[This was the last service we recorded in the Sanctuary, with no worshipers present.]
Siobhan Dowd had only published two novels for children before she died of breast cancer in 2006. Two other works were close enough to done to be published posthumously. But her greatest success was no more than an idea when she died, an outline really, for a work about a boy coming to terms with his mother’s terminal illness. Fellow author Patrick Ness took it up, completing “A Monster Calls” in 2011. It went on to win top British awards for both the writing and for Jim Kay’s illustrations, the first work to capture both awards in more than fifty years. Five years later, it would become a feature film.
The “monster” of the novel, the one that visits and intrudes into the life of the boy, Conor, is a giant anthropomorphic tree. Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien would recognize the monster as much like an “ent,” a species of sentient and mobile tree-creatures in that author’s imaginary world of Middle Earth.
Our trees do not walk, but it turns out they do talk. It has been over twenty years since ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered that trees were communicating with an assist from latticed fungi in the soil. Through this forest-wide web, if you will, they are able to communicate their needs and swap nutrients. Simard is clear that a forest is a cooperative system. All of those stories and myths about “the great mother tree” or “the great father tree,” found in indigenous cultures and science fiction, turn out to be more true than not.
This is uncomfortable for some of us. Our relationship with nature has largely been one of exploitation and sometimes wanton abuse. Nature herself is ordered in a cycle that includes predators and scavengers. The antelope eats the grass, the cheetah eats the antelope, etc. etc., on through the cycle of life. We don’t think the cheetah contemplates what the antelope is thinking, though we really don’t know. We do know that things like empathy and grief appear to exist in other species, despite our effort to distance ourselves, to pretend we are not creatues, our human exceptionalism as noxious as national exceptionalism, religious exceptionalism, even congregational exceptionalism.
“Wilbur the Pig” competing at the Blue Hill Fair might feature in a cute children’s story, but we still want our bacon.
The old adage of not being able to see the forest for the trees is about the ways we can focus on the microscopic and miss the macroscopic. But in our new way of seeing a forest, it is also a reminder of hidden connections and the tenacity of life, the resilience of life, the ways cooperation and what I dare to call love is hard-wired into all of creation.
Then there are the Pharisees as portrayed in today’s gospel reading. In reality, the Pharisees were not so bad. They understood that the Torah, already centuries old by the time of Jesus, needed interpretation in order to apply to new ways of living. They explored and sometimes embraced new ideas, like a form of postmortem existence, a resurrection, where our fidelity would be rewarded, where God would make right what seemed unjust in this world. These were ideas that found their way into Christianity as well.
Sadly, the Pharisees ended up in conflict with the Jesus movement, so they look pretty bad in scripture. But it is probably fair to say they were scrupulous in their observance of Hebrew religious law, even if it was re-interpreted for their time. In this, they would have been joined by the Scribes, those other frequent villains of the gospel, who were not so much recorders as litigators, a sort of Hebrew religious lawyer.
As the opponents of Jesus in the gospel, they come off as placing law over love.
The world in which the story unfolds is not our own, does not fit into our worldview. We would not, for example, ask who had sinned to cause a chid to be born blind. We understand that there must be a genetic or developmental cause for that sort of disability. The answer Jesus gives doesn’t exactly fit our worldview either, at least not the worldview of most progressive Christians, for Jesus states that the man has been blind all of his life for exactly this moment, that God intended the blindness not as punishment but as an opportunity to display the healing power of Jesus.
The Pharisees are busy trying to make Jesus look bad. He’s the competition. If he isn’t for “them,” he must be the enemy. His powers must come from demons. The man wasn’t really blind. Or maybe it isn’t the same man. They harass him, his parents. His response? I once was blind, but now I see. So they drive him out.
In a similar story, the Pharisees would obsess over the fact that Jesus heals a withered hand on the sabbath, the conflict that gives us Christ’s retort, “the sabbath was made for people, not people for the sabbath.”
The Pharisees cant’ see the forest for the trees in the colloquial sense. They are so wrapped up in “us vs. them,” so committed to their way as being the only right way, so nit-picking about rules and procedures, that they miss this: he once was blind, but then Jesus came, and he could see. The man had a withered arm, but Jesus healed, yes, even on the sabbath. He was mentally ill, left living among the tombs, but Jesus healed him. She bled uncontrollably, but she touched Jesus and her life changed.
They were going to stone her, in their self-righteousness, not the man with whom she supposedly committed adultery, only her. But Jesus intervened.
They were busy being right.
He was busy changing lives.
And it turns out those aren’t always the same thing.
He was blind and then he could see. They were blind and remained blind. They refused to see what was good, what was holy.
We still do this. Look at this time of crisis. The first word of out of our leader’s mouths should be to acknowledge that there are families grieving, that people are sick and scared, that jobs have been lost, that the most vulnerable have become more vulnerable than ever, that those locked up in our age of mass incarceration have seen their already retributive sentences turned into likely death sentences. Start by telling me you care, not be boasting.
Having a great and common cause should be when we are at our best, has historically been when we have been at our best. Sure there are those who place their personal gain above the common good, hording hand-sanitizer, engaging in insider trading. But most people are good and decent, the whole toilet paper thing aside.
People who have a common purpose, who have a vision, don’t bicker as much about the little things. This is true in bad times and in good, whether it is a church deeply engaged in justice work, or a nation trying to put a man on the moon.
The forest is alive and deeply connected and a place where life moves, in ways that are seen and ways unseen. Jesus is still alive, in ways seen and unseen, when we live the sort of love he demonstrated for us. Courageous love.
May we have courageous love. May we see the forest and the trees. May we understand that we have a great task to do, even in these dangerous times, creating a world where Jesus is not a weapon, but a sign of hope, and an inspiration as we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. Like Patrick Ness, may we take up the task when other’s stumble and fall. A monster calls. But we are people of hope. Amen.