Being Fruitful

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, January 25, 2026
Matthew 4:12-23

    Share if you can in the comments or out loud (unmute yourself): what is your favorite fruit?  Today is the first day of our Stewardship campaign called “Bearing Fruit for Jesus,” and it might be kind of funny to know that God’s favorite fruit is a Christian.  How can a person be a fruit, anyone want to respond with a guess?  A few weeks ago, I got to talk with my friend Pastor Tim who supports Stewardship efforts for all member congregations in the whole ELCA all over the country.  Usually, we think about stewardship as how we are fruitful with our money.  We will talk about that in a few weeks. But Pastor Tim reminded me that stewardship is way more than just remembering that what we have (stuff) is a gift from God.  He said there are at least 12 different kinds of stewardship or ways we can be fruitful, actually.  Let’s see if I can remember them all:  Financial, Talents, Time (Steven will share his thoughts in a few minutes about that), our Personal Property, our Church Property/Buildings, Creation, our Community (Church or we could think more broadly about our Town and being good Citizens), Social Media/Online Presence, our Relationships, our Bodies, our Voice (speaking up for others in terms of Advocacy), our Praise, and our Call. Hey, I think I got all twelve.  Can anyone think of any other area of stewardship I didn’t mention?
    That’s a big list for us to think about how we use all of these gifts that God has given us and how we might be fruitful with those gifts.  I’d like to take a minute and talk together about someone you know who has been generous.  Who is someone who taught you to be generous?  And again, it could be someone who taught you to be generous with money, or someone who was generous with their time or with their relationships or the other kinds of stewardship I just mentioned.  You can put your thoughts in the comments or unmute yourself and share.  I personally can think of many people who were models of generosity – in my own family, but actually what first comes to mind is people in the church – my home congregation growing up, and then when I first became a pastor.  
I served in rural Nebraska for three years, and most of my congregation members were farmers.  What I found to be the best part about living in a small town was how generous people were in taking care of one another – as a church community, and in the larger community.  If you needed a cup of sugar, the stereotype was so true – you just went to your neighbor to borrow it.  We adopted a mile of the highway where the church sat and had regular highway clean up days to care for our little corner of God’s creation.  And every harvest season, by November, kind of like in biblical times, we’d get numerous donation checks from the local grain elevator – farmers consistently donating the first ten percent of their harvested crop income to the church.  Most of the members of my congregation didn’t even question tithing their income – it was just what you did, and as a result our church was able to be very generous in the community.
Our church started a food pantry to support larger community efforts – donating to a nearby women’s shelter as well as the local food pantry and thrift shop, and supporting a weekend backpack program for kids to have food on the weekends when they weren’t at school.  We knew the people who were struggling for the most part – they belonged to our church, too, but people were careful not to make a big deal of it.  One of my favorite stories was of a single mom who struggled to make ends meet working at McDonalds yet still managed to organize the local Blood Drive regularly – the church helped her, but she helped others, too – she was generous in the ways she could be, even if she couldn’t be generous financially.  I hope in my story you are noting that this was a church that cared for God’s creation, stewarded their relationships and their belonging to a larger community, stewarded their building and stewarded their time, talents and treasure, too.  This is what it means to be fruitful.
    So my next question is, How do you feel close to God through your own generosity?
If you don’t want to answer now, that’s ok, but this is a good reflection question to discuss as a family or a friend later.  In our gospel for today, Jesus asks the first disciples to follow him, and they are commercial fishers.  Jesus helps them see their job in a new way – he uses what they know, fishing, to help them think about fishing for people as his followers.  He calls them to something new.  It’s remarkable, because they leave everything behind “immediately,” Matthew says, to follow Jesus.  Throughout the gospels, we see how Jesus teaches his disciples to be fruitful in new ways for the kingdom of God: proclaiming the good news about Jesus, curing diseases and sicknesses, casting out demons, caring for the poor.  This is still our call today – as we think particularly about how we use our time – how are we being fruitful in the work that we do, in our volunteering at church and in the community, and not just WHAT we are doing, but HOW we are doing it because we see that everything we have is already a gift of God?  An apple tree can’t help but produce apples.  A Christian can’t help but produce good fruit, connected to Jesus the vine. Thanks be to God.  Amen.