"The Healing Tree"

Revelation 21:10, 21:22-22:5

¹⁰And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.

²²I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. ²³And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. ²⁴The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. ²⁵Its gates will never be shut by day-and there will be no night there. ²⁶People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. ²⁷But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life.

¹Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ²through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ³Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; ⁴they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. ⁵And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

Sermon:

When I was a child, I had a bizarre habit:  I liked to talk to trees.  I could be found off in the corner of the yard having a whole conversation with my favorite leafy friend.  It gets stranger…I haven’t yet told you why I talked to trees.  I wasn’t talking just to the trees, you see.  I was actually talking to the elves who lived in the trees.  (Perhaps I was influenced by some Keebler fellows.)  The smoothed-over places of hollowed-out trees were the doors, naturally.  So I would talk to invisible elves in those trees, and I would even make little leaf boats and stick houses for them, leaving them presents under an oak tree.

Trees still stir something in me.  Pine trees are actually a large part of why I love it so much here, except of course when they are blowing out yellow pollen like exhaust from an old pickup truck.  John Muir, that great American naturalist, captured my fascination well when he spoke of trees after a storm saying,

“A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.”

You see in all that time I spent talking to elves in trees, I always felt that those trees spoke back.  And I kind of feel like they still do: speaking of things that last, of deep roots and constancy, of watchfulness and resilience. 

Which is why I adore this passage in Revelation.  If there were ever a tree that elves would like to inhabit (ha), it would be this one.  This tree in Revelation is a part of God’s vision for a new heaven and a new earth: where the God’s glory replaces the need for the sun, where barbed wire and concrete walls give way to a city with perpetually open doors, where the polluted waters of our world instead flow crystal clear, and where the leaves of a tree bring healing to all nations.

But as we heard this morning, this is not the first tree in scripture.  There was another tree—a quite opposite one—in Genesis, where Adam and Eve succumbed to the temptation of making themselves equal with God.  Having every single thing they could possibly need, they did not go to that tree for a little snack.  They went to fill their craving for knowledge of what humans were never meant to understand.  They went craving power.

We live – all of us – between these two trees: one of self- destructive greed for power, the other of healing and peace.  Between these trees, there is poverty and injustice, hunger, racism and war.  There are stories of genocide and slavery, of crucifixions and despair.  In our own time between the trees, there are bombings and explosions, and our own private sorrows that never make the news. 

But we are not left alone in this troubling forest between these two trees.  Between the trees, there is also the promise of a covenant and freedom.  There is Jesus: God breaking into this anxious world.  There is grace poured out on a cross, saying once and for all that though death is a reality, it will never win.

Because, more than anything else, between these two trees there is resurrection.  Easter happened.  And it did not just happen once, but Easter comes over and over again as God rains down new life like healing leaves gracefully falling from a tree. 

Like me as a child wandering through the backyard and deciding which tree to go have a chat with, we have to make a choice.  We have to choose a tree, and we only have two options: the first, or the second.

If we choose the first, we are choosing power and knowledge, and with it sin and pride and self-destruction.  We are choosing to put ourselves before all of the good creation God has made, and to make God in our image rather than be made in God’s image.  We are choosing to perpetuate cycles of ego and status, and to only believe in what we can completely understand, leaving no room to imagine another person’s perspective, much less to imagine the ways God is already working in this world.

But if we choose the second, that tree we cannot yet fully see, much less climb to escape our troubles, we choose life.  We choose resurrection, the imaginative trust that God is not yet done with this world.  We choose the promise that God is already bringing healing to the nations, even as the sinful pull of that first tree is strong, and that God brings this healing through ordinary people like us.

Whichever tree we choose, we will move towards: either backwards in old paths of selfishness and worshipping only what we can see and buy, or forwards in new paths of resurrection and healing. 

So, what is your choice?  What is mine?  The tree of that first sin, or the tree of eternal hope?  I really want to be able to choose that second tree: the healing tree.  And I think you probably really want to as well.  But we need one another to make that choice.  We need one another to embody God’s vision of a world united and made new.  We need one another to choose healing over hatred and life for God’s creation over our own need to consume. 

Let’s choose the healing tree together today.  And then, like God choosing to bring resurrection over and over again, let’s make that choice again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, until the day comes when there will be no more need to choose: no more night or pain or sin, when all that remains will be light, healing and life.  Oh, and a tree.  There will always be a tree.  Alleluia!  Amen.