POST-HELENE DEVOTIONAL AND REFLECTIONS II
FAIRVIEW PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
NORTH AUGUSTA, SC
6 OCTOBER 2024
(Silent Moments of Reflection)
PSALM 46:1-3, 7
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake, though the waters roar and foam.
The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
I. OPENING PRAYER
Holy One, you are our comfort and strength in times of sudden disaster, crisis, or chaos.
Surround us now with your grace and peace through storm or earthquake, fire or flood.
By your Spirit, lift up those who have fallen, sustain those who work to rescue and rebuild, and fill us with the hope of your new creation; through Jesus Christ, our rock and redeemer. Amen.
II. PSALM AND REFLECTION
PSALM 1
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
4 The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
REFLECTION ON THE PSALM
(from Timothy Keller, The Songs of Jesus: A Year of Daily Devotions in the Psalms)
Psalm 1 is the gateway to the rest of the psalms. The “law” is all Scripture, to “meditate” is to think out its implications for all life, and to “delight” in it means not merely to comply but to love what God commands. Christians have their attitude toward God changed from one of duty to free, loving self-giving because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. So to know how to meditate on and delight in the Bible is the secret to a relationship with God and to life itself. Views contrary to God’s Word are no anchor in time of need. God’s Word gives us the resilience of a tree with a source of living water that will never dry up.
PRAYER: Lord of the Word, don’t let me be seduced by the world—either naively going with the crowd or becoming a hardened cynic. Help me meditate on your Word to the point of delight. Give me stability and contentment regardless of the circumstances. How I need that! Amen.
(other prayers may be offered here, individually or as a group)
III. DEVOTION AND SCRIPTURE
I love trees. I always have. Until I was 12, we lived in a small town in the mountains of Virginia, and when I was in third grade—my daughter’s age—we had a class project in which we had to collect leaves from as many trees as possible and preserve them in wax paper. My dad had also grown up in the Virginia mountains, and he knew all the trees, so we spent a handful of afternoons and evenings driving through the neighborhoods and country roads looking for trees we hadn’t yet found. I still distinctly remember when we found a gingko in the yard of the local Catholic church and how excited he was!
Whenever I see a gingko, I remember that moment and that project, and to this day if I find an interesting leaf on the ground, I’ll immediately look up and around for its source. That’s not a textbook way to win friends and influence people, but it does give me a special affinity for the motif of trees in Scripture. What’s up with the Oak of Moreh and the Trees at Mamre in the Old Testament? Did everybody just know those particular groups of trees? Were they ancient landmarks like South of the Border and the Gaffney Peachoid are for South Carolinians today?
Or, more poignantly, what about this bit from John the Baptist:
Matthew 3:5-10
5 Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan were going out to him, 6 and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. 10 Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
Those religious leaders were the flowers and fruits of a 2,000-year-old tradition, and it could be cut down just like that? That’s a harsh statement!
But that’s the way it can go with trees. Hundreds of years of growth and productivity can be cut down in minutes or blown down in seconds. Sure, a new tree can be planted, but it might be lifetimes before things look the same.
John the Baptist’s tree is an apt metaphor for resistance to change and fear of loss. The Pharisees and Sadducees stood on two thousand years of tradition, but all that tradition had grown to block their view of what God was really doing. To see and understand Jesus, they would need to cut it down.
It can be easy to sympathize with them. Many times that we face change and loss, we see the world we’ve known or built crashing down and nothing taking its place, save for maybe a sapling. When compared to an old, mature, self-sustaining tree, that sapling hardly seems to be worth the effort to tend and nurture and grow to love.
But here’s the thing...even if a tree is 200 years old, it doesn’t take 200 years to grow into significance. It takes a few years to get stable and maybe a few years to bear fruit consistently, and maybe a couple of decades to get big, but once it’s big then you almost don’t notice the growth. A tree grows in width, but you don’t notice it. You don’t walk by it one day and bump into it the next and say, “did that tree just grow?” A tree also keeps growing in height, but you don’t notice it because it’s slow and mostly over your head.
Ironically, that’s how the Pharisees and Sadducees liked to operate: over everyone’s head. They were the intellectuals and the well-to-do’s and the experts engaging in high-minded debates. They didn’t want to be brought down to everyone else’s level, and they didn’t want God to be brought down to everyone else’s level.
But that’s exactly what God wanted to do. In Jesus, God precisely wanted to come down to the level of the people he sought to redeem, to reclaim. If that meant doing something new, then so be it. In fact, God had prophesied as much through Isaiah back when the people were facing capture and exile:
Isaiah 11:1-2,11
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
2 And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
10 In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.
God gives the reminder that a tree that has been felled is not completely dead. There are roots, and in good soil those roots can sprout new shoots quickly. Long before Isaiah, Job understood the Lord’s work in this way:
Job 14:7-9
7 “For there is hope for a tree,
if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,
and that its shoots will not cease.
8 Though its root grow old in the earth,
and its stump die in the soil,
9 yet at the scent of water it will bud
and put out branches like a young plant.
This is profound, because Job points out that even though they are new shoots, it’s the same tree! The roots are still doing their job below the ground regardless of the storms and axes above the ground. That is an amazing metaphor for God’s work, because God’s work so often lies in what we do not see, yet it is going on all the time.
It is valid to grieve the loss of something as beautiful as a tree, and as beautiful as any of God’s work that has stood for generations. At the same time, we cannot forget that God is always working in places we cannot see in order to bear fruit. Sometimes that has to happen through new shoots. After all, once a tree gets advanced in years, the fruit itself can go down a bit in quality. At a certain point, a tree must spend the bulk of its resources maintaining its structure rather than enriching its fruit. It still bears fruit, but mostly just for the sake of seeds rather than taste. You see this every year when you go through Edgefield County and there are piles of cut peach trees, with saplings in their place the next season.
John the Baptist understood that God was making all things new in Jesus, and John’s admonition to bear fruit is directly related to this new work, this new growth. The Pharisees and Sadducees were dwelling in the leafy canopies of the trees that God had planted, and God was calling them back to the roots, to the shoots, and the fruits. Being cut down would be a shock to them, but the new growth was coming and was available to everyone to enjoy.
And while we are on the topic of trees, let us not forget that God has a favorite tree. He put the tree of life in the middle of the Garden of Eden at the start of creation, and the tree of life is at the center of God’s eternal city in Revelation. Our ancestors rejected the tree of life, and we are prone to doing the same thing; but God kept the roots intact and grew from them so that we can return to Him in Jesus.
So in the metaphorical sense, we only have one tree and one set of roots that we need to be concerned about in life. Whenever we might feel that the well-loved “trees” of our lives are falling or being cut down, or are landing on top of us, we do not need to fear that disruption. Probably all of us in the last ten days have been disrupted by fallen trees, but God works in disruption. And while we might be trying to find how God is at work in all of this, it is important to remember that God can work in any disruption, no matter how devastating. God didn’t necessarily send a hurricane to disrupt our lives, but in a fallen world there are a lot of disruptions. Nevertheless, any disruption can be a holy disruption because it is God who redeems. It is God who wants to return us to the roots of life, to the growth He offers, to something new that He is doing.
It is also God who wants to bear fruit in us and through us, even through disruption...especially through disruption. Doing so is a sign of Jesus’s victory over death. When disruptions come, we can be tempted to doubt, to cower, to question the very goodness of the fruit God provides. That’s what befell Adam and Eve in the Garden.
Satan still uses the same game plan because it has always worked so well: introduce disruption into the world and use it to convince us to turn away from the goodness God wants to give, from the fruit that God wants to bear...tempt us to be so high minded about our own comforts and assurances that we can’t see how God is trying to work against them so that we can know Him and be more fruitful.
As people who have lived through a disaster, that may be the great temptation for us: comfort. We have all been pushed way out of our comfort zones in the past ten days, and I am sure that we would love to get back to them as soon as possible, especially because we can see an easy route to them: electricity, internet, air conditioning, regular schedules. As a church, we have made it through with only a few crises. Our house damage rate is less than 10%, and our physical injury rate is less than a quarter of one percent. That’s pretty good. Those are comfortable numbers, given the circumstances.
I would venture to say that we have not been cut down, and perhaps only barely pruned. That’s actually the best place to be: pruned rather than cut down. Pruning is still uncomfortable, but it beats being cut to the root. Of course, being pruned means that you have to bear fruit the next season. If not, then you do get cut.
Ideally, being pruned means that you grow in faith. There are actually sociological studies on this. In London during World War II, there was a phenomenon of the near miss. Initially, as Germany was bombing London every night, people cowered in their homes. The Germans hoped that this would crush English morale, but as more and more people survived the bombings, they actually grew more confident and more resolved to fight and to win. Shoots of hope grew faster than the bombs could destroy them. Instead of a fear of loss, there was a new resolve for victory.
The strength of new resolve is an amazing thing, and we see it in trees. I live in an established neighborhood, where huge trees fell all over the place. We had one pine leaning into another pine in the direction of our house, so we had to get those cut down. Our associate pastor, Dan Morris, lives in a brand-new neighborhood, and we dropped by his house on Saturday after the storm and the oak tree in his front yard was leaning at about 70 degrees, which would be scary except for the fact that it’s only as big around as a paper towel tube.
On Thursday I asked Dan to send me a picture of his leaning tree, and by that time it was straight thanks to a stake and some rope. That’s the thing about new growth, it can weather storms and it can be corrected as it grows, even from old roots...especially from old roots. That’s the same grace that God gives us when we try to grow anew: the grace to have faith and fall short, and the grace to be set on the right path in Jesus’s footsteps as we grow. It is the grace to find our comfort not in our own footing and circumstances, but in the roots and direction that Jesus provides as we grow to follow him.
By this point, day 10 after the storm, we have lived outside our comfort zones for a while. And as we have been outside of those comfort zones, we have learned more about loving our neighbors, about living by faith, about staying connected to one another, about praying and trusting God. Now I ask you: would Satan rather us return to our comfort zones, or learn to live with more discomfort and to trust God in it?
That’s what we’ve been doing, and y’all have done really well at it. Instead of going back into our comfort zones, let’s expand them and see where God leads. After all, the roots are secure. As we all return to what we have known as comfortable, let us remember that God has given us the opportunity to live with discomfort. How far can we take that? How much can we let this pruning be a shoot of growth, a source of fruit in our lives? How can we let God take this disruption and make it holy?
IV. CLOSING PRAYER: PSALM 108:1-6 (read individually or together)
My heart is steadfast, O God!
I will sing and make melody with all my being!
2 Awake, O harp and lyre!
I will awake the dawn!
3 I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples;
I will sing praises to you among the nations.
4 For your steadfast love is great above the heavens;
your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.
5 Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!
Let your glory be over all the earth!
6 That your beloved ones may be delivered,
give salvation by your right hand and answer me!
As you go, may the hands of Christ tend your wounds, may the Holy Spirit bring to your minds just the things you need to hear, and may you dwell in the Father’s arms at the last.