08/29/2026
Here's my sermon for Sunday, 8/30. The gospel for the day is: Matthew 16:21-28.
“Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name…”
Fair warning for everyone we’re going to go down one of my weird nerd mind rabbit holes again today. Namely I’m going to ask us to consider the beginning of our collect for the day when we invited the Lord to “Graft in our hearts the love of your Name.”
It turns out that grafting, specifically as it relates to growing apple trees is one of those random things I’ve spent too much time watching sciencey tv shows about. For those that might not be aware when an apple farmer wants to produce more of a specific type of apple, they don’t plant a lot of seeds from one of those trees. If we were dealing with something like heirloom tomatoes that’s exactly what they’d do. They’d take some lovely Cherokee Purple tomatoes separate out the seeds in the tomatoes and dry them, and then when it was planting time, they’d use those seeds. But in the case of apples, it’s different. Let’s say a farmer wanted a field full of Honeycrisp apples, they wouldn’t plant a bunch of seeds from existing Honeycrisp apples. It turns out that apples have so much genetic diversity in their seeds that using seeds to promulgate more trees will almost assuredly guarantee you don’t get what you want, and likely you’ll end up with sour fruit. Instead, apple orchards are typically promulgated by grafting. You take a cutting or bud from an existing tree with the fruit you want to grow more of and graft it to an already growing apple tree (called a scion) and from the graft the tree takes on the characteristics of the tree that the graft came from.
By the way I promise this sermon really is about the gospel and not agriculture.
Because Peter gives us this great example of what happens in our own lives when we choose to follow the Lord but stay tied to our own ways. In our gospel this morning Peter goes kind of wild, as he rebukes Jesus for proclaiming the very thing that Jesus came to earth to do. Peter was stuck in his earthly frame of mind and missed that following Jesus is transformative in our lives, not just something that asks us to be better versions of ourselves. Peter was being like an apple seed, growing in unexpected and not really productive ways. By the way, spoiler alert here, but growing and going wild is pretty on brand for Peter throughout scripture.
In our gospel, after rebuking Peter, Jesus gets to the grafting part with his disciples. He implores them and us to follow Him by letting go of our previous ways, if we want to keep the metaphor going, we’re asked to leave those seeds we bring with us behind. Instead, our growth comes in connection with Christ, as we follow our Lord.
One more note about grafting here, by the way this is when Julie usually gives me that pseudo-encouraging wife smile that really means you’ve gone too far and should wrap this up. It turns out that for a graft to truly take hold and be successful there’s more than just cutting and splicing together that’s needed. It’s actually critical that the cambium layers of the graft and scion are carefully aligned. The cambium layer is the thin ring of growing tissue just beneath the bark. As our Lord is grafted into our hearts and lives it’s critical as well that our growing edges are aligned. In doing so we take the parts of our lives that are full of life and growth and align them to the ways that Christ asks us to continue to grow moving forward. As Jesus is grafted into our lives, we align our lives so that we might continue forth and grow with and through Christ. By doing so we leave behind the wild and unpredictable growth and fruit that we would produce on our own, and instead we take on the fruits that Jesus invites us to produce.
And there’s one last piece of grafting that I want to highlight for us. The scion, the original tree that the graft was added to, us. Well, it doesn’t cease to matter after grafting. It turns out that original tree controls the size of the tree that grows, but not the fruit. If we went back and used seeds to grow the next tree there’s a decent chance it would end up as a giant 30+ foot tree that would take 10-12 years to produce fruit, but apple farmers choose their scions to be dwarf varieties which keep the trees to a manageable height for picking and that often mature in just 2-3 years and start producing fruit. Coming back to Christ being grafted into our hearts and lives, it’s important to remember that Jesus chooses us to be grafted to, Christ chooses our own characteristics to be attached to and grow with. In fact, Christ continued to choose Peter and all his wildness to be the first leader of His church. We matter, who we are and the particular gifts that each of us has matters. We don’t lose things as Jesus is grafted into our lives, instead we use the deep roots of ourselves to serve the growth and fruit that Jesus provides in the world. So yes, leave behind the self-focused fruits that we would produce on our own, but use the core of who and how we are to produce the fruit that Christ calls us to produce in the world.
Today our collect invites us graft in our hearts the love of Jesus’ Name. May we bring ourselves to that, may we grow forth through Christ, and may our fruits serve the kingdom of God as we move ahead.
