Planting trees
Thumbnail Image by jggrz from Pixabay
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
April 25, 2021—Easter 4B
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18
Let God’s love abide in you. And “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (1 John 3:18). By this you will follow Christ’s commandment to love one another. By this you will allow Christ to abide in you, to live in you, to let his Spirit work in you and through you.
Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
As I was thinking and talking about shepherds this week, I was reminded of a story a friend of mine told me some years ago. It was written by French author Jean Giono in 1953, and it is fictional, but tells a story that has been lived out in truth across the world in many nations.
In the tale of “The Man Who Planted Trees,” a young man hiking through a desolate area of the French Alps in 1910 seeks shelter (and much-needed water) from a lone shepherd he encounters quite by chance. A quiet man, the shepherd tends 30 sheep or so out in the midst of a wilderness of bare hillsides and dry stream-beds. But he welcomes this stranger, gives him water drawn from his deeply dug well, and allows him to walk beside him as he goes about his day. On their walk, he takes the hundred perfect acorns he painstakingly sorted through and chose the night before, soaking them in water before putting them in a sack at his waist. He leads the storyteller out beyond where he pastures the sheep, up to the top of a ridge, and begins to plant those hundred acorns. One by one, he makes a hole with the iron rod he uses as a walking stick and drops an acorn in.
“Is this your land?” the young man asks.
“It is not,” the shepherd replies.
“Do you know whose it is?”
“No, I do not. Perhaps it is common land. Perhaps it belongs to someone who cares nothing about it.”
It isn’t his land. He isn’t being paid to plant these trees. Only one in ten, in fact, will survive and he will not likely see any significant growth for many years to come. And yet … he plants.
He plants because he believes that the land is dying for lack of trees. And he wants to bring it back to life, even if he might not live to see the results. So he picks up acorns; he sorts through them carefully; he soaks them in cool water; and he plants them.
When the young storyteller returns ten years later, weary from fighting in WWI and longing for fresh air, he finds forests of oaks ten feet tall, and his old friend still planting 100 acorns a day, as well as birch and beech seedlings down in the valleys. All this from the work of one man, proving that a person could claim God’s power for creation as well as destruction.
It isn’t just the trees themselves: bringing shade and halting erosion has shifted the whole eco-system. Gradually, water has returned to dry stream-beds, and a variety of plants and animals are beginning to find a home in the area. Villages are starting to grow and thrive again. And by now, perhaps we are less surprised to hear that STILL this solitary man keeps up his work of planting: acorn by acorn, seedling by seedling, through another World War and on for over 30 years.
Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
As I said, this is not a true story in the way that we generally mean such things. But it is TRUE. Planting and reforestation miracles like this HAVE occurred: two men created two separate forests in India in just such a way; the Green Belt Movement planted 65 million trees in Kenya; the Million Tree Project planted, well, millions of trees in Mongolia to reverse desertification.[1] And on and on across the world.
Not for profit: using volunteer labor from churches and schools and local groups. Individuals, out there doing work whose effect would require years to reach fruition.
And that’s what strikes me about this story’s image of a shepherd: it counters our desire for immediate gratification. It places something in the balance against our obsessive focus on short term profit (whether that be a corporate bottom line or our own personal gain and comfort). It takes a long view, a broad view on the needs of an entire system. And then slowly, quietly, it does something.
He laid down his life. He did. Not by dying—few of us are called to do such a thing—but by offering his time, his passion, his effort to this work. He set aside self-interest and recognition, and was willing to wait a good long time before he could even see any results of his labor. He laid down his life. And in this, he found great contentment.
It is the way God shepherds: not just taking care of our immediate needs (if that’s all the psalm refers to, God becomes a gigantic vending machine) but of the world as a whole. And if God is to live in us, then that spirit of shepherding must live in us too.
Think of that shepherd: the one who knows that before we can walk beside the still waters, sometimes we must bring the waters back to life. Invite that wise, patient one inside your mind and heart and spirit, and allow him to dwell within you. He just might give you, give ALL of us, the sight and the strength to take the long view. To tend to others not just by providing for what we imagine they need today, but by discovering what they truly need to heal and flourish into the future.
It requires quietness. Let quietness abide in you. It requires time and space. Let time and space abide in you. It requires trust. Let trust abide in you. It requires (I will say it again) patience. Let patience abide in you. Let it live in you. Let GOD live in you; let the love of Christ live in you; let the Holy Spirit live and move and have its being in you! And you will walk beside still waters.
The Shepherd Finds the Lost Sheep by Pamela Grenfell Smith
Not one of the shrewd old ewes, nor yet a ewe
that always mothers-forth twin lambs in spring –
nothing special about this sheep except its absence
at the evening count, but at last you find it, bleating
its idiot panic, broadcasting its location
to predators and shepherds. You get there first
but it does not rejoice to behold you. Adrift in fear,
it thinks you are a threat, flinches and shakes.
When you stoop to pick it up, it bites your thumb.
Once it’s on your shoulders its hooves flail at your face.
As you climb and climb the almost-cliff it fell from,
a hot wash of terrified sheepshit streams down your side.
This is the sheep for which you are answerable.
This weary, filthy night constitutes the measure
of your faithfulness. You haul the sheep
back to the sheepfold. If only it had broken
a leg, what a feast you’d be having tonight!
But it is whole, and must be watered and fed,
examined, cleaned, enfolded – this day’s work
might end at last when the moon is high in the sky,
that herald of ease, that radiant friend to shepherds.