What the Fruit?

This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen on Sunday, December 7, 2025, to the congregations of Unfinished Community and Ashiya Christian Church, drawing from Matthew 3:1-12.

John the Baptist is an…interesting character in the Gospel story. We tend to think of him as “one of the good guys,”  in that binary “good vs. bad” way many of us tend to read the Bible at least. And not only that, he’s one of the original members of “team Jesus,” in that he was declaring the word of the coming Messiah even before Jesus really rocked up on the scene. 

He liked Jesus before it was cool, you could say. 

So when we read today’s passage we - like pastors, theologians, and seminary students powering through exegetical analysis papers in a caffeine-fueled haze have since time immemorial -  tend not to get too critical of ol’ John’s message here, or his approach for that matter. We see Jonny Baptistes here ready to swing on a bunch of Pharisees and Sadducees, and we jump right in there with him. 

Brood of vipers? Right on! Get ‘em, Johnny! 

But the funny thing is…John the Baptist hasn’t actually met Jesus yet. That doesn’t happen until the end of the chapter, ‘round about verse 23 or so when Jesus turns up for a baptism, the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus, and then immediately yeets him out into the wilderness like a catapult from the middle ages. 

So it’s safe to say that John…did not have a lot of exposure to the teachings of Christ Jesus Actual. 

Now what’s funny about John the Baptist is that he is actually right about a surprising number of things. He gets a LOT of things right here. He even gets the timing basically right, only missing Jesus himself by about half a chapter or so. 

But while John the Baptist, prophet that he is, is right about the timing and the circumstances, while he can read the signs of the times perfectly and knows, with divine certainty, that the arrival of the Messiah is at hand, he really, really misses the mark as to what that Messiah is going to be all about. 

Of course that's to be expected, really, because it's a human temptation that all of us face. We all have this inherent desire to make God in our own image, to make God reflect our own cultural context, our own biases, and to frame God and the Holy Spirit - consciously or unconsciously - into a means to validate our own poor decisions, or to reinforce our existing biases, rather than to simply allow our understanding God’s self to point us towards the ways in which we need to change.

Nah. It’s much easier to imagine God as our validator, our liberator, the breaker of chains who shatters situations we don’t like, sends away people we’d rather not deal with, and spares us from the difficult, painful, unending work of personal change and growth. It is for this reason that the greatest spiritual discipline of our time - perhaps more now than any other time, as the amount of information we have available provides us with untold abilities to construct rationalizations and proofs that God is on our side in particular - is to push back against that incredible temptation, to try to understand the ways in which God is is not only totally different from us overgrown monkeys with a weird fetish for colored paper and shiny metal circles, but the ways in which God is straight-up better than us.

That….is a real challenge, my friends. Admitting that we were wrong about the ways the Spirit led us. Admitting that it was culture rather than Christ, ego rather than Spirit, pride rather than compassion, or selfishness masquerading as divine guidance, which set our path for us. 

And I’m sorry to say, it’s a challenge that John, like nearly everyone else in the story at this point, fails miserably. 

Listen to his description of who the coming messiah is to be, for example:

"His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

That….doesn't pair well with "love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you," does it?

Now before we get too judgmental of ol’ Johnny B. here, let’s remember that the culture of the time had some very specific understandings of who the promised Messiah was to be, all of which were filtered through the very painful, very real experience of living as a conquered people under the oppression of the Roman Empire. Jews of the period desperately wanted a conquering, warrior-king of a Messiah who could throw off the yoke of the Romans and lead them into a new, prosperous, and crucially independent new era. 

The Romans were brutal, imperialist oppressors after all, and while they had used their prosperity to make a subservient vassal government out of the Jewish throne and many of the religious leaders, the average citizen really wanted that not to be the case.

So John’s vision, John’s understanding of the kind of Messiah God ought to send into that time and place doesn’t come from a place of evil or malice. The God to whom John prayed was a liberational God, one who could not stand the cries of the suffering and oppressed any longer and who was coming, winnowing fork in hand, to tell the oppressor to fork right off.

With the benefit of more than two thousand years of hindsight, study, and hard-learned generational lessons about the nature of God in this world - to say nothing of having lived our entire lives in the shadow of all the teaching Jesus had at this point yet to deliver - we know that this isn't who God is, nor was it who Jesus was during his time on Earth. Jesus, being of God, knew that if you cast down one oppressor in anger, all you do is empower another to take their place.

Even the most liberational leaders, given absolute power, become the thing they sought to overthrow eventually.

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

So Jesus was never going to be that. Never the Messiah who brings the oppressors to their knees with righteous anger. It had to be something different, the Messiah who lives as a divine example of a better way, a way to break the cycle of violence and oppression not by meeting oppression with counter-violence, but by effectively loving it to death.

But John…didn't know that. Couldn't know that.

Not yet.

Which is why it's all the more surprising that, in the middle of his big, badass, "come-at-me-bro" rant against the pharisees, full laden with the cultural context of decades of oppression by the Romans, he still manages to absolutely nail this utterly confusing, wildly unexpected, but absolutely, unequivocally, 100% Jesus line:

"Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance"

Now I don't know about you, but this one stopped me in my tracks.

Fruit worthy of repentance?

Not fruit worthy of God's blessing, or fruit of righteousness? Not fruit worthy of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control?

Repentance?

What….what?

It almost feels grammatically wrong, doesn't it? In the language of the Christian tradition if you're "bearing fruit" that's usually a good thing, but at the same time repentance is what we do when we've done a bad thing…so how could you "bear fruit" but have that fruit be "worthy of repentance," and how would doing THAT somehow be a good thing? 

You bear fruit -  which is good - but that fruit is worthy of repentance - which means it's bad - but the way John’s putting it out there still feels like he’s saying it’s a good thing? 

WHAT?

Of course if we come at this with the same “make God in our own image,” self-justifying energy I talked about earlier, it’d be awfully easy to allow ourselves to assume that this means “bear the kind of fruit that makes everyone else realize how desperately they need to repent," but that kind of "be so awesome the haters just can't hate you" theology really doesn't sound like God either, does it?

As it happens the problem here is - as it is with a great many things in this world - that we’re operating off of an underlying assumption that we’ve never questioned, but which makes this whole thing incredibly confusing. 

We’re assuming that repentance is a big deal.

See, we like think of repentance as this thing we do if, and only if, we've done some terrible evil and need to turn away, to make reparations, and perhaps flog ourselves several dozen times or at least do a bunch of Hail Mary's or something. Repentance is, to a lot of us, the way we punish ourselves for screwing up. 

But repentance isn't supposed to be some ceremonial, big-deal thing that we only do only when we've done some terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing. 

Repentance, my friends, is so very much more than that. 

Repentance isn’t a one-off act; it's a cultivated state of mind.

What Jesus points us to in all his teachings, and what John - perhaps accidentally - lands on perfectly here, is the idea that if we mean to love as God loves, then the kind of people we absolutely, unquestionably cannot be isn’t just people who never, ever, ever change course, because the next-worst thing to that is people who almost never ever change course. 

If we are to love as God loves, then that means being the kind of people who listen to the wind, who feel the changes in the breeze, and allow their own understandings to change with it; allow their selves to change with it. We want to be the kind of people sail through life like a ship gently sailing across the water, like riders of that ever-flowing justice-stream Amos talks about. But being that kind of person requires a kind of attentiveness to the ways in which love’s winds are blowing, and the ability and wisdom to know that sometimes those winds can take us into dark and dangerous waters. 

But those dark and dangerous waters? That’s where you’ll find those most in need of help.

When we fix our eyes on our our own destination for our lives, when we only allow ourselves to conceive of the future we want, the life we want, and the desires of our own hearts, we lock ourselves into a course that cannot be changed. But when we drop our guard and listen, we begin to hear the Spirit telling us to adjust our heading. 

To change course.

To turn around. 

Metanoia; to repent.

The fruit we produce reflects the heart that produces it, and when we share that fruit we share a piece of our own hearts with the world around us. When our hearts are locked into selfishness, when we’re stuck only on what we want or what we need, the fruit our hearts produce becomes bitter to the taste. And while we may feel entirely justified in what we do, while we may spin a million different fictions as to how the Holy Spirit is on our side, we need only look around us and watch as our world changes around us. We find it harder and harder to connect to the people we love, and the people who truly love us, as our bitter fruits drive us away from them. We find ourselves surrounded more and more by those with a taste for bitter fruit, and moment by moment we find our whole lives becoming more and more bitter. 

Until we cannot remember the sweet taste of love anymore. 

We may find what we wanted, but we’ll have lost what we needed to attain it. 

But when our hearts are repentant, when we take the discipline of allowing the divine winds of love to change our course, the fruit we bear becomes sweet, a fruit worthy of that repentance. 

We may find ourselves sailing into painful and difficult waters, the waves may crash around us and the seas may roar, we may find ourselves winding up somewhere totally other than where we wanted to go, may find ourselves becoming someone totally different than we thought we wanted to be, but when we drop our guard and embrace the divine breath that moves us to repentance…

…we find more love than we could ever have imagined. We find ourselves pulling lost boats out of the storm, banding together against the wind and the waves. With every moment of struggle there is a change of course, and with every change of course a smile as we remember why we are here. 

To serve the risen Lord; not the Messiah who breaks our chains for us, but the Lord of Love who invites us to the cross with him so that no matter how brutal, or painful the storm may be, on the other side of it we shall see the sunrise, and be with him in paradise. 

Amen.