Bear Good Fruit June 28

Your Daily Tripod June 28, 2006 Number 120

Celebrating Four Months of Helping You Live the Cursillo Method Daily

Piety

Jesus, help us today to listen to your rules for growth and life and act accordingly. Touch our hearts with the words of the Psalmist.

Instruct us in your rules for life so that we might observe them. Give us discernment so we can observe your rules and keep them in our hearts. Lead us down the narrow path of your commands to the narrow gate so we can enter into it with you.

Pull our hearts toward you not toward economic gain or career advancement. Help us to turn our eyes away from seeing what is selfish but rather what is selfless and life giving. Jesus, we desire your friendship and your teaching. In your justice, give us the instructions for life and the ears to truly hear your words. Amen.

Study
http://www.usccb.org/nab/062806a.shtml

“Every good tree bears good fruit.” Matthew 7:15

If Jesus were teaching us today, we might not understand his images as much as the first century Christians did because they were closer to the land.

Jesus is connecting discipleship to the fruits (or outcomes) of discipleship. If Jesus wants to cultivate good trees in his orchard, what is the right relationship between Jesus the grower and us His trees? What makes a good tree?

If the good fruit is the outcome of our discipleship, what makes us a good tree? What rules do we have to live by? Simply this: Listening to our loving gardener Jesus and doing what he asks of us.

The root meaning of the Latin and Greek words translated as “rule” is trellis.[1] Jesus establishes a framework upon which life can grow with this teaching. Henry writes, “While a branch of a plant climbing a trellis cannot go in any direction it wants, you cannot know in advance just which way it will go. The plant is finding its own path, within a structure. The space in which it moves is open, though not without boundaries.”

Jesus prescribed for us today a path for growth. That path is not that our actions and words are consistent. The path is that our actions flow from the will of God. It is not about saying and doing that leads us up the trellis. Rather it is about hearing the words of Jesus and following them. Hearing and doing.

Jesus and St. Benedict built the rules/trellis to help human goodness grow – indeed to help the experience of God that is already abiding in our hearts to unfold. To let our good trees bear good fruit.

Action

Good fruit…with all this water we should be able to grow plenty of good fruit. We have an abundance of water. Help us to share not only out of our abundance but out of our subsistence.

I just heard about an interesting book on the radio today (while sitting in an especially slow cross-town, rain-soaked traffic jam. Serve God, Save the Planet by Matthew Sleeth has recently been published and poses, from the sounds of the interview on WAMU, as a way for evangelicals and environmentalists to work together to save creation.

You may not yet be convinced of the inconvenient truth about global warming, but if we don’t take care of the environment, then there may be no trees growing, good or bad. Here is one of Dr. Sleeth (yes, he is a medical doctor – emergency room specialist, not a Ph.D.):

To begin with, here is a Christian tradition that all can benefit from: celebrating the Sabbath. The fourth commandment - "Honor the Sabbath" - is a mental health prescription that has served humans well for millennia. If Americans did no work, no shopping, and no driving one day a week, we would instantly produce fewer greenhouse gases, use billions of gallons less fuel, and be closer to sanity and to God. The Sabbath is God's gift to man, 52 times a year.

If we all walked to church, then we wouldn't be fighting in the newly expanded parking lot either to see who gets out first.

Dr. Sleeth has a number of other suggestions from changing to fluorescent light bulbs to using a clothesline instead of a dryer to riding a bike to work. Maybe all these suggestions won’t work in our lives, but the thought of such a holy alliance is intriguing.

Now where did we put those clothespins? The rain is supposed to end by Thursday, Noah, right?

[1] Henry, Patrick. Benedict’s Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of St. Benedict. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. Page 1