February 10, 2022

 ^“7Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.

 ⁸They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream.It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green;
 in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”

When I was a kid, I loved to climb trees.  We had a tree in our yard when I was 4 or 5 that had a low branch coming out of the trunk where I could rest.  At our house when I was in elementary school, I spent hours in the tree interacting with the neighbors over the fence.  Actually, tree climbing hasn’t entirely been kept in my childhood.  I was at a park the other day and couldn’t help scampering up.  When you are mother of a 10 year old, sometimes you get to climb a tree!  Trees are these natural structures that lift us up, give us breath in the oxygen they create, hold the soil in place, and inspire us with their steadfastness.

The reading for Jeremiah talks about a tree--where it is planted, where it is rooted, and that it bears fruit.  A tree is an interconnected system of life.  The Xylem are the tree veins that carry the water and nutrients from the soil.  The leaves change the nutrients with the energy of the sun into sugars the tree can use and store.  The Phloem are the tree veins that carry the sap and distribute it where it is needed around the tree.  A tree is a system devoted to the flow of life within itself and a tree is devoted to the passing on of life in the form of seeds and fruit so that other trees might grow and have life.

We Americans tend to look at life as about the individual—individual rights and personal relationships.  We tend to think of ourselves as individual trees.  Have I committed any sins or made anyone’s life any easier today?  What are my needs?  What is my schedule?  What are my interests?  Am I blessed or happy?  Yet each of us are only a tiny branch or bud on the tree.  Without life flowing to us because of the labor of other people to make our food and clothes and products that make life easier, and build our roads and invent new technology to connect us, we can pretty much do nothing at all, on our own.  Our faith invites us to look beyond ourselves and to think of ourselves as part of a whole, a bigger system.  When we leave behind the I for the we, we find we have support and encouragement and we can provide that for others.  We also find that our gifts and abilities complement those of the rest of the group and we develop a mutually beneficial relationship that provides resilience in times when we are especially in need.  Thinking of the community as the tree helps us avoid the pitfalls of blaming people or ourselves for our troubles, which we tend to do to protect ourselves or pretend those bad things couldn’t happen to us good people.  Thinking of the community as the tree keeps us from getting arrogant when things go well, but instead remember and care for those in need.  Looking at the community as the tree helps us take ourselves out of the center and put God there and to consider how God makes us part of something, the great flowing of life.

The prophet Jeremiah asks where our tree is planted.  Ideally it is near water, its life source.  We too plant ourselves near water, the waters of baptism.  We are never far from the place God claimed us.  We are invited constantly to dip our fingers in water to remember whether we can remember or not, the promises God makes to us, the love and support the community offers, the journeys our ancestors made across and through waters.  Through it all, water is not far from us, washing us, cleansing us, claiming us, loving us, and flowing through us to bring life to others.  Oregon is a place of abundant water.  We may complain about the rain, but it keeps us fed and our crops growing.  As we consider our interconnectedness as trees, we must consider the life of the waters and our impact upon the waters.  The waters dry up when we abuse them.  They spread disease when we aren’t the good stewards God calls us to be.  When we take care of the waters, the waters will take care of us because the ecosystem is a flowing of life around and around.  We are all interconnected.

Trees also need to be planted in Good Soil.  Think of where our nutrients come from—from the earth, from the breaking down of organic matter.  Living things that have died are broken down by microbes and insects and make the nutrients available to the tree.  In the same way we draw upon the materials handed down to us from generations before.  We use them and reconfigure them in a way that works for today.  We can’t remake what was, but we use the stories and the nutrients to be inspired to grow and bear fruit.

Jesus is concerned about where we put down roots.  So often we are rooted in our own abilities and skills.  Jeremiah calls those trees cursed—the ones who are invested in human strength and put their faith in themselves or other people, who are fallible.  People fail, people die, people are short-sighted, people are selfish and power hungry.  When we trust God and put God at the center, love at the center, we can connect with other fallible, temporary people in community, and find the flow of life coming from our source and providing abundant life. 

Jesus was talking about where we are rooted in his sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke.  He got right down eye to eye with the disciples.  He is saying to be rooted not in the temporary situation of being poor or rich, hungry or full, weeping or laughing, but be rooted in God’s justice, in the flow of life for the community.  We tend to want to work toward being stable, happy, fulfilled, and wealthy and put down roots when we get there.  We start to worship those things as the goal or to believe that we are blessed with riches and comforts because of God’s favor.  But Jesus is challenging us.  Being comfortable is not the point and we can’t stay there.  The point is the flow of life, the sharing of life, the health of the whole tree, the health of the whole community which leads to bearing fruit.  Those other things are momentary trivialities.  They don’t last and they don’t matter to God.  If we trust in them we will find woe, because no one stays full forever.  No one is laughing forever.  Wealth will not love you back.  And he’s saying to those who are poor or hungry or crying,  God is with you.  This is not a lack of blessing.   You are favored with God’s presence.  You are loved.  It won’t always be this way.   Jesus’ sermon on the Plain is Mary’s Magnificat in Jesus’ own words, “The hungry are filled with good things and the rich go away empty.”  Put your roots down in the flowing of life, not fleeting comforts.

I love the movement in this story, just like last week.  Jesus steps into eye level with the disciples.  He of course has come from on high and now he is at their same level.  He speaks of those who have been elevated, being brought low and those who have hit bottom being blessed and honored, lifted up.  It is like a seesaw or a great reversal of how we thought life was supposed to be turned on its head.  It is a little disorienting.  It makes us a little sea sick.  But to question what the world teaches us is important and to remember what God tells us is important and invest there, is life-giving action leading to justice and life and hope for all Creation.

Even the reading from 1 Corinthians is about the power of life that Jesus offers.  The righteous one who has died, has been raised.  That power of new life transfers to us, to share the flow of life, to lift up what has fallen.  What is fruitful, falls to the earth, where it is nurtured and given the proper elements, puts out roots and pushes through the soil to grow and connect and live.  Jesus died and was buried, like a seed, and that seed grew into a grove of trees whose mission is the flowing of life to all those places which have been deprived of life.  Jesus embodies this great reversal.  He is most blessed who was most cursed by humans—blessed are those who weep.  Jesus rose from the dead to give us joy and life.  The one who was cut down, sends out seeds of faith and new life to all the corners of the earth and so you and I come to believe.  The one who hungered in the desert, has compassion on all the people who come to him hungry and he feeds them and he calls us each week to eat with him at the community meal of the Lord’s Supper.  And don’t forget the persecutions and insults and betrayal.  Jesus lived everything he taught.  According to the values of this world, he was woeful.  But God’s values are different from the worlds, because God can see the barriers we are putting up and the life we are scrambling to control.  But Jesus is a living blessing—everything he did and said opened the floodgates and removed all barriers so that no one could hoard life and power and riches, but those on the margins, the forgotten and woeful, would experience the life flowing from the tree of life.  All who had been cut off would finally know that it wasn’t God doing the chopping, but people who were afraid of sharing, who had put their roots down in sinking sand.  People who had been cut off would grafted onto the tree of the community in Christ, siblings participating in the flow of life

As we have been away from each other, maybe it has been hard to see how we are all one organism sharing life.  And sometimes in our disconnected world we don’t know how to share life with the greater community around us.  Many of you are doing it—visiting the sick and homebound, picking up trash on your walks, caring for young people, volunteering in schools and food pantries and clothing closets, planting trees, tending gardens.  Wouldn’t it be amazing to connect even more with other parts of the tree and see what faithful, loving people all around us are doing, how life is flowing through them from other people and to those at the margins.  Wouldn’t it be inspiring to more fully invest in the flow of life to the margins?  We want to grow our church, but more than that we want to grow the body of Christ and bear fruit, we want to share life so that people who have felt left out and have nothing know the blessing of God, the love of God, the interconnectedness of community.