Trees

​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.