By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

“The great use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.”

--William James

My title for this morning, taken from a familiar chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, comes from a passage in which Jesus warns about false prophets: “You will know them by their fruits,” he says.

Conversely, one could say the same for the true prophets. I feel privileged to have come of age in the time of one of those. For when all is said and done, I am certain that Martin Luther King, Jr. will be included among that company of those who have spoken truth to power. For a brief time, one could believe that God or the universe was actually on the side of the good, the right, and the true. For King spoke and acted in such a way that idealism did not seem to be a fool’s dream. Perhaps,--perhaps--one could actually change the world for the better. That is how it seemed to me, for one brief and shining moment of my youth.

That moment, brief though it was, has influenced the course of my life. It has provided me with a calling, beckoning me toward a life of service. It has remained as an inspiration in my darker hours, when cynicism and despair have threatened to overwhelm me, when I have lost hope, and when I have been tempted to give up the fight.

It was not only the words and example of King, of course. It was also the eloquent call to service by President John F. Kennedy, who asked us to unselfishly consider what we could do for our country, and whose creation of a civilian Peace Corps provided an alternative to military service to fulfill that call. It was in the brief but hopeful and ultimately tragic presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy. We all know the ending of the story of these three great heroes of my no doubt misspent youth.

But there were others, too. My ministers at the Unitarian Church, who taught me to look at the world with eyes of compassion and understanding and to question the unexamined prejudices of my small, coastal Maine town. My grandfather, a physician of the old school, who worked his way up from poverty to attend medical school and to live a life dedicated to the care of his fellow travelers in this vale of tears. And not least, my mother, by her example as a teacher--my teacher, for two years, heaven help her--and by her example of dedicated volunteerism to the library and the church and many other community groups.

All of them taught me, by their words or their deeds or their example, about the necessity of living a good life: a life of service on behalf of a troubled and troubling world. Put another way, the message I received from all of them was the familiar one--familiar, at least, thirty-odd years ago: from those to whom much has been given--brains or brawn, fame or fortune--much is expected.

No one has ever said it more eloquently than King, who in a famous, premonitory sermon preached only a few months before his assassination, spoke of the necessity of living “a committed life.” In “The Drum Major Instinct,” from which I read to you this morning, King captured the essence of what I believed then (as in my better moments I still believe now) to be the ideal life; that is, the life that ideally all of us are called to live.

Not out of some false sense of guilt. But because to live such a life is in some sense to fulfill our purpose as human beings, to become, as King would have put it, “the people we are truly meant to be”.

“The great use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it,” wrote William James. Have I missed something, or in recent years have we begun to lose this great sense of calling to the life of service? We seem to have gotten so hyper-focused on striving, on work, and on personal achievement, that there is little or no time left to spend on helping our fellow human beings, on trying to change the system, on working for justice and loving mercy. There no longer seems to be time to spare for the important work of building up the beloved community. We know what this has done to our families and to our communities of faith and to the places where we live. What has it done to ourselves?

The question we need to ask, it seems to me, is this: “Is success enough?” Life must be lived with a purpose and a goal, and I would argue that that purpose and that goal must be more than the next raise or the higher promotion. All the material things in the world will not bring you peace, and certainly they will do nothing to save the world. The world is sinking under the weight of so many things, when what it really needs is our time and our love. Indeed, one way to define the purpose and the goal of our lives is that it is to make the world a better place not only for ourselves, but for our children. Especially for our children.

I don’t think it is any great revelation to say that we are too busy for our own good. But what are we to do about it? One way is to recapture that sense of a calling to the committed life. This is especially important for our younger people, whose lives and vocations are still ahead of them, and whose choices have not already been made. We must give them anew a sense of the importance of the life of service, something that I was given in my youth by the powerful example of Martin Luther King, JR. and the others I mentioned.

But it is also important for the rest of us, those of us who have already made most of our choices, and who may even feel trapped by our circumstances and prevented from living the lives we were truly meant, and still desire, to live. I include myself, too, for too often I feel myself lacking in the kind of commitment that I am talking about, cut off from that youthful enthusiasm and sense of hopefulness that started me out on this path in the first place. It’s all too easy to fall into the pattern of complacency and of “what’s the use, anyway?” What can I do about racism, and poverty, and homophobia? What’s the good of my piddly little contribution to a world determined to go to hell in a handbasket?

I don’t know about you, but I struggle with this on an almost daily basis. I know that I could be doing more, in my community and in this church, to live the kind of life that I am talking about. And if that is what I am called to do, then I also know that my life cannot reach its fulfillment until I get my priorities in order and get on with the work of saving the world, which is only another way of saying, saving myself.

Too many of us, I think, come to the church looking for what it can do for us. We look for it to fill our spiritual emptiness, and we are disappointed when it doesn’t do so. We look for it to solve the various social problems that we see all around us, unless we are blind, and we are angry when we discover that the church is but a microcosm of those problems. What we fail to realize is that it is up to us, to each one of us, to fill our own spiritual emptiness and to solve those problems which exist in our community and in our church. The great Reformers of the 16th century recognized this reality when they spoke of a “priesthood of all believers.”

Of course, those reformers were skeptical about the efficacy of good works alone to solve our personal and corporate problems, for they had seen how this idea could be abused and trivialized in the system of indulgences prevalent in the Roman Catholic Church of their time. They said that we could be justified--made just, as God had intended for us to be--by faith alone. There are literally millions of Christians today who still believe that “accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior” is all that is required of us.

But, fortunately, the Church never lost sight of the importance of living a life replete with good works as well as faithfulness, and in the 19th century our Unitarian and Universalist forbears in particular began to reemphasize our responsibility toward the Other, to take up the causes of their day, be they abolition or women’s rights or prison reform, to create voluntary organizations such as the Red Cross and the Temperance Union and the Anti-Slavery Society, in order both to begin to solve the problems of the society beyond the walls of the their local congregations, and, just as important, to save themselves from meaningless and empty lives.

If the primary identity of men and women is to live with a goal and a purpose, then these religious ancestors of ours achieved at least a partial enlightenment. For they discovered in these commitments, these works of their hands and hearts, both a goal and a purpose. That goal and that purpose they called “self-culture,” by which they meant the nurture and growth of the soul for the ultimate betterment of the world. It is what I believe Dr. King meant when he spoke of the committed life. Such a life, one might argue, is its own reward.

What we need is a revival of that sense of commitment and responsibility, both within the church and within the larger community of which it is a part. We need to ask ourselves, what are our commitments, and are they worthy? More important, are they feeding me spiritually and morally, and are they contributing to the sense that my life has a meaning and a purpose and a goal worth striving toward? Is my life making a difference in the life of even one other person, and, if not, how can I begin to make it do so? What can I do to inspire a young person to live a life not totally self-centered, but directed at least in part toward the life of the Other? What can I do to save the world, even my own little corner of it?

The answers to those questions, if they are to have any meaning, must be your own. You must decide what work you are called to do. The answers begin to come when we achieve a recognition that life is ever what my colleague Edward Searl calls “A Precarious Balance”between our own needs and the needs of the world. Ed writes:

Weigh your spiritual health
on a balance.
On one side
Heap on your need to be alone,
Your yearning to retreat inward
to silence and solitude.
Pile on your selfish desires
and your self-seeking ways.
(Do not be embarrassed by them,
they are important and real.)
On the other side
Heap on you compassion and concern.
Your love for your fellow kind
leading you outward.
Pile on your instincts
to find companions of heart and mind.
Gently lay here your selflessness,
your willingness to give,
even sacrifice yourself,
for another person or cause.
Here is room for your conscience;
treat it gently.
Never stop heaping as long as you live.
On either side the piles will grow.
The balance will be unsteady,
tipping from one side to the other,
tipping between selfishness and selflessness.
Always seek a steady level,
a precarious balance.
The art of living is to somehow
keep the balance of Life
throughout the shifting changes.

Our calling as persons shaped by the purposes of God is a
meandering journey, it is not a straight path; part of what we need to learn
is how to walk from place to place in the geography of faith without losing
heart and letting our fears overwhelm us or our enthusiasms distort our
vision. Vocation is not a matter of a single, unchanging sense of purpose.
The fact is that throughout our lives we live in the midst of several callings,
changing times and new understandings of God’s voice which calls us.

Whether you agree with the God-language or not, the point is that life does have a meaning and a purpose: even if it is up to us to give that meaning and purpose to our individual lives, we can do it. In my darker hours, when my commitment falters and I am ready to abandon the good fight, when the meaning of my life is elusive, I find hope in this thought: that I can spend my life on something that might outlast it. It’s a kind of immortality I can understand, and it is real. May the fruits of our living make us worthy of being remembered by all those who shall come after us. Amen

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock