Worthy Fruit - or, When Life Gives You Apples......

Gospel Lesson: Mathew 3:1-12 

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming,  "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."  This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: "Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.' "  Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.  Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan,  and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.  But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruit worthy of repentance.  Do not presume to say to yourselves, "We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.  Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

Sermon: “Worthy Fruit”

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(or…) When life gives you apples….

About two weeks ago I brought home from church a grocery bag half full of apples. A friend of mine had posted on her FB page that her backyard tree was bearing sweet Fuji apples, way more than they could use. Free to anyone who wanted them. But they were wormy - must be carefully cut into pieces. 

The bag sat around for a few days, until I could get at them.

One of the things I loved about my brief season of “ real” retirement - which consisted of six months since May of this year, when I finished my studies - is that I have time to sit down and do things like trim up 20 pounds of little apples to make applesauce. Most of my life has been filled with multitasking - at least 3 things happening at once - and now to be able to sit down for however long it takes to trim apples is a joy and a blessing. I will admit that the laundry was running in the background, though - I still seem to find ways to do two things at once!

I didn’t really know what wormy apples would be like. I guess I have always bought the pretty, fully-grown, nicely shaped, healthy-skinned apples.

That’s not what these were like at all. They were small, misshapen, puckered, and each one had either multiple tiny holes or one big cavity in it.



As I rinsed them and sat down to start cutting into them, I wondered what wormy apples would be like on the inside. Would I cut one open and find a worm popping out to smile at me like the Richard Scarry books I used to read my kids?  

Well, it wasn’t like that at all. It was basically nice apple fruit, and yucky apple fruit. And every apple had some good fruit.

Now, that didn’t mean that I used every apple. I didn’t have the patience to deal with some that were extra ugly - I just cut them in half and tossed them into the scrap pile.

But I thought as I worked about how every single apple had something salvageable, useful, in it - and I may not be willing to take the time to save every good piece of it, but God does - God sees our ugly selves, our wormy souls, the sin that is in each of us, and God looks past it to the good fruit that is also inside every one of us. This is the fruit that is worthy of repentance. No matter how messed up or broken or incapable of doing good we may feel, or we may see others as being, we all have good, and God delights in that good, and encourages us to use that to bear even more good fruit. 

How many of you recognize the name Antoinette Tuff? She is the woman who talked Michael Hill out of a terrible potential tragedy in late August of this year, when he walked into her school near Atlanta one morning, loaded up with weapons and ammunition. Both Michael and Antoinette had good fruit in them - and both of them had difficult, ugly pasts that also misshaped them and made life extra challenging for them.

Antoinette’s life was a mess at the time this had happened. She was struggling to care for a child with multiple disabilities. Her husband had left her after 33 years of marriage. She had been so despondent that she had tried to take her own life. If you imagine yourself in Antoinette’s shoes, you can begin to understand how hard it could be to overcome the ugliness and sadness, the discouragement of her life, to get up every morning and go to work as a receptionist, to get through the day with no real way of knowing how or when things would ever get better for her.

Michael’s life was a mess that morning too. All we know about him is that he hadn’t taken his medications, that he thought he needed to be hospitalized for his mental illness, and that in the depths of his illness, he had gathered up guns and ammunition and headed for the school where Antoinette worked.

And what had perhaps looked at its beginning like another humdrum, boring day, same as all the others, for Antoinette, became a defining moment. And for her it was defined by her faith, by anchoring on her faith, as she said her pastor had been preaching just recently. And so not only did she step out – way out - in faith and courage and hope that morning, but she very intentionally sought out the goodness in Michael – she calmed him, she reassured him, she encouraged him, and clearly she spoke loving kindness and compassion to him – even though he was heavily armed and had already shot off a few rounds to show what he was capable of.

Bear fruit worthy of repentance. What does John the Baptist mean by that? We know that to repent means to turn – to turn away, certainly, from evil and sin and its grip on our lives, but even more it means to turn toward, to anchor on, to choose the straight path, every time we have the opportunity to choose. Repentance doesn’t happen once for all time. That’s why we acknowledge our sinful nature every time we gather for worship, in our words of confession. And it’s why we remind ourselves, and one another, that our pardon is already assured, undeserved, unearned. It’s grace. It’s the peace of Christ that we share with one another. It doesn’t make the brokenness go away. But it says that it’s OK to turn from it, to recognize and to focus instead on what is good in one another, to love one another and to work together, even with those who we would rather judge or turn away from, or run away from, so that together we can add up all our fruit, all our good fruit, all that is worth the courageous act of repentance, in order to help build up the kingdom of God.

So then, out of a bag of ugly apples, blemished, partly rotten, invaded by worms that made them damaged goods, we can gather together their goodness, and we transform them – dare I say merge them together - into delicious, useful, worthy, applesauce.

Into something that doesn’t look like what it started as, that makes use of the good, that steps away from the inevitable bad parts, that rejoices that God has promised that every branch that bears good fruit will be pruned – will be pruned – for the purpose of bearing more good fruit; and that, just like Joseph said, even when his brothers intended to do harm to him, God intended it for good.

So let us find strength in knowing that God sees the good in ourselves and one another, let us joyfully accept the grace that comes from the Holy Spirit to forgive us for what is not good, and let us be the body of Christ to one another by acknowledging the good in each other and by working together to bring unity, and reconciliation, and to build up the kingdom of God, in this Advent season and always.