There are many ways to change your consciousness. One, you just try to stay up for a couple days, and you don't sleep for a couple nights, and you kind of start to get giggly and weird and do freight thinking different ways and looking around. Lack of sleep will mess with you. A fever? will give you weird dreams. Ever had those weird fever dreams or ideas or confusions? Actually, sleep is just weird itself. You wake up and, God, there was one the other day and I really, I dream, I don't remember what, now I can't remember, but back then it was so vivid I had to go check. It's like in the dream, I dreamed I'd thrown something away and even after I was awake, I went to look in the trash can just to make sure whether it happened or not, whether I just dreamed it. So we can alter our consciousness in various ways. You can take substances, illegal or legal, and that will change your consciousness. You can get yourself just angry and in a tizzy, and that will change your frame of mind.
One way to change your consciousness is to listen to an audio book. about a novel about trees and drive from Stanly County to Montgomery County, as I have been doing. Because it is weird. because this book is talking about trees and people that care about trees. It's a fictional book called The Overstory and I'm driving along and of course, I'm looking at all those magnifi
cent trees once you start heading out of Albemarle and this book is describing how trees actually communicate with one another through the release o
f pheromones and the fungi, fungus and various things that has ways to communicate. And I'm just looking there and I'm thinking, These trees are watching me. I think that one's moving. Oh, it's the wind. .. And it's been a really awesome experience. Listen to this audio book called The Overstory by Richard Powers, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for fiction. Actually, my friend Mac and I are in a book club, so we're both reading it together. And these various characters and their lives are shaped by trees. An overstory, I had to look up. Some of you all may know it because you're in the forestry business here in Montgomery County. It's the top canopy of the tree is the overstory. is the understory. So we think of the trees almost like a building is having different stories. So this book has captivated me as I drive along. How did these trees get here and how are they so different? What would it be like to photosynthesize? And if they photosynthesize, how do the trees down below that don't get any sunlight get the energy to survive? And how are all these trees kind of working together but also competing? You just start thinking these things. And all the creatures that live up in them, they're birds that live in certain parts of trees depending on the breed. Fish do the same thing if they have a fish tank. Some fish like to be at the tops or the bottom. Birds like to be at the overstory or understory. And you start to realize, whole world out there that I had no idea. It's really pretty amazing. Trees are present. in the Bible, because I had to go look it up. I'm like, well, could I, is this, is this, when you preach every week, everything is sermon material. Tell me nothing of your life, because it may end up here. Give me no books.
So, I thought, can I work this into a sermon? Trees are present in the Bible more than 300 times. More than 50 types of trees are mentioned. Well, of course they are. They've been here on this planet with us since the beginning. and we need them because they sustain so much of our lives. We build church floors and pulpits and we make fires and tools, sometimes weapons. We use them for various implements in our lives, obviously. Less now because we got plastic, but wood, you can imagine, it's such an important thing to the Israelites and the Romans. The wood, of course, also provides a place for the animals to live, and we can eat them. And so the trees provide our oxygen that we breathe, because without them, we only have the carbon dioxide that right now Bob is just breathing out, and I think all of us are, we're just breathing out carbon dioxide. So the trees are helping us out in that way. There are trees in the Garden of Eden. won the knowledge of good and evil, and won the tree of life. There is a tree for Jonah to sit under when he had a bad day at the end of his book named Jonah. There are trees that provide the wood for Noah's Ark, and it's an olive tree branch from a dove that signals that the world can be lived in again. And of course, Jesus dies on a tree. The trees keep popping up, and even God's story in the Bible. The word Croatoan was carved on a tree, and that's one of the famous stories of North Carolina, the lost colony. The paper that I read from came from a tree. So the trees do all these things in our lives.
And it is a tree that's the image that Nebuchadnezzar is given in his dream in the book of Daniel that only Daniel can interpret. That he dreamed about a tree and it covered the whole planet and provided for the, what do you mean the whole planet? I don't know, I'll check the text. What does it say? It's in the midst of the earth, yeah, and its height was great, so. It was big. him and Daniel gives him the story because in a weird way the Bible likes to compare us to trees. Daniel's like a tree or Nebuchadnezzar's like a tree. The book of Proverbs says to be a tree is to be a wise person planted by the waters. So trees are not only our friends and that they provide and support us, we can learn lessons from them. And that's what the Bible likes to bring up. In the Gospel of Luke, it's talking about cutting down a tree that doesn't bear good fruit.
And the Bible is not a book for how to run a tree business. Bible tells us about how to be a part of God's kingdom. And one way we can think about how to be a part of God's kingdom is to kind of be like a tree. And a good tree yields good fruit if it's a fruit-bearing tree. And if it's not a good tree, it's sickly and it can't provide and it can't be a part of the world and contribute to the world. The Bible suggests this idea that trees are something that we can learn from. They are different from us. If you carved your name in the tree, how, well, how, if you carved your name, it's from the book, right, if you carved your name at four inches, how tall will your name be 50 years later? Trick question. The tree only goes from the top, it would always remain the same. Trees, you knew that one? Trees are, I had five bucks, you wouldn't know it, so I just lost five bucks. Trees have hormones and communicate, but they don't have a nervous system. So they're like us in that they use hormones, but they're not like us, they don't need a spinal cord. They don't really have a brain. They can't feel, they don't have pain receptors, but they do talk to one another and within themselves through some complex systems.
They are alien life on our planet. but we need them and we can learn from them. This is where my mind goes on that 30 minute drive as I listen to this book and look at the trees. J.R.R. Tolkien that wrote The Lord of the Rings loved trees. He loved trees so much that he created a magical being called the Ants, and they are tree shepherds. And their job is to shepherd and care for the trees in Middle Earth. So he thought of the trees as almost like sheep and other animals. And it's kind of true that they grow and they form little areas and you might protect them, want to encourage certain species for various reasons. Tolkien loved trees. God must have loved trees because God made them.
So what can we learn from the trees? Christians have been learning from nature for a long time. Early on in the Christian tradition, they spoke of the Book of Nature. So nature is like a book that you can read. Now, the better book is the Book of Scripture, because it more clearly describes God and our place in God's world and what God wants in God's kingdom. But the Book of Nature tells us a lot of things as well. That we should thrive. that we should contribute, that we should participate, that we should seek things that are beautiful, because the world is such a beautiful place. So trees are a way that we can grow. And we think of that especially today on Pentecost, which is a day when the church was born. So how do we grow as people who are seeking the kingdom of God? How do we become better and healthier and taller and stronger? One thing trees can also teach us is a part of a book of nature. is that God's scale is huge. So when you read the Bible, it goes from a very long time ago to sometime in the future. And there are kingdoms and peoples in the Old Testament that we don't know anything about because the scale is so large. They have come and gone, and the only reason we might have heard of them is because they somehow encountered the ancient Israelites. God's scale is more like trees than ours. That's scary because it makes us feel so very small. But it can also be a nice message that we're part of a world, and the world has made it so far and keeps moving on. And we get to share in that part of it. And maybe I don't have to take myself quite so seriously, because the world is really, really old, and it's going to keep going. And it'll be fine. I think in terms of millennia and not in terms of 80 years here on this planet. I think that's a nice message in some ways. It can be a little unsettling, but it can be a nice message. I don't need to worry so much.
Growth is slow. So trees, you can watch them grow, it ain't gonna happen immediately, but over time growth is slow. So as we change and grow, the growth is slow. I quit eating Oreos, I really miss the Oreos, I really miss the Oreos, I really miss the Oreos, I kinda forget about the Oreos, and eventually I don't. I don't. have to eat them anymore. The hard bit is, the easy bit is day one, the hard bit is day four. Whatever, pick your poison, right? The hard bit is getting further, but that's what growth is like and eventually you can get to where you have changed. And the problem for us is we look in immediately, just today, well I failed my diet just today, so we're always worried about now, now, now, now. But, right, what about next week? That's a nice message to learn from the trees. And from God, the scale is large.
And the last one, numero tres, I'll give you. Trees are grounded. Ha. And we do better as a people being grounded. The spiritual thinker, Valentin Tomberg, says, the consciousness must move from the head to the chest. so that we carry our consciousness. He compares it to two things. One is the tightrope walker, because the tightrope walker can't think about, oh my gosh, I'm gonna fall, or they can't think about, I've gotta step right here. What do they have to do? Pay attention to their breath, because their breath is gonna knock them off, and they have to look at the endpoint, right? You don't walk like this, you walk. So you have to in a weird way get out of your head and relax. There's nothing different from a tightrope to this floor except for the mind. Right? If I can walk a straight line here, I can walk a straight line between two very tall buildings. I'm not going to do it, but in theory, right? And you have this, because sometimes we're up here too much, and like trees, we need to be here. The other great example Tomberg gives, there's a tradition of early saints in the church. that when the Christianity was illegal and the Romans would execute Christians, and sometimes they'd cut off their heads, there's a few stories of the early saints, they'd cut off the head, the saint's body would stand up like in a horror movie. You just go with it. I mean, I don't buy it personally, but it's a good story. I don't, you know. you can decide yourself. Picked up the head and walked and preached a sermon and then sat down in the church. There's a couple of stories of this if you look it up. Now whether you believe that or not, the beautiful idea is to be a saint, you gotta not have your head here but down here. Right? Being grounded in your body. Breathing, what they tell you to when you're giving birth. What they tell you when you're stressed, when you're going under surgery, to breathe. And of course, the trees are breathing too, just in a different way. And sometimes we're a little more like a tree and a little more grounded, we're a little more connected to God's kingdom. Thank God for the trees.
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