How Do you Find Peace and Joy in These Challenging Days? Believe it or Not, Trees Point the Way

To be honest, I’m kinda surprised.   Every day, Monday through Friday, I broadcast on Facebook Live, a walk on the labyrinth right behind our sanctuary.  And go figure, folks actually watch it.  In fact, way more folks watch those walks than watch this worship, sometimes 3 or even one time, 10 times as many.   I don’t know.  Maybe that has to do with the fact they only have to hear me talk there for about six minutes!  

And if you’ve been one of those folks that watch those walks, you’ll know when I get to the center of the labyrinth, I take a moment to look around.   And as I’ve done so, one thing I see in that look around always captures my attention.   And every time it does, just seeing it gives me a little bit of awe, along with a sense of comfort, even peace.  I think I notice it more now because I realize.  That thing I see each walk gets more attention in the Bible, after God and people, than any other living thing.  You’ll find it on the first page of the Bible and on the last page.  You’ll find it in the very first Psalm and the first page of the New Testament.   Every major event of the Bible has this living thing in some way connected to it. 

As cool as that is, this living thing shows up in all those places, because God knows it has power.  It has power to connect you more deeply to God, to each other, to the world around you.  It has power to even give you a profound sense of peace and hope and joy even in the worst of these days.   So, where can you find this living thing that has such power?   In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Genesis 1:29-31, 2:7-9,2:15-17

Have you guessed it?  Have you guessed what living thing carries such power that you find mentions of them everywhere in the Bible?  What I just read probably gives you a pretty good idea.   The living thing, beyond people, that gets more mention than anything else in the Bible is trees.   But now that you know that, so what?  

Sure, it gives you the right answer to a Bible trivia question.  But what does it do for you beyond that?   What does it matter that at the beginning of the whole story, the key choice that the first human beings face is choosing between two trees?   It matters a lot.  In fact, in that choice, you not only find the way to a life of peace and joy, of a life that is truly life.   In that choice, you find also what leads you away from that life.  You find what lies at the heart of the brokenness and pain of the human condition.     

But before you get to that choice, you need to first understand just why God focuses on trees in the first place.  Trees don’t just a central place in the Biblical story.    Trees have a central place in your story, in the whole story of this planet. 

Living on this planet, we take it for granted that stuff lives, from plants to bugs to our pets to us.  But as far as we know, all that living stuff, all of it exists nowhere else in the universe except here.  Sure, we guess something living must be out there.  But we haven’t found it.   We have found nothing else alive, not even something microscopic, anywhere else but this planet.   But on this planet, sheesh.  Life happens everywhere, even under our fingernails.   And in the Bible, when God wants to focus on the plants that lie at the center of all that life, God focuses on trees.  And that makes sense.

Right now, wherever you are, you are breathing trees.  Up until a few hundred years ago, no human being got that.  We had no idea where the stuff we breathe even came from.  One idea is it came from rocks.  People saw mist rising off the rocks and thought.  Oh, that’s where it comes from.  But if you talked to any scientist 300 years ago and said that trees were powering every moving thing on the planet, they might have laughed at you.  But go figure, it’s true.  In fact, you likely learned about that in elementary school.  But do you get what that means?   If every human being died tomorrow on this planet, trees wouldn’t be bothered a bit.   If every tree died on the planet tomorrow, every one of us would die soon after.  

So, when God talks about planting a tree of life, God isn’t just giving you a nice image.  God is telling you something profoundly true.   In fact, right inside you right now, you have a sort of tree.   Until recently, scientists weren’t able to really grasp what the inside of our lungs looked like.  But now we know.  This is what they look like.  

 Does that look like anything you’ve seen before?

And in this scripture, and in the wonders of these trees that surround us everywhere, God is telling you something absolutely, crucially important.   Everything is connected to everything else.   There is no such thing as independence anywhere, in nature, and even among us.

If we didn’t realize it before we sure realize it now.  This crisis has taught us just how interdependent we are.   Every day now we realize how many thousands of folks we depend upon to simply live, not just the folks who check us out at the grocery store or who deliver those groceries to our door.  We depend on the thousands growing it, picking it, packaging it, and then driving or flying all that stuff to us.  

And that’s where that other tree comes in, the tree that God warned Adam about.  What makes that tree so bad?   What’s wrong with knowing the difference between good and evil?

Years ago, two writers, JohnEldredge and Brent Curtis shared an insight that answered that very question.  Eldredge and Curtis wrote this: “Satan’s seduction of our heart always comes in the form of a story that offers us greater control through knowing good and evil rather than the unknowns of relationship.”  And why do we want that control?  Why do we want to know?  Well, because with relationship, it feels like you can’t really know.  Instead you have to trust, and trust can feel scary.

But in that tree and the command not to eat of it, God was asking the human beings exactly that question.  Do you trust me?  Do you trust me enough to believe what I tell you about the tree?   Are you willing to depend on me, on the wisdom I’m sharing with you, even if you don’t completely understand it?  

And these days, we’ve had to do a lot of trusting.  We’ve had to trust that when folks tell us we need to socially distance or wear masks or wash our hands we need to do that.  Now we may not completely understand all the reasons behind that.  But we simply trust that they’re telling us those things to save our lives, to save the lives of our loved ones, to save the lives of everyone.    And trust, more then you realize, holds everything together.  Trust holds marriages together. Trust holds families together. Trust holds nations together.  Now to a large extent, trust holds the whole world together.  But if you know the story, Adam and Eve didn’t trust.  They didn’t trust this God, God who had given them everything.   They wanted control.  They wanted to be the ones in charge. 

And this desire for control, this unwillingness to trust God or each other or even our very selves this lack of trust messes the world up all over the place.  And why do people not trust?  In the end, it comes down to fear.   Adam and Eve didn’t trust God because they feared.  They feared that God was holding out on them, that God didn’t want the best for them, that God didn’t really love them.  

And ever since, people have been caught up in that same fear. They have believed that same lie.   You can’t trust God.  You can’t trust anyone really.   But here’s the painful truth.   No can get away from trust.   You’re depending right now on the trees outside your window for the very air you breathe.   You’re literally living on that trust right now.  Every day, you trust countless things outside of your control just to keep you alive.

As scary as this coronavirus is, it can obscure the miracles of protection that happen every day inside your body.   Literally every day, your body kills off something that could harm or kill you and you don’t even know it.  Your antibodies along with other cells notice it, attack it, and get rid of it, and you’re none the wiser.  And fairly soon, at the most a year or two, with a little help from science, your antibodies will figure out this virus and protect you from it too.   But right now, those antibodies are already protecting you.  Every day, in countless ways, you live on trust.  And you can do that because the God who created this world is trustworthy.  You can trust, because this God does really love you. This God loves you more than you could ever imagine.   And you know that because of a tree too.

About 400 years ago, the extraordinary poet, George Herbert wrote a poem called The Sacrifice.  And in that poem, Herbert, created a work where he imagined Jesus talking to us, helping us see the suffering he willingly endured for us on the cross.  And in the middle of that poem, Herbert wrote these lines.    

O all you who pass by, behold and see;

Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;

The tree of life to all, except to me:

In Jesus, God gave up the tree of life, so he might give that tree back to you.   In Jesus, God gave up everything so you might have everything, so you might know this God does love you, even more than life itself.   And because everything is connected, that sacrifice, that gift, has changed everything for you.  It means, right now, if you are alone in your home, you are not alone.  You are never alone.  You are always connected to God, and through God, to those around you, to even the trees outside your window.  And you live in a world shaped and ordered ultimately by that love, a love you can trust, a love that has even defeated death.  And as you trust in that love, you will see it more and more.   You will behold it all around you, in the folks walking on the street, in the words of scripture that nourish you, and even in the trees that surround you.   And as you behold it, you will discover God filling you more peace, with more joy, with more love that you could have imagined possible.  So, trust in the love, for as you do you will discover life, a life more abundant, even in these days, than you could ever imagine.