Jesus does not tell His disciples to test a prophet by his robes, his credentials, his confidence, or how loudly he invokes the Lord’s name. He gives them exactly one test: the fruit. What does this teaching produce, in the lives of real people, over time? Grapes, or thorns? A tree fit for shelter, or one fit only for the fire?

That test does not require faith to work. You do not need to believe in the Father to notice whether something bears grapes or thistles — the fruit is visible either way. That’s part of what makes it such a durable teaching: it was never a password for the already-convinced. It’s a way of seeing that works whether you call the source of it God, or nothing at all.

So let’s look at the fruit, plainly, the way Christ told us to.

When a teaching tells a disabled person that their body is a mistake to be prayed away, or a burden rather than an image of God exactly as it is — what is the fruit? Isolation. Shame. Real, measurable harm. Thistle fruit, whatever verse is cited to grow it.

When a teaching tells a trans person that their existence must be erased before they can be loved — the fruit is the same. Estrangement. Homelessness. Despair. Still thistles.

When a teaching is used against a survivor of sexual assault — implying shame belongs to the one who was harmed rather than the one who harmed — look at the fruit: silence, self-blame, a wound sealed instead of tended. Thistles again, no matter how devout the voice delivering it.

When a teaching tells someone who has been to prison, or is still finding their way back from addiction or a broken season, that redemption has a waiting period they must serve first — what’s the fruit? Despair dressed as accountability. Not what Christ describes here.

And when a teaching tells a person far from home, afraid and uncertain of their place in this country, that their fear and their need for welcome are themselves a moral failing — the fruit is cruelty dressed as principle. Bloom does not deal in that fruit, regardless of who is delivering it or from what podium.

Now hold that same test up to different fruit. A caregiver sitting with someone at 2 a.m. because no one else will. A community that says “your name is your name, full stop.” Forty-seven people helped before anyone asked where the money was coming from. That is grape fruit — the tree Christ says will not be cut down.

Paul’s word to the Romans sits right alongside this. He tells a persecuted, marginal community that they’ve been freed — not from their bodies, but in them — to offer themselves, as they actually are, in service of what is holy. Your members. Your actual, particular, embodied self. Not a hypothetical purified version of you waiting somewhere else. For those of you who hold this as an act of grace received, that gift is real and it is yours. For those of you still finding your footing on faith, or who’ve never had a reason to use the word “God” at all — the same truth stands on its own two feet: choosing, with your own power, to do something good and to keep questioning rather than simply accept what you’re told, is itself the fruit this passage is pointing to. Grace or effort, gift or choice — both roads lead to the same orchard.

This is the heart of it: the Gospel gives us a fruit-test, not a purity-test. Scripture has been used for centuries to demand that marginalized people prove their worthiness before they’re allowed to belong. Christ flips that entirely here. He doesn’t say “prove you belong, then I’ll tell you if the teaching is true.” He says: watch what it does, over time, in the real world — and that will tell you everything.

So beloved — whoever you are, wherever you’ve come from, whatever you believe or don’t: when someone tells you that loving your trans neighbor, housing your disabled neighbor, believing your assaulted neighbor, or welcoming your frightened neighbor is somehow contrary to holiness — ask what fruit that claim has produced across two thousand years, and ask what fruit love has produced. The math is not close. By their fruits you shall know them. Not by their confidence. Not by their volume. By their fruit.

↑ The order resumes below.