Sermon 10/4/15
1 Corinthians 11:17-34
Fruitful: Jesus’s Fruit
In case you’ve missed it, we’ve been talking about fruit!
Fruit, fruit, and more fruit. Next week, many of you will be helping out at our
booth at the Apple Festival, but for those who are here, we’ll close with a
final reflection on what it means to be fruitful, before we turn to some of our
particular expressions of fruitfulness at Apple Valley, namely that we increase
our fruitfulness by being prayerful, invitational, and missional. That doesn’t
mean, of course, that you won’t hear any more about us being fruitful. I’m
hoping that we’ll be returning again and again to being clear about the fruit
we’re seeking. My hope would be that everyone here would feel confident
expressing an answer if someone asked what fruit we’re trying to produce at
Apple Valley.
Still, on the last day we’re all together focusing on
this in worship as our main theme, what is it that is left to be said. When I
first sketched out our worship series, I was going to be talking about the
verses in the gospels where Jesus looks at the crowds and sees how they need
direction and tells the disciples that the harvest is plentiful, but the
laborers are few, so pray for God to send more laborers into the harvest. But
it just wasn’t connecting, wasn’t getting the import or urgency that I feel is
attached to this work we’re doing on fruitfulness.
Then I began thinking about how today is World Communion
Sunday. There are many Sundays, many Sundays, when Christians around the world
all celebrate the gift of holy communion. But World Communion Sunday is a day
when we make particular note of the way we are bound together as people of
faith by one bread, one body, one Lord of all. Our practices vary, but we’re
bound together in that we are all members of the body of Christ. We are the
body of Christ. To me, that means that we’re the expression of Christ in the
world. As we share in the bread and cup, the product of the wheat of the field
and the fruit of the vine, as we are filled up with the presence of Christ, we
in turn become for the world the body of Christ. That’s what we pray when we
consecrate the elements. We ask for God’s spirit to be poured out on the bread
and cup, so that they might be for us the body of Christ and so that we might
be for the world the body of Christ. We are Christ’s body in the world.
And then it just kind of hit me, this phrase: We are
Jesus’s fruit. As we starting thinking about the fruit we produce, and bearing
good fruit, we talked about God’s promise to Abram and Sarai, which is
basically that they would be fruitful, and their fruit would be fruitful.
Generations of fruitfulness. That’s what God wants – fruit that is so good it
bears more fruit. In the scriptures, Jesus is described as the first fruits of
creation. First fruits are the best, in the scriptures, the best that gets
offered to God, and Christ is the first fruit of everything. Christ is the
first fruits. And as God calls us to
bear good fruit, we’re tasked with this because we in turn are already the fruit of Christ!
The awesome task, the awesome privilege, the incredible responsibility we have been given is to
be the fruit of Christ. We, God’s children, drawing closer to God through
discipleship, through following in Jesus’s footsteps, through claiming the life
abundant that is really life – we are in fact Jesus’ fruit, what Jesus came to
accomplish, the harvest of his work. We are Jesus’s fruit, Jesus’s harvest. And
so people will look at us, watch us, observe our lives, and draw conclusions
all the time about Jesus and his message, about being Christians, because they know too, even if they wouldn’t put
it in these terms, that followers of Jesus are the fruit of Jesus’s ministry.
What conclusions are people drawing from us, from you and me, from Apple
Valley, about who Jesus is?
In our scripture text today, we find the apostle Paul teaching
the community at Corinth about communion. Apparently, some bad practices had
developed quickly after folks started following Jesus. Gatherings of the faith
community would take place at a member’s home, and usually a wealthy member,
since they had spacious houses. Apparently, some people started making
communion something where the wealthiest were served the best of the communion
first, and lower class folks were only invited later, when sometimes the feast
had already run out. Paul is outraged at such a corruption. If we demonstrate
in the communion meal that we are one body of Christ, how can that be true if
the meal turns out to only be offered for some? Paul condemns the disparity,
condemns divisions, and says that anyone who comes to the table without
discerning the body will be condemned. Discerning means perceiving or
recognizing. So Paul says we have to “recognize the body” if we don’t want to
be judged badly.
So what does it mean to recognize the body? To discern
the body in communion? It means that we recognize the presence of Christ in the
meal, the presence of Christ in ourselves – that we are Christ-bearers –
carriers of the presence of Christ into the world – and that we recognize
Christ in each other. For Paul, then, the Corinthians failed to discern the
body because the rich were forgetting that the poor were also Christ-bearers.
We have been seeking after good fruit, and we will
continue to do so. And part of that seeking is a process of discerning the body
– recognizing the presence of Christ with in us, and the responsibility that
comes with it, so that we can help others recognize the presence of Christ
within them. We embody Christ in the world, because we are his fruits, and we
in turn bear more good fruit, as we nurture and cultivate the seeds that God is
planting.
Teresa
of Avila, a nun who lived in the fifteenth centuries, wrote this poem that has
become one of my favorites:
Christ has
no body but yours,
No hands,
no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are
the eyes with which he looks
Compassion
on this world,
Yours are
the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are
the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are
the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are
the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has
no body now but yours,
No hands,
no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are
the eyes with which he looks
compassion
on this world.
Christ has
no body now on earth but yours.
We are part of the
harvest over which Jesus has labored. We’re some of his fruit, grown with love,
with his own life poured out and into us. We are his fruit. We are his body.
Let’s make for God a plentiful harvest. Amen.
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