The following is excerpted from a sermon preached this past Sunday, October 11, 2009 at Union Memorial United Methodist Church in Baltimore, MD.
One of most important set of memories I have of my youth was the way my sister, brother and I spent our summers. We were raised mostly in the city – in Washington, DC - but each summer – until I was about thirteen years old, we traveled to Madison Heights, Virginia (just outside of Lynchburg, Virginia) to spend the summers with my grandparents.
There are many things that I remember about Madison Heights and those summers. I remember our large extended family (all of our uncles, aunts and cousins, and those we thought were our cousins). I remember that the doors of my grandparents’ house were seldom – if ever - locked, and I remember that we would run and play outside without seeming ever to worry about anything or anybody.
I remember my grandmother’s cooking, and I remember my grandfather’s large garden. He called it a garden, but it seemed like a farm to me. I also remember that my grandparents had several fruit trees in their yard. One of the fruit trees was a large peach tree. I can remember – every summer - watching that peach tree, and waiting until the middle of summer when the peaches on the tree would be ready of picking and eating. Sometimes, we would pick the peaches, and eat them right off the tree – right at the tree. We didn’t think to wash them – we would just eat the peaches off the tree. It was good fruit.
I realize now that such good fruit did not emerge instantaneously. The good fruit of that tree emerged within the context of a peach seed that had been planted many years before. It was a seed that had been planted in good, fertile soil - soil that had been watered by consistent rains, which with the sunlight that beamed down on it, served to nourish the seed, and helped the seed grow into a fruitful tree over the years. As a result of all of this, the tree that eventually emerged that would bear good fruit.
The lesson that Jesus is trying to teach here in what has come to be known as the Sermon on the Mount is a lesson about good fruit. In Matthew 7:17, Jesus says, "You will know them by their fruit." Here he makes a clear distinction between two types of fruit - good fruit and bad fruit. Good fruit is born from a good tree; good fruit cannot be born from a bad tree, and bad fruit is born of bad trees.
These words afford each of us an opportunity to take stock of how fruitful our lives are. In other words, what kind of tree are we? And what kind of fruit are we bearing? Are we bearing good fruit or bad fruit?
Thinking back on my grandparents’ peach tree, we knew as soon as we bit into a peach from the tree, whether the fruit was good or bad.
The nature of bad fruit is that it is either overly ripe and rotting, or not yet fully developed. Overly ripe and rotting fruit has lost its texture and its flavor has become a distortion of what it would taste like if it were still good. And if it is underdeveloped it is hard and usually hasn’t developed the full measure of what it would taste like if were allowed to grow to maturity.
Indeed, bad fruit manifests itself in many ways around us. It is born in the racism, sexism, classism that afflicts our world, and even many of our churches. It is born in our inattention to the poor and oppressed among us. It is born in self-interest and self-centeredness among too many. It is born in materialism and greed. It is born in what Marion Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund has called the dis-ease of “affluenza.” We possess too much that is worth too little.
Bad fruit is born of our collective inattention (or silence) amidst the wars in our midst, and violence on too many of our streets. It is born in our inability or unwillingness to heed the words of the psalmist, and to “seek peace and pursue it.”
In light of this, Christ points us to how we can bear good fruit. At another place in the Sermon on the Mount, he reminds us to “seek first the kingdom of God, and its righteousness, and all other things will be added to it.” He reminds us in the beatitudes that “blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.” And he points out that we are to love not only those who look like us, think like us, believe like us, worship like us, and agree with us – but that we are to love even our enemies.
The apostle Paul said that the “fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, long-suffering, generosity, and self-control” (Galatians 5:21-22). In other words, these nine things are the marks of fruitfulness for Christians.
May God grant us, in the living of these days, the grace, strength and courage to bear good fruit.
