THE PLACE TO BEGIN
(Luke 6:43-49; Proverbs 4:20-27)

            As always, it’s a very great privilege to be here this morning.  It’s also a very grave responsibility, and so I would ask all of you to please join me in prayer: 

            Lord, we come to this point in our worship where we long to sit under your word, to hear your voice, and to be changed by your Holy Spirit.  Guide what is said and how it is heard, and may we all behold your glory in the face of Christ, in whose name we pray.  Amen   

It occurred to me in preparing this sermon that as of today we are about half way through the season of Pentecost—which runs for six months from Pentecost Sunday in May all the way to Advent in late November.  It’s usually the least recognized or appreciated season in the Christian calendar, since it has none of the drama or celebration of an Advent or Epiphany or Easter.  It’s called Pentecost because it’s that time of the year when Christians reflect on how the Holy Spirit brings Christ into our lives.  It’s all about the hard work of being transformed—each and every one of us—into the likeness of Christ.

Which is also why some Christian traditions prefer to call this six-month period common time.  Our spiritual transformation seldom involves the spectacular events that we find in the other seasons.  Instead, it takes place right in the midst of our mundane, ordinary, common life.  Quietly, invisibly, or (to borrow a metaphor from Jesus himself) like the wind blowing wherever and however it wishes, the Spirit of God performs his mysterious work within the routine context of getting up, going to work, caring for our families, and trying to follow Christ as best we can.  To me, the season of Pentecost is captured most vividly by that parable Jesus gives in Mark’s gospel when he describes a farmer who plants seed in the ground and then he goes away, only to discover within a very short period of time that the seed has begun to sprout—how, Jesus tells us, the farmer does not know.  

It is mysterious how God works in our lives.  And for that very reason, it can also be very frustrating.  For one of the consequences of having the Spirit at work in our life is that we become increasingly aware of just how profoundly broken we all are.  In fact one of the chronic complaints of those who seek to follow Christ is that the more serious you are about it, the more often you seem to fail.  No one complained more loudly and painfully about this than St. Paul himself in the seventh chapter of Romans where he writes:

I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my natural self.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.   …What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?

Now this is clearly not a very good place to be, but if we’re honest, we all regularly find ourselves in this same place.  Why do we struggle so?  Where is the promised Holy Spirit who is supposed to bring us new life and change us?  And what does God think about our whole, pathetic dilemma?  This is obviously a huge topic and not something I can adequately address in a single sermon, but that is also why we are given six whole months every year to wrestle with it during the season of Pentecost.  But for this morning, I thought I could at least try to point out where we might even begin.   

There are numerous places in all four of our gospels where Jesus provides us with help on this problem.  This morning’s gospel text from Luke is just one of many I might have chosen.  It’s part of an extended discourse in Luke that sounds a lot like Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.  Just prior to our text, Jesus talks at length about why Christians must not become judgmental toward one another, but rather cultivate a forgiving and generous spirit.  And then he gives that famous metaphor about the log in our own eye and a mere speck in the other person’s eye in order to describe how we are all much too preoccupied with fixing other peoples’ problems when, in fact, we are completely blind to how bad things are in ourselves. 

All of which leads to the text I am concerned with today, beginning with verse 43.  Let me read it again:

No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.  Each tree is recognized by its own fruit.

In other words, by taking a hard look at ourselves, and specifically the kind of fruit we are bearing, we can pretty much tell what kind of person we essentially are.  Which may sound like a simple thing to do, but it’s actually not that easy.  Thirty years ago I knew a woman who created conflict no matter what she did or where she went.  Strangely, she was always trying to help people, plus she gave a great deal of her own time and money to various charitable organizations.  But no matter what she did, it always resulted in hostility, hurt feelings, and paralysis.  Even though she was trying to do good, mostly bad came out of it.  There was something fundamentally wrong inside of her that leaked out onto everything she touched.  To use Jesus’ metaphor, her fruit was bad because there was something intrinsically wrong with the woman herself.

And what made it doubly tragic was that she was oblivious to what was going on.  She was always angry at how ungrateful people could be, or how misunderstood she was, but it never occurred to her that she might be the problem.  But you know, if we are honest, it’s very difficult for any of us to see ourselves objectivity.  If we could just follow ourselves around for a single day as an outside observer, I think we would all be appalled by the number of hurt people we leave in our wake.   But just so there is no doubt about the kind of fruit we ourselves are producing, Jesus actually gives us a very practical way to test our own fruit, as he says next:

People do not pick figs from thorn bushes, or grapes from briers.

 In other words, people aren’t stupid.  They know where to go to get good fruit.  And so we should periodically ask ourselves, “Do people come to me knowing there will be good fruit, or do they stay away because they have learned from experience that only painful thorns will be found?”  Now I realize we sometimes find people to be attractive because of their looks or wealth or social status.  But Jesus isn’t referring to any of that.  He is asking whether people are drawn to us by our goodness.  Do they see Christ in us?  When someone is hurting emotionally, are we someone they might be naturally drawn to?  If they have a material need, are we known as an especially generous person?  If they have sinned and need to confess, are we known for our discretion and a spirit of forgiveness?  Or if they are simply perplexed, are we known as a person with humble wisdom?  People instinctively figure out where to go to when they are in need of fruit.

All of which raises the question, “If we are all so alike in our struggle with our natural sinful nature, why is it that some people still manage to produce so much good fruit and others so much bad?”  Jesus addresses this next in verse 45:

The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.  For out of the overflow of his heart the mouth speaks.

I have, for a long time, felt that this is one of the most amazing, helpful things Jesus ever said.  It touches on so many important issues—far too many for my sermon today.  But at least note a couple of things.  First, you cannot fake it when it comes to being good.   We are all masters at trying to work on ourselves from the outside.  We quickly learn what people expect from a Christian, and so we develop behaviors which conform to this image. We act in a particular way, use the right words, avoid the wrong things, hang around the right people, and so forth.  But underneath it all the real us, the us on the inside is still festering and getting moldy, and eventually leaks out.  For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.

Haven’t we all been shocked by our own behavior on occasion.  We thought we had everything under control and then suddenly—wham!  Out comes a burst of anger, a selfish act, a sick humor, or any number of evil things.  And the problem all along is that we’ve been focusing on mere external behavior and not on the heart which actually controls us.

The second thing Jesus’ words allude to is that our heart is a place of storage.  The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart.  The heart is more than our emotional experience.  The heart is the very center of who we are and what we value.  And as the old saying goes, “Garbage in, garbage out.”  We can fill and condition our hearts with ignorance, hatred, lust, envy, greed, and any number of other things that are in ample supply all around us.  We can hang around people, read books or watch TV programs that reinforce these things.  Or we can fill our hearts with Christ.  This, too, is shaped in part by who we hang with, what we read and watch, and so forth.  But even more importantly, we feed on Christ by faith, through obedience to his word and by developing a life of prayer and worship.

But the big hurdle is that we don’t know our true selves—our heart—all that well.  But it’s something we had better get to know, because it’s our heart that Christ wants to change.  And the way he changes us is by offering to fill our hearts with himself.   For example, we haven’t come to the Lord’s Table today because something magical is supposed to happens to us.  Through communion we learn to feed on Christ every moment of every day.  We study our bibles not so that we can impress our friends or become dogmatic in our theology, but because we are hungry for Christ—to know him, believe him, follow him.  We pray not as a way to get stuff or have mystical experiences, but to be in a deep and ongoing relationship with our Lord.

But please don’t get me wrong.  I am not minimizing the importance of self-control or having standards, or right behavior.  My point is that focusing on our external behavior has very limited value.  Yes, we can all learn better ways to communicate with each other and to treat each other.  Yes, there are personal rules we can all develop that will help us behave more ethically or morally on a functional level.  But if we concentrate primarily on our external behavior, then at some point—at some unexpected time and place—the real us will suddenly rush to the surface and shatter our whole facade.  It is out of the heart that the mouth speaks, and so it is upon the heart that we must always be working.  Which means, if we focus on the heart, our external behavior will take care of itself.

And so, for example, there is wisdom in simply putting a lid on our mouth when we catch ourselves about to say something hurtful or stupid or unfair, but you know what is even better?  To immediately chase that suppressed thought back to its source in our heart—to ask ourselves the hard questions, such as:

Where did that come from?

Why do I harbor these hurtful attitudes toward this person or about this issue? 

Why have I let this attitude fester and grow, even when I know it’s wrong? 

Why do I let myself believe all this nonsense without doing the necessary reflection on whether it’s really true or not? 

Do I need to make this a serious focus of prayer? 

Do I need to be reconciled with someone with whom I have secretly born a grudge? 

Or do I simply need to own up to myself that I tend to believe a lot of things even when there is no rational basis?

And if we are willing to prayerfully chase these unexpected and unwanted attitudes back to their source, we can then bring that broken part of our heart to God and seek his grace to heal it.  This is where the battle really lies and where our faith really has to lean into God’s powerful grace, for in ourselves we cannot make deep, radical change.  Only God can.

At the beginning of my sermon, I mentioned Paul’s all-too-human complaint in Romans seven.  Paul was someone who took Christ at his word and tried to obey from the inside out, and what he encountered was that terrible struggle between who he longed to be and who he actually was.   But chapter seven was not his last word.  Chapter 8 gives us the answer to Paul’s agonizing dilemma.  In a very real sense, Romans eight is the whole season of Pentecost in miniature—that is, it describes our “life in the Holy Spirit,” for only the Spirit of God can create a truly new heart in us. 

First, Paul learned to trust in God’s forgiveness (for he opens Chapter 8 by declaring “there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus,” no matter how many times we fail).  Second, he learned to trust in God’s power, for Paul next tells us that only “by the Spirit we are daily putting to death the deeds of the sinful nature”—that is, if we truly believe that God is at work in our lives, we will never give up the fight, no matter how many times we get knocked down.  And finally, Romans 8 reminds us of our ultimate victory, for indeed, as Paul writes, “all things do work together for good”—nothing is wasted, even our failure—and in the end, there will not only be a new heaven and earth, but a new us.  On this side of the grave, we will always fall far short of our goal.  But this side of the grave is a mere shadow compared to what God has in store for us.

If you want an even more vivid description of this same truth, think about what Jesus told his disciples in the upper room, just before he was arrested.  Let me paraphrase his words:  “Don’t be upset that I am going away.  It’s to your advantage that I go.  For I will send the Holy Spirit who will bring my life into yours and thus your life will be joined with mine, and together we will be joined to the Father.  But in the meantime, if you truly love me, you will strive to follow my teachings.  But in order to do this, you must remain in me as a branch remains in a vine or you will never produce this new life that I want to create in you.  A branch cannot produce the fruit by itself.  It is the vine that makes the fruit grow.  So, in the same way, stay connected to me.  Rely on me.  Trust me.” 

And there you have it; it’s that simple and yet that hard.  Christ is our hope.  Christ is our life.  Out of what’s in our heart, our mouth will speak.  And so, Come, Lord Jesus, come—fill our hearts with yourself.    Amen