The Root and the Fruit

Picture someone who has never been here before stepping through our doors this morning for the first time. He doesn’t know our names. He hasn’t heard our sermons or watched us in the parking lot or lingered with us over coffee in the hall. He sees only what’s in front of him: the candles, the vestments, the way we kneel, the words we say together. And whether he means to or not, he’s asking the very question our Lord sets before us in the Gospel. Which of these people is a sheep, and which is a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

It’s an uncomfortable question, and it gets more uncomfortable the longer you sit with it, because the honest answer is that we can’t always tell from the outside. And worse than that, we can’t always tell about ourselves. Our own Collect admitted as much a few minutes ago. We prayed to God, whose never-failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth, and we asked him to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which are profitable for us. Notice what that prayer takes for granted about the people praying it. It assumes we don’t reliably know the hurtful from the profitable. It asks God to do the sorting we can’t do ourselves.

The other lessons say the same thing from a different angle. The Proverbs of Solomon open by telling us where real discernment even begins: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Not cleverness, not a sharp eye for other people’s faults, but a reverent heart bent toward God. And the Psalm turns that into a prayer we could all pray honestly: Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, and not to covetousness. That’s a man asking God to tilt his wants in the right direction, because he knows his own wants lean the wrong way. Put those two together and you have the ground the Gospel and the Epistle are planted in. Before we can read anyone’s fruit, our own or a stranger’s, we first have to be taught.

So here is what these lessons hold together. Because we can’t reliably tell the corrupt tree from the good, and can’t always tell our own religious clothing from real fruit, God doesn’t leave the sorting to our competence. He gives us two things at once, a gift on the inside and a test on the outside. The gift is the Spirit of adoption, who makes us sons and teaches us to cry Abba. The test is the fruit by which that sonship is known. And the Spirit who gives the one is the same Spirit who bears the other, so that in the Christian life assurance and obedience are never at war.

Start with the test, because it’s the harder word. Beware of false prophets, our Lord says, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Chrysostom, preaching on this passage centuries ago, caught something in the wording we might skip past. Christ didn’t merely say look. He said beware. He was sharpening our sight on purpose, because the danger here is precisely what doesn’t announce itself. The wolf Chrysostom describes is one of those who are of a corrupt life, yet wear a mask of virtue. He would not, Chrysostom says, choose to take the pains of the narrow way, but to make a show only. That’s a hard thing to hear, because a mask worn long enough starts to feel like a face. I’ll be honest with you. After enough years of wearing these vestments, a man can catch himself performing the very holiness he’s meant to be living, and not always notice the seam.

Now, our own Articles take this fruit-test and turn it to face us. The twelfth of them says a living faith is known by its works as surely as a tree is discerned by its fruit. That’s the Gospel pressed inward. And it matters which direction we press it, because there are two ways to hear ye shall know them by their fruits, and only one of them is Christ’s. The wrong way sends us out of the church door as inspectors, scanning the next pew for wolves, keeping a private ledger of everyone else’s failings. That’s the suspicion our Lord never intended, and it rots the one who practices it. The right way turns the lamp around and holds it up to our own works first.

So let me ask it the way our visitor at the door asks it without a word. What, in the common life of this parish, would a stranger actually read as fruit? Not what we’d tell him about ourselves, but what he’d see. The patience we show a difficult member. What we do with our money when no one is keeping score. Whether the people who kneel here on Sunday are recognizably kinder on Thursday. And here’s the searching part: would what he sees point to the tree we profess? Would it lead him back to Christ, or only to us?

If the Gospel were all we had this morning, that question could crush a tender conscience flat. But it isn’t all we have. Listen again to how Paul answers it. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The word Paul uses for adoption is a legal word, the making of a son who wasn’t born one, given the full standing of the household. That’s what has happened to you. And the proof of it isn’t your performance. The Spirit itself, Paul says, beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God. The cry Abba isn’t something you work up. It’s given, planted in you by the same Spirit, in exactly the way the Collect asks for discernment as a gift and not an achievement. You don’t become a son by bearing fruit. You bear fruit because you have been made a son.

And now, held between the gift and the test, we can face the hardest sentence in the Gospel without either panic or presumption. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. The man who only says Lord, Lord has the clothing without the tree. He has the word without the root it should have grown from. But notice, the answer to empty words isn’t frantic effort to prove ourselves. The answer is the Spirit of adoption himself, because he doesn’t only comfort us, he leads us. As many as are led by the Spirit of God, Paul says, they are the sons of God. The same Spirit who cries Abba on the inside is the Spirit who mortifies the deeds of the body and bears his fruit on the outside. That’s why sonship and obedience can’t be pulled apart. They’re two works of one Spirit. And Paul doesn’t flinch from where that leads, either. If children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. The fruit that the Spirit grows in an adopted son will sometimes look like suffering, borne in Christ’s company. That, too, is a kind of fruit a watching world can read.

In a few moments we’ll come to this altar, and it matters how we come. We don’t come as people who have passed the inspection, who have sorted ourselves out from the wolves and earned our seat at the table. If that were the price, none of us could pay it. We come as adopted sons and daughters, fed by the Father whose providence orders what we cannot order for ourselves. We come with our masks set down, hungry for the very thing that grows real fruit in us, the life of Christ given here in bread and wine.

So take this home with you. You are not left to guess whether you belong to him. The Spirit who was given to you cries Abba in you still, when your prayers are strong and when they’re barely a whisper. You don’t have to counterfeit a holiness you don’t feel, and you don’t have to despair over the fruit you haven’t yet grown. You have been made a son. Now go and live like one, so that the stranger at the door, and the Father who already sees the root, will find the same tree, bearing the same fruit, all the way down.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.