Sunday Devotions: Fruitfulness
Deuteronomy 30, Colossians 1
One of my favorite things about summer is getting to eat a variety of fresh fruits in season. The rest of the year I can get by on apples and pears, harvested in the fall and keeping through the winter, plus raisins and other dried fruit. But while I know that I can find other fruit in the grocery store, produce grown out of season — especially that transported from halfway around the world — both carries significant environmental costs and tends not to taste all that good.
So as spring turns to summer, I revel in the abundance of fresh fruit making its way from not-so-distant farms to our table: sun-ripened strawberries and plump blueberries, sugar sweet grapes and juicy melons. Even if you don’t use fruit to top ice cream or cake, it’s like eating dessert several times a day — all while you get some remarkable health benefits in the process! And that’s not even counting the fruits we usually think of as vegetables: e.g., the tomatoes I turn into salsa and the avocados I convert to guacamole for our weekly taco nights; the zucchini I grill, the cucumbers I pickle, and the bell peppers we all snack on.
So while I’m far removed from the agrarian context of this week’s Old Testament lesson, I can appreciate what it means that “the LORD your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all your undertakings,” including “the fruit of your soil” (Deut 30:9). The biblical “fruit” refers more broadly to any agricultural produce — including the grain whose harvest must have brought to memory Joseph’s dream of abundance in the midst of famine. But the endless array of fruit on our tables each summer is a modern reminder of an ancient promise, that “the LORD will again take delight in prospering you, just as he delighted in prospering your ancestors” (v 9).
That prosperity depends now, as it depended then, on the labor of people far less affluent and comfortable than me. So should never read the Bible’s promises of material prosperity in ways that make invisible the toil of those who bring the fruit to our tables — especially since something like 70% of this country’s nearly 3 million agricultural workers are immigrants, most of them undocumented and at risk of deportation. Instead, this week’s passage from Deuteronomy should bring to mind passages from that same book in which God commands his people to treat fairly, charitably, and justly the aliens working among them (e.g., Deut 24:14-15, 17-22), even feeding them every third year from a tithe of all that was grown (Deut 14:28-29).
But if we shouldn’t spiritualize our text in ways that let us withhold justice from such laborers today (Deut 27:19), we also shouldn’t read its mention of “the fruit of your body” (30:9) in a purely material way. See the fruit delighting your senses this summer and rejoice to “walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God” (Col 1:10).
In this week’s New Testament text, Paul celebrates the Christian community in Colossae, where the gospel “has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God” (v 6). What is this fruit? What grows out of our lives that pleases God? It’s hard not to read that word in one epistle and think of another of Paul’s letters describing traits like joy, patience, and kindness as “fruit of the spirit” (Gal 5:22-23). But here, Paul describes the Colossian fruit of the gospel in terms of three virtues that are also familiar from other epistles, praising God for “your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven” (Col 1:4-5).
If I can push the metaphor to its breaking point… When we eat our favorite produce this summer, we savor their sweet flesh, but discard the other element that makes this part of a plant a fruit. Every summer we spit out the seeds of watermelons, scoop out the seeds of cantaloupes, eat around the pits of peaches, and even breed away the seeds of grapes, scarcely thinking what happens to them. But when we live out our faith in joy, our hope in patience, and our love in kindness, such fruits of the gospel don’t just brighten and sweeten life for a season; they spread seeds of eternal life, bringing nearer to more and more people “the kingdom of [God’s] beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (vv 13-14).
Next week’s lectionary readings: Psalm 52; Amos 8:1-12; Luke 10:38-42; Colossians 1:15-28.