​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany VII, Year C
February 20, 2022
 
World History.  Ninth grade.  Our teacher was Mr. Porter Smith, an LSU fan among Bulldogs, he fancied himself a missionary of the human story.  The text book was insanely broad and decidedly western in focus, but over the academic year, we romped all the way from the Ancient Sumerians to the Cold Warriors, which was then, current events.  Pedagogically, Mr. Smith was a cause-and-effect guy.  Borrowing rather poorly from the Newtonian physical principal that all effects have causes, and all causes have an effect, intended or unintended.  As lenses for big surveys go, it was effective, but we did not have much time for nuance.
 
Mr. Smith was a big believer that people learn what they write, so every week, we were assigned two three-page papers, to be hand written, in ink, on notebook paper.  Naturally, we all raced out to purchase the widest ruled paper we could find and those new-fangled erasable pens.  Papers were returned every Monday with a few words and phrases underlined, and a circled letter grade at the top.  Topics were huge like: the reasons for the rise of the Roman Empire, the impact of the Norman Conquest, or the causes and effects of World War I.  With no Google to help us, we were impelled to kick it old school, and read the textbook.
 
Inevitably, our world weary ninth grade whining erupted with every assignment.  We complained about the grind of Porter’s Papers behind Mr. Smith’s back, and when my classmate, Lara, slipped up and called Mr. Smith, Porter, to his face, her grades went from Bs to Ds for the next two-week series of essays.  The whining persisted.  “Why, Mr. Smith, do we have to do this every week?”  “Aren’t these assignments the subject of volumes of history?”  “It makes our hands hurt to write so much.”  “This is not fair!”  If you have ever been a parent, an adolescent, or had parents, which is, well, all of us, you can predict his response.  That’s not fair!  Right.  Life is not fair.  Life is not fair, Bubba (he called us all Bubba).
 
I do not remember most of what I once wrote, nor would my present self be impressed with what my ninth-grade self deemed definitive, but I do remember that statement, repeated regularly and often.  Life is not fair.  And as an adolescent, college student, husband, parent, pastor, and friend, I have said this, thought this, and lived with this is life’s many chances and changes. 
 
As random tragedy strikes, dishonesty thrives, relationships fail, the poor suffer disproportionally, where, when, and to whom we are born determines much of our lot in life rather than any other factor.  It is easy to say life is unfair, throw up our hands in resignation, and become as existentially discouraged as a scorned Shakespearian lover.
 
Our biblical lessons chronicle heaps of unfairness in the life of God’s people.  Joseph, beaten and sold off by his older brothers, suffers in slavery, is unjustly indicted, and goes to prison.  His Israelite descendants are sacked, pillaged, enslaved, and occupied many times over.  St. Paul squabbles with the Corinthian church because they believe that their faith should afford them special treatment and guaranteed happiness, that is what the tv preachers of their day promised.  And Jesus, Jesus scorned with ridicule, challenge, and disbelief turns around and tells us to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, and turn the other cheek to be smacked as hard as the first one.  This is no way to build a movement.  This is no way to impose any restorative justice.  (I will say here that in no way is Jesus condoning domestic abuse.  This is not his topic or focus.  Any attempt to justify such violence is wildly misguided and anathema to the dignity of every human being).
 
As we know, Jesus’ encounters with the forces of political dominance, the forces of strict and transactional religious potentates, and with followers much of the time, does not go well.  They don’t get it.  When faced with pure love in person, they all balk.
 
A newspaper Seattle reporter once asked Mohandas Gandhi: “What do you think of Western civilization?” He answered “I think it would be a good idea.”  Any serious look at the process and evolution of civilizations reveals the necessary establishment of codified laws.  The first laws we know of were established by Ur-Nammu, king of Ur, which was Abraham’s original home town, thus, the idea of law baked into the God story from the beginning. 
 
And Lord, how God’s people have clung to and contorted rules as exclusionary, onerous, and requirement for earned blessing.  What started with the 10 commandments, guides for living in community, were extrapolated into 613 laws, complete with a rubric for harsh punishment.  That is some intricately crazy stuff in there, telling us what to do if our tunic has mold, or our neighbor steals our donkey.  Following Levitical law was tedious.  It is no wonder those folks were uptight as they took themselves too seriously and God’s grace, not seriously enough.  All of this got done at the hands of religious folks who, bless their hearts, yearned for a God that kept score.  Before Exodus got to Leviticus, the Law went from basic loving standards to a complex system.  
 
We may think we have evolved, but our sense of justice and fairness tends to be skewed to our highly particular point of view.  Where we stand depends, largely on where we sit.  Even though we intone to our children that life is unfair, we bend over backwards to try and make it fair for us.  Most of the polarization and division in which people stew is based on grievance: outrage that somebody, somewhere, getting an easier or better life than us.
 
In just about every encounter, Jesus pushes us to change everything: change our worldview, change our view of others, change our view of ourselves, and when we can, act out of love without a transactional expectation.  In going to the cross, Jesus takes on the deepest horror we can imagine, showing that life is not contained between a birthday and a death day. Life is bigger than we know; bigger than our limited ability can imagine.  We are not built to fade away, we are created to rise.  There is music and laughter and abundance for all, and lots of cake.  Occasionally, we catch a glimmer and cannot say grace enough.
 
Mr. Smith was it wrong.  I have been wrong.  We have been wrong.  Life is fair.  We enjoy it through no innate ability of our own, not through our own goodness, good work, great thinking, or strict legal adherence.  The fact that we live in all kinds of sin, along with the 100% of all others being sinful, in corrupt systems, and with a long record of atrocities, the great wonder is that we know anything of goodness and loving kindness.  We find joy, peace, patience, kindness, and all that, not because we worked for it, legislated it, and made it so, but because God’s light outshines our deepest darkness.  This case against life being unfair may include lots of historical and experiential evidence, but that case has already been settled for good.  Love won.  Love wins.  The tragedy of human history provides more insight about us than about God.  When the final exam comes, the history we studied and crafted as an epic tragedy is, really, a comedy of Divine Ecstasy.  Life is fair, Bubba.  Life is fair.  Amen.

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany VI, Year C
February 13, 2022
 
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
 
A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
 
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
 
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
 
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
 
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
 
Joyce Kilmer, a fellow Episcopalian wrote that old chestnut of a poem in 1913.  Tragically, he was killed five years later in World War I.  Though nothing else he wrote is ever read, this poem is one that I was forced to memorize and recite as a school kid in Georgia.  Later, as Boy Scout, I backpacked in the Joyce Kilmer National Forest in western North Carolina. In the late 1930s, Kilmer poem and tree lovers set aside a wilderness that timber barons had never touched.  It is a gorgeous place with many three and four-hundred old trees, groaning under the weight of longevity.  Kilmer never made it to North Carolina, he wrote Trees in New Jersey.
 
Due respect to Kilmer, and to trees, the poem is not well regarded in literary circles.  While it has quotable nuggets, the poem combines sing song couplets with mixed personified metaphor and sappy sentimentality.  As such, Kilmer’s other memorialized legacy is an annual Bad Poetry contest at Columbia University.  You may, of course, draw your own conclusions as explaining art kind of ruins it.
 
The thing Kilmer does capture is the large place trees occupy in our natural, physical, and metaphysical consciousness.  Trees embody so many things: deep roots, long-term growth, rhythms of time and seasons, bearing fruit, and even when dead, providing wood for shelter, and fuel for fire.  In an interview on NPR, ecologist, Suzanne Simard, summarized a number of peer reviewed studies saying: “Trees are [in fact] social creatures that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans.  Trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain.”  She goes on to explain that trees send messages of stress and danger as well as working cooperatively to share light and nutrients.  Natural scientists are give that cellular explanation to what Kilmer, however awkwardly, observes.
 
Trees point to Holy presence too.  The earliest of God stories tells of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, right there in the center Eden.  The earliest God stories people tell take place in a land where trees show them the places where water flows, food is plentiful, and life can flourish.  In a hot climate without air conditioning, shade is more than desirable; it is necessary for survival.  Not surprisingly, we hear all kinds of tree stories in Hebrew poetry. The very first Psalm, number one in the Hebrew Hymnal intones:
 
Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked…
Their delight is in the law of the Lord…
 
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither;
everything they do shall prosper.
 
In his poetic work, the Prophet Jeremiah borrows from Psalm 1 saying:  
 
Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
 
They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
 
Trees are not just nice images, they are living examples of thriving, abundant life.  Like most great teachers, they do not give advice.  They just show us how to live.
 
And yet, even massive, thriving trees are not eternal, at least in the form we call tree.  We have a clear example in the front yard of Emmanuel Church.  The great Emmanuel White Oak, weathered three centuries, sent out seeds for who knows how many other White Oaks, created tons of biomass as rich soil for other life, provided food for birds, bears, deer, and ultimately, people too.  That great oak is now a shell of what it once was, but it is not finished.  In time, it will take on new forms of matter and energy, no longer what it once was, but part of what is and is to be.  There the Oak stands, not explaining anything, rather, showing us life even in death when we are willing to look past the surface of what we see.
 
I am not going all Neo-Celtic Druid here.  I am rooting us in context for the person and work Jesus.  Having spent some time as a carpenter, he knows his trees.  But, when he gives his sermon we hear today, he draws into a new way of framing how we see things versus the way things are.  His people, like us people, tend to equate apparent wealth, cool stuff, happiness, and status with some sort of divine reward (#blessed).  Jesus reveals that our way of seeing is incomplete, and wrong side out.  Instead, Jesus looks points to the fringes, the messes, and the gaping wounds.  Where there is poverty of all kinds, hunger for love, material needs, grief, and ridicule, he says, that is where God gets busy. 
 
[The political among us might call this radical egalitarianism.  The literary among us might call this foreshadowing.  The theological among us might call this a theology of the cross.  Whatever we call it, Jesus calls us to the see the forest, not the trees.  We are all interconnected.  We are part of a larger whole.  We are all a mixed bag of woe and blessing.  Jesus tells us to beware of false perception, shallow roots, and material assumptions – to beware of the narrow view from wherever we sit.
 
On this eve of Valentine’s day, beware the scourge of sentimental couplets, heart shaped chocolates, or greeting card sentimentality that commodifies love as a single expression or fleeting feeling.
 
God is love.  The whole miraculously birthed, divinely present, teaching, preaching, healing, reviled, scandalized, arrested, tried, and crucified Jesus is love.  The resurrected, living, present, and eternal Jesus is love.  The wildly creative and active Holy Spirit is love.]
 
In Jesus day, the Romans were well known and much feared deforesters.  They ravaged resources to build their ships of empire.  They left behind dead branches as signs of their destruction, and when it came time to deliver the final blow, they fashioned crude crosses of dead wood to torture and kill all who stood in their way.  For all the world, they looked like they were the winners.
 
And yet, one such set of branches, the detritus of perceived dominance, was fashioned into a cross for Jesus of Nazareth.  On Good Friday, the blood of love mingled with the dead wood of a cross and trickled down into the soil.  And that crude instrument of death was transformed into a new Tree: the tree of eternal life.  No longer a sign of death, that tree has sprouted branches, seeded new lives, and stood in front of us to show us that what we think we see is not all there is.
 
Kilmer was right.
 
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
 
Amen.