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At Home in Jesus

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This is the message I preached at St. Timothy's and St. Mark's (with one change). The text is from The Message Bible, John 15: 1-8. Have you ever been so hungry that you felt like you were about to faint? You are at a friend's house and you see that on the table in front of you is an inviting, delectable-looking bowl of fruit. It must be there to be eaten, so you grab one of your very favorite fruit--your mouth is watering, you can almost taste it-----and then, much to your disappointment, you discover that it is a piece of wax fruit, the fruit is fake. It may look good, but it is phony.            We are a church that loves to eat, aren't we? We love our  fellowship time with coffee, tea and all kinds of goodies. Food is something we know a lot about. This passage from John's gospel is not some hard to figure out parable. Vines and grapes and branches were very familiar to the disciples, just as they are to us. It was and still is a common Jewish metaphor.