"Many are the Branches!" I am the vine, you are the branches. This passage is often used as part of the funeral service, as it brings comfort to those who mourn. It is a glorious theology, the bedrock of Christian community. What does it mean to believe in these words - - to live out these words in our lives of faith? Like words about love, we hear them so often, and use them so freely, they can lose their meaning.

I am the vine, you are the branches. Today, we begin the re-planting of South Bay students! To some degree we re-plant old knowledge, but the true joy is harvesting anew with the branches that God has given us. Those branches are us all. We try and rid ourselves of ingrained responses to hatred, intolerance, bigotry and prejudice in our own community and especially at our school. We teachers do the hard work of pulling up the weeds, clearing out the debris, and preparing the flowerbed for planting and harvesting and for showing itself to a waiting world.

The seeds of knowledge and hope which we plant now will abide in our students, and the fruit that they bear will be abundant. If we as a staff and parents agree to teach them, by word and example, to abide in the Lord of Life, who is love incarnate, they will be love to the world. We plant in the sure and certain hope that prejudice and hatred and bigotry will end if we love and respect one another. God is love, and if we love one another, God lives in us, and God's love is perfected in us.

And if you can't remember all that, just remember this: Jesus said,"I am the vine, you are the the branches." I look forward to our participating together in this ministry of education, knowing those who work here and those who are being nurtured have the ability to be branches of our risen Savior, Jesus Christ.