Grafted for the Harvest

The arborist walked the property at Underwood around the old house for the better part of an hour before he called me with an estimate of what was needed. Some of what has grown up there, planted as small shrubs, he told me, has to come out entirely — years of neglect had let disease take hold; multiple shoots had grown in every direction, sapping strength from the main stem. A large blue spruce, with more dead wood than living in it, was like tinder that would go up like a torch in the fire next time.

The fire next time. When I grew up on the farm, about every ten or fifteen years, we would nearly lose the place to fire. Back in 2007, when both my parents were alive, a fire roared up the bluff from the railroad tracks six hundred feet below, along the Columbia. All the trees on the bluff were burning. My ninety-four-year-old father was standing by the lawn above the bluff with a garden hose, defending my parents' house, when the deputy sheriff arrived and evacuated my parents in his patrol vehicle, just ahead of a fire that had already crossed the road. My mom may have gotten out with her purse; I don't recall. A lot of foliage by the lawn burned, but the house was saved by helicopter water drops.

So the fire next time has always been in the back of my mind as nature repaired itself, and the remaining trees grew thicker. All of that was still with me this morning, reading the propers appointed for today.

But I digress — except I don't, not really, because Cranmer knew exactly what he was doing when he chose that verb for us this morning. Graft in our hearts the love of thy Name. Not plant. Not merely sow. Graft — which is a harder, stranger mercy than either, and I have just spent the better part of an hour hearing exactly what that costs in practice. A seed you drop in the ground that's already yours. A graft is different. A graft takes something living and cuts into something else living, and binds the two together, wound to wound, until what was foreign becomes native and starts, in time, to bear.

This prayer is older than Cranmer, older than the Reformation itself — it comes down to us from the Gelasian Sacramentary, prayed by Christians for the better part of a thousand years before it ever reached English ears.

Cranmer's own choice of words recalls Saint James: every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights. Which tells you something. The Church has always known that good things are not only implanted in us by God's grace; He alone nurtures and cares for them until they bring forth an abundant increase. It is not enough to be rescued once and left standing there. Something has to be grafted in, and the prayer does not stop at grafting — nourish us with all goodness, and of thy great mercy keep us in the same. Grafted, and then fed, and then kept. The whole life of faith is in those three verbs.

Another story — at one time, my father had a Bartlett pear orchard, and I learned early that Bartletts were grafted to different rootstocks so they could survive for decades rather than years: pear decline was a particular disease that Bartletts were subject to with their natural roots. Gophers also found them exceptionally tasty.

However, grafting is only half of what an orchard needs, and Scripture knows the other half too. Our Lord says it plainly in Saint John's Gospel: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.” That is exactly what the arborist described to me on the back acreage, translated into a single verse — some branches taken away entirely because there is no fruit left in them to save, and some pruned back hard, further than seems kind, precisely so they will bear more. The Father is not a sentimental gardener; He is a working one.

You have heard me say that our daily service lessons are always linked to the Holy Communion Epistle and Gospel. Let me draw them out and connect them for you today.

Our First Lesson this morning promises what comes after the pruning, and it is worth meditating on, because it is entirely about restoration rather than loss.

The Lord states through Hosea: “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him. I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall grow as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree… I am like a green fir tree. From me is thy fruit found.”

Notice what is healed: the backsliding itself — the condition that produces the overgrown, diseased, unproductive growth the arborist described to me. God does not merely prune us and leave us standing in the wound. He remedies the initial cause of the disease, and subsequently the branches proliferate and the fruit is restored.

Saint Paul's Epistle sharpens Hosea's original promise, using the metaphor of a body rather than an orchard. In our Second Lesson, he states: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body; neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.” This act of yielding constitutes a form of pruning — the will surrendered, branch by branch, thereby enabling what previously bore one kind of fruit now to bear another. A few verses further, in the Epistle proper, it states: “But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.” Paul is not describing a singular mercy, concluded and relegated to the past. He is describing ongoing husbandry — the same daily pruning the arborist described to me, except the cultivated ground is a life.

If you attended Morning Prayer, you would hear David singing of that same mercy in the words of a man half-drowned and hauled out alive. One line of Psalm 18 is worth remembering this week: he brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me (Ps 18:19). Not merely rescued. Brought out into room enough to grow in.

He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.Psalm 18 : 19

I want to say something plain here because I think it matters more this year than most: David is not a hero from a story we admire at a comfortable distance. David is all of us. The cave he hid in, the cords that wrapped him — that is not history closed and finished. It is the shape turmoil always takes, in every age, wearing whatever face the age gives it.

Bayard Hale Jones termed this dynamic redemption: not a singular, past rescue for someone else, but an ongoing pattern occurring now, in this room, this year, for people who arrived this morning burdened by unspoken concerns. Wherever you feel constrained this week — by grief, worry, or anything else that makes the walls press closer than any friend can reach — that is David's cave. And the very voice that once rang through the mountains on his behalf still speaks today.

Which is why grafting matters, and why pruning matters, and why one deliverance was never going to be enough. God does not haul us out of the flood and set us down and walk away satisfied. He grafts us in. He prunes what is dead. He nourishes. He keeps us in the same.

We remember the rainbow, the sign of the first covenant and the promise He would not destroy the world again with water. But in the words James Baldwin used to title his book The Fire Next Time, from an old African American spiritual, we recall the Day of the Lord which is yet to come:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time!Traditional Spiritual

Consider what unfolds next in Mark's Gospel. Four thousand hungry people, three days without food and facing a long, faint journey home, witness seven loaves become more than enough: seven baskets of fragments remain after everyone has eaten their fill. That is symbolic of what we receive each Sunday.

I know now what will happen on that ground at Underwood. But that is not so different from what happens at this table today. The Lord of all power and might is not in the business of leaving anything for dead that He has any mind to save, and He is not sentimental about what needs to come out first. He grafts. He prunes. He nourishes. He keeps us in the same, and feeds past the point of enough. And whatever overgrown or neglected corner of your own life you carried in here this morning — I have a message for you: He has not forgotten it is there, and He is not finished with it yet.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen ✟