Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, October 20, 2024.

… It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us. (“Fall,” by Edward Hirsch)

I’m appreciating this month’s worship theme, “Trees,” and its invitation to notice and be more aware of our quiet green companions, and the part they play in our lives. How trees, as physical beings and also as symbols for life, can help us to be connected to the quiet and often invisible life that’s flowing around us. To say nothing of the Spirit, moving in our midst.

Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t there something about this season that pulls us down to earth, invites us to lean into the shadows as well as the light, reminds us that life is fragile and fleeting? It’s no accident that in two weeks we celebrate the days of All Saints and All Souls, when we remember those who have died. We remember that those Christian holy days were layered over the pagan holy day of Samhain, which comes midway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It’s a turning point, and this time of year, you feel it, don’t you?

After the bright, airy, high-flying days of summer, fall pushes us down to earth. Reminds us that we are mortal, formed from the earth, and to the earth we shall return. It causes to remember that our days are numbered, so, to wonder, how are we going to spend them? To ask, “How will I be of use? How will I savor and celebrate this life I have been given?

One of the promises of religion is that it helps you cultivate a depth of spirit and soul, so you can hold both the joy and the sorrow; can live in the light and the shadow. We have rituals—simple ones like lighting candles and naming our joys and sorrows, and yearly ones like All Souls and Christmas and Easter that help us to mark different seasons and the diversity of life, its ebb and its flow.

Religion, like poetry, like art, like music, is powerful and transformative because it invites us below the surface; its language and stories are full of symbol and metaphor. Which is meant to help us apprehend and encounter and feel and maybe even talk about these mysteries are hard to explain or describe. 

Those words Dag Hammarskjöld wrote in his journal describe, for me, what a spiritual experience, or the presence of God, is like:

In the point of rest at the center of our being, 
we encounter a world 
where all things are at rest in the same way. 
Then a tree becomes a mystery, 
a cloud a revelation, 
each person a cosmos 
of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. 

Spirituality and religion are meant to bring us to that still point where we can sense there is something more moving in our midst. In us and around us. A Force. A Source. A Spirit. Inviting us to let go a bit, so we can sense, so we can trust that we are part of something larger than ourselves. A Love that will not let us go.

Through one of her characters Alice Walker wrote, “Tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for God to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.”

Isn’t this why you come to church? To share in a deeper experience. To be part of a shared story. To be seen for who you are. And to see others in their beautiful complexity. And when you do this, how interesting life becomes! When you really try to see a tree, or a patch of earth or sky, or a person, you enter into relationship with it. You understand there’s way more that you don’t know.

A tree is a mystery, isn’t it? It’s this strong, solid, living thing, and it’s more than that. We can see trees in all kinds of ways, as providers, as companions, as friends, as symbols. 

Michael Pollan writes about the metaphors we use for trees, and how we humans, out of a need for meaning, have put a lot of weight onto those tender branches, and how, over time, our metaphors for trees have changed. He wrote,

“Every time we think we’ve figured out what a tree really is—the habitation of gods, a commodity, part and parcel of transcendent nature, component of the forest ecosystem—it turns out we’ve simply come up with a temporarily handy new description of it. Still, our metaphors matter.”

Pollan senses that the old metaphors are wearing out, and wonders what new metaphors for trees might be. He writes:

“Think of the tree as earth’s breathing apparatus, an organ that helps regulate the planet’s atmosphere by exhaling fresh oxygen and inhaling the carbon that animals, decay, and civilization spew into it. The tree, under this new description, is not merely a member of the local forest ecosystem (where we’ve known for some time that it exerts considerable influence on the local life, soil, and even climate); it’s also a vital organ in a global system more intricate and interdependent than we ever realized. Earth may not be a spaceship but an organism, and trees may be its lungs.”

If we can come to see trees and our planet this way, Pollan says, “it will not longer make sense to see ourselves as being outside nature, or even to thing of trees as being outside culture. Indeed, the whole inside/outside metaphor might wither away, and that would be a good thing.”

This week one of you sent me words that echo this understanding, from Marysia Miernowska: “Our veins echo the patterns of rivers, branches, and root systems. We are not a part of nature. We are nature.”

On the first Sunday of this month, I offered you an image from Psalm 1, which says good and faithful people are

  …like trees
    planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
    and their leaves do not wither.

I like that image, a lot, and find it a helpful and inspiring one. It’s how I want to be—well-watered, strong, flexible, fruitful.

And today I want to offer you another image, another metaphor for this human life, also from the Hebrew Bible. This one, of another kind of plant, is from the book of the prophet Isaiah:

All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades
when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever. (Isaiah 40:6-8)

I think I’d rather be like a tree, growing by the water, than a patch of dry grass! But Isaiah’s words ring true, don’t they? Life is fleeting. We can pretend that it’s not, but just take a walk through a cemetery, reading the headstones, or look at the obituaries, or belong to a faith community for any time at all, or just be part of any family, and you will see that none us are going to make it out of here alive. That those you love are mortal. And so are you.

John Donne, the English poet and priest put it this way:

“No one is an island, entire of itself; every person is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…

Any one`s death diminishes me, because I am involved in humankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

We are part of the human family. So of course we feel the pain and loss a death brings. And we are connected beyond the human plane. We are part of the dance of life that includes it all—creatures great and small, trees and grasses, sea and sky, sun and moon and stars above. 

The farmer and poet Wendell Berry wrote words that feel like a prayer for these days: “When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.”

The invitation is fall wholeheartedly into this life. To embrace these connections we share. To make our way through these days with gratitude for the struggle and the joy.

Let us be people who are grounded, rooted, down to earth. And let us be people ever reaching out: open to the Spirit, stretching toward each other, reaching for the stars.

Now and forever,

Amen.