This is the seventh in a series of eight sermons based on Greg Ogden’s book Essential Guide to Becoming a Disciple: Eight Sessions for Mentoring and Discipleship.
I like to make authentic fresh salsa. By that I mean if you go to a dinner or picnic
in southern Mexico and there is something on the table called salsa, I want
mine to be as close to that as I can get it. That cooked up stuff in a jar we buy at the
store is obviously not fresh nor is authentic salsa either. The manufacturers of that stuff make us want
to believe it is the real deal and we buy it because we were raised to believe
that the Old El Paso taco kit was real Mexican food too.
To make good, authentic fresh salsa you need fresh ripe
tomatoes. In late summer when the
tomatoes are in season my salsa is really good.
Out of season, it’s still good but I have to use hothouse tomatoes,
tomatoes grown in a green house.
Actually, almost all the tomatoes we buy in grocery stores and no matter
the time of year are hothouse tomatoes, i.e., industrially produced food.
Industrially produced hothouse tomatoes are
deceptive. The seeds are genetically
modified to produce fast growing plants that yield tomatoes that will be
visually appealing, have tough enough skin to endure packing and handling, and
have relatively the same nutrient content as tomatoes grown outdoors in season.
But, we all know that no matter how ripe
that tomato looks in the store, even the expensive and deceptively labeled
vine-ripened ones, it will still taste like cardboard. Ripened only means they started to ripen
while still on the vine. If you want
them to “fully ripen”, you need to let them sit on kitchen counter for a week
or so preferably in sunlight. Even then,
the taste is still wanting.
The hothouse or green house is not the problem. The hothouse is actually a good idea. It provides a controlled optimal environment
for vegetables to grow in and out of season.
We can indeed have tomatoes in February that are just like the tomatoes
we have in August. The problem lies in
the industrial modifications made to mass-produce vegetables that are at most visually
appealing, picture perfect, regardless of what they actually taste like. The consumer is at the heart of the matter
here. We are the ones who prefer to make
food purchases based on visual appeal rather than the quality of its actual
taste.
Now, let’s apply this insight of hothouses and
industrially produced tomatoes to our life in Christ. Bearing fruit is a frequent metaphor that
Jesus uses to describe the goal of our life in him. Ripening in Christ is our maturing to be more
and more as he is. This is true for us
as individuals and for our life together as a congregation.
Authenticity is the crucial word here. We are to be authentically like Jesus. We each and we together are to be as much
like Jesus as we can be. This
authenticity requires our yielding to the work of the Holy Spirit in us. This yielding necessitates the we daily we
set aside time to just be in the presence of Jesus by means of the presence of
the Holy Spirit with us and with Jesus worship God the Father thanking him for
his love and faithfulness knowing that he will neither leave us nor abandon us;
time to just be in God’s presence with a heart that says “Lord, make me who you want me to be. This yielding to the Holy Spirit’s work also
requires that we dive deeply and prayerfully into the scriptures, studying them
not only to learn the details but also listening with an openness for God
speaking to us through them.
This yielding to the Holy Spirit also requires we do intentional
Jesus time with some sisters and brothers in Christ. A small group of three, four, or five
followers of Jesus is the hothouse of the Jesus Way. Small groups of believers gathered
intentionally to share our lives and our journeys with Christ together is the
optimal environment for bearing fruit in Christ. Following Jesus isn’t simply a matter of
belief. It is a matter of relationship,
growing to be more authentically like Jesus requires relationship. The sooner we come to accept that
relationship is the necessary condition for authentic growth in Christ, the
sooner and faster we will begin to bear quality Jesus-fruit. Small group discipleship is the hothouse of
the Jesus Way. Small groups provide
accountability, support, guidance, and unconditional love; the prime nutrients
for bearing authentic Jesus-fruit.
Now let’s take a minute to look at the other side of
the hothouse tomato metaphor; the industrialized mass-produced fruit side of
things. The idea of what church is and
how to do it that most of us have is primarily a post-World War Two
phenomenon. The church in North America
probably had its greatest growth spurt between 1945 and 1965. The reason for it was that those who lived
through the Great Depression and the WWII wanted to have a lot of babies and build
a better world for them.
The suburb arose at this time and provided the church
with a new model for doing things. To plant a church in the
suburb required no evangelism because most everybody moving out to the burbs
was Christian already. You just had to
put signs up advertising your denomination, location, time, and minister and
people would turn out in big numbers.
Church programming came to its fore in this time as
well - Sunday School Programs, Adult Education programs, Outreach programs,
Stewardship programs, Women’s programs, Men’s programs, Fellowship programs,
programs ad nauseum. This programing model of doing church quickly
became the way to do church. It got to the point that if your programs,
and particularly if your children’s programs were super-fantastic, people would
even cross denominational lines to consume your product.
This is when Church began to look like industrialized
agriculture. The church was here to moralize and teach Christian values to our already Christian culture in the same way public education was meant to make good, employable citizens out of us all. History has now proven that
fun and exciting programming failed to produce fruit pleasing to our Lord. Even though in its day it produced great
numbers of church members,…well, let’s just say a really tasty tomato was hard
to find.
In the food industry, the only way to get rid of
industrialized food is for the consumer to stop buying it. To demand their grocers bring in affordable,
locally grown real food. In order to do
that, we the consumer have to stop being so swayed by what things look
like. So also, we who follow Jesus need
to decide whether we want to bear authentic fruit in Christ or keep trying to
offer the community around us the same industrialized Jesus-like fruit that
they started to balk on en masse in
1965. North American has since gone from
being predominantly Christian to being a mission field. Maybe the people out there would prefer we
set before them authentic Jesus-fruit grown in the hothouse of discipleship
rather than the industrialized not so authentic fruit that we don’t even have
the resources to produce anymore anyway. Just saying.
Amen.
