Beloved of God

Trees.  They surround us in the Pacific Northwest and help define the character of this bioregion.  Great forests unbroken for hundreds of miles once blanketed this land on which our westside cities now stand.  The size and density of these stands once led us to believe that they were inexhaustible and would be with us forever.  Still today we seek out old growth groves untouched by human habitation, hoping to encounter a great cedar or Douglas Fir whose girth and height will leave us dumbfounded.

For millennia before we modern immigrants arrived here, Tribal peoples have looked to the trees of these great forests for food, shelter, clothing, transportation, utensils and utility—but also spiritual insight and insignias of spiritual identity and power; living emblems connecting the spirit world with the earth (think totem pole). 

My first Call in pastoral ministry brought my family to the Redwood Coast of Northwestern California.  I remember the excitement of exploring those ancient forests that first summer nearly three decades ago.  Driving south on Highway 101 along the Eel River we entered Humboldt Redwoods State Park, one of the last remaining refuges for the trees, and took the exit for FOUNDER’S GROVE.  Stepping out of the car in that majestic grove was like stepping into a cathedral.[1]  The sheer scale of the trees left us slack jawed and tongue-tied.  Within a ten mile radius of where we stood were some of the largest and most accessible Redwood giants on the planet—trees that towered over 350 feet, with trunks measuring 15 feet or more in diameter, some of which had begun as seedlings when Jesus was a toddler.

Ancient ancestors of this species—Sequoia sempervirens—had been reaching for the sky along the coast of the western Pacific for scores of millions of years.  Redwoods had been turning soil, air, and water into leaf, branch and trunk eons before human beings appeared on planet Earth.  So ancient is their lineage that the footfalls of dinosaurs once echoed between their trunks.[2]  Now we were standing in their shadows, craning our necks in awe, hushed and humbled by these greatest of living beings.

The greatest of the world’s remaining Redwoods have names given to them.  And a champion among champions was a tree in Founder’s Grove called The Dyerville Giant.  As tall as a 30-story building at 370 ft, with a diameter of 17 ft., a circumference of 52, and weighing perhaps a million pounds, the Dyerville Giant was one amazing plant.  As we stood there touching its trunk in 1986 it was easy to imagine it would be standing for many generations yet to come.  But after a series of heavy winter storms swept through the region in the winter of 1991, saturating soils and weakening shallow root systems, The Dyerville Giant was clipped by a younger neighbor and came crashing to the ground the night of March 24.

Word of the tree’s fall spread swiftly, and foresters and scientists moved in quickly to study the tree and to take sprigs from its crown for grafting onto healthy seedlings, thus preserving the genes of the fallen giant.  From the point of the graft onward it would be the Giant’s “super genes” at work.

Ezekiel’s message from the passage above paints a picture of a whole ecological subculture existing and even thriving under this great CEDAR transplanted by God.  It provided God’s exiled people then, and it provides us now, with an image of the expansiveness of God’s vision for the earth’s future and a new image of the Tree of Life, in whose branches all peoples and all nations shall find their true home.

As we move this month from the Season of Light to the Season of Lent, the mid-week Lenten services we share with sisters and brothers from Calvary Lutheran will invite us to contemplate images of TREES that form a “scaffolding” of sorts within the Scriptures.   Our 40 day sojourn, beginning with Ash Wednesday, February 18, is a period of spiritual renewal.  I, for one, look forward to having that renewal include walks among the trees.

Together in Christ,

Pastor Erik