Grapes

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org

Order of Worship

April 28, 2024

Fifth Sunday in Easter

10:00 a.m.

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.

Prelude

Greeting and Announcements

Mission Statement: We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

Call to Worship:

Come to the vineyard of God.

We seek Christ, the vine of great love.

Drink from the waters of life.

We live in the light of God’s grace.

Come to the vineyard of God.

All are welcome here.

*Hymn Gather Us In #2236

Prayer of Confession:

Merciful One,

you know when we are afraid to love;

you know when we are too cowardly

to show mercy.

Remind us again

that perfect love casts out such fears.

Surround us and strengthen us with your perfect love,

even in the face of our imperfections.

Imbue us with a love so strong,

with such growth toward perfection,

that we may cast aside our pride

and embrace the power of love.

Assurance:

Christ is the vine. We are simply branches.

If we abide in Christ, Christ’s words will abide in us.

Ask for whatever you wish in Christ’s name

and it will be granted.

In the name of Christ,

you who seek forgiveness are forgiven!

Scripture Reading John 15: 1-8

Jesus the True Vine

15 “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[a] to make it bear more fruit. 3 You have already been cleansed[b] 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[c] my disciples.

Sermon Grapes

The central theme of this morning’s lectionary-appointed Gospel reading is all about how we thrive when we stay attached to our Creator. Jesus employs an agricultural image that conveys to the disciples that God is the main vine, and all people grow out of God as branches, and then produce the fruit of the vine, grapes, that nourish the world. We can produce an endless supply of grapes if we draw from what we find in the vine, or the Sacred. But when we go off on our own, we become withering branches. What amazing things can we do with God’s help?

On that note, I invite you to take a detour with me. I promise, we’re coming right back to Jesus.

Have you seen the Disney movie Encanto? It came out a few years ago, and my kids are infatuated with it. That killer soundtrack by Lin-Manuel Miranda makes it ultra watchable for the whole family. It takes place in Colombia, and it tells the story of a family, the Madrigals, who have settled in the town they’re in now after the grandparents fled their hometown during a civil war. The grandfather was killed during the journey, and the grandmother was on her own to raise her three babies. The twist, though, is that a magic house sprang up around her after her husband died, an anthropomorphic house that takes care of her. And all three of her children, and then her grandchildren, gained a special power when they turned five years old. All the special powers–healing, controlling the weather, predicting the future, growing plants, strength, shape shifting, and talking to animals–helped not only the family, but the community around them, survive, and then thrive.

The thing is that the grandmother, Abuela, was deep in grief, and filled with anxiety and fear. She already lost her home and her husband, and she was terrified of losing anything else. So she raised her children, and then her grandchildren, to be very anxious perfectionists. As it turns out, trying to be perfect at every minute and constantly fearing loss doesn’t help you use your gifts to the fullest. Actually, those forces really hinder what you’re capable of. And the magic house is slowly filling with cracks.

So the oldest of the grandchildren, Isabela, has the power to grow any plant, flower, tree, or herb she can think of. But Abuela, desperate to make everything look perfect, restricts Isabela to only making the prettiest roses. During a critical turning point in the film, Isabela’s little sister Mirabel makes her lose her temper, and for the first time ever, Isabela grows something other than a rose–a cactus! This inspires Isabela to wonder what she’s always been capable of that she held herself back from, and, most importantly, what she could grow if she stopped worrying about disappointing Abuela. Isabela fills the town with color.

Ok, back to the Bible now. Jesus prepared his disciples to be like the Madrigal family to those around them–to heal, to be strong, to be resourceful, and to bear amazing fruit. Unhindered, and supported by God, there’s no end to what the disciples are capable of, and they end up planting an entire worldwide religious movement, one that has brought every one of us here today, 2,000 years later. Just think about that. Jesus taught the disciples to keep asking, just like Isabela, what else can I do? The answer was just about anything.

That is, until the disciples began bickering amongst themselves. Like Abuela, they wanted perfection, and they feared loss. Fearing loss is consuming, and devastating. Loss is inherent to growth, and Jesus explains that right in this scripture passage. Pruning away branches that have stopped growing allows nutrients to reach the branches that are growing. But so often, we, as church families, start channeling Abuela, and her deep fear of loss. We worry that if we say goodbye to a branch, the whole plant is next. And, like Abuela, we compromise the whole garden by expecting perfection out of it. And the truth is you don’t get perfection when you grow anything. Being knee deep in soil is not a perfect experience. But that’s what produces those grapes.

Y’all heard a whole bunch about our General Conference from me last week, but this week I have some huge, and joyous, updates to share with you. The United Methodist Church is at a huge crossroads in the vineyard business. We cut the whole plant in half, and entrusted the half we lost to another gardener, the Global Methodist Church. We’re losing more of the plant in this season, as this week at GC we gave our Methodist friends in Eastern Europe and Asia our blessing to leave our connection and become the Christian Methodist Church. We also passed worldwide regionalization, pending ratification from all the annual conferences, which will allow our friends in other countries to update church structure and ordination guidelines to fit their needs, rather than being hamstrung by what works in the United States. It gives American Methodists, and Methodists around the world, freedom to grow the plant, to ask themselves, What else can they do? But it’s still loss.

A huge victory for LGBTQ equality in the Church happened with the striking of homophobic language from our social principles. We cut off the branches in the Book of Discipline that called being gay “incompatible with Christian teaching”, so that fruit can finally grow. It’s a change that’s been desperately needed for over half a century. But it’s still change. And change is loss. And loss hurts. I have beloved, longtime colleagues who I will not be working with again because they left our connection. For them, a vineyard that doesn’t restrict people on the basis of sexuality and gender identity was too much. Methodist folx feared dividing this denomination and losing beloved colleagues for years, and put off changing the Discipline to prevent that grief. But now, it’s here, and we have to sit in it.

But no possibilities, new plants, and juicy grapes spring forth after loss.

That brings us to today. Right here, right now, at this church in Schenectady, New York. What is God empowering us to do? What inspires and excites us? What would we want to do as a church if we felt like nothing was holding us back?

The Good News for us is that we can totally go do that thing. Today. Right now. The only thing standing in the way is our own selves. When church families get that surge of inspiration and, like Isabela, run down the street planting jacarandas, what stops that joy, fun, and growth is the Abuela among us. Women and men, young and old, all races and backgrounds, being an Abuela is an equal opportunity role in our churches. But when our inner Abuelas pop up and start getting anxious, we show too much restraint, and we stop growing. We start to fear loss. What if a new ministry costs too much money to get off the ground? What if a few families don’t like that idea, and they leave? What if this idea makes us too different from other churches in the area? What if the work gets too hard? In churches, we demand perfection, and start addressing those anxieties by creating a bunch of paperwork to submit to the conference office, and by creating lots of committees that have to thoroughly talk everything out and vote about it before an idea can go anywhere.

Don’t get me wrong, order in the church is important, and it’s an important part of my responsibilities as an Elder. But when we deep dive into those instincts, when we get super legalistic and bureaucratic, when we insist that no one can read our work until every i is dotted, and when we make our focus retaining and pleasing the members we have instead of casting the net as far as we can, we stop Isabela from growing exotic plants, and send her back to the endless roses. We make our grapes sour. We don’t grow, and we die. We cut ourselves off from the will of the Creator.

Change is scary. Loss is scary. Loss hurts. It’s okay to look at the possibilities and feel intimidated. But leaning into fear is what cuts us off from the vine. The other side of fear is excitement. Instead of trembling, get the tingles. What gives us that feeling? What potential do you want to see our church realize? What goals do we want to shoot for? Let’s go there, because I bet the grapes will be delicious.

Amen.

*Hymn Lord, I Want to Be a Christian #402

Offering

Offertory

*Doxology #94

*Prayer of dedication

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

What a great world it would be, God our Friend, if we all kept our lives grafted in Christ Jesus, the True Vine, and like good branches produced the bountiful fruits of his Spirit.