Good Fruit, New Roots

Reclaiming a Faith That Grows Outward, Not Upward

This is the final essay in this week’s series on Vertical Morality. If you missed the earlier reflections, start with The Rotten Fruit of Obedience, The God of the Strongman, and When Empathy Becomes a Sin.

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Planting Something New

We’ve walked through a lot this week.
We’ve named the damage that obedience can do, the ways empire disguises itself as faith, and how empathy gets labeled a sin.
It’s been heavy — and honest — because it had to be.

But this is where the story turns.

Because the work of unlearning isn’t just theological; it’s personal.
It costs something.
For many of us, it’s cost belonging.
It’s cost relationships we thought would last forever.
It’s cost the comfort of certainty, the illusion of safety that came with being “right.”

Deconstruction is a kind of dying — and there’s no shortcut through it.
But that’s also the nature of resurrection:
something new cannot be born until something old is willing to fall apart.

Faith was never meant to end in rubble.
It was meant to grow roots.

The same soil that once held fear can hold something new.
The same heart that learned obedience can learn compassion.
The same faith that climbed ladders can learn to plant gardens.

Vertical morality taught us to measure faith by submission — who obeys, who leads, who gets to speak for God. But horizontal faith asks a different question: Are we helping each other flourish?

Because if the measure of holiness is love, then morality isn’t about climbing closer to heaven — it’s about creating heaven here. It’s not about who’s “over” or “under,” but whether we’re growing with one another.

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A Different Kind of Morality

In a world trained to worship authority, reimagining morality as mutual flourishing feels radical — even dangerous. But this is what Jesus modeled again and again: a life rooted in relationship, not rank.

He said, “What you did for the least of these, you did for me.”
He didn’t say, What you believed about me.
He didn’t say, How perfectly you obeyed.
He said, What you did — for the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, the stranger.

That’s the heartbeat of horizontal morality — seeing God’s presence not above us, but between us. It’s a faith that measures holiness not by separation from the world, but by participation in its healing.

And if we go all the way back to the beginning, this is what God called good.
In Genesis, goodness wasn’t moral perfection — it was harmony.
Each thing flourishing in right relationship to everything else.
The light and dark. The earth and sky. The waters and the living things that filled them.

Goodness was the web — the interconnected life between all things.

That’s the vision Jesus called the kingdom come —
not a place above us, but a way of being among us.
A restoration of relationship.
A faith that grows outward, not upward.
The reestablishing of flourishing between all things —
humanity, creation, God, neighbor.

But we shouldn’t pretend that living this way is easy. When you start centering compassion over compliance, people notice.
And not always kindly.

Jesus was accused of being from Satan — not because he was evil, but because he refused to play by the rules of a system built on fear. He healed on the wrong day, touched the wrong people, preached in the wrong places. He broke the categories that kept the powerful comfortable. And for that, the gatekeepers called him dangerous.

Anyone who chooses love over law will hear the same accusation eventually.
You’ll be called heretic, woke, deceived. You’ll be told your empathy is compromise, your kindness is corruption. You’ll lose people who once felt like family.

But take heart — you’re in good company.
You’re walking the same road Jesus did.

The moment you begin to choose people over purity,
you’ll be misunderstood by those still guarding the ladder.
And you’ll also begin to find the others —
the ones tending gardens at the ground level,
growing something new out of what religion left for dead.

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The Sacred Work of Cultivation

For so many of us, the language of faith was used to control us.
Words like obedience, holiness, and discipline—meant to draw us toward love—were twisted into tools of fear. They told us that love needed guarding, that questions were rebellion, that faith meant closing our eyes.

But those words don’t belong to empire.
They belong to love.
And love wants them back.

Reclaiming them is not a sentimental exercise; it’s a survival strategy.
Because we are living in a world where cruelty is rewarded with power, where outrage is currency, where truth is treated like a threat. Every day brings another fresh hell—another reason to shut down, numb out, and pick a side.

Cultivation is how we resist that pull toward despair.

Maybe compassion, curiosity, and accountability are the new spiritual disciplines—
not replacements for prayer or study, but what keep them honest.

Compassion refuses to let statistics become stories we scroll past.
It asks, Who is hurting, and what does love require of me right here, right now?
It moves love from sentiment to action — from sympathy to solidarity.

Curiosity is resistance in a polarized world.
It asks, What if the person I’ve been told to fear still bears the image of God?
It listens past the headlines and algorithms long enough to remember our shared humanity.

Accountability keeps love from becoming vague.
It asks, How does my comfort depend on someone else’s suffering?
It drags faith out of abstraction and into policy, paychecks, and power structures.

This is what cultivation looks like in real life:
volunteers at food banks when policy fails, neighbors checking on one another after the latest storm or shooting, faith communities using their buildings for shelter instead of show.
Ordinary people tending to the world like it’s worth saving—because it is.

When we live this way, we begin to repair what was broken.
We restore the soil that empire stripped bare.
And slowly, love begins to grow again—through cracks in concrete, through grief and exhaustion, through all the places that swore it could never return.

Because this is the sacred work of faith:
not protecting the system,
but tending the soil.

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Salvation as Liberation

For too long, salvation has been sold as escape — a ticket out of a world God supposedly gave up on. But the salvation Jesus spoke of wasn’t evacuation.
It was liberation.

It wasn’t “How do I get to heaven?”
It was “How do we bring heaven here?”

And nowhere is that clearer than in the story of Zacchaeus.
When Jesus looked up into that sycamore tree, he didn’t see a sinner to shame or a soul to rescue — he saw a man entangled in the machinery of exploitation.
Zacchaeus wasn’t just lost in spirit; he was lost inside a system that rewarded greed and punished compassion.

Jesus didn’t call him out — he called him down.
He said, “Come down, I’m coming to your house.”
He chose proximity over purity. Relationship over respectability.
He walked straight into the home of someone the crowd had already written off, and the whole town gasped.

And that’s when the miracle happened.
Zacchaeus stood up and said, “Half of what I own I’ll give to the poor, and anyone I’ve cheated I’ll repay fourfold.” And Jesus said, “Today, salvation has come to this house.”

Not because Zacchaeus said the right words at the end of a service.
Not because he signed a doctrinal statement or repeated a prayer.
But because his life — and the lives around him — began to change.
Because the very system that had divided them began to unravel under the weight of love.

That’s the kind of salvation Jesus modeled.
It doesn’t happen in an instant. It’s not easy or clean.
It requires repair, redistribution, and repentance.
It asks those of us with power or privilege to do exactly what Jesus did:
to move toward the people we’ve been taught to fear,
to sit at the tables we were told to avoid,
to give up what empire told us we needed in order to find what actually saves us.

This is hard, holy work.
It’s emotional, economic, relational. It touches everything.
Real salvation isn’t the magic words that get us out — it’s the difficult, daily choosing to stay in and make things right.

That’s why Jesus called it good news for the poor.
Because it dismantles the systems that keep them poor — and keeps dismantling them until everyone can breathe.

Salvation is not about climbing out.
It’s about digging in — reclaiming the sacred ground of our shared humanity and calling it holy again.

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Replanting the Faith

“Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

―J.R.R. Tolkien,The Lord of the Rings

I think about that line often — especially now, when the world feels so heavy, so fractured, so far from what it could be. We didn’t choose to live in a time when truth is contested, when cruelty is applauded, when faith has been twisted into something unrecognizable.

Ye, here we are.
And we still get to decide what to do with the time that’s been given to us.

Maybe that’s what it means to be people of resurrection — to keep planting anyway.
Even when the ground is hard.
Even when the roots are fragile.
Even when the old systems keep trying to convince us that nothing new can grow.

Because the way of Jesus has never depended on the empire’s approval.
It’s always taken root in the cracks — in small acts of courage, in quiet refusals to give up on each other, in communities who still believe love can outlast fear.

Replanting the faith means taking back what was stolen:
the language of holiness, the beauty of compassion, the possibility of justice.
It means tending a faith that grows outward, not upward —
a faith that feeds, heals, and liberates.
A faith that sees God not in the thrones of power,
but in the hands that break bread and the hearts that break open.

This is the calling of our age:
to build something truer in the ruins,
to live a gospel big enough for the world we actually inhabit,
to keep showing up — tired, tender, and still willing to love.

Because resurrection isn’t just an event we remember.
It’s a practice we keep choosing.

We can’t fix the tree by pretending the fruit is sweet.
We fix it by growing something new.

Something rooted in relationship.
Something that bears good fruit — love, joy, peace, justice, kindness.
Something that grows outward, not upward.

And maybe someday, generations from now, when they speak of our time,
they’ll say: They decided to plant anyway.

Maybe that’s how every good story of faith ends — not with certainty, but with invitation. I mean, resurrection doesn’t tie things up neatly; it calls us forward.

There is still soil to tend.
Still systems to heal.
Still neighbors to love.

And the beauty of it all is that we don’t have to do it alone.
Each act of empathy, each brave conversation, each small kindness is a seed — and together, those seeds become a garden.

So let this be our beginning, not our conclusion.
Let this series end the way every true resurrection does — with an open tomb and a call to go and live differently.

May we keep choosing love over ladders,
presence over purity,
and courage over comfort.

Because faith was never meant to climb.
It was meant to grow.

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To those who’ve stayed with me through this series — thank you for daring to imagine something different.

We’ve named the harm that obedience can do.
We’ve traced the roots of control, and the fruit it bears.
But more than anything, we’ve remembered that love was never the enemy of truth — it’s what makes truth worth telling.

The world we’re building won’t grow from fear.
It will grow from tenderness, from trust, from the holy risk of empathy.
From the courage to look one another in the eye and say,
your liberation is tied up in mine.

So may we keep digging where love still lives.
May we plant what power tried to uproot.
And may the faith we grow next
be one that makes room for everyone to bloom.