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It may not be easy to believe this now, but there was a time when I was a tiny little boy with no beard and a full head of hair. It wasn’t gray, either. One New Year’s Day when I was maybe six or seven I was visiting my grandfather’s house and, as it happened, I was the only kid there. All the other people at the New Year’s party were huge loud adults who were eating traditional foods like sauerkraut and pickled herring and drinking wine from the vines my grandfather grew in back of the house. At midnight, someone said, Why not let Eddie have a sip of wine too? So they gave me a sip of the most horrible wine I’ve ever tasted, more like vinegar than wine. I must have made a face, because they were all laughing and chuckling. My grandfather wasn’t a very good winemaker, at least not by then, because he had grown old and no longer bothered to prune the vines. A healthy grapevine, as Jesus said, has to be pruned, and the branches that no longer bear good fruit are burned; otherwise, each vine will grow unchecked and, while it will bear a lot of grapes, they will not be very good. This happened to my grandfather’s vines, and the wine they produced was bad. For a while they were good enough for jelly, so every year my grandmother made a huge batch of grape jelly and gave it away to everyone she could think of. In time, as more people politely turned it down, she gave up on that too. By the time I was ten, I was living at their house and helping to harvest the grapes as table grapes. The red ones were useful only for table grapes; they had almost no flavor, but were refreshing eaten cold. In the end, my grandfather’s labor over thirty years had come down to no more than that. I learned from this that more is not necessarily better; a small fraction of the jungle canopy behind our house would have borne better grapes and good wine. Everyone who heard Jesus understood all this, since wine was not a luxury but a necessity of life and vineyards were and are everywhere in the Holy Land. But Jesus goes further. He makes one of the “I am” statements; just as in last week’s gospel he says “I am the good shepherd,” here he says “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Now he is not only our protector and leader, but he is part of us and we are part of him. Now the wine that we drink in the Holy Communion is not only wine but also his blood, and because we are made one with him his blood is our blood, which we drink to nourish the spirit of God within us. The bread and the wine are our spiritual food and drink, not in an abstract sense but a very physical one, and they sustain us in spirit just as ordinary food and drink us sustain us in body. I would like to say just one other thing about vineyards. The roots of grapevines go deep into the earth, very deep, which is why they can grow in dry hot places like Israel and California; they don’t rely on rain, like grains and tubers, but draw up pure water from underground and fill their fruit with it. The branches that bear the good plump fruit do so by tapping deep wellsprings, and the branches that flourish in the vineyard of God tap the source of all life in the love of God and the redeeming power of Christ, the vine and deep root from which we grow. When we live in Christ we are not separate from him, and we are not separate from other human beings. The reading from the Book of Acts, St. Philip’s baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, is a perfect example of the unity of all peoples. As we heard just a few minutes ago, the eunuch was earnestly reading Isaiah, trying to learn more about God, but could not understand what the prophet was saying. Who, he asks, is the one who was denied justice, humiliated and slaughtered like a sheep? When Philip explains, the eunuch – obviously a very intelligent man – immediately understands that salvation is not to be gained only by the Law and the prophets, but by participating in the life of Christ. This begins with baptism, so when he sees water he asks what prevents him from being baptized immediately. This is as close as the New Testament comes to humor, since in fact there are a few details that, before Christ, would have made it impossible even consider: He is not Jewish by birth, being a eunuch he can never be circumcised, and he is in service to the ruler of a foreign power. But Philip doesn’t even hesitate, and the eunuch goes on his way rejoicing because he has discovered in the act of baptism, the act of becoming part of the body of Christ, the truth he could not find by himself. I thought for a while about preaching just on the lesson from Acts, since its relationship to this congregation is so obvious, but it seems pretentious for me to talk at length to you about racism. Unfortunately you understand this better than I do. But the lesson is clear: Here is a man who is trying to understand the scripture of the Jews even though the Jews would have rejected him absolutely as a stranger who could never have been part of their community. How often we have, even unconsciously, shunned people whom we would not want to be part of our community, whether that means our church, our neighborhood, or the school our children go to. Shunning need not be a matter of race; homeless people are universally shunned, and so are those who are strange, whose behavior is “inappropriate” according to our social norms. We all know such people, and we have met plenty of them with our community lunches. We will meet many more in a little while when we return to Trinity Church for the garden ministry. Many of them also attend daytime services at Trinity and other downtown churches; like the eunuch, they are searching for truth and wholeness of spirit in their own way. They and we are all the same, branches of the great vine that is the source of life and truth. Amen.