"Knock on Wood and Touch Grass"

 “Knock on Wood and Touch Grass”

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

Look around the place you’re in and start thinking about all of the items that are connected to trees. I’ll give you a moment to look around. 

Okay, what did we find? Zoomers, you can put yours in the chat, please. (Take examples: pews, tables, cross, electricity from coal, air that we breathe, rayon in fabric, paper.)

Make no mistake, we humans are intimately intertwined with trees. This summer we’re spending time journeying alongside UCC pastor Daniel Cooperrider and his book Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You. By exploring the four natural elements of water, fire, earth, and air, Cooperrider helps readers “reread the Bible in a living, breathing, yearning, determined search for God from the perspective of nature.” [1] 

Cooperrider notes that trees are featured on the opening and closing pages of the Bible. He writes, “Other than God and humans, trees are the most mentioned living thing in scripture.” [2] Trees are a living testament to the earth element. They spring forth from the earth and are connected to all the other elements. Like us, they are made up mostly of water. Like us, they breathe air. Like us, they either decompose or return to the earth through fire.

Our biblical stories of creation point to our deep connection with the earth through trees. When the first human is created, God forms the human, adam, from the adamah - the human from the humus. Adam, that Hebrew word for the first human in the creation narrative, is an earth-creature, a dirt-dweller. Just as the sweeping stories of the Bible begin and end with trees, humanity has its origin and its ends in the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

Our ancestors slept under canopies and lived in forests, surrounded by trees. These days, most of us are much more disconnected from our tree-cousins. And yet….we, too, sleep, eat, work, worship in buildings made from trees. Children are often wiser than adults and they remember their connection to trees more easily than we do - climbing trees, swinging from swings held in their branches, building tree houses and forts. And like those ancient stories in our Hebrew Bible, we maintain a connection to trees in our English language. Human comes from humus - people from the earth. Humility means to be in touch with the earth. When we are centered we say we are “grounded.” When we need to remember something important we tell one another to “remember your roots.”

Trees and humans have a symbiotic relationship, as I’m sure you know. Have you ever seen one of those pictures of a tree’s root system right next to a human lung? The roots of the tree look just like the bronchi and bronchioles in our lungs. Humans were created partially to consume oxygen. In doing so, we have a symbiotic relationship with nature. Bishop Michael Curry puts it this way: we live because of trees. Trees live because of us. 

Our sacred stories testify to this powerful human-tree connection. As Cooperrider mentioned, trees are absolutely everywhere in the Bible. He reminds us that sacred scripture “begins with the Tree of Knowledge and ends with the Tree of Life….trees loom like an old growth forest over the tangled undergrowth of scripture…..If you’re looking for significant landmarks to guide your path through the tangled bark of scripture, look for the blazes on tree trunks like you would on a hiking trail.” [4] 

In the very beginning of our sacred scriptures, we see this intimate connection between humans and trees in both of our creation narratives. In the first story, in Genesis 1, trees are given a unique place of honor and privilege. On the third day, the day when trees begin to grace the earth in this story, God pronounces a “double blessing.” It is the only day in the story where God pronounces creation good TWICE. It is also the day when we begin to see the powerful co-creation theme in the story. [5] God does not “bloop, bloop, bloop” plop the trees down like they’re playing a sandbox video game. Instead, God calls upon creation to create: the earth itself brings forth life that has the ability to create new life on autopilot - seeds and fruit bearing forth new life, generation after generation. 

I think it is this deep, mystical kinship with our tree-cousins that children are aware of when they feel the urge to climb into a tree. We feel it when we sense that unwinding of our anxious spirits when we make time to walk in a forest or sit under a tree's lovely branches. We can even tap into this kinship in our daily lives if we take the time to be mindful of the human-tree connection when we feel our feet touch the wooden floor when we get out of bed in the morning, or write on a piece of paper, or eat a handful of almonds. Perhaps we can even pause as we leave the house to say hello and thank you to a favorite tree in our yard, offering gratitude to the earth in the same way we kiss our family goodbye. 

This deep and intimate connection between trees and humans continues in our second creation narrative, the one we heard part of today. That poor, maligned apple tree that wasn’t even an apple tree. The earth-creature that we call Adam was told not to eat from the fruit of the tree in the center of the garden. (Incidentally, Eve wasn’t even there when God gave that warning, but that’s a sermon for another day.) This story that has sometimes been framed as a story about “original sin” has as many interpretations as there are leaves on your favorite tree. 

I want to share with you Cooperrider’s interpretation which blew my mind. [6] He notes that when trees appear in this story we are told “God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” But when the humans, later, see that tree in the middle of the garden we are told that “the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes…and she took and ate.” Did you catch that subtle shift? The humans reverse the order. God said the trees are first and foremost pleasant to the sight. They are there to be appreciated for their beauty and their tree-ness. It’s only secondary that they exist to help fuel our human bodies. 

Perhaps the problem is that we humans have a tendency to get things wildly out of order. Rather than appreciating the tree for its own unique, inherent, beauty - it’s tree-ness, we see it primarily as a thing that exists for our benefit. God told the humans they could eat from all the other trees - there was no danger of starvation, there was plenty to go around. But the humans saw this beautiful tree not as its own uniquely valuable self but solely as something to be consumed. They got it backwards. And that was the problem and the cautionary tale. 

The tree was in the center of the garden and the tree drives the plot of this second creation story. The intimate relationship between humans and trees is on full-display in both creation stories. From the way humans are both made from the earth to our dual call to be co-creators with God to the cautionary tale of humans getting our relationship all mixed up and backwards. Our tree-cousins exist as peers in these creation stories. 

Again and again, we are reminded that an important part of our call as humans - creatures formed from the humus - is to exist in right-relationship with trees and, indeed, all of creation. To be humble is not necessarily to be meek and mild. To be humble is to carry an awareness of that connection with the earth. To be grounded, rooted. To know who we are and our place in this vast and awe-some world. 

When I was a little girl, I had terrible vision. After we discovered I couldn’t see anything the teacher was writing on the board in 2nd grade, we went to the eye doctor and I got my first pair of glasses. It must have been October at that point because the trees were doing their colorful autumnal dance of glory. When we walked out of the eye-doctor’s office that day, I was, quite literally, looking at the world through a new pair of eyes. I looked up at the trees - a kaleidoscope of orange, gold, green, brown, red - and I gasped in surprise. I exclaimed to my mom, “You can see the individual LEAVES on the TREES?!?” I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life. 

God made our tree-cousins beautiful to the sight. God made our tree-cousins so very much like us. And we are called to remember that the trees are our friends, our neighbors, our peers. 

We probably all know this saying: “knock on wood,” right? We say this when we don’t want to inadvertently cause something bad to happen. People all over the world, across cultures and across centuries, have said something like this. There’s apparently something about that action of touching wood that reminds us humans to get in touch with our humility. We touch wood to remember that we, too, come from the earth. In connecting with our tree-cousins, we remember who we are. 

Kids these days have a thing that they say that’s a little like this. When someone is a bit out of touch with reality they say, “Touch grass.” It started in gamer-culture as a way of gently poking fun at someone who had clearly spent way too much time in front of a screen. “Touch grass,” they say. As in, “you need to unplug for a bit and get grounded. You need to get outside and into the real world. You need to remember who you are.”

We give thanks for our tree cousins who help us remember who we are and whose we are. May we always strive to be in right relationship with the trees and all of creation. Amen. 

NOTES:

[1] Cooperrider, Daniel. Speak with the Earth and it Will Teach You, 11.

[2] Ibid, 99. 

[3] Curry lecture at Festival of Homiletics, May 2023. 

[4] Cooperrider, 98. 

[5] Ibid., 98-99. 

[6] Ibid.,