TREE OF SHAME……………….TREE OF GLORY

MEDITATIONS FOR PASSION SUNDAY

1. THE TREE OF OUR DISOBEDIENCE

GENESIS 3:1-8

The tree stood in the grounds of the old telephone exchange and it was full of conkers.

Its branches were aching under the weight of the fruit.

There was a notice staked into the ground nearby

“Keep Out Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted”

I walked by the conker tree every Sunday on my way to church – but the stern notice meant I kept my distance from the conker tree – although I wanted conkers very badly indeed.

A naughty boy joined the church choir.

The sort who smuggles chocolate into the pages of his anthem book.

He told me that nobody worked at the telephone exchange any more, and certainly not on Sunday.

He told me that it was alright to go into the grounds and shake the conkers down from the tree.

So that is what I did. Carefully and stealthily and when nobody was looking. I began to gather as many conkers as I could.

Suddenly from an upstairs window of the telephone exchange a man is waving his fist at me. He’s shouting at me and banging on the window as hard as he can.

He says he’ll be coming round my house to make sure I get a good hiding.

Can’t I read – the notice means what it says.

I ran home like a cry baby – conkers and tears spilling from me in equal measure.

For a week or more I dreaded the ring on the doorbell – and I found a different way to walk to church.

The one thing you can’t have – that’s what you want.

All the fruit from all the trees given to Adam and Eve – except just this one – and it’s that one they want.

People misunderstand the love of God.

They either see it as a fierce angry sort of love that’s waiting to catch us out and punish us.

Or they see it as an “anything goes” sort of love that means we can live with a sense of “gay abandon”

God gives us huge freedoms. Massive gifts.

But there must be something that defines love. There must be loyalty. Responsibility and commitment…and although we don’t like the word much…there must be obedience.

The serpent’s talk blinds Adam and Eve to this truth and in reaching out to that tree they reach out beyond the love of God.

They are saying this love is not enough for us.

We want something more than God has given.

Then in their shame for having done it, they use the other trees as a place to hide themselves from God when he comes searching.

I don’t think he was out to punish them, not then.

I think he wanted to draw them back to his love before it was too late.

But they simply went deeper into the woods.

What began with a single tree of disobedience ended up a great forest full.

What is to be done when we wriggle free of His love like this.

One thing’s for certain, its’ not what God wants, and he’ll never stop offering ways back for us.

This tree in the Garden of Eden, a symbol of our sin and disobedience.

Yes, there’s no running away from it.

But I’ll tell you a truth about this tree. It won’t stay like that for long.

THE TREE OF HOPE

MATTHEW 13:31 MATTHEW 7:15-20

I was sent to Windsor Castle on a long Summer’s course for those mid way through ministry.

We had a Quiet Day in the Queen’s Private chapel on the Estate and nearby was a lovely house where the Queen Mother used to live.

In between the talks I lazed about under a huge oak tree, gazing up through its branches to the blue sky above, and the sun twinkling down through it all.

Sharing the same shade on the other side of the tree, I was startled to find two elderly women sitting silently, gazing in the direction of the Queen Mother’s old home.

It turned out that they were retired maids who had lived most of their lives in her service.

Each day they came and sat silently under the tree to remember their beloved Mistress and to take stock of the world.

“We feel so close to her here” they told me “Our love for that woman grows taller and deeper, just like this great tree and when we sit here we feel we’re still part of her”

The ministry of Jesus was as small as a mustard seed.

So short. Touching the lives of individuals, yes, but never taking the world by storm.

Preferring to entrust everything to sundry tax collectors and fishermen – rather than scholars who knew their books.

Yet the seed grew in them. That love getting taller and deeper by the day.

Until it was an oak tree which simply cannot be ignored.

Something small becoming something big in which everyone can find a home.

I love the image of this tree and the vision of people united by a love that is greater than anything that divides us.

I love to think of a time when together in His branches we all come and make our home.

If the church is about anything at all, it is about making this vision real.

A place where all our hopes and aspirations, all the memories of the past and all the possibilities of the future are brought under the same shade.

I think that as he hung on Calvary’s lonely, bear tree, our Saviour may have had a vision of what that tree would become through his dying and rising.

Not a place of pain but of healing.

Not a place of loneliness but of togetherness

Not a place of restlessness but of nesting down.

Not a place where we are all the same but where we rejoice in our God given differences.

A place where all the birds of the air come and make their nests in its branches.

THE TREE OF GLORY

LUKE 23:26-43

In the years following the great storm of 1987 there was much terrible devastation in the countryside but there was also something incredibly evocative about walking through a tangled woodland. I had an open air cathedral all of my own.

Out at Hindhead beyond the old convent of the Sisters of Bethany.

To me every branch, every cluster, every trunk, every turn of the path, everything the storm had altered evoked my tangled life and God’s love moving amongst the chaos.

I remember one tree in particular. One of its branches had been almost severed by the storm and it had broken away from the trunk and fallen across a branch of a neighbouring tree. This neighbouring branch had broken its fall and continued to hold it in its half-severed state and would probably continue to do so for many years.

I could hear the supporting tree branch creaking under the weight of its broken neighbour.

There were three trees at Calvary of course and the man who hung on the tree in the centre was willing to bear the burdens of the other two – if they would but choose to lean on Him.

The penitent thief took the offer and leaning on the Saviour’s tree, he found his way to paradise. –

The other continued to rail at Jesus rather let his burden go to Him.

Here is the heart of the cross for me.

Jesus bearing our burdens even though his arms creak under the weight of them.

Not in any symbolic way – but in a real way, so that he understood the pain of being human for himself – and he goes on offering that support moment by moment in your life and mine.

Through the tangled woodland of our lives that is both glorious and chaotic, He looks for that which is about to break and shatter – that He might be everlasting arms of love for us.

“Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest”

If this is how he supports us then we see the pattern for our own cross shaped lives.

Holding up the brokenness of our neighbour.

Here is love in its fullness.

The tree of shame becomes the tree of glory because of the enormity of the love that is offered in those outstretched arms.

THE TREE OF LIFE

REVELATION 22:1-5

I was on a treasure hunt with schoolchildren at Skipton Castle in Yorkshire.

And there I found the most precious thing, although it was not mentioned in the Children’s interactive worksheet.

In the forecourt of the castle stood magnificent tree.

It was an extraordinary thing for it grew out of a font.

A huge tree with its roots are firmly planted in the place of baptism seemed to say so much.

About the prospects of life and growth when we become firmly rooted in Him.

I marvelled at it whilst the children tugged my sleeve anxious to be looking for the next clue and then the gift shop.

In the tree of life described so vividly and mysteriously in the book of Revelation we find the significance of all our three previous trees rolled into one.

Here is the forbidden tree of Eden transformed.

Uprooted from that paradise garden and planted now in the middle of a city street.

And fruit which was once untouchable is now offered to all – for the healing of the nations

And God no longer lives at a distance from humankind.

He does not walk in the shadows in the cool of the day anymore.

He is with His people, dwelling so close to them that in this new city there is no need for a Temple or a church – for everywhere is made holy by His presence.

Here is the tree which grew from a mustard seed of which Jesus spoke.

It started so small as the preserve of a chosen people, but now, nourished by the waters of life, there is a place amongst its leaves for everyone.

There is no more disunity. No territory to protect. No status to preserve.

All security and all purpose for life is found in this tree which produces fruit for all seasons.

Here is the tree of Calvary from which we had averted our eyes, such was the suffering of our saviour there.

Where once there were wounds there now are fruits and the fruits have the power of the love for which he died.

The woodland of our lives once so tangled and torn is now formed into a straight avenue along which we all pass together towards the throne of God.

We are baptised people, our roots in the font, our growth sustained with holy water.

Don’t let’s settle for the tree in Eden for ever beset by our guilt and our sense of distance from God.

Don’t let’s settle for the tree in which only some people can find a home – where circles of inclusion and exclusion are continually drawn by Councils and Synods.

Don’t let’s settle for a view of Calvary that just stays with the suffering and makes us feel bad about ourselves in relation to God.

The passion of our Lord leads us through all that, step by uncomfortable step, to this final point of the tree in the street, where the Advent cry finds a voice again right here in the Lent. Emmanuel “God with us”

R 25.3.07