Easter 5B

Easter 5B May 3, 2015 When I was a child, we would make frequent trips back and forth between Jackson to Vicksburg to visit my grandparents who live there. I loved to look out the car window and watch as the beautiful, green colored hills rolled by. I can remember being enthralled by the foliage that grew all over those hills and thinking that it was so beautiful, both because of the way that it looked but also because it signaled that we were getting closer to seeing people who I loved to spend time with. Fast forward to my adulthood, when I learned what that green-leafed foliage on the hills outside of Vicksburg really was. I encountered it up close and personal in the rectory yard in McComb as it sneakily sought to take over my camellia bushes and entire flower beds. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Kudzu! So I have this weird kind of love/hate relationship with the stuff. And one of the interesting things about kudzu that I found is that the vines would grow incredibly long. As I was pulling one part of the vine off my bushes, I would discover that that single vine was stretched all the way to the other end of the flower bed, entwined with many other plants along the way. It’s also incredibly tenacious, holding onto other plants with a kind of super-strength. Truly, kudzu is the Incredible Hulk of the plant world. In today’s gospel reading, as he is preparing his disciples for his departure, Jesus says to them, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” And I can’t help but think of kudzu when he says this: how even though bad things are coming and are going to happen to all of them, Jesus is making them a promise that he will hold onto them tenaciously; how we as the body of Christ are all inextricably connected with other parts that may be way down at the other end of the flower bed. I had an encounter with this truth a few years ago through Camp Bratton Green, our diocesan camp for young people in Central Mississippi. I had been to Bratton Green for one session as a child (5th grade), and it had been a pretty good camp experience, but I had not felt particularly plugged in to the life there. I had definitely felt like there were insiders and outsiders, and I was one of the outsiders. So I never went back, until I had just graduated from high school and decided I wanted to be a counselor. I was accepted to be on the staff of a priest I had never met, a man named Duncan M. Gray, III. And I made up my mind that as a counselor, I would actively work to make sure that every single one of the girls in my cabin felt a profound sense of belonging. I had a great week at camp that week, and it opened up a new sense of belonging for me in the life of that place. Fast forward ten years, and I had just come back to the diocese from seminary, and I was fulfilling my required two years of service on staff at Camp Bratton Green. On my first day there, one of the permanent staff (the college age kids who run the camp for the entire summer) came up to me, and she reintroduced herself and told me that I had been her camp counselor for her first session ever at Camp Bratton Green. She told me of how that beginning and that sense of belonging had opened the door for her for many happy summers spent out at Bratton Green and how she had come to be on permanent staff to help foster that sense of belonging in the children coming after her. Jesus says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” We have no way of knowing how our gifts and our offerings may affect and enrich the life of a member of the vine in another part of the flower bed. And in working with young people, especially, we never know how God will take and use the gifts that we freely offer and how God will multiply those small humble gifts into a radical abundance. But today, we are given the opportunity to do just that. Our entire diocese is marking today as Gray Center Sunday, when we remember and acknowledge the important role that Gray Center and Camp Bratton Green play in the formation of people as followers of Jesus Christ in Mississippi. No other place in this diocese has taught as many young people the beautiful truth of what it means to abide in God, to be a part of the long, snaky, interconnected vine that is life in and through the body of Jesus Christ. Today, we give thanks for that ministry, and we have the opportunity to give money to support all those important ministries that fall under the auspices of Gray Center. If you are able to give thanks for Gray Center and Camp Bratton Green in this way, then you can put cash in the offering plate today (or use one of our new offering envelopes and designate on the front for Gray Center), and it will go directly to Gray Center, or you can make a check to the church and put Gray Center Sunday on the memo line. We have no way of knowing how God will take and use that offering which we make in the life of the children of this diocese and beyond, in the life of Camp Bratton Green, in the life of Gray Center and all who go there for nourishment and retreat, and in the life of this community; but I believe that our small offering will be transformed by God into a radical abundance that will be beyond our wildest imaginings. Kind of like kudzu.