The Secret Life of Trees

I’ve never considered myself a “tree hugger.” It’s not a bad thing, it’s a very noble thing. It’s just never been my thing. I’ve never fooled myself into believing that I am any kind of gardener, but I love trees.

The Garden of Gethsemane, 2023.

Trees have been a part of our storytelling tradition for centuries. For centuries, they have delighted our imaginations. Take the Tree of Protection in Narnia, Old Man Willow from The Lord of the Rings, the Whomping Willow from the Harry Potter books (which was particularly grumpy, not to mention dangerous), Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, and let’s not forget Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. There’s just something about trees. They have a story to tell, and we can learn so, so much from their secret lives.

Oranges in Bethlehem, 2023

In January 2023, I was blessed by the trip of a lifetime. It was called “Her Journey,” a pilgrimage for women to the Holy Land. It was there that I really started paying attention to trees, or at least in a theological way. On our first day, we went to a lecture at Bethlehem Bible College, and as we were walking on the sidewalk, something tugged on my hair. I turned around and saw a tree branch attached to the most perfect lemon tree, with bright green leaves, and full of fruit. It was beautiful. A joy to behold. So, I took a picture. Not to be outdone by the lemons, the oranges were thriving in the school’s courtyard. Again, bright green leaves full of fruit. They were ready for their closeups-- all begging to have their pictures taken. So, I obliged.

Pomegranates in Galilee, 2023

A couple of days later, after we took a trip on a little boat across the Sea of Galilee, we were going to eat lunch on the waterfront, and as we waited outside, I had my first sighting of a pomegranate in the wild. Now, I love pomegranates, so you can imagine how excited I was to see some on a tree instead of in a box at the grocery store. I walked over to them slowly as if they were going to catch me sneaking pictures of them. Their leaves had yellowed, and the branches were mostly bare, but there were still pomegranates like big red Christmas ornaments hanging from the long, thin branches. Again, more pictures.

In the days that followed, every time I saw a fruit tree, I would nudge my mother as if she’d never seen one before. It was as if we were in the middle of an orchard. Each tree was picture-perfect and full of brightly colored fruit. Lemons, oranges, pomegranates, dates, bananas. The fact that there would even be banana trees in Israel was astonishing to me. But there they were in abundance.

I don't know what I expected the day we visited the Garden of Gethsemane, but I didn’t expect the olive trees to be as they were. They were wide with gnarly knots and twists in their trunks. They look dried out and not so alive, but if you looked closely, you’d see them. It looked like someone just tossed a bunch of black olives into the branches, like so much confetti, and they just stuck there among the little grayish-green leaves.

When I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about the trees, their beauty, and abundance. A quick flip through my photos revealed an unusual number of pictures of trees. They gripped my attention so much that I had to put paintbrush to paper to get them out of my brain. What was it about those trees that made them so fruitful? They wouldn’t let go of my imagination, and it wasn’t until I read something about the Holy Land that I discovered why. Here’s what I read. Flavius Josephus wrote this in the first century in 78 A.D. about the land near the Sea of Galilee:

Its soil is so fruitful...the temper of the air is so well mixed that it agrees very well with several sorts, walnuts, which require the coldest air… palm trees which grow best in hot air; fig trees and olives, which yet require an air that is more temperate. One may call this place the ambition of nature, where it forces those plants that are naturally enemies to agree together… it not only nourishes different sorts of fruit beyond expectation but preserves them a great while…for besides the good temperature of the air, it is also watered from a most fertile fountain. (Flavius Josephus, "The Jewish War," Book 3, Chapter 10:8.)

Sea of Galilee, 2023

What Josephus noted was that these trees that provided nourishment so abundantly were trees that, by nature, should not even have been able to live near each other in the first place, much less thrive in the same soil. But they did, and he attributed that success to one of the most fertile fountains from which they all drank—the Sea of Galilee.

Sometimes, our differences are so intimidating and seem so foreign that we believe we have no business living near each other. But that isn’t true. Like Galilee’s "ambition of nature", God’s ambition is that all God’s children, whether enemies or not, should abide as one. What the trees in the Holy Land teach us is that there is one most fertile fountain that makes their harmony possible. We, too, have one MOST fertile fountain. Paul reminded the Corinthians, “For we were all baptized by one Spirit to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink” (I Cor. 12:13). One source. One fountain. One Spirit.

For all to flourish as God wants us to, we must testify to the life-giving waters. The commandment to go and make disciples requires that we do. We are commanded to accept each other in love. Our witness is empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring souls to abide in Christ so that they, too, may be preserved and rooted deep in God’s love, as in Ephesians 3:14-19:

I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses all knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

To be filled to the measure, we must continue to drink from the source of life and never quench that thirst. We cannot keep it to ourselves or allow anyone to be kept from it. If we do, our unity is incomplete. We are bound as one body united in one Spirit. We are reminded to “make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that holds you together” (Eph. 4:2-3).

Paul called out the body of Christ, that unity of the Spirit, explaining that all the members of the body are necessary. In Ephesians 4:16, he wrote, “the whole body grows from him, as it is joined and held together by all the supporting ligaments.” Each member (the eye, the ear, the hand) serves the whole body according to its unique function. Without each other in the fullness of God’s design, we would be left blind without our eyes. We would be lost without our hearing. We would suffer, AND WE DO when we discount the value of any person. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul goes on to tell them, "God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be,” (12:18), and “there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it" (12:25-27).

Do you know what that means? It means we ARE. NOW we are. Not we will be. We are now the body of Christ. We aren’t here to build connections; we are here to recognize that we are already connected—whether we want to be or not. We are intrinsically linked. Inseparable. We can’t deny our connection. Theologian N.T. Wright wrote, “In Christ, Christians not only belong to one another, but actually become mutually identified, intertwined, bound together.”

A while back, perhaps a year or two, I watched a beautiful BBC documentary titled Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees. Dame Judi Dench is enamored of trees. The documentary followed a year in the life of her beloved 6-acre wood and the trees that call it home.

There was a scene in the film when a fungi expert explained to Judi just how brilliant her trees were. She bent down and grabbed what I thought was a weed, but it turned out to be a white, stringy, root-like rope. She explained that this was actually a network of fungal threads that attach to the tips of tree roots and build upon one another to connect trees. And not just trees of the same kind, but different types. Like an underground web covering the whole forest.

Apparently, the network allows the trees to communicate and share resources. They can send nutrients from one tree to another and even send chemical and electrical signals to tell other trees when one of them is being attacked by leaf eaters. The other trees release chemicals to protect themselves.

Sometime later, I watched an episode of Green Planet with David Attenborough, and he said that when trees die, they can even distribute their food reserves through the threads to their neighbors. This network, this secret network, creates a common purpose—to help each other thrive.

There is a network of dedicated individuals who share their resources, pray for one another, check in on one another, feed one another, and help maintain our community. But their network has a limit. Each person can only do so much, but if more people would plug into the network, the whole body can do so much more. God did not intend for some to carry the church's work and mission for the entire body. God gave each of us gifts of the Spirit to serve others. Again, Paul, to the Corinthians, wrote, "There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of work, but in all of them, and in everyone, it is the same God at work" (I Cor. 12:4-6).

Everyone has a gift of the Spirit, and it was given to benefit the common good. Not to hoard it or keep it unspent. Each of us must earnestly consider where we may use our talents to serve God. It is one of the greatest ways to practice what the ancient Greeks called koinonia.

What is koinonia? If you haven’t heard the word before, you definitely have heard the English translation of koinonia—fellowship. Now, someone, centuries ago, did us a disservice when translating koinonia as' fellowship.' But koinonia is greater than that. The root word of koinonia is koine, which means “common,” not basic common, but “shared” common. When Paul spoke of koinonia, he meant a shared life in Christ. We become more fully one body of Christ when we commit ourselves to living, worshiping, and serving in unity. That’s the assignment, and the trees understand it. They live in koinonia—drinking from the same fertile fountain and conjoining their roots so that others may benefit from their lives and they can be stronger together. This is the secret of the trees. One body. One Spirit. One God.

So, let us learn from the trees that God designed by continuing to drink from the same Spirit and extending ourselves to others, recognizing our gifts, and offering them for the common good. When we do, we will reap the richness, the fullness of Christ’s vision for this world—on Earth as it is in Heaven, where God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit model perfect koinonia for us.

In the name of God, the Creator, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.