Vines and Branches

By reason of circumstance, I find myself pondering out the John 15 narrative of Jesus as the true vine and us as the branches. I guess it is what my friend Paul referrs to as a blinding flash of the obvious, but there's more to this passage than the idea of being attached onto Jesus. There's a profound statement here about community, who we are, not just who I am.

I think we like to imagine that we are the vine, and Jesus is the soil. We're rooted in Christ, we say. We take our nourishment directly from him. Me and my Jesus. We're tight, me and him, we like to believe.

But when we do that, we promote ourselves into his place. I am the vine, not Jesus.

But if Jesus is the true vine, we are still tight with him, still taking our nourishment from him. But the image is less individual. We are not one by one rooted in the soil, but we are all part of one whole, of which he is the center, the support, the source. All nourishment still comes through and from him, but we are not individually rooted, we are grafted in, one by one still, but all grafted into the same source. One source, one life, one vine.

If Jesus is the true vine and we are the branches, we also look like him. When we promote ourselves to vine and say we're rooted in Jesus (as the soil), we excuse ourselves from bearing resemblance to the source. But the vine has the same texture, only greater, bears the same leaves, only more. The vine bears the same nature as the branches, but reaches farther, nourishes the branches, supports the whole structure.

There is no idividualism in branch-ness as there is in vine-ness. Jesus can, as the vine, exist on his own, without us. But as the branch, we have no life in our selves. As the branch cannot bear fruit apart from the vine... you know the passage. I suppose there are other vines that exist apart from the true vine, but what sort of fruit do the bear? Only the true vine endures.

I don't really know why I'm blogging this, except as a way of thinking out loud. I guess the revelation that modern individualism does promote us to being our own vine, and that if Jesus must be the vine then such individualism is heresy. I guess I'm just trying, yet again, to get into the ancient mind.

Baseball Haiku

A swing and a miss--

Ball or strike, who can decide?

Redlegs lose again.

 

You know, I almost wish they’d come in second for the season.  Then we would have had an unspoiled though lesser victory, the first winning season in ten years.  To lose at home in the first post season game in the Great America Ball Park, to not even score.  Just sad.   Well, maybe in another ten or fifteen years, we can actually win a post-season game or two. 

Big market baseball wins again, gotta be a hollow victory for Philadelphia.

Birth Control and Beasts of Burden

I was having a conversation with a friend tonight, and I have no idea how the conversation took this turn (you know those type of conversations) except that we were discussing the Pro-Life movement, abortion, and society. And I pointed out that the ancient bedoins used a kind of interuterine device on their camels, to prevent them from being incapacitated by birthing and nursing. They placed a stone in the camel's uterus, so that little baby camels wouldn't prevent would-be mamma's service as a beast of burden.

Which does lead one to wonder what the real impetus behind the feminist movement might be. After all, women mustn't "sacrifice" their careers (burden bearing) for child bearing.

Sounds snarky, I know. But look at what our culture has become since women turned from child bearing to burden bearing. For a while, we all lived on one income (male as wage earner or combined family business model) and we did quite well. Then women joined the burden bearing and more material possession came to be seen as accessible luxury and then necessary to our families. Now most American families would say that it is difficult if not impossible for the family to "get by" on one income. Inflation, joblessness, materialism; these are the burdens we bear.

Birth control and feminism have turned women into camels, who have a load other than life to bear. Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn't it? So much for women's liberation.