The Forest or the Trees
September 07, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Genesis 2:4b-22, Acts 17:22-28
Today we begin the Season of Creation again. This church is a liturgical church: we observe liturgical seasons such as Advent, Lent, and Ordinary Time. Most of the liturgical seasons and holidays revolve around the life and ministry of Jesus: Advent, Lent, Christmas and Easter are obvious examples. Pentecost celebrates the Holy Spirit. The Season of Creation offers us an opportunity to reflect on God the Creator, and particularly to respond to honor God’s creation, as scripture does, and to respond to the biblical mandate to care for God’s creation.
The Season of Creation offers a theological opportunity to see nature as an additional text through which to learn about God. The reasoning behind this approach comes from Psalm 19, whose opening verses tell us: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world….” In other words, creation tells of the glory and character of God – continually creation is telling us about God, without words, yet the teaching is everywhere. The theological challenge of the Season of Creation is to see what we can learn of God from God’s creation.
In the last two years I have found this to be fascinating: last year, when we studied Oceans and I learned that deep oceans and shallow oceans are very different modes of ocean life, I was reminded to go deeper in my spiritual journey and that going deep creates a different kind of spiritual experience. When we studied Grasses, I learned that grasses are unique in that they continually grow from the roots, instead of from the ends, and I was reminded that where we root ourselves determines how we will grow. We are rediscovering what people in Biblical times took for granted – the earth teaches us about God.
Two years ago, the Season of Creation rocked my theological world as we were studying trees. Since trees have something to do with forests, let me quote briefly from that sermon. Eric Singsaas, our church’s webmaster and a member of UWSP’s biology department told me, “As far as I am concerned, the #1 cool thing about trees is that they are literally made from air. Invisible CO2 enters the leaves, is made into sugars, and woven into cellulose (another type of sugar). Invisible “air” turns into something as massive as a white pine or redwood tree. They are useful for food and shelter for us as well as lots of other creatures.”
This is amazing to me. And it is really helping me understand the importance of biology in understanding theology. Trees are made of air. Trees take in the air and God transforms them in this process – bringing into being what didn’t exist before: sugars, cellulose, leaves. God makes them out of something else into what they are supposed to be. And coolest of all – relationships are fundamental to creation, because as Rabbi Arthur Waskow wrote in our Call to Worship two years ago: “we breathe out what the trees breathe in, we breath in what the trees breathe out. Together we breathe each other into life.” In God’s creation, we need each other. Even those of us who are different from one another – trees and humans – need each other. It’s not obvious at first that we are part of one another, and yet, in God’s creation we all have a place. And part of who we each are is being in relationship with one another… So we begin to learn from trees that transformation is integral to the way God’s world works. And we begin to learn that the miraculous is part of the ordinary in God’s world. So perhaps God really can change human hearts.
As I reflected upon trees, I began to realize that indeed in God’s creation, the extraordinary is the ordinary way. Trees, every day, every moment, take in air and transform it into leaves, branches and trunks. Transformation is the central process in creation. When we think about it, perhaps the resurrection of Jesus was intended to reveal this truth to us: that God is constantly in the business of transformation, of bringing new life, changed life, from endings.
And in the forest, we learn about the transformative power of community. Remember the old saying, about failing to see the forest for the trees? It’s usually meant to describe someone who is so focused on details, like trees, that they fail to see the big picture, such as a forest. And indeed, many of us oversimplify the forest to be merely a group of trees.
But in fact there is much more to the forest than trees, although trees are the distinctive feature of forests. As I think about my childhood summers spent in the woods of the Pocono Mountains, I remember the rocks in the woods, and the lichen, the small wintergreen plants, the starry moss, the lichen, the poison ivy and the white waxy Indian pipes. I think about the birds, whose calls my grandmother could recognize, and the chipmunks, deer, bears, and rattlesnakes, snapping turtles and newts. Recently I’ve learned that forests aren’t only an eco-system unto themselves, but they make a contribution to the greater ecosystem of which they are a part – forests make a huge contribution to storing carbon in our world. And while most of us rightly cherish the richness and grandeur of old growth forests, new growth stores carbon at ever increasing rates, so planting new forests creates new opportunities for carbon sequestration. And interestingly, trees that are cut and used as wood products continue to store carbon – it is only as trees are burned or dissolved into lakes, rivers and oceans that they release the stored carbon. Thus, forests have a significant impact on the health of all of creation.
When I first thought about trees and realized how they embody the transformative processes which are at the heart of the universe and that they characterize the dynamic nature of life in God’s world, I thought about individual people. I thought about how God can transform lives, and that change is the one constant in life. I realized that the extraordinary process of transformation is God’s ordinary work with people.
But this year, I realized that I failed to see the forest for the trees. When I was thinking about individual trees and individual people, I failed to consider the even greater dynamic of people in community, and especially the faith community which welcomes the transformative power of God. I realized that the richness and diversity of life in community is like the richness and biodiversity of forest life. I realized that the church, like the forest, is a community of life, death and transformation. I realized that the church, like the forest, is constantly including people who are growing, people who are thriving, and people who are dying. I realized that just as you sometimes need to harvest a few trees for the health of the forest, sometimes we need to end a program for the health of the church. Alla Renee Bozarth says it so well in these lines from her poem in Life Prayers: “An ancient forest is always in a dynamic state, half of its body actively growing, half of it actively dying—these are the same half! The other half is always eating and being eaten. Trees live for two thousand years and then are food for as long. This is perpetual and holy communion.”
I realized that the forest and the church are alike in that diversity breeds vitality. We don’t all agree here – we are Democrats, Republicans, Greens and independents. We are single people, families, widows, and couples without children. We’re gay and straight, young and old. It’s life-giving that we don’t all agree and that we’re not all the same – diversity nourishes vitality.
And, just as the forest literally breathes life into the communities that surround it, by capturing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, so too can a vibrant church impact the community around it. The Church through history has breathed new life into society by fighting for civil rights, against child labor, for an end to violence within families, and throughout society. We breathe life into our world, and in the process we are enlivened as well.
Although 1/3 of world is forested, deforestation a major threat to the life of this planet and I would argue that movement away from spiritual communities is equally deadly to the collective human spirit. Communities of compassion and courage, communities of spirit and song, communities of vulnerability, mutuality, and hope invigorate the world around them, as well as creating transformation for the individuals within them. The world needs the church, as the earth needs the forest. And faith practiced in community has richness and benefits that are substantively different than faith lived individually, just as a forest is far different than a single tree. Nonetheless, perhaps the decline of the church in the modern world will create new opportunities for growth, just as the heat of a forest fire releases some seeds that wouldn’t otherwise grow. But no one lights a forest fire for that reason, and we have to remember that while a forest fire creates new opportunities for growth, it is growth that comes at the expense of the forest that once lived. Letting the church decline, and the vitality of our own connections to the church diminish, may eventually create conditions in which new forms of faith communities will grow, but we and the world around us will have lost much in the meantime.
Wangari Maathai was the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner – she is a woman who changed the landscape of Kenya by first planting trees herself, one seed at a time, and eventually planting a movement to plant trees. She and the Green Belt Movement have been reforesting deforested areas of Kenya, and now the Green Belt Movement has begun the Peace Tent Initiative to facilitate healing and reconciliation following ethnic violence after the December 2007 elections in Kenya. In her case, planting forests and planting communities of reconciliation became part of the same movement.
Our church’s Session is realizing the power of relationships that are built among folks in the church, and realizing that vital community is more than just people who spend a couple of hours together on Sunday. We, too, are a reforestation project, planting new initiatives for community. Let’s find ways to connect to one another, to be part of each other’s web of life, to reach across generations and life situations, and get to know each other. Let’s be a forest together – folks who are being transformed, transforming and nourishing each other, and breathing life into the whole world in the process. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Genesis 2:4b-22, Acts 17:22-28
Today we begin the Season of Creation again. This church is a liturgical church: we observe liturgical seasons such as Advent, Lent, and Ordinary Time. Most of the liturgical seasons and holidays revolve around the life and ministry of Jesus: Advent, Lent, Christmas and Easter are obvious examples. Pentecost celebrates the Holy Spirit. The Season of Creation offers us an opportunity to reflect on God the Creator, and particularly to respond to honor God’s creation, as scripture does, and to respond to the biblical mandate to care for God’s creation.
The Season of Creation offers a theological opportunity to see nature as an additional text through which to learn about God. The reasoning behind this approach comes from Psalm 19, whose opening verses tell us: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world….” In other words, creation tells of the glory and character of God – continually creation is telling us about God, without words, yet the teaching is everywhere. The theological challenge of the Season of Creation is to see what we can learn of God from God’s creation.
In the last two years I have found this to be fascinating: last year, when we studied Oceans and I learned that deep oceans and shallow oceans are very different modes of ocean life, I was reminded to go deeper in my spiritual journey and that going deep creates a different kind of spiritual experience. When we studied Grasses, I learned that grasses are unique in that they continually grow from the roots, instead of from the ends, and I was reminded that where we root ourselves determines how we will grow. We are rediscovering what people in Biblical times took for granted – the earth teaches us about God.
Two years ago, the Season of Creation rocked my theological world as we were studying trees. Since trees have something to do with forests, let me quote briefly from that sermon. Eric Singsaas, our church’s webmaster and a member of UWSP’s biology department told me, “As far as I am concerned, the #1 cool thing about trees is that they are literally made from air. Invisible CO2 enters the leaves, is made into sugars, and woven into cellulose (another type of sugar). Invisible “air” turns into something as massive as a white pine or redwood tree. They are useful for food and shelter for us as well as lots of other creatures.”
This is amazing to me. And it is really helping me understand the importance of biology in understanding theology. Trees are made of air. Trees take in the air and God transforms them in this process – bringing into being what didn’t exist before: sugars, cellulose, leaves. God makes them out of something else into what they are supposed to be. And coolest of all – relationships are fundamental to creation, because as Rabbi Arthur Waskow wrote in our Call to Worship two years ago: “we breathe out what the trees breathe in, we breath in what the trees breathe out. Together we breathe each other into life.” In God’s creation, we need each other. Even those of us who are different from one another – trees and humans – need each other. It’s not obvious at first that we are part of one another, and yet, in God’s creation we all have a place. And part of who we each are is being in relationship with one another… So we begin to learn from trees that transformation is integral to the way God’s world works. And we begin to learn that the miraculous is part of the ordinary in God’s world. So perhaps God really can change human hearts.
As I reflected upon trees, I began to realize that indeed in God’s creation, the extraordinary is the ordinary way. Trees, every day, every moment, take in air and transform it into leaves, branches and trunks. Transformation is the central process in creation. When we think about it, perhaps the resurrection of Jesus was intended to reveal this truth to us: that God is constantly in the business of transformation, of bringing new life, changed life, from endings.
And in the forest, we learn about the transformative power of community. Remember the old saying, about failing to see the forest for the trees? It’s usually meant to describe someone who is so focused on details, like trees, that they fail to see the big picture, such as a forest. And indeed, many of us oversimplify the forest to be merely a group of trees.
But in fact there is much more to the forest than trees, although trees are the distinctive feature of forests. As I think about my childhood summers spent in the woods of the Pocono Mountains, I remember the rocks in the woods, and the lichen, the small wintergreen plants, the starry moss, the lichen, the poison ivy and the white waxy Indian pipes. I think about the birds, whose calls my grandmother could recognize, and the chipmunks, deer, bears, and rattlesnakes, snapping turtles and newts. Recently I’ve learned that forests aren’t only an eco-system unto themselves, but they make a contribution to the greater ecosystem of which they are a part – forests make a huge contribution to storing carbon in our world. And while most of us rightly cherish the richness and grandeur of old growth forests, new growth stores carbon at ever increasing rates, so planting new forests creates new opportunities for carbon sequestration. And interestingly, trees that are cut and used as wood products continue to store carbon – it is only as trees are burned or dissolved into lakes, rivers and oceans that they release the stored carbon. Thus, forests have a significant impact on the health of all of creation.
When I first thought about trees and realized how they embody the transformative processes which are at the heart of the universe and that they characterize the dynamic nature of life in God’s world, I thought about individual people. I thought about how God can transform lives, and that change is the one constant in life. I realized that the extraordinary process of transformation is God’s ordinary work with people.
But this year, I realized that I failed to see the forest for the trees. When I was thinking about individual trees and individual people, I failed to consider the even greater dynamic of people in community, and especially the faith community which welcomes the transformative power of God. I realized that the richness and diversity of life in community is like the richness and biodiversity of forest life. I realized that the church, like the forest, is a community of life, death and transformation. I realized that the church, like the forest, is constantly including people who are growing, people who are thriving, and people who are dying. I realized that just as you sometimes need to harvest a few trees for the health of the forest, sometimes we need to end a program for the health of the church. Alla Renee Bozarth says it so well in these lines from her poem in Life Prayers: “An ancient forest is always in a dynamic state, half of its body actively growing, half of it actively dying—these are the same half! The other half is always eating and being eaten. Trees live for two thousand years and then are food for as long. This is perpetual and holy communion.”
I realized that the forest and the church are alike in that diversity breeds vitality. We don’t all agree here – we are Democrats, Republicans, Greens and independents. We are single people, families, widows, and couples without children. We’re gay and straight, young and old. It’s life-giving that we don’t all agree and that we’re not all the same – diversity nourishes vitality.
And, just as the forest literally breathes life into the communities that surround it, by capturing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, so too can a vibrant church impact the community around it. The Church through history has breathed new life into society by fighting for civil rights, against child labor, for an end to violence within families, and throughout society. We breathe life into our world, and in the process we are enlivened as well.
Although 1/3 of world is forested, deforestation a major threat to the life of this planet and I would argue that movement away from spiritual communities is equally deadly to the collective human spirit. Communities of compassion and courage, communities of spirit and song, communities of vulnerability, mutuality, and hope invigorate the world around them, as well as creating transformation for the individuals within them. The world needs the church, as the earth needs the forest. And faith practiced in community has richness and benefits that are substantively different than faith lived individually, just as a forest is far different than a single tree. Nonetheless, perhaps the decline of the church in the modern world will create new opportunities for growth, just as the heat of a forest fire releases some seeds that wouldn’t otherwise grow. But no one lights a forest fire for that reason, and we have to remember that while a forest fire creates new opportunities for growth, it is growth that comes at the expense of the forest that once lived. Letting the church decline, and the vitality of our own connections to the church diminish, may eventually create conditions in which new forms of faith communities will grow, but we and the world around us will have lost much in the meantime.
Wangari Maathai was the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner – she is a woman who changed the landscape of Kenya by first planting trees herself, one seed at a time, and eventually planting a movement to plant trees. She and the Green Belt Movement have been reforesting deforested areas of Kenya, and now the Green Belt Movement has begun the Peace Tent Initiative to facilitate healing and reconciliation following ethnic violence after the December 2007 elections in Kenya. In her case, planting forests and planting communities of reconciliation became part of the same movement.
Our church’s Session is realizing the power of relationships that are built among folks in the church, and realizing that vital community is more than just people who spend a couple of hours together on Sunday. We, too, are a reforestation project, planting new initiatives for community. Let’s find ways to connect to one another, to be part of each other’s web of life, to reach across generations and life situations, and get to know each other. Let’s be a forest together – folks who are being transformed, transforming and nourishing each other, and breathing life into the whole world in the process. Amen.