“Home Grown Faith”

October 23, 2005

Scripture Reading:   Matthew 22: 34-39

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr 

 Blue Point Congregational Church

There is a refrain that we learned to sing last year it goes like this, Love, love, love, love.  The Gospel in one word is love.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Love, love, love. 

Love is the spoken refrain we hear over and over in the Bible.

Deut.  6:4-5 declares, Hear O Israel:  the Lord your God, the Lord is one.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 

Leviticus 19:34 states,  …the foreigners who reside with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the foreigner as yourself, for you were foreigners/aliens in the land of Egypt:  I am the Lord your God.

God declares that he will be faithful to Israel even though she has disappointed him again and again,  I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continues my faithfulness to you.  Jeremiah prophesizes (Jer. 31:3)

The first letter of John urges us to love each other.  Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God;  everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love…”

Paul summarizes the importance of love is one of the greatest poetic passages of the whole Bible.  Let us read it together.  Turn to the back of your hymnal to page 547 and lets read #132.

The core of Jesus’ message is love.  He summarizes it in our gospel passage.  ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 

Do you remember the refrain I sang at the beginning of this sermon?  It is so true.   Love, love, love, love.  The gospel in one word is love. 

 Love is the ruler by which we measure the truth.  Love is the plum line by which we straighten all of our actions in the world.  Love is the compass by which we steer all of our relationships.

Love.  As I was writing my sermon, I stopped here.  How does this great love work in our lives?  Jesus says that we are to love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind.  How does this happen?  I didn’t really know what to say, so I stared out the window for a while.  I write my sermons from my office at home.  My desk is right next to the window.  My mind wandered.  Outside my window are four apple trees that we planted a couple years ago in our front yard.  When we bought them at Skillens Greenhouses they said that the first several years they wouldn’t bear much fruit.  This is true for several years only an apple or two would ripen.  But, this year one of the four trees simply exploded with apples

Of all the trees this is the one that I least expected to flourish.  It is the one that has been most damaged by the winter ice storms.  Several of its branches have been permentantly bent due to about ten pounds of wet snow and ice hanging off them for weeks last winter.  Something happened to the stakes that were holding it so it would grow straight.  Now its trunk tilts at a precarious angle.   It is skinny.  Its branches are still in the twig category.  It looks like a cartoon apple tree.  It is ragged and foolish.  Yet, it is abundant. There are more apples than leaves on it at this point.  

The apples are big too.  They are about four inches in diameter.  Lots and lots of them are  big.  This is what I saw when I was looking out my window thinking about the love of God and about loving God.  And, the apple tree seemed to answer my questions about how it may work. 

Our love of God starts with a hunger like the idea to plant our apples trees started with a hunger.  It wasn’t much of a hunger, admittedly.  The idea to plant apple trees  felt more like a vague hunch than hunger.  Likewise in the spiritual life we often are not conscious of the depth of our hunger when in fact we are  famished.  But it was hunger for apples, none the less.   We live in an old farmhouse, as I have mentioned before.  When we moved in, there was and still is, one immensely ancient apple tree in our front yard.  At first it doesn’t even look like an apple tree because it is not squat, but as tall as some of our maple trees.  Its trunk is pocked with holes from some sort of insect.  Its bark is old and cragged.  But, it branches twenty feet above our heads let fall thousands of apple blossom pedals sprinkling on us like snow each spring.  From this ancient tree we determined that a century or so ago the family who lived here must have had an apple orchard in their front yard.  An apple orchard in our front yard was an idea that struck a chord with us.  It felt soft and poetic, and not many people had orchards in their yard in suburban America.  It was reminiscent of something we were not sure of.  Perhaps it was a life closer to the land.  Perhaps it was a time when things were simpler.  The idea awakened a sort of hunger,  perhaps a better word was longing, or hopefulness.   It wasn’t earth shaking, but it was there.  So we went to Skillens Greenhouses and bought some young trees.  We dug some deep holes, dumped the root balls in each one, stuck a hose on them and drenched the whole shebang.   

Isn’t this how a lot of us ended here at this particular church?  We got an inkling of wanting something more.  We drove past the church.  Maybe we didn’t even notice it at first.  But then we looked and saw that it’s brick façade, topped with a cross.  The building had obviously been here a long time, and before that had been transplanted from another clapboard church down the road.  Church buildings always give people a kind of secure warm feeling.  Like the thought of apple pie.  We think that it was good for the kids anyway.  Plus, we are curious as its wisdom from long ago.  It suggests that there is something that we might be missing in our so modern lives.   There may be something in it that we can’t come up with ourselves.   The church building awakens a longing in us, yes, the beginning of a spiritual hunger.  To say the least, something has got to be better than Wal-Mart where we had come from.   So too, something in us longs for God even before we know God.  Likewise, we will be hungry, even before we know the good fruit to eat. 

After the apple trees were planted and watered, then then were pretty much forgotten.  Everyday for years we drove down our driveway past the trees on our way to something else.  We have busy lives, and so many things, so much more pressing pulled us away from the trees.  We bought our food somewhere else.  We got things that were prepackaged, processed and prepared for us.  Year went by.  Sometimes in spring we would be walking to get the mail and smell a few blossoms.  Or in winter we would shake off some ice, or not and just note how the branches were touching the ground with the weight of winter and mercilessly do nothing. 

Skillens Greenhouses told us that at first the trees wouldn’t seem to be growing at all.  But, all their energy would be in establishing a root system.  Surely it didn’t look like they were growing much.  Still scrawny.  But indeed in the dark soil the roots shot tendrils and extensions.  They sucked up the nutrients.  They obeyed an inner code as they followed the seasons.  This was happening practically on its own.  So too once we start going to church, once we plant something no matter how little to satisfy this longing in our souls roots are sent out,  even unconsciously and without our realizing the depths it is penetrating.  These roots of this longing entwine themselves with the words of the bible, the symbols of communions, the power of the music from the organ.

Like I said it has been three years since we planted these trees.  Then this year this one tree just exploded with apples.  Its abundance became more and more apparent as the small green nubs of apples became red/green baseball size apples by late September.  Certainly I am such a lame gardener, it is fair to say that it grew in spite of what I did rather than because of anything I did to it.  It is as if some sort of master gardener had been sneaking around when we weren’t looking and fertilizing it with a kind of deluxe miracle grow.  Our hunger for God, our longing to find something real, and meaningful, grows and suddenly then is reciprocated by profusions of  love from God.  We take a few steps towards God and God walks a thousand miles to get to us. 

As much as we were stunned by the amount of apples it took us a while to try them out.  Perhaps it was because we couldn’t really believe our eyes.  Perhaps it is because we always had bought perfectly shaped shiny red apples from the grocery store and didn’t trust the real thing when we saw it.  Likewise we come here and it is a small church and sometimes it is hard even to believe such abundance can come from its branches.   I was told by Skillens Greenhouses that apples trees cannot be planted alone.  There has to be at least one other to send out its pollen on the legs of the bees and so to fertilize the other.  I suppose  Christians get together for the same reason. 

Some of the apples were strangely bulging in odd places.  This made us suspicious but others were fairly symmetrical.  All the apples have some sort of spots on the skin.  These were far from perfect.  Could they be edible?  The branches drooped more and more as the apples weighed them down.  Some from the top were now touching the ground.  Still we didn’t pick them.  Still we were creatures of habit and drove by to what we thought were more important bigger and better things.  We would declare, “We need to pick those apples or the tree is going to be permanently damaged.”  Or, “We need to pick those before frost sets in.”  Or, “Some are going bad, we need to pick them soon.”  But, we didn’t until one day Ian got off the bus.

Ian was hungry.  I had promised him that I would go grocery shopping but he had little faith in my promise.  So, he stopped and picked an apple off the tree and ate it on the way up the driveway.  “Mom!”  he burst through the door, “These apples are delicious.”  This coming from my son who will not eat anything that looks different from the way it appears on the box cover.  My son loved these pock marked misshapen home grown apples.  He was hungry and this little tree provided him with fresh sweet crisp food.  He ran out and picked another one and became full on its apples.  He got me to taste one, “Why they are really good!”  I said surprised.    

We can’t force ourselves to love God.  It doesn’t work if we guilt ourselves into loving God and say, “We ought to love God.”  It doesn’t help to create an urgency and say “If we don’t love God now, it will be too late!”  In order to love God we have to taste the fruit of God and see how sweet it is.   We have to fall in love with the flavor.  In Gal. 5:22 Paul describes the fruit of the spirit, the nine flavors – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. The taste of the apple is all the days of summer sweetness wrapped, stored and delivered to me in its meat. 

Once we get the taste of the apple that we wanted more.  So we would drive down the driveway and no longer drive past the tree, but stop and reach out and pluck and apple or two.  “Anybody hungry?”  Then hand them around in the car.  Then just the other day, after school Ian and I went and carried an old bucket down and picked a bushel of apples. We gently reached up to its fragile branches so abundant.  My thumb and palm gently pulling and the orb would drop into my hand.  The branches led me up to the brilliantly blue sky.  The sun warmed the side of my face.  We precariously reach for the perfect ones on the top branches.  “Get those way up top, Mommy.  They’re perfect!”  Peril and abundance, isn’t that what happens when we love God ?

Of course there are much slicker looking apples in the grocery store.  Although, I dare say, none that taste so sweet as these.  Certainly the grocery store is more efficient in delivering it products.  But, I take more comfort in this little tree.  Grocery stores close, and this tree offers abundance any time of day or night.  Perhaps even the tree will be here for years after we are long gone.  Like the old apple tree on the other side of the driveway has seen many families come and go. 

Little as it is, this apple tree lives abundantly.  So too, loving God with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds  we will live abundant lives.  Our pollen will fling itself upon the air, catch a ride on some person’s whose life we have touched and be carried throughout the world to then fertilize other souls longing to love God  who will eat the fruit of this love.

Love, love, love, love.  The gospel in one word is love.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Love, love, love.