Sermon preached at St John’s Bexley: 28th April 2024: Fifth Sunday of Easter/APCM (Annual Parochial Church Meeting) Sunday: Acts 8:26-end; 1 John 4:7-end; John 15:1-8
It’s Saturday night: The Sun has set and the candles have been lit in the house. People are gathered round a table with wine, sweet spices and a braided cup. The candle is lit and held aloft and then a man pours wine into a silver cup.
The cup fills up to the rim and then, gently more wine is poured in: A meniscus forms above the rim of the cup, the tension holds for a moment and then, with the next drop of wine, the crimson surface of the liquid breaks. Wine spills down the side of the cup onto a small silver dish, where it collects: An outpouring.
The man takes the cup and, the contents spilling down its sides and dripping from his hand, blesses God for deliverance and for the gift of wine.
This is the start of the Havdalah, the Jewish Ceremony that separates the Shabbat from the six days of work that lie ahead: The sweetness of the sacred time has filled the Kiddush Cup (the cup of Sanctification) and now it flows over – carrying something of God’s grace into the time that will follow.
As God was blessed at the beginning of the Sabbath on the Friday night, so too God is blessed again – a sacred recognition for the source of that abundant outpouring.
That ritual blessing has carried, over the centuries, into our Christian practices: If you watch whilst I’m preparing the altar during the offertory hymn, you’ll see me raise in turn the unconsecrated bread and wine: At this point the prayer of the Priest is a blessing of God:
Blessed are you Lord God of all Creation, for through your goodness we have this wine to offer. Fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become the Cup of Salvation.
(Although in this case I try not to spill any: Even though I can be a bit splashy sometimes – and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our Sacristan for the work she puts into laundering the altar linens…)
Jesus said “I am the vine, you are the branches.”
It’s from the branches that the vine bears fruit: the growth, the extension, the overspill: And the branches, which must be properly cultivated, pruned and tended, they can’t bear fruit without the vine.
We the branches, grow from Christ the vine: Extending into the World like the fractal patterns of a Mandelbrot set. Vine, then branches, Christ then us, sent out into the World to bear the fruit of our source… And yes, sometimes we must prune, temper restrain, but we always do that with a view to a greater expansion outward.
One of the earliest callings of God’s People, going all the way back to Abraham, is that we should be a Blessing to All Nations: As the wine of sanctification overspills from the Kiddush cup onto the plate below, or as the vine sends out branches on which the fruit grows. So we, filled with the grace of our Blessed God and growing from the True Vine, extend that blessing out into the World:
It doesn’t come from us – it comes from our source: We are God’s overspill, and we can’t overflow unless we have first been filled.
So many things fill us to capacity: Joy, love, hope – Sorrow, anger, pain… And when we are full, we overflow. Unable to contain whatever has been poured into us, it branches out into the World – our words, our actions, our mere sense of presence affecting everyone and everything around us.
We are God’s overspill and God’s presence pours into the World through us: Branches stem from the Vine, and fruit grows on the Branches – Our joy, shining with the light of the Resurrection; Our love, in the pattern of the man who washed his disciples feet; Our rage, like that of the man who overturned tables and drove out moneylenders; Our pain, a taste of His Crucifixion.
Because forcing containment is bad for us – we know that. Overfill a glass with no scope for release and it will shatter from within: Not only that, but maybe it’s also heretical, because if God can be found in all things, in every single aspect of this Human Condition which we share with Christ, then to keep that wine within, bottled up, to prune back the branches so far they will never bear fruit – that would be to try to force the grace of God into containment within ourselves.
And even those emotions we try to hide: The frustrations and the anxieties, they can speak of God too, and so their fruit can give as much a taste of Christ to the World as the ones we will all too eagerly share… That outpouring can also be a blessing…
God blesses the World through these spillages of humanity mingled with divinity.
Today, in the life of this church, we have something of a Havdalah moment ourselves: At the APCM we close the book on last year whilst keeping an eye to the next. As our Jewish friends on a Saturday Night, look back on the Sabbath, we look back on the sweetnesses and sorrows with which God has filled our cup in the previous year – working God’s purpose out in our church, our parish and our own lives.
And seeing how the cup has been filled, we are also mindful that something is spilling over – a continuation of God’s abundance into the year of work that lies ahead of us.
Our hands dripping with overflowing wine we raise the cup of the past year and in thankfulness, with all that we have been given, we bless God, ready to enter into the work that lies ahead.
Blessed are You, Lord God of all creation. Through your Goodness we have all that we offer. Fruit of the True Vine, work of this church, may it be a blessing to all Your World.
Fr. Edward 