A New Vintage

Rogation Sunday – “A New Vintage” – 05-25-2025 - Rev. Tony Romaine
 
“If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish and it will be done for you!”
 
This Sunday across the world, people are celebrating and asking for a blessing, for a blessing of their fields, farms, tables, work, hands, feet…and the list goes on. What would you ask for if you could have anything? Jesus says, abide in me and my words in you and whatever you ask for it will be done. It is the abiding that is the root, “pun intended” of our solution. To define the word “abide” may be useful. Abide can be defined as acting in accordance with, waiting in, to endure in, or remain. Thus, to truly abide in Jesus means that we live as he longs for us to live and act as he longs for us to act; as we await His second coming. Moreover, this means that we, the new vintage, the grapes being grown in Christ’s vineyard, are called to align with God’s love through Christ. And while this takes many forms, because it is Rural Life or Rogation Sunday, let us speak specifically about our world.
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God has entrusted us with the care for the earth and God has also entrusted us with communal care for each other. As the theologian Daniel Migliore states, in being created by God we find our full expression in relationship with each other and all creation. Which leads naturally into the great commandments we receive from Jesus to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul; and to love one another as Jesus loved us; the very commandments Christ is calling us to abide in from our Gospel today. Thus, if we are to abide in Jesus, then we must love each other as ourselves, and in that love, we are entrusted to take care of all creation.

This means that to be a good Christian is not to just take care of the man or woman in need, but to go deeper, as Christ did, to provide them with food, make sure they can make a livable wage, and respect their human dignity that is God-given. This means recognizing it in unknown places and people, just like Paul and how he came to meet Lydia, who eventually became one of his greatest mission supporters. What if Paul had not listened to his vision, or had stuck to the status quo of the day, or the “way we have always done it” and not allowed for the Holy Spirit to open his eyes about Christ’s love for gentiles, women, the marginalized? When we open ourselves to how Christ longs for us to abide in Him by being present in our world, we are indeed becoming that new vintage of beautiful love.

In other words, we are to exercise a practice of reaching out to those who need us, those who are at the margins of society, and those who have no recourse to “pick themselves up by their bootstraps.” Why? Well, one reason is that C.S. Lewis says that if you told people this, all you’d have is a bunch of broken boots! But I ask…Well what if they do not even have boots? What if they are trapped in a never-ending circle of despair? What if all they need is a helping hand, not money thrown at the problem? For instance, I once had a friend who argued with me about welfare programs and he quoted the saying, “If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish he will eat for a lifetime.” I said that is great, but what if that person does not have a fishing pole, or bait, or a lake or river to fish in?

See friends, this is part of being a new vintage, one that abides in Christ, one that abides in God’s commandments, one that glorifies God in the love poured out upon all creation. Why, because, God has entrusted us with all creation, God has gifted every part of creation with dignity, and every human being has a destiny; we are all created and redeemed to glorify and enjoy God forever. Remember the end of our Gospel today, Christ is calling us to abide in Him, to trust in Him, to live and love like Him, so that our joy may be complete! So that our joy may be complete, as the new vintage, as Christ’s vintage!

It is our duty as God’s creation to ensure and lift up those whose destiny seems bleak, or whose destiny is clouded with the detriments of our modern society. We must, as we have been entrusted by God, live out the life God has given us, Jesus has taught us, and the Holy Spirit fills us with each and every day, until that one fine day when all creation will not be at want. Until John’s Revelation comes true and the Lamb has brought peace to all the earth. And this includes taking care of our place in the universe, as well as, the creation upon it.

But this new vintage, we the new vintage also have another role in the asking and the abiding, specific to our rural life we celebrate and remember this particular Sunday: if we are to abide in Jesus, that means we are to be good stewards not just of humanity, but of the earth and all living things. In other words, part of our getting to ask and receive through the abiding in God’s love is also ecological and environmental responsibility is to care for all God’s creation with which we are entrusted. We must care for the rivers, streams, and oceans so that there will be an abundance of fish for us to eat. What good would it be to teach anyone to fish if we did not have a place to catch any? 

If there is no place to grow vines, if there is no place to plant fields, if there is no clean water to drink, then there is not only no new vintage, but no vintage at all. If there is no food to eat or grow, then we truly have not abided in Jesus or followed God’s call in our lives to be good stewards of the gifts from God. If we use and use and use, and leave a wasteland to the future generations to come, then we have not abided in love with Christ, for Christ came to plant seeds and vines for future generations, not tear up the ground and destroy any future’s chance. And if we ignore our impact on the world, then we truly are blind to how the sins of today will affect the lives of tomorrow.

This is the human footprint that we can no longer just look at from a distance and pretend we have no impact over. As the theologian Sallie McFague states, “whatever may have been the mechanisms of evolutionary history in the past, evolution in the present and future will be inextricably involved with human powers and decisions.” In other words, no matter what has happened before, humanity will impact every part of the future of the world. Well if we are called to love as Christ loved and abide in Christ to bring about complete joy, there darn well needs to be a place to experience this until Christ’s second coming!

And we can ask and ask and ask till we are blue in the face about God providing crops and land and rain and you name it, but if we take that gift and tear it apart and destroy it and pollute it so that it is non-arable wasteland, then we must ask ourselves if we are truly abiding in Christ! And I do not know about you, but my rural life is made more joyful because of lakes I can swim in, forests I can walk through, farmland that provides for families, and communities that support and love one another no matter if they agree or not on every single issue, but are those abiding in the love of Christ, this new vintage.
Rogare Sunday is all about asking…Asking God to remember us in the midst of this vast world, asking God to remember our fields and forests, to remember that we are God’s new vintage, God’s pruned and prepared vine, asking God for everything we need as we abide in Christ.
 
But let us not be mistaken, friends, God has answered and continues to answer our asking through the Word come to Life in Jesus Christ who told and taught us exactly what we need to do and exactly how we receive what we are asking for…

“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”

This is how we live as the new vintage Christ has called, God has pruned, and the Holy Spirit inspires; to be complete joy in our rural life and everywhere we go, is to take God’s love to our world, Amen