Description
This week invites us to think about the shape of a life lived in response to God and God’s action. What do we truly value, what are we becoming, what kind of fruit do our lives and communities produce – or should they produce, or would we’d like them to produce!?
In Exodus 20, the freshly liberated people of Israel receive the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, which are given in the context of a relationship and on the foundation of God’s liberating action. A gift of grace, the Commandments call this freed people into a particular model of life, lived in relationship to God and to one another and in the freedom God has given them. Our Commandments Confession uses the themes of God, words, time and people to reflect prayerfully on the shape of our own lives and the places where we fall short.
Paul wrestles with what gives a life its shape and value in his letter to the Philippians. He looks again at all those things in which he once placed his confidence, his identity, status and achievements, and radically reassesses their value. His language of gain and loss leads towards movement: “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,” pressing on with following Jesus on the way that leads to life. The Blackout Poems activity makes that movement tangible: by letting some words disappear, participants discover what they want to remain visible and consider together what is truly valuable.
Jesus’ difficult parable of the vineyard raises questions about stewardship and the way we live producing fruit (or not). It is told during Jesus’ series of confrontations with religious leaders in Jerusalem, drawing upon the biblical image of Israel as God’s vineyard. Christians absolutely must resist perpetuating this passage’s history of sinful anti-Jewish interpretation, instead recognising Jesus’ Jewish context, and that we are observing a fiery debate among fellow Jews! Rather, Christians can look for the challenging and life-giving word which is for us: how we are stewarding what God has entrusted to us, and what of the fruit of the Kingdom of God?
The two Gospel activities approach this question from different directions. In Building the Vineyard, the congregation encounters the parable as a vineyard physically takes shape among them, creating space to wonder together about this challenging story. In What Fruit is Growing?, the focus moves towards response. Each person contributes a grape to a communal vine, naming or drawing the fruit they hope to see growing in their own life, church, neighbourhood or world. The resulting vineyard holds together the different hopes, gifts and longings of the whole community.
Across these readings there is a movement from gift to response. God liberates a people, and they learn a new way of living. Paul encounters Christ, and is transformed in his sense of what matters. God entrusts the vineyard, and Jesus asks what will become of it. Engagement options this week invite us into that exploration: confessing where our life together falls short, letting go of what no longer defines us, and imagining the good fruit we long to bear.
