Fruit Trees

Today, I'm going to remain with the same text from yesterday, but with a different perspective.

This is a wonderful passage that speaks to the diversity present among those that are part of God's family.  Sometimes there is a tendency in the church to lump all people of faith together, to try and make them all the same.  Have you ever been to a church where there seemed to be an unofficial dress code?  What about an unofficial requirement of income?  All too often, the folks that gather together to worship and praise God together all look and act remarkably the same.  Which makes those places more than a little uncomfortable for a visitor or searcher who wanders in and looks, acts, or comes from a different place than the "norm."

I love how this passage declares that the righteous grow like a palm tree or a cedar.  These are not the same.  They are different.  There is few things of similarity other than they are trees.  Yet, they are both used to describe the righteous.  Do we need to look and act the same to be righteous?

What I think is even more interesting is how the Psalmist declares that the righteous bear fruit.  Last I checked a cedar tree doesn't bear fruit, at least not in the way we might normally think of fruit.  And perhaps that's the lesson that we need to learn today.

God doesn't have one vision or desire for what the "righteous" should look like.  They are just to grow.  Perhaps they grow tall and strong, perhaps shorter and fuller.  Perhaps they are quiet and solid in their faith, perhaps they are loud and boisterous, perhaps their faith is private.  Regardless, they are growing.  And the fruit is being produced, each in his own way.  The fruit from the palm tree and cedar are very different from the fruit of the apple or peach tree.  Each tree bears it's own fruit according to its tree.  An apple tree cannot produce peaches no matter how hard it tries to make itself.

In the church maybe we need to focus less on trying to get us all to be the same; to have the same views and theologies, the same "faith", producing the same fruit, and instead celebrate the many ways that God grows us, and the many ways that we produce fruit for the glory of God.