.