Summary: God has put us on this earth to "bear fruit."
Through all his many years of coaching the Dallas Cowboys, Tom Landry was one of the winningest coaches in pro football. After all those years as a coach, you'd think he would have learned something about leadership - and indeed he did. Someone asked him, once, to describe the essence of leadership. Landry replied, "Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do in order to help them achieve what they want to achieve."
That little proverb works pretty well on the gridiron, but it also happens to work well in the church sanctuary: especially in the activity in which we're now engaged together - this activity known as preaching.
It takes two to tango, as they say, but it also takes two to preach - or at least two. You need one person to preach, and another to listen - although there are usually a good deal many more listeners than that.
Preaching is getting someone to do what they don't want to do in order to help them achieve what they want to achieve. There are certain things our Lord calls us to do, as his disciples, that we don't especially want to do. But it's important for us to do them if we're going to achieve our goal of fully living into our calling as disciples of Jesus Christ.
High up on the list of things most of us don't especially want to do is the activity known as stewardship - or, financial giving, if you want to sweep away all euphemisms. Who wants to part with their hard-earned money? But the simple fact is, if we don't part with some money - in amounts significantly challenging for each one of us, based on our income - we'll never achieve our goal of becoming faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. Giving, you see, is not incidental to Christian discipleship. It's not an elective option. It's not a commercial, "a word from our sponsor" that interrupts the main show. In many respects, giving is the main show.
Do you doubt that? Just look in the Bible. Rick Warren, author of the bestselling book, The Purpose-Driven Life, once picked up a Bible concordance - an index to the Bible - and did a little word count. He discovered that the word "believe, believing, believer" is mentioned 275 times in the Bible. The word "pray, praying, prayer" is mentioned 371 times. The word "love, loving, loves" - as you might expect - is mentioned way more often: 714 times. But then he looked up the word "give, giving, giver." That word occurs no fewer than 2,162 times.1
Somebody else did a rough reckoning and figured that the Bible mentions money approximately three times as often as it mentions prayer. That's hard evidence for the assertion that giving is not incidental to the Christian life. As one preacher has said, "It is a short route from the pocketbook to the soul."
Jesus is saying much the same thing in today's Gospel lesson. Just before the passage we read, he was speaking about hypocrisy - about people who are so concerned with the speck in their neighbor's eye, they never see the log in their own. "You hypocrite," he says, "first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye."
Then the Lord goes on to tell a little parable. It's about a tree that bears fruit. You never get good fruit from a diseased and dying tree, Jesus says - only from a strong and healthy one. "For every tree is known by its own fruit."
Jesus was a wise religious teacher, but he also evidently knew something about horticulture. He knew the entire purpose of a fruit tree is to bear fruit. You can see that by driving to any place where there are apple orchards. You'll see row upon row of trees, each one planted and carefully tended to optimize the yield of fruit.
Did you ever notice those fruit trees are smaller than most other trees? Nature has a reason for that. In the words of one commentator:
The fruit tree utilizes the cooperation of every cell in order to blossom and bear fruit. This has consequences: the fruit tree will never scale the height of heaven. Every fruit tree displays the built-in "wisdom" to stop growing in height at a particular moment. From that moment forward, after reaching its optimal height, the tree redirects its maturation processes toward bearing fruit for others.2
Some trees in the forest veritably soar into the skies. They attract attention to themselves, and rightly so. Artists paint them. Poets praise them. Landscape designers plant them in just the right spots. Such trees are majestic, pleasing to the eye.
No one ever said such a thing about an apple tree. Drive by an orchard sometime, after the fruit's been picked and the leaves have fallen to the ground, and you'll see row upon row of trees that are twisted, stunted, altogether ugly. That's because the apple tree doesn't attract attention to itself. The apple tree is a giving tree. Every pulse of life within it is dedicated to the single goal of bearing fruit.
Jesus' parable talks about fig trees and grape vines, rather than apple trees, but the message is the same: "Every tree is known by its own fruit."
There's another place in the Bible where Jesus talks about trees bearing fruit - or, rather, not bearing fruit. It's a very strange passage, one that's baffled Bible scholars for centuries. No one can figure out for sure what Jesus is up to, as he does this thing. Mark tells the story, in chapter 11, of how Jesus walks up to a fig tree, looking for figs to pick. He's hungry, and disappointed to find no figs - only a great profusion of leaves. Jesus says to the tree, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again!"3
"In the morning," Mark says a little later, "as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots."4
Some have called this little story "a visual parable." If they're right about that, then it's akin to this other parable we've been studying. Fruit trees are meant to bear fruit: and woe to them if they fail to do so!
What is the fruit your life is bearing? Not for yourself - for others. What is it that you do beyond serving your own needs, and the needs of your immediate family - that makes life better for someone else? Such accomplishments are notable fruits of your life, as God sees it. Those fruits may take the form of time, of course - time given to work worth doing on behalf of others. But the reality is, time is only the half of it. Our culture measures success - indeed, it very often measures the worth of people - in terms of money.
Up in the north country, they make delicious syrup by tapping maple trees, so the sap runs out into a bucket. Then they boil the sap down, and boil it some more, until it becomes the sweet, golden essence we know as maple syrup. In much the same way, money functions as the refined essence of human labor and talent. Each of us, over the course of our lives, produces a certain finite amount of the stuff. Some produce more than others, but that's not the point. The point is, how much of what you and I produce - on a percentage basis - do we give away for God's purposes?
The biblical standard is proportionate giving - the tithe. An Old Testament tithe is 10%. Although the New Testament doesn't talk much about tithing, it's clear that Jesus and his disciples accept the Old Testament standard without questioning it.
The tithe - because it is a percentage - is a fair standard. There was a pastor, once, who was leading a class for new church members. He taught them about the biblical standard of the tithe and encouraged them to use that as their goal - if not immediately, then step by step, year after year, to move to reach it.
A young mother looked back at him with a bewildered expression on her face. "After what you've just said, I don't think we can afford to go to this church!"
"Oh, but you can," the wise pastor replied. "The church of Christ has no admission fee, no membership dues. All are welcome in God's house, whether they give thousands or nothing at all."
What other organization do you know that operates like that? Can you imagine walking into the grocery store and hearing the cashier say, "Take what you need, give what you can"? But that's exactly what the church says, week after week. We know that if we're truly doing the Lord's work, the Lord will see that we have what we need to keep on doing it.
Now I'm going to say something that may surprise you: "Don't give to the church."
Yes, you heard me right: Don't give to the church.
What I encourage you to do, instead, is to give to God - and, as you do so, to see that act of giving as the fruit your life is bearing, for God's glory. Try not to think of it in terms of dollars - because that's truly not how God sees it. What does God care for dollars? Think of it as a percentage of all that your life is producing. Don't seek to be the sort of tree that only grows tall and mighty, accruing glory for itself. Seek to be the sort of tree that bears much fruit, for the good of others.
In the words of priest and pastoral theologian Henri Nouwen, "We have been called to be fruitful - not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness."5
May you discover that sort of fruitfulness - the sheer joy of it - in your own life!