At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, "Come down to the water."  it was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less.  If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.  After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.  The whole show has been on fire from the word go.  I come down to the water to cool my eyes.  But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
 

Fruit and love belong together: The true fruit is the love that has passed through the Cross, through God's purification.  "Remaining" is an essential part of all this.  In verses 1-10 the word remain (in Greek menein) occurs ten times.  What the Church Fathers call perseverantia--patient steadfastness in communion with the Lord amid all the vicissitudes of life-is placed center stage here.  Initial enthusiasm is easy. Afterward, though, it is time to stand firm, even along the monotonous desert paths that we are called upon to traverse in this life--with the patience it takes to tread evenly, a patience in which the romanticism o the initial awakening subsides, so that only the deep, pure Yes of faith remains.  This is the way to produce good wine.
 

"At Magdeburg, a group of Lutheran theolgians, under the leadership of Flacius, had undertaken the writing of the history of the church from a Protestant point of view. As this was divided into centuries, one for each volume of the work (it never got beyond the thirteenth), the whole was called the 'Centuries of Magdeburg.' Canisius undertook to refute this work, although -- interestingly enough -- not by an appeal to history, but by attempting to show that the practices that the Protestants decried as innovations had their origin in Scripture. Thus an ironic situation developed in which Protestants were attempting to prove through tradition that the Roman Catholic Church had departed from the authority of Scripture, and the Catholic Canisius was trying to show on the basis of Scripture that the Protestant reconstruction of tradition was wrong."

~ Justo Gonzales, A History of Christian Thought
  

Moreover, beloved brethren, a new kind of devastation has appeared; and, as if the storm of persecution had raged too little, there has been added to the heap, under the title of mercy, a deceiving mischief and a fair-seeming calamity. Contrary to the vigour of the Gospel, contrary to the law of the Lord and God, by the temerity of some, communion is relaxed to heedless persons,—a vain and false peace, dangerous to those who grant it, and likely to avail nothing to those who receive it. They do not seek for the patience necessary to health nor the true medicine derived from atonement. Penitence is driven forth from their breasts, and the memory of their very grave and extreme sin is taken away. The wounds of the dying are covered over, and the deadly blow that is planted in the deep and secret entrails is concealed by a dissimulated suffering. Returning from the altars of the devil, they draw near to the holy place of the Lord, with hands filthy and reeking with smell, still almost breathing of the plague-bearing idol-meats; and even with jaws still exhaling their crime, and reeking with the fatal contact, they intrude on the body of the Lord, although the sacred Scripture stands in their way, and cries, saying, “Every one that is clean shall eat of the flesh; and whatever soul eateth of the flesh of the saving sacrifice, which is the Lord’s, having his uncleanness upon him, that soul shall be cut off from his people.”  Also, the apostle testifies, and says, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils; ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils.” He threatens, moreover, the stubborn and froward, and denounces them, saying, “Whosoever eateth the bread or drinketh the cup of the Lord unworthily, is guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.”