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Pastor's Corner
"You shall know them by their fruit."
It's a pretty straightforward teaching from Jesus,
laying out for us how we can tell the difference between folks who really
teach and live out the Way of grace and folks who are just in it for
power. What are the results of an individual's life? How do they
shape the world around them?
And from our home gardens, and the plots in the Community Garden, we have a sense of
that. Berries and fruit trees, or the vegetables that now begin to
fill our summer tables, all of these things give us a sense of what makes
for "good fruit." Here it is, right on the plant, and
either it grows or it doesn't. Either it tastes good or it doesn't.
This year, I decided to do something a little bit
different in my front yard. To the beans and berries and tomatoes
and squash, I added in a half-barrel filled with dirt and compost.
The goal: potatoes.
Hailing from Scots-Irish ancestry, I think there's
something in my genetic makeup that's particularly fond of
potatoes. They're just good, hearty, flexible, energy-yielding
yum-ness. You can bake them with a sprinkling of garlic, salt, and
olive oil. You can fry them. You can boil 'em, mash 'em, stick
'em in a stew.
As I learned when doing my pre-planting research,
potato plants are interesting critters for another reason. They
will produce fruit. Not always, but when the conditions are just
right, those pretty little clusters of flowers on the top of the plant
will become fruit that looks almost exactly like a tiny little green
tomato.
Cut it open, and it's filled with little seeds,
just like a tomato. Eat it, though, and things get a little
unpleasant. Potatoes are the close cousins of deadly nightshade,
and both their fruit and their leaves are poisonous. The poison is
particularly concentrated in the fruit, causing headaches, convulsions,
intestinal distress, hallucinations, and death.
And so, as the potato plants grow up like
gangbusters, their tubers still hidden under the earth, I find myself
reflecting on good fruit and our expectations of others.
If you found yourself stranded on an island where
wild potatoes grew, you might see the fruit and think, hey, maybe I can
eat that. But after you munched down the fruit, by the end of the
next day you'd be pretty darned sure you knew the answer to that
question.
Stay away from those plants, you'd say to
yourself, groaning. They're poisonous and horrible.
But that's just because you'd only be looking at
the surface, and seeing the thing that *seemed* to be the edible part of
the plant. You'd be making a judgment about what was and was not
good based on a partial understanding.
And you'd go a little hungrier for it.
We make the same mistakes with other human beings,
I think. We have, in our minds, a set image of what it means to be
good. So when we encounter persons whose "fruits" do not
meet our expectations, we may choose to label them negatively before considering
the fullness of what they have to offer. We don't give ourselves
time to discover the ways in which they may be good, quickly dismissing
them as unworthy or our time and attention.
Jesus certainly didn't do that, not with tax
collectors or adulterers, not with the outcasts or the unclean or the
traditional enemies of his people. He sought the goodness and saw
the potential in all, and challenged us to do the same.
So as you tend your garden plots this summer,
either at home or in the Community Garden, take a moment to think about
what is and is not fruit, and remember to consider the wholeness of every
person you encounter.
Peace
of Christ, and Blessings,
David
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