know much yet about wine.  I'll leave the fruit of the vine to the experts for now. Instead I want to talk about roots. Where are your roots?  I ask the question because of a word that appears in our reading from John's Gospel and in the Letter from John : abide...abide.  Jesus says, "Abide in me."  In the midst of this very agricultural imagery about the vine and the branches, I think it's fair to the greek of the Gospel to play with our translation a bit, to translate "meinein," Jesus' word, not simply as abide in me, or remain in me, but "be rooted in me." Where are your roots? My parents still live in the house where I grew up.  Some of my earliest memories of that place are of the two big blue spruce trees out front.  They were tall when we arrived, and they were still growing pretty rapidly.  We used to hang Christmas lights on them each year.  I remember when I was little, my dad used to do this with a neighbor.  With a ladder and a broom stick they were able to get the lights to the top of the tree. Unfortunately, by the time I was big enough to help decorate, the trees had gotten much taller.  My father, who subscribes to the life philosophy that "anything can be solved with bailing wire and duct tape" had cobbled together an extension of the broom handle involving several lengths of PVC pipe.