Krista Tippet (OnBeing.Org) writes: “Our young century is awash with questions of meaning, of how we structure our common life, and who we are to each other. It seems we are more divided than ever before – unable to speak across the differences we must engage to create the world we want for ourselves and our children.”

This February 16, 2020 sermon reflects on the ways we can participate alternatively, intentionally, and in concert with the divine impulse that knits the cosmos together so we can work for the wellbeing of the world.

“We Are God’s Forest” | Based on readings fro 1 Corinthians 3.1-9 and Krista Tippett (OnBeing.Org “Our young century is awash . . . )

March 2021 Update: for more on the wonder of the wood wide web, and especially, trees, see the BBC’s special with Judy Dench on her passion for trees: https://youtu.be/rjnv_AevX4s

For all our advances and improvements over the centuries, one thing seems unchanged—our disharmony, our divisiveness, the way we find ways to fracture our societies, the penchant we have for creating hierarchies of value, importance, power, and privilege.

Not long after the death of Jesus, the early Christians began spreading what they understood to be Jesus’ vision for a new humanity. They were trying to live out a vision for a way to live humanly and humanely; they actively resisted the ways of the kingdoms of the world and embodied what they envisioned as the kin-dom of God—that’s kin as in relationships, not king as in royalty; that’s a kin-dom, where friends and relatives live democratically, not kingdom, where some rule over others tyrannically.

The early Christians had a little success at this, not a lot. It was terribly easy to slide back into the troublesome ways of organizing human life that were all too common but never too creative.

We see just this in our reading this morning from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians—a small band of Christians living in the southern Greek port city of Corinth. It’s a letter written in the year 53 or 54 of the Common Era.

The small congregation at Corinth was made up of people drawn by Jesus’ vision for a new humanity. People coming from all walks of life had tasted a spirituality that gave them a sense of real union with the divine, an experience of unity that didn’t require anything but an inner awakening of their souls to the Soul of the Universe.

You didn’t need a priest to tell you about it; you didn’t need temple rituals to create it for you; you didn’t need scholars to teach you about it; you couldn’t buy it with your money; you couldn’t achieve it by might. Everyone, without exception, could not only experience God, but was entitled to experience God. And the way of Jesus was a way to this experience.

What’s more, this experience of God, available to everyone, was changing everything.

It changed the way you thought about your life; it changed the way you thought about the lives of others. It changed the way you treated yourself; it changed the way you treated others. It gave you a sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging. It gave you a sense of eternity, that though your body would die, a deeper part of you continued on. It gave you a sense of dignity now, that your life mattered, the lives of others mattered—and not just people like you, everyone mattered, for everyone equally belongs to God; God is in everyone; everyone is kin. And more, that everything matters, for all things come from God and exist in God and are being gathered into the fullness of God. All things are interconnected, all things are necessary, nothing and no one is unimportant.

It was an intoxicating vision, an ennobling vision, a creative, life-affirming, nourishing, verdant vision for the healing and the thriving of the world.

Christianity began with this kind of vision, but often it got sidetracked, hacked by lesser visions, visions of human life that kept people competing with each other, fighting against each other, tribalizing the world.

It was no easy thing to live into the new vision.

Not long after the diverse Christians in ancient Corinth were baptized into this vision, belonging to each other in this new way of being human, they started, as Saint Paul tells us in his letter, bickering and competing and fighting with each other, tearing asunder what God was gathering together. They were falling back into the ways of the kingdoms of the world and falling away from the way of the kin-dom of God.

“When one of you says, ‘I belong to this group,’” says Paul, “and another says, ‘I belong to that group,’ aren’t you behaving according to the ways that wound the world? Aren’t you falling back into that old humanity that promised too much but delivered too little?”

Look, says Paul, we’re all working at this together. Surely, often quite differently and sometimes in ways that will make you shake your head, but this is why the vision is so important. We are all children of God; we are all kin. The sooner you start behaving like it the sooner the world will change for the better.

We all have “a common purpose,” and we each need to do our part, “working together.” We are, to use another metaphor, “God’s garden,” each of us integral to this great green planet of extraordinary life and wonder and mystery.

Each of us and everything, integral to its flourishing.

In the early 1990s, a young Canadian forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard was studying the understory of logged temperate forests in north-west British Columbia. As she studied what was going on in the muck of the forest floor, that thick layer of vegetation beneath the main canopy of a forest, she began to take note of something that absolutely fascinated her.

Foresters had long assumed that to create a verdant setting for tree-growth and harvesting, they needed to weed-out unwanted saplings that were competing with the Douglas Fir saplings they wanted to protect and nourish for later logging. They thought the way to make a crop great was by making the crop pure.

Her work became a landmark study that points to the interrelatedness that many indigenous peoples and religious believers have often intuited, the reality Saint Paul was referring to when he called humanity “the garden of God,” all of us kin-folk in the grand spiritual ecology of the divine.

Here’s what she found—

When forest managers culled out undesirable trees, concerned that they could compete with desirable timber products, like the Douglas Fir, for valuable soil resources, they were actually contributing the the starvation and premature deaths of the desirable trees they wanted for logging. When the paper birch trees—the undesirable interlopers were weeded out, the health of the Douglas Firs suffered.

It seemed to Suzanne Simard that there was some necessary interplay going on between the trees, some hidden need they had for each other, oblivious to the logging industry, that needed further investigation, maybe something that would change the way they nurtured forests.

Here’s where it gets really interesting and really important for us and for the world we live in—

Simard’s research confirmed that beneath the forest floor there exists an underground social network, a “bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species” that links sapling to sapling, regardless of which species they belong to.

You’re beginning to sense what this means for us, aren’t you?

The trees—in fact, the whole multitudinous organisms in the understory—“give aid” to each other throughout this little plot of verdant biosphere, and together they “form a non-hierarchal network between numerous kinds of plants” (MacFarlane, Underland, p. 89).

There’s more—

“In a research plot thirty meters square, every single tree was connected to the fungal system, and some trees—the oldest—were connected to as many as forty-seven others.” When one species was weeded out, the others suffered.

“The fungi and the trees had ‘forged their duality into a oneness, thereby making a forest,’ wrote Simard about her findings. Instead of seeing trees as individual agents competing for resources, she proposed the forest as a ‘co-operative system’, in which trees ‘talk’ to one another, producing a collaborative intelligence she described as ‘forest wisdom’. Some older trees even ‘nurture’ small trees that they recognize as their ‘kin’, acting as ‘mothers’. Seen in the light of Simard’s research, the whole vision of a forest ecology shimmered and shifted—from a fierce free market to something more like a community with a socialist system of resource redistribution.”

Whoever said true socialism is bad doesn’t understand the true nature of things.

Simard later named this, “The Wood Wide Web.”

We are divided now, more divided than any of us can remember, more alarmingly divided than any of us realize.

Our divisions make us think that we’d be better off without those we don’t like or don’t agree with or don’t trust. We see ourselves as “individual agents” or collections of the like-minded who compete with every other challenger for a limited set of resources.

That’s old thinking. Destructive thinking. Thinking that jeopardizes our lives.

We are God’s forest, a “cooperative system” in which we talk to one another, support one another, creating collaborative intelligence once known as human wisdom—a wisdom that seems all too scarce today among our elected politicians and the voting population.

There are too many among us who still believe the very dangerous idea that we can Make America (or any nation, organization, group, or family) Great Again by weeding out what is undesirable—whether it’s particular kinds of people or particular ideas or particular behaviors or anything else.

Saint Paul ran into that dangerous idea long ago inside a religious community that should have known better.

He recognized that what was hurting that little community was an un-evolved idea, an expression of a lower consciousness, an ideology of ignorance.

“As long as there is quarreling and backbiting and prejudice among you,” Paul said, you are dividing what God wants to gather together; you are trapped in ways that are ruining the world; you are rejecting the vision of Christ, the noble vision, the creative, life-affirming, nourishing, verdant vision for the healing and the thriving of the world.

This is what God is up to in Christ. This is what God is up to in us, for we are in Christ and Christ is in us. As Jesus was the embodiment of the vision—the shining light, the model, the way forward, the pioneer and perfecter of all we are meant to be and become—so we are too. “We are Christ’s hands, Christ’s feet, Christ’s body now. Christ has no body now but ours,” and every member of that body is critical to its wellbeing.

When we weed out, uproot, report, deport, criticize, minimize, demonize or terrorize those who are different from us; when we’d rather have a purified politics and purge our parties of dissent; when we gravitate toward our gated communities of sameness; when we unfriend those who disagree with us, and befriend those who agree with us; when we do this, we are, as Saint Paul said long ago, unspiritual, perpetrators of the ideology of ignorance, practitioners of a lower consciousness, purveyors of an un-evolved and unenlightened idea. We are dividing what God intends to grow together. Spiritually, we are sinning against the body of Christ; scientifically, we are harming the nature of everything.

When we weed-out, uproot, report, deport, criticize, minimize, demonize or terrorize anyone, no one gains. Not really. Not for long. We disrupt the nature of things and all things suffer.

On this scientists and mystics are in one accord. All is interdependent. Everything belongs. Everyone important.

Fir trees need birch trees. Forests need fungi. We need each other.

[transition to meditation]

Now, as we go into stillness,

let us grow quiet,

let us grow spiritually alert,

let us begin to sense, perhaps like we’ve never sensed before, that—

none of us is truly isolated,

each of us is connected to the Whole,

none of us are ever only one,

each of us is connected to All,

none of us is ever a body only to ourselves,

each of us is a member of a larger Body,

the Body of the living Earth,

the Body of the living Christ . . .

. . . [ silence ]