By Their Fruits

[Matthew 7:13-17]

By Their Fruits

By the Reverend Tom Paine

Preached at FPC Tenino

June 9, 2024

¹³ “Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy^[a] that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. ¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

¹⁵ “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶ You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles? ¹⁷ In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Thus you will know them by their fruits.

A happy memory I have from my childhood is sitting down with my family, in the early 1970s, and prime-time TV would be interrupted by the Billy Graham Crusades. They would always be in some major city. We would be amazed that, for what seemed like an extended sermon, Graham would pack football stadiums and huge fields.  And, at the end of his sermon, after some inspirational music, there would be the altar call. And hundreds of people would go down. It just seemed fantastical to my younger self.  I mean, in the Baptist church I grew up in, if two different people answered an altar call, that was a lot. If three did, we’d be talking about it for weeks. But at those Billy Graham Crusades, three would answer in the first five seconds. And they’d keep coming. It wowed us.

And today, it may not be quite the same, but big numbers still impress us.  Prime time TV may not be interrupted. But we have all seen ministers that pack a huge auditorium of worshipers. Mega churches seem to thrive with large congregations. I remember one in San Antonio we would drive by – the church looked like a sports stadium and it had the biggest Texas flag in the city flying out front. By contrast, in our neighborhood congregations today, we can be wringing our hands.  We don’t have altar calls.  We don’t even have many visitors.  And our numbers, while stable, are nothing like what we see in those TV ministries.  What do we do?

Welcome to a third sermon in a series I am doing this summer on passages that do not commonly come up in the Revised Common Lectionary.  The lectionary is a system of readings used by many churches, worldwide, which help churches focus on the breadth of scripture. And, overall, it is something I consider good.  But, especially during the summer, I have departed from it to do a deep dive in a particular topic. And I thought this summer it would be fun to look at Gospel passages that the lectionary doesn’t cover.  

As with any passage, context is important. In this one, Jesus is at an early point in his ministry. He has been baptized. He has resisted Satan in the wilderness. He has called his first four disciples. And he is preaching his famous Sermon on the Mount beside the Sea of Galilee.  People from all around Palestine have shown up to listen. And he has taught some of his most well known teachings – such as the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and that we shouldn’t judge, or we ourselves will be judged by such standards. And he is beginning to wrap up his sermon here in this passage.  But, even with the multitude before him gathered to listen, one thing Jesus underscores is not to read too much into numbers. That’s not what God considers most important.

We just finished celebrating the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. This means that next year we will be remembering the end of the War in Europe eight decades ago. And in the church, we should be remembering someone who was alive on D-Day but who didn’t make it to VE Day because he was martyred.  The person I am referring to is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  

Many people today have forgotten Bonhoeffer but we need to remember him.  He was a German and a Lutheran.  And he was a pastor who, in the early 1930s had a comfortable and successful pastorate in New York state. But when the Nazis came to power, he moved back to Germany.  But it wasn’t because he had any sympathy for the Nazis. Quite the opposite. He recognized the danger of the Nazi party. You know how some folks will say, “If you don’t like it, leave?”  Bonhoeffer did the polar opposite.  He went back to his homeland, even at the risk of great personal peril, because he sensed his country was going dangerously off course.  And unlike most German Christians who went along with the Nazis and incorporated all of their ideology into their churches, he formed a small group of Christians to oppose them and their churches to shun the Nazi propaganda.  The Nazis eventually arrested Bonhoeffer, imprisoned him, and when it was very obvious they were going to lose, went out of their way to kill him.

One of the most valuable contributions that Bonhoeffer made to Christian theology was to differentiate between cheap and costly grace. Cheap grace, according to him, is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, and communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. By contrast, costly grace, he said, is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a person will gladly go and sell all they have. It is the pearl of great price for which the merchant will sell all his goods.  It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a person will be willing to lose all; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves their nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, a gift which must be asked for, the door at which a person must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.

Jesus pretty much overtly warns us not to expect most people to choose costly grace. It’s nothing we are going to discover in some easy metric where we can count heads. Where do we find it?  In people’s actions.  

In our passage, Jesus used two analogies. The first is that of a gate. Jesus said that the narrow gate and the confined path of his disciples are quite the opposite of the wide gate and broad path chosen by most people. The ends of the two ways are also radically opposite too. But the way taught by Jesus, upon which the disciples are invited to travel, is vastly superior despite the demands because of who awaits us.

When our son was little, he got into Bob the Builder, originally a British animation character.  For those of you with kids, or grandkids, you likely remember him. Eventually, Bob got big over here for a time but when John first became interested in him, he wasn’t as well known. We always remember running into a salesperson when we asked her if she had any clothing with Bob the Builder on it she said, “Oh, he isn’t really catching on. As a matter of fact, he isn’t in at all now. You should introduce him to something else.” But John didn’t want something else as a preschooler.  He wanted Bob the Builder.  And it surprised us that the other salesperson thought we would care if Bob was popular or not.  But human beings young and old always seem to be impressed with numbers.

Maybe though God knows what is needed aren’t lots of people but rather people who will be graceful, who will work for justice, and who will yearn for righteousness.  And doing such inherently doesn’t make people popular.  It usually doesn’t draw large crowds. Indeed, it can make you lose everything – at least everything that the world tends to value. To God though, that’s when we really have the chance to shine.

Jesus used two other pairs of contrasting analogies – that of wolves and sheep and that of good and bad fruit trees.  Jesus warns us that just because it may seem we are in the right place and with the right people – it may not be so.  That there are some people who claim to be a part of God’s people, indeed sometimes claim to be called as a leader of God’s people, but they are instead ravenous wolves who desire nothing more than to eat the sheep in the sheep pen.  How do you know good people from bad? Jesus changes his analogy to trees.  Trees that produce good fruit versus those that produce worthless fruit. So, no matter how they identify themselves, consider the fruit they produce. In our case, are those leaders urging people to be more graceful? Do they help highlight what is unjust?  Do they try to do and get God’s people to do what is right? Or, do they seem like they are in it for some other reason?

I don’t mean in all this that we should just ignore how many people we try to share Jesus’ way with people.  Jesus’ teaching isn’t meant to make us cynical, or proud, thinking “well, we are those good apples, not those bad apples who are destined for destruction!” Jesus ended up making his ministry very public and called on his disciples to go to all lands, preaching the Good News.  I just think we can sometimes get distracted by numbers and think that’s what’s most important.  Indeed, even though the four Gospel writers log in the feeding of the 5,000 and the feeding of the 4,000 – but how many were there at Pentecost when the church started?  Just a little over a hundred. How many were at the foot of the cross?  Just a handful. The most significant things in the Gospels are not reflected with huge crowds.

You probably have heard the phrase, a “poisoned apple.”  Do you know where it comes from?  Initially, when the Eurpoeans came to North America their botanists at the time misidentified our common tomatoes with nightshade, a European plant that was poisonous.  For a time, everyone thought that tomatoes were poisonous and they called them “poisoned apples”. We learned in time, especially from observing native Americans, they were not poisonous at all but delicious to many. Such is the way, I think, sometimes we can misidentify God’s people.  At first glance, they may not seem like who God’s people should be at all.  But if we focus on what they are doing, and the fruit they are producing, it should be instructive to us. 

Going back to Bonhoeffer’s teaching for a moment, how costly is it for us to be Christians? I don’t think it is very costly at all in our society for most people to say they are a Christian.  There are parts of the world where it is, but not here.  It may not make us the most popular.  It may take some of our time.  But I don’t think we can say it is costly just to identify ourselves as a Christian.  But, if we really follow what Jesus is teaching.  If we really put Christ first, it indeed may cost us something.  At least by worldly measures.  What fruit do we have to show?

And I wonder how much the church has been weakened in the past one hundred years over the fact that we didn’t take these very verses seriously.  Particularly, that part about ravenous wolves will try to get in our fold. We absolutely have had ordained ministers, missionaries, and church teachers and more who were wolves in the fold, who ravaged their flocks, and who did tremendous and lasting damage – not only to their victims but to the whole body and the way people think of us. Just this week, I read a new story of what some of the missionaries did to native Americans as representatives of Jesus Christ.  It is tragic!  We have had predators in our midst. We lived in denial for far too long.  We have had charatons who were after nothing more than people’s money.  We have had people who used the church as their personal playground to dominate over other people. We have had people use the church to further their political ambitions when they weren’t really Christians at all. And it has all made some people say they are done with church and will not come back. And it is going to take time to prove to those outside the church that we will not turn a blind eye – we will be vigilant against such wolves. The church should always be the safest of all places to be.  

This can sound like dreary and exhausting work. Sounds important – for someone else to do.  Not me.  But we forget what is promised.  We forget where that narrow gate leads. We forget the Good Shepherd truly awaits us. And all the things we often think are so important are just a taste, a tiny slice, of the good that God has in store.  God is the author of life and sent Jesus to lead us to eternity. His life wasn’t easy.  Why should ours be? But Christ invites us to a way that will lead to true fulfillment. Jesus assures us that in the end, his burden, if we want to call it that, is light.

How can we be the opposite of the wolf in the fold?  How can we go out and share God’s love, God’s grace, and God’s righteousness with people who receive so little of it? Those should be our driving questions for us. When sheep, God’s people, see threats abound, will we show up?  How can we show care?  How can we help?

We can lament that the church does not have the pews as filled as it used to have. We want the numbers like in the good old days. But the need for God’s people has not shrunk, at all, indeed it has grown.  Maybe our metrics need to stop being how many heads we can count at events but instead how many people we can show love and grace to. How many people can we convince that they indeed matter?  How many people can we show that Christ died, not just for the people everyone expects but for some very unexpected people too?  And how can we avoid writing people off – even if some initially took the wrong gate?

Finding that narrow gate. Living the way of the Good Shepherd. It is not found by how many people we can gather in a room. It is by living out the love God has shown for us. God planted us in this time and place. Can we produce the good fruit needed which we judge by the way Jesus produced good fruit?  Can we let Christ inspire us to be the people we are called to be?

Jesus Christ is the way.  Jesus Christ is the truth.  Jesus Christ is the light.  Let us not just believe in him. Let us live like it. To God be the glory, forever and ever, amen.