This morning’s Gospel text is Jesus beautiful words to his disciples about the vine and the branches. So to illustrate that passage this morning, I borrowed Rosemary’s spider plant from the office. These are called spider plants because they reproduce by sending off these little shoots that look a little bit like spiders I guess, and these shoots burrow in and make new plants wherever they land. Including, as you can see with this guy, on top of filing cabinets. They are tenacious little suckers, which make them particularly successful as office plants.
Their tenacity also makes them good plants for the gardening-challenged like myself. When I moved into a new place in DC, my friend Julie gave me a spider plant as a house-warming gift. My housemate and I named it Sprout, and we put it in the windowsill, pretty pleased with our new addition. But for a long time, Sprout didn’t seem to be doing very well. It got plenty of sunlight, and we were very careful with the watering, so that we didn’t overwater or underwater it, but still it did not grow. Finally, one afternoon while my housemate was home from work, she discovered the problem. Sprout had become the favorite snack of our cat. Anytime Sprout sent up any new shoots, Shadow the cat was quick to hop up on the windowsill and eat them. Shadow also liked to chew on the more mature leaves, leaving our poor plant spindly and mangled. Once we discovered the problem, we moved Sprout to the top of the television where Shadow couldn’t reach him. That was all it took. Today, Sprout lives happily in Iowa, where he has totally taken over the alcove above the shower where he lives. He also has offspring across the country. I was gifted one of Sprout’s babies as a graduation present from seminary. We named him Junior, and Junior currently lives with my parents, where it is all my father can do to keep Junior from reproducing himself in every other potted plant on my parents’ patio.
I think the spider plant’s tenacity is a good description of our Gospel reading for this morning. Jesus told his disciples, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” And it seems like the kingdom of God works a lot like a spider plant. We’re connected to the Kingdom through this seemingly spindly little vine of faith. It seems insignificant, like the spindly vine of the spider plant. It seems weak, it seems like not enough to sustain life. But what it lacks in outward appearance, it makes up for in sheer determination. See faith, the faith of God poured out on us in baptism, is a tough faith, it is a persistent faith, it is a determined faith, and it will bloom in the most unlikely of places. And, more than that, it will continue again and again, to find new places to bloom and flourish and expand. And if you cut it off, if you snip off the shoots, that only encourages it further, that only challenges it to reach out more, to reach deeper, to reach stronger, to bring about new life in any tiny patch of soil it can come across. Forcing, with sheer grit and determination, new life in a place where life seemed impossible.
It’s been a week of impossible things. I don’t know about you, but I have felt beaten down this week. With the riots in Baltimore and the devastating earthquake in Nepal, there have been a lot of places where life has seemed impossible, where the kingdom of God has seemed far away.
And yet, in the midst of all this darkness, with the quiet tenacity of the spider plant, the kingdom of God has proven, yet again, that in the midst of the impossible is exactly the sort of places where the kingdom of God is most likely to show up. A friend of mine is a pastor in Baltimore, and from him I have seen the stories that do not make the paper. Stories like the man who stood between the police and the rioters, protecting the police from those who had come only to cause trouble, stories of men from rival gangs coming together to find a new way forward together, stories of protests of prayer and song, where thousands gathered to sing Amazing Grace, to pray, and to proclaim that the kingdom of God is not violence, but neither is it the systemic injustice that has kept Baltimore and its people as prisoners in one of the most impoverished cities in the nation for decades. But the kingdom of God is in fact a third way forward, a way that values the life and the worth of all people. These are stories that do not make the news, but they are the kingdom of God rising up in the most unlikely of places to proclaim that even here, God cannot, God will not, be silenced. That even here is God.
And in Nepal, the Lutheran World Federation, of which our denomination, the ELCA, is a member, is already on the ground in Kathmandu, working through partners to support those who need it the most. What’s more, Lutheran Disaster Relief is committed to long-term disaster relief, which means that long after the news has stopped covering Nepal, we, through our partnership with Lutheran World Relief, will be with our brothers and sisters in Nepal, helping them through every stage of the rebuilding process. From amidst the devastation of the earthquake, shoots of the kingdom of God are already visible among the rubble, promising that even here, even when the world shakes, the kingdom of God cannot, will not be shaken. Even when all around is nothing but broken concrete and shattered hope, the tenacious vine of Jesus Christ is breaking through the rubble, growing new hope, shining new light, transforming what was broken into glorious new life.
And we are the branches of this vine, we are the ones sent by Jesus to bring that light and life and hope to the world. It may feel like this work is too big for us, like we cannot make changes that matter. But we are branches off the vine of Christ, so it is not us alone, but Christ through us that makes the difference.
With the quiet tenacity of a spider plant, the kingdom of God is growing in our world, in our community, in our own lives, bringing into being the nearness of Christ. In the tiniest crack, the vine of Christ roots itself in, pushing aside all that holds captive, until the rich fruit of the kingdom of God shows forth. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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