Christ the True Vine, and the Branches

 Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator, Tuesday 11th February 2025

Christ the True Vine, Lorenzo Lotto 1514, Suardi Chapel (detail)

In the reading we’ve just heard (John15:1-11), Jesus uses the lovely metaphor of the vine to describe the relationship between God his loving Father, himself and his disciples.

Vine growers know that their vines must be heavily pruned to produce good grapes. Jesus tells his disciples that he is like the roots and trunk of the true vine, his Father is like the vine grower, and they are like his branches. His loving Father prunes them to make them more productive. They must abide in Jesus, cleave to him, to produce much fruit. If they don’t, they are like useless branches, they will be pruned and wither, and be fit only to be burned.

Jesus’s loving Father God wishes them to be his Son’s disciples, and wishes them to bear fruit. Jesus loves his disciples, as his Father has loved him. He calls them to abide in his love by keeping his commandments, just as he has kept his Father’s commandments, so that he may rejoice in them, and they may be filled with joy.

What a marvellous metaphor this is for how God’s love permeates Jesus and his disciples!

God will prune the branches, but will do so with love. He does not promise life will be easy. Left to their own devices, disciples would run off in every direction. They will sometimes need to be checked, redirected. They will sometimes find life is not what they hope or expect. There will be painful disappointments along the way. But this is the price they know they must pay to be part of Jesus’s marvellous vision, to know they are loved, and to be filled with the joy of knowing they are producing good fruit.

Jesus tells his disciples they must keep his commandments to abide in his love. What are these commandments? Three, I believe, summarise them all. When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, he replied (Matthew 23:37-40), ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”’ These are the first two. And the third Jesus gave his disciples on the night before his crucifixion (John 13.34-35), ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’

And what is the good fruit that disciples will bear, when God’s skilful pruning has encouraged them to grow, and they keep Jesus’s commandments? I believe the good fruit are lives that deserve the blessings Jesus promised in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-10), which I wrote about in this month’s Grapevine. Or as St Paul talks of in Galatians (5:22), lives that display the fruits of the Spirit ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’.

The good fruit is surely the holy lives of Jesus’s disciples. Let us pray that we will all bear such good fruit.

 

Fishing for people

 

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Raphael 1515, V&A

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan churches on Sunday 9th February 2025, the 4th before Lent

I like to imagine Gospel stories happening in places I know, to better understand them.

In this morning’s Gospel, Luke (5:1-11) describes how Jesus called Simon, James and John to be his disciples beside the lake of Gennesaret – another name for the Sea of Galilee. But in my imagination, the scene is the banks of Lough Derg - the lake of Gennesaret is just a bit larger than Lough Derg, and wider, but not so long.

So, in my mind’s eye I see Jesus, pressed in by the crowd, commandeering Simon’s lake boat from which to speak to the crowd on the beach at Dromineer, a couple of boat lengths out. Jesus must realise that Simon and his partners James and John in the second boat have had a bad night’s fishing. He does them a good turn in exchange for their help. When he has done speaking, Jesus tells Simon to take the boat out to the deep channel over by the Clare shore where they will find fish. And they do – so many that they fill both boats up to the gunwales until they almost sink.

Everyone is amazed at the size of the catch. Simon falls to his knees in front of Jesus saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ – for the first time Simon acknowledges Jesus’s power. Jesus says to him, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people’. And Simon, together with his partners James and John, the sons of Zebedee, make their life-changing decision to leave their old lives as fishermen and follow Jesus in his travelling ministry as his disciples.

This is a key moment for Christians and for the Church

On the face of it there is nothing special about these three men. Simon - nicknamed Peter, meaning the Rock – and James and John are plain fishermen, just ordinary working people. But along with others Jesus also called, they become apostles, sent out by Jesus to preach the good news he taught them. They were the first leaders of the Jesus movement we call the Church.

Jesus trained them to be apostles as they followed him in his travelling ministry. They were flawed as we all are – they often failed to understand Jesus’s message, they fled in terror when he was arrested, Simon Peter would deny knowing him three times, and only John would witness his crucifixion. But after the resurrection they all encountered the risen Christ, and at the first Pentecost they all received the gift of the Holy Spirit.

From the upper room where they had been hiding, they burst out onto the streets of Jerusalem. They preached the good news that Jesus had taught them, and they attracted a growing band of disciples – the first Church in Jerusalem. The Book of Acts tells the story of how that Church spread like wildfire across the Roman empire - 300 years later under Constantine it would take over that empire.

The explosive growth of the early Church marks the success of Jesus’s project to bring good news to all people – but it all began that day on the shore of the lake of Gennesaret.

The situation we are faced with today in Ireland seems rather different, doesn’t it?

More and more people, particularly younger folk, feel less and less connection with the Church, no matter what tradition they come from. The numbers who attend, listen to the good news, and lend financial support, seem to fall year by year and decade by decade.

Clergy and Bishops thrash about looking for new ways to fill the old pews again. Meanwhile ordinary parishioners like you and me are fearful that ours may be the last generation of our families to sit in them. We are all too aware of neighbouring churches which have shut, causing many in their congregations to lose the habit of regular worship, and to lose any but a cultural connection with the Church, for weddings and funerals.

The words of Isaiah (6:1-13) in the OT reading speak to our times, I think. Israel has ceased to flourish, just as the Church has. The future is grim. They will ‘keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand… until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate’. I am reminded of the images of Gaza we see in the news every day. But notice, that Isaiah ends with a message of hope. The broken and burned stump of the great tree of Israel will be the holy seed from which it will spring again. Perhaps the great tree of the Church can sprout again from a broken and burned stump.

I suggest that today’s Gospel story has a lesson for us.

Simon Peter and James and John had spent a fruitless night, fishing where there were no fish. It was only when they did as Jesus advised and went out into deeper water, that they would haul in nets filled to breaking point.

Christian leaders who fish for people as successors to the apostles, surely need to do the same. They must go where God’s Holy Spirit directs, away from the shallow waters of our sterile theological divisions and tribal identities, into the deep waters where real people are found. People suffering from illness, poverty and injustice. People frightened by an uncertain future and change they do not understand. People searching for meaning and peace in a world of excess and violence. People who yearn to hear good news.

We faithful parishioners in the pews must support those who launch out to fish in deeper water. We must be filled with hope, hope that a renewed Church will bring the good news of Christ to a new age.

But how can we be filled with hope? Why should we believe such change is possible?

Firstly, because the Church decay we are experiencing is not inevitable. It is largely confined to Western Europe and increasingly North America. Churches in Africa, in South America, in China and other countries are vibrant, dynamic and growing rapidly, filled with the Holy Spirit and with joy. We need to learn from them.

And secondly, because the Church has suffered existential crises many times, and each time it has brought renewal of the Church for a new age:

·         A new, monastic Church flowered in the chaos of the imperial church of the disintegrating Roman Empire. That brought Christian faith here to Ireland and across pagan northern Europe.

·         The rich and corrupt church of the 13^th Century in turn spawned orders of friars like that of St Francis of Assisi, which renewed popular faith through their simplicity of life and service to the poor.

·         Abuses in the 16^th Century Church fuelled the Reformation, and with it came renewal, not just of protestant churches, but of the Roman Catholic church too, in reaction to the reformation.

·         And in the 19^th Century the Spirit drove a new wave of Christians of all traditions to mission. Some went as missionaries overseas, seeding those churches which are growing today. Others joined orders dedicated to education, health care and the relief of poverty in the new industrial towns and cities – the lovely ‘Call the Midwife’ series on BBC1 captures how that spirit lived on into the lifetime of many of us.

It is right that we should be filled with hope, because history teaches us that Church renewal follows crisis, as the Holy Spirit prepares it for changing times.

I shall finish in prayer with the Collect of the Word for today:

Most holy God,
in whose presence angels serve in awe,
and whose glory fills all heaven and earth:
cleanse our unclean lips
and transform us by your grace
so that your word spoken through us
may bring many to your salvation;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God for ever and ever. Amen

Holy Living

The Sermon on the Mount, detail, Jan Breughel the Elder

Published in Grapevine, the monthly newsletter for the Nenagh Union of Parishes, for February 2025

Recently, I have been pondering the Beatitudes, the blessings which Jesus taught to his disciples at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3-10). Members of the Community of Brendan the Navigator, of which I am one, say them responsively every time we meet for worship, as we do every month in Killodiernan Church. They are a wonderfully concise summary of the Christian values we must seek to live by to receive God’s blessings. I see them as a recipe for holy living.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

We are poor in spirit when we know what we have is enough. Then we can give up the constant struggle to get more than we need, we can share what we have with those who have too little, and we will find true happiness.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

We mourn for the people and things we have loved but have lost. We may feel heartbroken, but when we remember them as a great gift of love, and not dwell on their loss, we will be comforted and find healing.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

The meek respect and value other people. We must try our best not to be selfish, egotistic or narcissistic, so that we can work with others to make the world a better place for all.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

When we work passionately for what is right, just, true, and beautiful, we will attract kindred spirits, we will begin to make a positive difference, and we will be filled with life.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

God cannot forgive us, thereby freeing us from corrosive guilt, unless we also forgive those who have wronged us.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 

The pure in heart focus on the love that God showers on all his creatures. When we respond to this love by loving God and our neighbours, we see God’s love at work in the world.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Peace is not just the absence of war. It is being free from hatred, free from threats of violence, free from fear. Jesus, the Son of God, urges us to love our enemies, and shows us how to deal with hatred, threats and fear. We must imitate him to be like children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

It takes courage to speak up for what we know is right in the face of evil. But we must stand up for what is right, come what may. Nothing that evil can do to us would be worse than the shame of betraying the love God has shown us.

The Beatitudes are so easy to say, yet so very hard to live by, aren’t they? We cannot do so without God’s help, so we need to pray for it.

Loving Father, send your Holy Spirit to help us live by the teaching of your Son Jesus Christ, that we may live holy lives, and receive the blessings he promises. Amen

 

Christian Unity Week 2025 in Nenagh

The Nenagh Church of Ireland and Catholic parishes invite you to join them, with Christians of all traditions, in an ecumenical prayer service for Christian Unity Week, in St. Mary’s Church of Ireland, Church Road, Nenagh, on January 24th at 7pm. All are welcome!

The service will be based on materials prepared by the community of Bose, an ecumenical monastery of women and men in northern Italy. They have been distributed by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. We will listen to Martha confess her faith in Jesus, ‘Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world’. In this 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, we will affirm the faith we share by saying together the Nicene creed in its original form, shared by both the Western and Eastern churches before the ‘filioque’ schism. And the moment will be marked by sharing the light of Christ, symbolised by lighted candles, as the flame is passed on from the Paschal candle to candles held by the congregation, filling the church with light.

Deborah O’Driscoll, Minister for Catechetics in the Ódhrán Pastoral Area, comments:

“God calls us to unity, not uniformity. Each of our Christian traditions has its own gifts to share, and when we come together, we enrich one another through the love of Christ. Let us celebrate the diversity God has made and recognize that, though we may worship differently, we are one family in faith. Unity doesn’t mean thinking the same way—it means walking together in love, listening, and learning from one another as we strive to build God’s kingdom together. We are better together.”

Echoing her words, Joc Sanders from the Church of Ireland Nenagh Union says: 

“God surely loves the diversity of our Christian traditions, just as he loves the wonderful diversity of life he has made. We do not all need to worship in the same way, nor even hold exactly the same beliefs. But when we gather to pray together as Christians of different traditions, I believe the Spirit urges us to the unity Christ prays for, which is unity in diversity. We have much to learn from each other. We need each other to be salt and yeast to build God’s kingdom in the world. We truly are better together than apart.”

A version of this article was printed in the Nenagh Guardian edition for Saturday January 18 2025

Faith in uncertain times

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 14th January 2025

I don’t know about you, but I am fearful. We are living in a time of great uncertainty. More uncertain even than at the height of the Cold War, perhaps, when people of my age thought seriously about how we should respond to the threat of nuclear annihilation, which seemed all but inevitable at the time.

Today, we see narcissistic demagogues rise to power across the world. We see wars on our screens that bring obscene destruction to cities, and those who live in them. We see the benign climate we have enjoyed, the climate in which we humans and nature have flourished together for millennia, collapse into a nightmare before our eyes.

WB Yeats experienced something similar in his own time, when he wrote this in his poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

St Paul speaks to fears like this in today’s reading (1 Corinthians 1:18-31). He calls us to consider our own call to follow Christ Jesus. ‘Not many of us are wise by human standards; not many are powerful, not many are of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. God is the source of our life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.’

Paul calls us, I suggest, to personal holiness, to the holiness modelled for us by Jesus Christ. The Beatitudes he gave us show us how we should respond, humbly but without fear, to sin and evil in the world. It is no accident, I think, that they were chosen as the Gospel reading at the state funeral last Thursday of that good and faithful Christian, President Jimmy Carter.

We spoke the Beatitudes earlier. They are easy to say, aren’t they? And so very difficult to live up to. But let us do our best to model them in our lives.

And let us, in John Wesley’s words, ‘do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can, as long as ever we can.’

Ministry with Children

The boy Jesus in the Temple, Heinrich Hofmann, 1881

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh on Sunday 29th December 2024, the 1st Sunday of Christmas

Today’s readings are both about the presence of children in holy places.

In the OT reading (1 Samuel2:18-20,26) we heard about the child Samuel ministering before the Lord in the sanctuary at the pilgrimage shrine of Shiloh, where his parents had left him in the care of the priest Eli.

In the NT reading Luke (2:41-52) told us about the 12 year-old Jesus staying behind in the Temple at Jerusalem when his parents returned home to Nazareth. 

How did Samuel come to be with Eli in the shrine of Shiloh?

Shiloh was in what we now call the West Bank, about 30 km north of Jerusalem. After the Israelites conquered Canaan, it was one of the main centres of Israelite worship, until the Temple was built in Jerusalem. The Tabernacle which they had brought with them on their wanderings was kept there. At that time they were led by Judges, rather than Kings, and Eli was both a priest at Shiloh and a Judge.

Samuel’s parents Elkanah and Hannah made an annual trip to worship at the shrine at Shiloh. Hannah desperately wanted a child and prayed for one at the shrine, promising that if she had a boy, she would dedicate him to God. Her prayers were answered, she gave birth to Samuel, and when he was old enough, she brought him to Eli at Shiloh and left him there in his care. It is a very touching detail that when she came back on her annual trips to the shrine, she always brought him a little robe she had made.

It may seem strange to us that Hannah could give her child over to be fostered by Eli. But fostering of children was common among our ancient Irish ancestors, as it still is today among Nigerians, often causing real difficulties with immigration authorities. And posh folk still send their children off to boarding schools.

The fact is that by giving Samuel over to Eli, Hannah ensured he had a good education. He inherited Eli’s role as a Judge of Israel, the last one. And he would become a great prophet.

In today’s Gospel, Luke tells us the single thing we know about Jesus’s childhood from the canonical Gospels - we know nothing else from his birth until his baptism by John.

The boy Jesus goes AWOL - absent without leave, when his parents return home from his family’s annual Passover visit to the Temple in Jerusalem. ‘When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.’

When they found him, Mary chided him, saying ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ And Jesus replies, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’

Jesus was brought up as a Jew, in a devout Jewish family, attending the synagogue in Nazareth, where he would, no doubt, have become familiar with the Jewish scriptures, our OT. We believe Jesus to be the fully divine Son of God, the 2^nd person of the Trinity. But we also believe him to be fully human. 

Here we glimpse, I suggest, his humanity, as a 12 year old boy on the cusp of adolescence. He listens to and questions the teachers of his Jewish faith. He is slowly but surely feeling his way toward a mature understanding of the loving God he calls his Father. He is preparing himself for his adult ministry, in which he proclaims ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matthew 4:17).

As he matures, ‘Jesus increases in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour’, we are told. Mary treasures all these memories in her heart. Later she must have shared them with a disciple, so that Luke could pass her story on to us.

All this gets me thinking about the place of children in our Church today.

It is our corporate responsibility to raise them in a loving community of faith, so that they can, like Jesus, ‘increase in wisdom and years, and in divine and human favour’, to use Luke’s words. Our duty is to model for them what it means for the kingdom of heaven to come near.

We must never forget that our children, like ourselves, are spiritual beings. When they listen and question, as Jesus did among the teachers in the Temple, we must be attentive and answer them with complete honesty appropriate to their age. They are feeling their own way to understanding the God of love we believe in.

When the time is right, the church, with our support, offers them preparation for confirmation by wise priests and teachers. In this we can see a reflection of the 12 year-old Jesus among the teachers in the Temple.

We hope and pray that they will then feel able to affirm their faith publicly, before the bishop, in front of the congregation. But that must be their decision – no one has the right to force them to do so.

This is the ideal, but sadly we know that some children experience something quite different.

With great sorrow, we must recognise that within churches of all traditions, as in wider society, there are those who prey on and abuse children, causing them immense harm.

We all know about the child-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, which damaged so many children, and turned so many away from that Church. But none of our Christian traditions is immune. Our sister Anglican church, the Church of England, is now in turmoil about past child-abuse scandals. Senior churchmen have covered them up for years to protect themselves, their friends, or the reputation of the Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently been forced to resign for not taking timely action, and there are now calls for the Archbishop of York and others to resign too.

We can only hope and pray that in our parishes, and in the wider Church of Ireland, our Safeguarding Trust processes are sufficiently robust to ensure that children and vulnerable adults are protected, and that appropriate, timely action is taken when incidents and risks are identified. Safeguarding is immensely important, and we must take it seriously. We owe a debt to those on our parish safeguarding panel, and to those working with children who undergo regular Safeguarding training. We should keep them in our prayers.

I shall finish in prayer with today’s Collect of the Word:

God of community,

whose call is more insistent

than ties of family or blood;

may we so respect and love

those whose lives are linked with ours

that we fail not in loyalty to you,

but make choices according to your will;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen

Millstones and the Good Shepherd

 

Wall-size painting of Christ as Good Shepherd surrounded by multitudes of people, painted by Ruth Owen Pook and hanging in The Chapel of the Good Shepherd at The (Episcopal) Cathedral Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Reflection for morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 10th December 2024

The Gospel reading set for tomorrow, Tuesday, is the much loved Parable of the Lost Sheep (Matthew 18:12-14), but to place it in context I have chosen to start the reading at the beginning of the chapter.

The disciples come to Jesus and ask ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven?’ They really want heavenly greatness for themselves. But Jesus knows that wanting to be great is not the way to greatness in the kingdom of heaven. So he calls a child to him and says, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’  Humble, weak, ordinary human beings, as trusting as this child, will be greater in the kingdom than those who push themselves forward.

Jesus is concerned that disciples who seek greatness will mislead ordinary folk, and be like a stumbling block to them, causing them to fall below God’s standards, in other words to sin. So he warns them, ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.’

If we look around Christ’s church today, we see all too many cases where leaders who want to be great have become stumbling blocks to ordinary Christians like you and me. A few have done evil things, and must dread the millstone. Others, from different Christian traditions, have sought to protect their positions, their friends and their churches by covering up the evil behaviour, of others. This has seriously damaged victims, and caused many good people to turn away from the church.

As we all know, the Roman Catholic Church has been seriously damaged by clerical abuse scandals and cover-ups, here and around the world. And our own Anglican Communion is not immune. Recently we have been shocked to learn of the appalling abuse of young men by John Smyth, a Reader in the Church of England. Senior clergy and leaders covered it up for many years, enabling him to move to Zimbabwe, and then South Africa, to continue his abuse. The Church of England is in turmoil. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been forced to resign for not taking timely action, and there are calls for other resignations.

We can only hope and pray that in the Church of Ireland our Safeguarding Trust processes are robust enough to prevent anything similar here.

Christian leaders of all traditions must beware of the dangers Jesus himself warned of, and choose the path of humility, the child-like humility of someone who knows the overwhelming power of God’s fatherly love for all his creatures. They must be open to give an account of themselves.

But what of the little, ordinary Christians? Jesus goes on to reassure us with his Parable of the Lost Sheep. He is our true and faithful shepherd. He does not rest until he has found any of us who is lost. And if he finds us, he rejoices, more than he rejoices over those that never went astray. When we see church leaders misbehaving, we should take comfort in this: ‘It is not the will of (our) Father in heaven that (even) one of these little ones should be lost.’