"The Trees Know" | Nathan LeRud | December 1, 2024

I'm hoping you'll forgive a little bit of nostalgia in me this morning. I'm having very vivid flashbacks of the first time I stepped into this pulpit 15 years ago.

Nobody had prepared me for what it would feel like to stand up this high and then look out on this sea of faces and experience for the first time what it felt like to have that many people giving me attention.

I remember like having this almost visceral reaction. I told my therapist later like I get why politicians are the way they are; that is the biggest turn on I know. I'm a little bit scared of how much I like it. It's a pretty it's a pretty intense experience.

It was this Sunday that that happened 15 years ago– it was the first Sunday in Advent, and these were the texts that we heard that day: Jeremiah's righteous branch, Paul's blessing to the congregation in Thessalonica, Jesus's words in Luke about the fig tree.

He says, when you see that fig tree starting to put out its buds in the spring, you know summer is coming. That is how it will be, Jesus tells them, when the kingdom of God breaks in on you. It will come with fire and clouds and thick darkness; it will come like a beautiful spring day, like trees bursting into bloom full of beauty and splendor.

The kingdom of God, he says, is at the same time both of these things: it is both the judgment and the grace.

The writer of Ecclesiastes had written centuries before: for everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under Heaven. You might know The Birds version of that text: "to everything turn turn turn, there is a season..."

That's the one that we know. Ecclesiastes got there first.

And Jesus is riffing on a similar idea in Luke when he gives his followers this image of the fig tree as a way to understand how time works. We might say he says, learn to pay attention– the trees have something to show you. The trees will show you the way. They mark the seasons.

And if you learn how to pay attention to the world around you, it will show you how to move forward into an uncertain future.

You move not with fear but with freedom.

The name for that way of learning how to pay attention as the the Christian wisdom tradition has taught it down through the centuries, the name for that spiritual practice we might say is discernment.

"Discernment" is a simple word on the surface of things. All it means is listening, right, sifting, distinguishing all of the various voices in my head from the one true voice that is God's voice within me.

But discernment turns out to be a little more complicated than that.

It does not mean, I have learned, squeezing my eyes shut and praying that God will give me a sign, a voice from Heaven, a flashing neon arrow that says, "Go this way, you dummy."

"That way, that way, that way."

I always want God to work that way, right, put in your coin and get the light, it'd be so much easier if it worked that way.

But discernment as the Christian wisdom tradition has taught it down through the centuries means learning how to read what we might call God's first testament, that is the world, right, it's nature, it's the world God created, the people God created.

Learning to listen, learning to trust my own body, which is really just part of this greater landscape, it's–

I'm just another tree growing in the great forest, so when I practice that kind of discernment, I learn how to trust that the world of creation will show me the way forward.

If I learn how to pay attention to it, the trees know something that I don't know yet.

That's one way of paraphrasing what Jesus says to his followers in Luke, He says –

[pause]

[aside] One of these days.

I swear, some of you have watched me fiddle with this mic for 15 years now, and you're still waiting for me to get it right.

Jesus says look at the fig tree–

[aside] Boy, this thing doesn't want to stay on.

Look at the fig trees, he says, look at all the trees in the forest as soon as they sprout leaves, you can see for yourself, you know that summer is near. You can smell it in the air.

You know that smell in the spring when the buds are just starting to emerge.

If you're not paying attention out in the world, you can come in into this courtyard, and that tulip tree out there will show you the way– actually, you can you can see her this morning. The buds are already on her, she's just starting to get ready.

It will still be a couple of months; I'm trusting that she will know it's not quite time yet, it's going to get cold.

It's going to get– don't put your flowers out yet, girl. But she's ready, right. She's like almost bursting at the seams. She's almost ready to go. She knows what time it is.

We might imagine Jesus saying, learn how to pay attention to that tulip tree. She knows something that you don't know yet.

A couple years ago, on my last sabbatical, my brother-in-law Ben and I built a little 9x13 foot hut. It's almost kind of a lean-to.

It's behind my parents' cabin up in Rhododendron on Mount Hood.

My parents bought that place when they retired, and I remember the first time we saw the property, this gorgeous hand-hewn wooden cabin. It was built by Henry Steiner– that's a name up on Mt. Hood– built by Steiner in the 20s.

And over this foot bridge on the other side of the creek, there's this little grove of trees, and what was once kind of a memory of a horseshoe court. It was kind of grown over and abandoned.

And I thought, this is the place. This is the place for poustinia.

I talked a little bit the last hour about what that word means, "poustinia," where it comes from. That's a word out of the Russian Orthodox tradition.

"Poustinia in Russian just means "desert," because in the Russian tradition a poustiniac, kind of like a a temporary hermit of a kind, they go into this metaphorical desert, a little cabin. And in traditional poustinia, all the cabin is furnished with is a bed, a chair, a lamp, a cross, and an icon of the Madonna in the corner. It's super simple, super spartan. And you go in order to hear the voice of God.

Now I have never built anything in my life. Ben is the one who designed and coordinated this project. I was just unskilled labor.

But we cleared the spot, we poured some some cement supports, we built a floor, and then we framed in the walls. Ben was out on the weekends to help with the complicated bits like putting the roof on, but during the week it was just me out there in the woods, mostly in the rain because it was a really rainy May, hitting my thumb more times than I care to count with a hammer and hearing stuff come out of my mouth that I didn't even know that I knew.

It was it was like the hardest thing I have ever done, and I wasn't sure what exactly was driving me to do it. I remember my mother once saying like, you're going to finish that thing right?

And sometimes it felt like I was being– I was being driven to do it by something I didn't even really understand.

I told my therapist, sometimes, especially like on the more stressful days, I felt like I was building my own coffin.

That was kind of a dark– he was like okay, maybe we want to unpack that. You're getting ready to turn 40, is that is that what's going on here, coming to terms with mortality are we?

Maybe it was the stress of the job, my wrestling with with what it felt like to have I mean completely– almost completely– personalized my interior life, my spiritual life, to the degree I realized l that summer– to the degree where I can't like, I can't read a book, I can't pray a psalm, I can't sing a hymn or go to a movie without wanting to take notes for a future sermon or a class or an article for the newsletter or something.

I wanted a place that was just mine, a place where I could be alone and and try to listen once again to the voice of God, to try to find that voice in the midst of everything else going on.

I told my brother-in-law, it does not need to be pretty. All it needs is to be functional. I'm setting the bar really low because I'm building this thing. But then once the walls were up and insulated and we lined them with cedar paneling, which smelled amazing, and we installed these oak hardwood boards on the floor, and suddenly this little 9x13 doomed structure, the bane of my existence, my coffin, became beautiful.

And once it was finished– it was a weekend last February when I finally kind of finished the framing– I sat in front of that window and this little desk that I found on Craigslist. I shut my eyes, I breathed in the scent of the cedar– it's the most magical smell that I know– and in the silence of that poustinia, right, a building completely off the grid, no water, no electricity, no hum of any appliances. It's remarkably well insulated.

So when you shut the door, I was unprepared for the particular quality, the thickness of that silence. I don't think I've ever really experienced total silence like I did.

Three months later, a realtor wrote my parents a letter. There was a couple she was working with that was looking for a Steiner cabin, which is what my parents had, and this couple was ready to make an offer. And my sister had just learned that she was pregnant, she actually called me that weekend that I finished the poustinia and the coming of Thaddeus has changed everything in our family. It made so it made no sense for my parents to be an hour away from Portland up on the mountain when their life was here, with easy access to I-5 so they could be here at Trinity.

The offer that this couple made was too good to turn down and the timing was right, so as a family we made the decision to sell that Steiner cabin, our little bit of paradise in the woods. And the poustinia, just 3 months finished, went with it.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

So I went out in July for my last weekend in my little cedar-lined prayer coffin. It was the weekend of my birthday. It was last July. It was just me again alone in the poustinia, this one place, the one thing I had built with my own two hands, my place to be totally alone, the one place in the world I knew I could find this quality of silence that I craved.

And I don't really have words for what happened to me that weekend except that the trees knew something that I didn't know yet, and they started whispering in my ear.

Or maybe God started talking to me, or maybe the poustinia has not let me go yet, or maybe it was all three.

Maybe it was all in my head, but something shifted in me that I still don't really understand.

But that shift began this process of discernment, this process of deep listening, paying attention to what my body was telling me.

And ultimately that process led to my decision to step away from this job. To end my tenure as Dean of Trinity Cathedral, and figure out how to find that silence, where to find that Silence of God again.

I know I can't, you know, like maybe it will be out in the world somewhere.

My sense is it's really in here.

But how do you find that? How do you cultivate that?

My sense is that the trees have a lot to say to me right now.

I think maybe God has a lot to say to me if I can learn the wisdom to hear it.

I've spent 20 years of my life telling other people what I thought God was saying in classes and sermons and in spiritual direction one-on-ones.

I spent a lifetime up here in this pulpit talking at you, so maybe I'm just tired of the sound of my own voice.

Sometimes I think that's really what it is.

I want more silence. It's the thing I crave.

I want fewer words.

I want to hear God's voice again.

That realization has meant a kind of an apocalypse in my life.

It's another big scary theological word, "apocalypse," but all it really means is "unveiling," right.

An apocalypse is just a– it's just a revelation. I mean, how complicated can it be?

Apocalypse means something like "release" actually, and when an apocalypse happens, I've learned it does not always come as the– you know– the roaring of the sea, the earthquakes, the fainting and forboding, all the weeping, gnashing of teeth that scripture talks about.

More often, in my experience, apocalypse comes as the gentlest rustling of the wind in the trees.

It's something that the Hebrew Prophet Elijah discovered on Mount Horeb.

The apocalypse in Elijah's experience came as the sound of sheer silence.

That kind of silence can break your world open. It can tear apart everything you thought you knew for sure.

That is often deeply painful, and often it comes along with grief and loss.

But once the trees start talking to you, there's no turning back. Not once the fig tree starts putting out its spring buds, once that tulip tree out there in the courtyard starts to burst into bloom.

You start paying attention to the trees, and all of a sudden you know what time it is, because the trees know something that we don't know yet.

Or maybe the thing that they know is actually something that I do know, something I know deep down when I stop coming up with new innovative things to say and instead learn how to listen to what my body is telling me.

The part of my body that is connected to every tree and every shrub, every person, everything that is.

I'm just another part of God's creation, after all, yearning, as Paul writes in another letter, yearning for my completion, for my my telios, the perfection of all creation that is promised in these ancient texts.

Paul writes about the apocalypse. We don't use that term for it, but Paul writes about the apocalypse in Romans.

He says, we know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains up until now, and we ourselves who have this tiny little inkling of God's spirit, we too are groaning inwardly while we wait for the the fullness, the full flowering of everything we were created to be.

Turns out there's nothing terrifying about the apocalypse, although it comes with disruption and change in its wake.

But the other side of every apocalypse, every revelation, every changing of the seasons– the other side of that kind of disruptive change is such incredible beauty.

This is actually what the natural world was created to do.

This world was not created to stay still, it was created to change and to grow, to decay, to die, and then to rise again in the spring, just when the buds start appearing on the trees.

The signs of death and decay are all around us. Our texts know that.

Clouds and thick darkness here and forboding, the dimming of the sun, the coming of the darkness.

But the signs of life are all around us, too.

All I need is a little a little space, a little time.

I shut up, I take a deep breath, and I learn once again how to start paying attention.

The trees have never let me down, not when I learn how to trust the one who made them.

She's the one who made me.

She's the one who made you.

And she is not finished with us.

Not quite yet.