Bear Good Fruit

Excerpts from Minister Jamie's sermon based on Mark 10:2-16...

I always check out church signs.  I don't know if you're one of those people who pass a church, and you just want to know if it is a boring church, or they got something going on in there.  A little bit of fun, you know?  

I was walking like I typically do early Saturday morning, and I saw a sign that said, “Let's conjugate Christians”.  Now for those who might not have been paying attention in English class, conjugation is typically something that you do to a verb.  But I think I get the point of what this church was trying to get at - we really need to change.  We who call ourselves Christians need to change. We need to change in the way we hear things and the way we speak, and the way we interact in the world.  

There was a very famous judge who was married for almost 60 years and was asked, “What is your advice on a successful marriage”?  Her reply, “it helps to be a little deaf”.  What you hear, how you hear it, and what you respond to says everything about you.  You can't take every comment, everything that's spoken, to heart all the time.  Sometimes you have got to tune it out.  Sometimes you have got to know when to tune in.  And sometimes you have got to know when it is something that we really need to address.  It's true with scripture.  

Scripture speaks to us.  There are so many different ways in which we can hear, the way we can see scripture used and read.  It's very important that we be a little deaf sometimes, because what people tell us we ought to be may not always be what we're needing to hear from God.  As the GOAT even once quipped, “Negative experiences without teaching become destructive”.  Meaning you go through things in life… you see scripture that gets used to tear someone down, to judge, to criticize. Maybe you yourself have encountered scripture in such a way that has made you feel a little bit smaller. Without someone to come along and say, “maybe there's another way to see this… maybe there's another way to look at this”, we get left holding this bag. And we're just not really sure how to navigate those waters. 

I'm very confident that is true for this young man that I'm about to tell you about.  I believe he had a good heart.  I believe that he had good intentions.  I just think the way he saw Scripture was not in harmony.  A few years ago, I was sitting by the state capital on the hill overlooking Bicentennial Park.  It was 7:00 at night.  It's dark.  I was doing a zoom Bible study, and right when the Bible study was over, I felt a little tap on my shoulder.  I turned around and there's this guy who was in his mid-20s who had heard me say some things in the study that that that worried him. This was somebody who identified as a Christian who perhaps thought, it's my responsibility to introduce myself and to correct what he said during the zoom Bible study.  

So, over the next two hours we engaged in a conversation about marriage.  He believed that, based on Genesis, based upon this verse in Mark, and the verse that we find in Matthew, it is everyone's obligation to be married and to have children.  He insisted the Bible declared that we be fruitful, that we marry someone of the opposite sex.  To quote the late, great, Toni Morrison, “Definitions belong to the definer, not to the defined”.  The way we hear something will 100% color how we respond, and how we use what we hear.  That is true in this case, because I agreed with him that we are called to be fruitful and to multiply.  But what does that mean?  

Well, as you might know, early Christians often believed that the end of the world was nigh.  That maybe not even one generation would pass away before Jesus would return.  The people were looking for Jesus’ return. So, the way early Christians constructed “be fruitful” begins to look a little different than the way some others had constructed it in history.

To be fruitful means that we are fruitful in love, and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and goodness, and self-control.  What that means is, it doesn’t matter if you're single, if you're married, if you have married and are divorced.  What matters is that your life bears good fruit.  That we invest in that Kingdom.  That eternal Kingdom that we don't get into by reproduction.  We are all called to treat people with respect, with love, and to use scripture in a way that uplifts, encourages and helps people to lead lives that are fruitful, and that can multiply in faith and hope and in love.  

My friend Cory was a pastor in Texas.  His wife decided she was tired of their marriage and asked for a divorce.  Because Corey got divorced, they asked him to step down.  He did indeed step down.  He moved to Birmingham, and he would become an amazing hospital chaplain.  What others did to him because of how they heard and how they used Scripture created immense damage.  Corey heard the command to be fruitful and to multiply in a different way, in a way that allowed him to follow that voice into a career that he has truly been fruitful in.

I don't think I have to do a lot of convincing on this, but let's just say that some folks God does not bring together.  Matthew understood this reality very clearly, and we know Matthew understood this very clearly because he actually put an exception in the text for divorce.  If he had not understood that maybe there was just a little more to the story than just the black and white letter of the words, he wouldn't have added an exception.  He understood that just like our individual lives should bear fruit, so should our relationships.  Our relationships should be honorable and pleasing.  They should bear the same fruit: love, and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and goodness, and gentleness, and self-control. Human beings are created to be in relationships with each other.  

So often we interpret and use scriptures in a way that cuts good fruit off from community instead of helping us bear good fruit that adds to the life of our communities.  We must be really careful about as Christians how we see, how we hear, and how we use scripture.  I believe we are a people who want others to hear, “Jesus loves you, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”  We want people to hear that wherever they are in life. 

We here in this place, in this church, get to be conjugated Christians.  We get to be changed by the love of God, by the grace of God every single day, knowing that none of us are finished products.  As we experience life, as we experience the world, as we experience church, as a community people disappoint us, they cut us, they wound us… we come to Christ as children, with that non-cynical way of seeing people, just to love people.  If we're not careful we can become more and more cynical as we age.  If we're willing to put down our cynicism and put down our criticism, then we can come as little children with pure hearts.  As children trying to love, to care, to honor, and to respect all people, wherever they're from and for no reason other than they are created in God's image.  

Today we are challenged to open our hearts to God's work the way that a child would.  We do this when we make space for good fruit to grow and to multiply.

May it be so today and always.  

Amen.