This blog was started as one about riding motorcycles, and now I'm beginning to add other areas of interest. This is a sermon I gave in August, 2024. It's about evaluating competing claims from various Christian apologists and leaders.
Matthew 7:15-20
By Their Fruits
Have you ever noticed how many Christian denominations there are? I’m not talking about religions other than Christianity, just Christianity. According to the Center For the Study of Global Christianity, there are about 200 currently active in the USA, and about 45,000 worldwide.
And this is not a new issue. We in the western church tend to think that until 1517 that there was just the Roman Catholic church, and it was the Reformation that started the splitting, but then we remember the Orthodox Church, and it’s easy to think that the Great Schism in 1054 CE was just the first split. The thing is, from the death of Jesus until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, there were already about 50 denominations.
denominations begin?
There are many answers to those questions. Sometimes it’s down to biblical interpretation. The Bible is not a book, it’s a library comprised of many books. So many books that the various denominations cannot even agree on that. The western protestant bible contains 66 books, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. The Roman Catholic bible contains 73 books. The Orthodox bible contains 81 books. These books were written over the course of roughly 1500 years by many authors in many historical circumstances writing to many different audiences with many different needs. None of these authors were aware at the time they were writing that what they were writing would one day be included in this library with the other 65, or 72, or 80 books. None of the authors knew they were writing “The Bible”.
This is to say, the bible is not written in one voice. The various books of the bible have different points of view and areas of emphasis, and as a result the books are not always in perfect agreement. One may wish to pretend this is not the case, but a reasonably careful reading of the bible makes it clear that it is very much the case. And that’s okay. In fact, I’m inclined to argue that it’s a good thing. We’re not all the same, and neither is the bible. But sometimes, people latch on to one point of view, or even one passage, and their focus on a narrow area can lead them into conflict with whatever is the dominant Christian doctrine in their time and place, as happened with Luther and his understanding of Romans 1:17.
This is before we even get into the topics of translation and interpretation, and as has been pointed out every translation requires interpretation. Meaning, you have to understand what a Greek or Hebrew manuscript means before it can be translated into any other language, and this is fraught. A statistic that illustrates this is that there are something like 50 different English translations! Fifty!
The result is that people read different things into the bible. People find different things that speak to them, and different things to minimize or ignore. From those different readings and understandings people then develop different doctrines. Doctrine is that stuff we say we believe, but which is not unambiguously stated in the bible. Doctrine can include many things; the trinity, the role and significance of Mary, the meaning and events of the Eucharist, child vs adult baptism, even which day of the week is correct for the sabbath.
And this, like the ambiguity often found in the bible, can be a very good thing if what it enables is different people being able to find their way to a relationship with God. We know this. We’re here in a congregation and denomination that tends to not read the bible literally, that tends to not lock down on rigid dogma, that is explicitly non-doctrinal. Many of us found our way here from denominations with rigid doctrines and bible readings that were obstacles to our relationship with God. So this diversity of denominations may be God’s way of reaching more people where they are.
justifies making one group of God’s children less valuable than others. There are some denominations that
make women subservient to men. There are some denominations that condemn whole races or regions of the world. There are some denominations that create doctrine around sexuality, gender, and reproductive rights that favor in-groups while diminishing the personhood and autonomy of out-groups, claiming that people in those groups are beyond God’s love. Many times these denominations adhere to doctrines that deny God’s love not only for members of other religions, but for members of other denominations. There is even some doctrine that condemns to hell members of one’s own denomination. I’m looking at you, Calvin. All this while believing that the creator God who is the source of all things condemns rather than loves God’s own creatures.
It has always been thus. There have always been religions that favor their adherents, and justify maltreatment of everyone else. Both Judaism and Christianity began as tribal religions that favored their own. Even though Paul in the letter to the Galatians emphasizes the need to move beyond Jew vs Greek, male vs female, slave vs free, yet even in the early years of the faith, there were others who wrote letters in Paul’s name that diminished women.
The fight against tribalism has been a persistent struggle. Even today we see this in full force as some American Christians seek to present themselves as persecuted, and so make up outrages to justify their self-righteous victim-hood. Nothing godly or loving in this. It is simply an attempt to motivate adherents while trying to claim moral high ground.
themselves to the American public as “the only real Christians”. They portrayed themselves as the most pure, the most committed, and the most faithful, even though substantial portions of their doctrine were very recent, such as opposition to abortion, belief in the rapture, and so on. They succeeded in convincing large broadcast and print media outlets that they were the authentic voice of Christianity. As a result, they managed to portray themselves to the public as the sole possessors of Christian truth, thus presenting themselves as the voice of Jesus.
What makes this even more troublesome is that they use their religious doctrine to appeal to and justify the prejudices in their adherents as a means to gain political power. Scripture explicitly warns us against such motivations. In Matthew 4:8-10, it reads:
8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, 9 and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ”
This is not to say that religious people should not bring their moral, and theological points of view to the public square. As an example, Dr. King’s actions were motivated by God’s love rather than by hunger for temporal power, but those who would sell their souls to a political movement so they can legally define who is within the circle of God’s love and who is not, they’re not serving God.
What serves God? What are the fruits of faith in God? Scripture gives us examples.
The prophet Micah made it clear in Micah 6:8:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?
In the New Testament, we hear directly from Jesus when representatives from John the Baptist question him in Matthew 11:4-6:
4 Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5 the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. 6 And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
Or later in his ministry, Jesus is questioned in the marketplace in Matthew 22:36-40, and he boils it down:
36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
If you believe that God is the creator of all things, of all people, and you love God, then Jesus’ conclusion is obvious, that the way you show your love and obedience towards God is to love what God loves, and God loves everyone and everything.
Jesus expands on this late in his ministry in Matthew 25:
The actions Jesus describes are acts of love, acts of inclusion, good fruits, not acts of hate, acts of exclusion, bad fruits. Paul echos this in his First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13:
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
Which brings us back to the 7th chapter of Matthew in which Jesus describes knowing people by their fruits. None of us can claim to fully know the mind of God. None of us can know for certain which doctrines accurately represent God. None of us can know for certain how to understand conflicting or ambiguous bible passages, so Jesus gave us something simpler; look at their fruits, their actions, and see whether those fruits reflect God’s love. While we’re doing that, we will be well served if we also look at ourselves. By the standard of the Dorothy Day quote in today’s Reflection, my own love of God has some improving to do.
Given all this, how do we get beyond simply bleating, “We’re Christians, but not like that”?
We do it with love. Love individually and love collectively. We worship the God who so loves the world, and our job is to be vessels of that love. We do it with Winter Nights. We do it through Mercy & Justice. We do it by advocating for environmental justice. We do it with our witness in support of God’s LGBTQIA children, we do it in support of refugees, we do it with backpacks, we do it in support of those whom others seek to exclude, and there is always more to do. The Kingdom of God only comes through love. The Kingdom of God only comes through changing hearts, and our best method for changing hearts is to live our Christian witness, our Christian love, loud and proud.
Amen
