Like a Tree Beside the Waters
By Rev. Mary Luti
January 28, 2007
The Fourth Sunday After Epiphany
Lessons: Genesis 2: 4-9, 15 Psalm 1: 1-3 Revelation 22:1-6a
That tree that the kids painted in Margaret Jewett Hall wasn’t meant just to spruce up a drab wall. That tree defines their worship space. It marks the spot where our children sing, tell the old, old story, and pray—often for us. There God comes to meet them, and there they open themselves to God. Lately the children have also been welcoming us grown-ups to the tree to learn with them about the faith we share. We have enjoyed several “multi-generational” formation hours in that space, singing, playing, listening, and learning, all ages together. In this way, this Tree of Life is also presiding over an increasingly integrated and more whole community.
The tree in Margaret Jewett Hall is not the only tree near which the church gathers. For as long as we has been meeting on this corner, the great Kentucky Yellowwoods in the Garden Street yard have been as much the symbol of our church as the Shem Drowne cockerel on the tower. Under the Yellowwoods, we sip lemonade on summer days, swap the sad and the glad stories of our lives, and watch our kids clamber up from childhood into the future of God.
In the Beginning, the Bible says, God planted a garden. And at its heart God set the Tree of Life. And from that first tree in Paradise, to the old trees on our lawn, to the new tree on the wall, we biblical people have always been tree people. We cannot tell the story of God’s love without speaking of trunks and roots, vines and branches, leaves and fruit. The oaks of Mamre, the root of Jesse, the burning bush, the olive, the mulberry, the willow, the cedar, and the fig—as we learn their names in all the stories of our tradition, we come also to know the God whose simple presence (as the psalmist says) makes trees everywhere clap their hands for joy.
And so it’s not surprising that when God drew even closer to us in Jesus, his story also unfolded tree by tree. We remember that Zacchaeus became his disciple while perched in a sycamore tree. We recall that Nathaniel was called to go with him when he was sitting under a fig. We still tell each other the story of the mustard seed that grew into a great tree whose branches hosted all the birds of the air—no matter who they were, or where they found themselves on the journey. The fruit tree that would not bear fruit, Jesus said in another story, need not be cut down, but commended to the care of the Gardener for yet another year—a mercy (we suspect) that was probably extended the year after that as well, and the year after that one too… Jesus, we proclaim, was hanged on a tree. They buried him in a garden full of trees. (When he was raised and appeared to Mary, she even thought he was a forester!) And Revelation tells us that in the End, when God re-creates all things, a tree will straddle the River of Life and produce fruit in every season, and its leaves will be for the healing of the nations.
This morning we rejoice in two special events at First Church. A few minutes ago 24 people became members of the congregation. And later, in Margaret Jewett Hall, the whole community will eat together, and we’ll conduct the Annual Meeting at which we’ll report on our life during 2006, elect new leaders, make other decisions, and adopt a budget for 2007.
What a splendid day this is for this congregation that we love so much!
If we’re not careful, however, a celebratory day like today might become a bit of a trap. We could slip into imagining the church to be like a club or an organization that you join, and to which you pay your dues. Or we might start thinking of it like a corporation that annually transacts its legal business. Our attention today could all too easily fall on our level of activity, our programmatic successes, our “productivity.” Or we could focus on numbers—numbers of members, numbers of slots filled on the committee slate, numbers on the budget in red ink or black.
But the Bible tells us a different story about ourselves. We are not a club, nor an organization concerned with bottom lines and the size and success of the franchise. We are first a people—a people set apart. We are also a family, God’s daughters and sons. And an assembly, a holy gathering for God’s praise and purposes. And we are, the Bible says in many places, a tree, a cedar, an evergreen, God’s own planting.
Not only, then, does God gather us under trees for shade and protection; not only do God’s trees welcome us, their fruits nourish us, and their leaves heal us; not only are trees parables for us of God’s patient mercy and faithfulness; not only are they signs of the times and places of epiphany and encounter; not only does our life with God and with each other unfold tree by storied tree—we ourselves are a tree. The church is a tree planted by God and in God, who is the living stream that feeds us. And when our roots drink deeply from that stream, we are a tree whose leaves do not wither and whose fruit never fails, a tree capable of welcoming, shading, feeding, and healing, planted at the heart of the garden of this world to offer life.
Today we have not signed up 24 new people on the dotted line. We haven’t done anything, but God has! God has grafted 24 new branches into the sturdy trunk of our tree. God is making new life circulate to us all by means of these new branches. And now by God’s grace there is even more room here for many more birds of every kind to flock, to feed, and to rest.
We are not meeting after worship to cast votes, fill committees, and discuss budgets. We are meeting to marvel at and give thanks for all the ways God provides for our health and wholeness, watering, pruning, and dressing us, so that we might thrive, and so that we might give ourselves away.
In a world where great forests are clear-cut for profit, where ancient olives are bulldozed and torn up by the roots from a land called holy, and where human saplings are cut down by bullets on city streets, never to reach full stature, we rejoice today because in all that First Church is becoming, we are an image of and a witness to a great truth—namely, that in the face of all the life-destroying things that human may do on this earth, God stubbornly plants and cultivates trees, God does not give up cultivating life—like the life that is in us at First Church, life for the sake of the world. This is why we find today’s events so humbling, so encouraging, and so awesome.
In just a minute we are going to sing a hymn called “We who are now brought together.” It’s a hymn (some of you will be relieved to hear after so much tree-talk in our worship today) that does not mention trees even once! It’s a hymn based on the 17th century Puritan covenant we recited a little while ago when we were receiving our new members. As I said, it has not a word about trees in it, but it has plenty of words about life, about promises, about walking together, about loving one another, and about Jesus Christ, who lives at the center of our faith, inviting all.
As we sing it now, I ask you to earnestly entrust to God this ancient yet ever-new planting of the Spirit, First Church in Cambridge. As you sing it, I ask you to give thanks wholeheartedly for the gift of yesterday’s faithfulness, 372 years of it! Give hopeful thanks also for the gift of tomorrow’s faithfulness, for the good work God begins, God does not forsake—we can be sure of God’s sustenance forever! And I ask you to be humbly grateful for the faithfulness of this church now, today, just as we are, and as I hope we ever shall be—growing in all the ways of the gospel, “so near as God shall give us grace.”