Forest Bathing.

 

John 16:12-15

During the heart of the plague year, that is, those months of quarantine due to Covid, our family did pretty well there, for awhile. Dan and I both have flexible jobs, for which we are immensely grateful, so we were able to tuck in and out of parent-teacher-pastor-professor duties with graceful ninja-like skill. I was Zoom-meeting and drilling times tables, studying the letter to the Romans and explaining the difference between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. Dan was parsing Greek verbs and making another pot of Mac and cheese, and grading exegesis papers while explaining factor trees and how to find the volume of a graduated cylinder. And then, we just hit a wall. We’d reached capacity. We just couldn’t function any more. The boys were testing limits and our patience, bickering, leaving wet towels on the floor and dirty underwear in the bathroom. Dan and I worried about reading delays and social transitions and job security before crashing to sleep at night, only to do it all over again the next morning. We were doing our best to do our part to keep a deadly virus from becoming even more deadly, but that left us isolated, stuck inside, and perpetually fussy. I’m sure most of you can relate. 

So one Saturday, after another fight over who was barging in to whose room, which then turned in to a fight over who hit whom first, which then turned in to an argument about who never gets in trouble and who always gets blamed for everything, I said, “That’s it we’re going to the woods.” 

We have this joke in our family. We are always encouraging the boys to get outside. But, alas, we rarely make them. They almost always choose Netflix and Fortnite. But whenever the kids are having a rough day, and we go out for a walk together, usually over to our nearby Dormont park, and the kids have this transformation -- their moods just lift — they start laughing, they start running around, their imaginations light up, they get along, they tell funny stories and ask great questions -- and we take a moment to remind them of what’s just happened. “Isn’t it interesting,” we say, “now that you’re outside, breathing fresh air, running around, playing and being imaginative, you feel so much better.” Every time. We tell them that they’ll feel better if they go outside, they resist and protest, they give excuses and arguments, but when they finally do get out there, they’re shocked by how much better they feel. And every time, we remind them, with a tone of loving sarcasm I am convinced is appropriate for parents of a middle schooler, we say, “Huh. Funny how that works. You get outside and life just seems much better.”

But really, it’s actually science. The Japanese coined the term, “Shinrin-yoku” - translated “forest bathing.” And they’ve done tons of studies about the physiological benefits of just wandering in the forest, with no goal, no intention, no accomplishment in mind. Just wandering through the woods. Studies have shown that this “forest bathing” lowers cortisol and adrenaline, lowers blood pressure, reduces anxiety, depression, anger, confusion and fatigue. It improves focus, reduces ADHD symptoms, and craziest of all, they’ve found that plants give off this chemical called phytoncides. This chemical has antibacterial and anti fungal properties, and increases a type of white blood cell in our bodies that supports our immune system and is linked to a lower risk of certain cancers. In fact, patients in hospitals with “green views” have shorter post-operative stays, take fewer pain killers, and have fewer post-surgical complications compared to those who have no windows in their rooms. So if you need to just stare out of the window for the next ten minutes, go for it. It’s the best sermon around.

Sometimes, we’ve just got to get out to the woods.

So as we wander through the forest on Trinity Sunday, I first want to remind you how very good it is for us, just to wander. Because we might start wandering around today, and maybe start feeling a little lost. That’s certainly the case whenever I try to think about or somehow “comprehend” the Trinity. 

I used to hate thinking about the Trinity. I’d end up in the philosophical and theological weeds where the theologians would drawl on and on with all the Greek and the pages of words and the footnotes. They’ll talk about the three in one and the one in three. They’ll use big words like perichoresis and hypostasis. One God in three persons, consubstantial in person, nature, essence and will. But also separate and distinct in and of themselves. Co-equal. Co-powerful. These authors insist on their rightness, and on their willingness to burn anyone else who might have a different perspective. There is one God in whom there are three persons who share one substance, and these persons, though one God, go by different names to denote those persons. They wax poetic about the heresies of modalism and Sabellianism and Arianism.  And then we wet-behind-the-ears seminarians would act like we understood what the heck they were talking about and we’d write papers about our own perfect orthodoxy that would get graded according to how smart we sounded, when really all we were doing was stringing words we didn’t understand together into incomprehensible theses and feeling really proud of ourselves. 

We’d use analogies like water and ice and steam, or the head, body and feet of a river, or a god “powerpack” that descends from the heavens, entirely God, but somehow suffused into a human body. We’d argue about the co-existence of the Son or the adoptionist theory that Jesus was made by God and then adopted in to God’s self. We’d argue about whether hypostasis means “essence” or “person.” And when we’d reach a dead end, when we’d start talking in circles and hiding our logical fallacies. After all the pages and the Greek and the footnotes and the Fathers we’d read, we’d shrug our shoulders, get to our required word count and say, “it’s a mystery.” “You must have faith.” The copout helicopter that will fly in to rescue us when we’re lost in the wilderness.

Somehow, being lost in the woods was just not ok. We like to have things figured out. We like to know and understand and comprehend and then tell others they’re wrong. 

But it’s ok. We really don’t have to have it all figured out. We’re just forest bathing.

We don’t have to understand any aspect or element of the forest in order to receive its benefits. Take a deep breath; we’re fighting cancer.

But I do want to tell you something cool about the forest, something that I think shows us a little bit of what the Trinity is like. And if you get lost, it’s no big deal, just come back to the surface, and forest-bathe. 

So often we think that we’ve got to get it all figured out, all by ourselves, we’ve got to come to this “personal” understanding of who Jesus is and what he has done for us, so that then we can go out and convince others to individually do the same. We look at nature like that, too. We don’t realize that everything is connected, that the elk need the wolves and the wolves need the prairies and the prairies need the elk in order for any of them to survive. We look at a tree and we think it’s this single thing, this one entity, this one “person,” “entire of itself.” But really, one tree is in unique relationships with all the other organisms all around it. In a sense, the tree is still a tree, but it is also the whole forest.

They call it the “wood-wide-web.” It’s a mycorrhizal network that creates a language through which the entire forest speaks to itself. So this network is made up of densely packed fungal threads that connect even plants of other species to each other. This fungus forms mycorrhiza with plant roots, and in this complicated system of tunnels and tubes, much in the same vein as our own internet, plants are able to pass chemicals between themselves in a sort of give-and-take relationship. It’s a “straight up exchange between plants and fungi. Plants provide carbon rich sugars made by photosynthesis, and in return, they get nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi scavenge from the soil.” And then “other plants use this fungal network to communicate to each other, and through these fungal networks, the plants themselves exchange sugars, nutrients, and water between themselves,” even if they aren’t members of the same species. Mother trees have been known to send extra carbon to their seedlings. When a birch needs more carbon and the fir has too much, the fir sends some over. Dying trees will donate their nutrients to specific neighbors. They’ll even send warnings to other neighboring plants. If one species is being attacked by a certain kind of aphid, they’ll tell all their neighbors to increase a certain chemical that will attract a specific wasp that just so happens to feed on aphids, even if their neighbors haven’t been infested with the aphids yet. 

As we wander the forest. As we breathe deeply the phytoncides and focus our brains and fight off potential cancers. Just think about all that’s going on underneath our feet. Scientists still don’t have a full grasp on what’s happening. Although they can detect signals going from one plant to the next, although they can prove that there’s some kind of communication going on here that suggests unity among the diversity, although they know that each species is unique in and of itself and yet still a part of some great organism, there is still so much we don’t know about what’s going on in and through those mycorrhizal tunnels. We know now that forests aren’t just made up of single organisms in a survival of the fittest, fighting for resources battle, but they’re also this bigger, greater, more connected thing, united by this network of fungus that enables them to relate and speak and help each other.  There’s a web beneath us, orchestrating and coordinating everything all around us.

And that’s the Trinity.

At least, that’s how my puny little brain is understanding and relating to this trinitarian idea, for now. 

It’s this web of interconnectedness. The means through which we relate to one another. The tunnels through which information and needs and desires and gifts are exchanged. The system of relationships that unites us all. 

It’s this mechanism of interconnectedness that reminds us that none of us are alone, none of us can survive without each other, and none of us is separate from this great web of being. 

When we make connections with one another, when we offer someone a cup of water or a pair of shoes or the space in front of us in line, when we weep tears of mourning fifteen miles away from the most recent school massacre, when we cringe in frustration at our helplessness in a war happening an ocean away, when we are at our wit’s end with bickering families all stuck in the house during a global pandemic, we are participating in the movement of the Trinity. We are traveling through those mycorrhizal networks to reach out to one another, plant to tree to fern to fungus. We are participating in that web of interconnectedness that, at least for now, I like to think of as the Trinity - this great web of relationship. The great web of being.

And we don’t have to understand it, or “believe in it,” or learn complicated apologetics and theological backflips in order for us to participate in it, in order for us to feel the benefits of it. We can just bathe in it. Take a deep breath. Wander around. There is God beneath our feet.

Thanks be to God.

When the Pieces Won't Fit.

 

John 14:23-29

Acts 16:9-15

    In our panicked scramble to clean the house before my in-laws came to town, we found a puzzle that Jonah had received for his birthday…last August? Maybe the August before? 1000 pieces of the solar system, stars and planets, our own sun’s rays bending down from above, and the earth, a swirling blue marble, creeping up from left hand corner down below. This puzzle is hard. There are so many colors and swirls and clouds of gas that it is just overwhelming the moment you open the box. 1000 puzzle pieces, each containing its own little world, a cluster of stars, a moon orbiting Jupiter. So while the grandparents visited, we’d weave in tiny little moments of puzzle piecing. Waiting for the hamburgers to cook on the grill, waiting for me to get home from work, waiting in between YouTube commercials, they’d study the pieces, gathering up like colors, trying possibilities, flipping them around, trying again. The other day I went to say goodnight to Dan before I went up to bed, and I found him, back arched, eyes squinting, hovering over the puzzle pieces, determined to find just one more connection before his own lights out. It was really slow going at first. There was just so much, all jumbled together, and none of it made any sense. In proper, decent, and in order fashion, we started sifting through to find the edge pieces first, trying to define our border, our limits, some comfort in the fact that this is where the puzzle ends and begins, even if it is a puzzle of the universe. Grandpa and Levi were the most dedicated, and Dan stepped in to help after a few notes on his banjo. Eventually, Gramma got involved, and even Jonah came by and found one piece to put right. 

Great Grandma and Grandpa always had a puzzle out when we’d visit them in Arizona. Every time we walked by, we were supposed to stop and find two pieces to put in their place. Eventually, by the end of our visit, we’d had enough pauses to form an entire picture of sailboats or red barns or deer grazing in the forest. 

They’re such pointless things, puzzles. You take a box with a nice picture on the front, open it up to find a thousand tiny pieces that you then painstakingly sort and turn and try and turn again so that you can form a copy of the picture that has already been printed on the cover of the box. 

And I could not start this sermon until I had at least figured out how the earth went together. I’d forage and hunt, looking for the exact right piece to fit the specific section, only to try other pieces that just seemed to show up in my hands, seemed to just quietly tell me, “try me here. Or maybe here.” I sifted and searched, sorted and tried, until all those clouds and waves and currents and land came together to form this terrible, beautiful world that we live in. 

My twelve year old son has two pairs of black and white Adidas tennis shoes. Both are mostly black, both have three white stripes, both have black laces. Once when he was running around, late for school, looking for his shoes, I found a pair of said black and white Adidas tennis shoes, and offered them to him. “Here, Jonah. I found them.” “No. Mom,” he said with a frustrated sigh, "Those are not the right ones.” 

The other day at his soccer practice, one of his white teammates was chasing another teammate, who was black, saying, “Hey monkey! Hey monkey! Get in the back of the bus monkey!” 

And about three weeks ago he came home from school, dumped his backpack in the middle of the kitchen floor, and ran straight to his room. A few minutes later we checked on him. He’s on the floor, tears streaming down his face while he pulls and tugs at his cheeks, saying, “They said my cheeks are so fat. How do I get rid of my cheeks? I have to get rid of my cheeks.” 

Last week in Buffalo, New York, ten people were murdered and three people were injured as they shopped for Corn Flakes and bananas and hamburger buns at their neighborhood grocery store. One man went in to buy a birthday cake and never made it home. This was the 198th mass shooting in the United States this year. 

The war in Ukraine rages on.

Babies aren’t getting enough formula.

Forest fires are consuming thousands of acres of land and homes in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, and Nebraska. 

A news reporter in Delhi asks a man pulling his cart of fruit to the market how he’s surviving these weeks and weeks of deadly 120 degree days, and he shrugs and says, “I try to drink water. I am not a rich man; I cannot afford cold drinks.” 

Three weeks ago the orchestra teacher at my son’s middle school was arrested under child pornography charges.

I’m sure you carry with you your own pieces that just don’t seem to fit.

Do you ever feel like the world is just breaking apart? Do you ever feel like the earth’s puzzle pieces just won’t fit?

Paul had spent most of his life trying to unravel the world. Of course, he wouldn’t have admitted that at the time. At the time, he thought that he was merely sifting through all the pieces and throwing out the ones that don’t fit. But then, when his own world is broken apart, when he experiences a vision from God where he can no longer see anything, something changes, something shifts, and he dedicates his life to gathering up all the puzzle pieces and showing how, in God’s grace, they can fit back together again. So he’s traveling around, eating with all the wrong people, getting himself thrown in prison, and then thrown out of prison, arguing with the other disciples, and somehow still finding time to proclaim the love of God in Christ, when he has another vision. A Macedonian man appeared to him and pleads with him. “Come to Macedonia and help us,” this envisioned man says. So Paul and his posse all pack up and set sail for Macedonia. It's quite a road trip. Several stops for gas and Slim Jims and mixed Coke-and-Cherry Slushees. Eventually, they land in Philippi, a Roman city, determined to connect all the pieces of this vision and their travels and the Word of God as they understand it back together. Except they hang out for a few days, and that Macedonian man pleading for Paul’s help is nowhere to be found. So, on the sabbath day, they take the remaining pieces of their puzzling vision, and they wander outside the gates to find a place of prayer. They’re searching for the searchers. The ones who don’t fit in. The ones who are looking for something more, and are willing to sit outside the gates until it comes. And instead of rescuing a Macedonian man, they take that puzzle piece and flip it around, studying it, wondering how it will fit. They sit down on the rocks and start talking to a bunch of women who had gathered there. Then they see Lydia, likely a Gentile woman, listening intently to their every word. Paul fingers the puzzle piece in his hand, trying to make sense of how any of this connects. She’s a rich woman. A dealer of purple cloth. A dealer in luxury. So that’s strange. Why would a rich woman who has everything she needs wander outside the gates in search of something more? Another set of pieces that don’t seem to fit together. She is fully present to what they have to say about God, she receives it with her whole heart, and Paul is given another piece to this Macedonian puzzle. They baptize her. Her and her whole household. More pieces. More turning and trying and studying to see how it all fits. She invites them home. She compels them. She urges. She insists. She will not take no for an answer. She gives them the final piece, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” “If you have found that I, too, fit in to the family of God, that I’m a vital piece to this kingdom of God puzzle, then come, come home.” She demands that they realize that she fits, and that they fit, too. And Paul and his friends gather up all the pieces that they have collected, pile them up, stuff them in their pockets, and follow her home. Nothing seems to fit the vision that Paul had received, but they’ve found more pieces in the process, widening the boarders of this picture even further, even if they don’t seem to fit together quite yet.

Last Thursday a bunch of misfit middle school kids in the school’s music department had a concert. The choir sang. The band and the orchestra played. Kids with pink hair and clip on ties and combat boots. Kids with big feet. Kids hiding under their hoodies and curtains of long, stringy hair. Kids with the wrong kind of black and white Adidas tennis shoes. Kids who’d said stupid things and kids who’d heard it. Kids who know what is going on in our world and show up to sing a song or play the drums or squeak through their first solos anyway. Kids who used their voices and the air in their lungs and the rhythm in their hearts to bring their puzzle piece forward, to explore how it fit in with everyone else’s, to say, even for just an hour and a half, even just among themselves and their parents and their siblings and grandparents, “I belong. I fit in. I am a vital piece. Come. Come outside the gates, beyond the insults and the constant criticism, beyond the comparisons and the violence and the inequalities. Beyond the oppression and injustice. In search of something more. Bring your pieces. Let’s see how all this fits together. We’re all searchers, searching for something that we can’t really name and we don’t really know what it looks like, but that will quietly invite us to try. “Try me here,” they’ll say, “or maybe here. We’ve travelled this far. Come. Come home.” 

How brave were those kids? How trusting their teachers? How’d they know that if they just brought what they had, if they just came together, if they just looked around, it’d all fit together somehow? How many negative voices and terrifying comparisons and echoing laughter for their “wrong” shoes did they have to endure, and then take what they had, no matter how imperfect, no matter how unsure of the big picture, and stand up there on that stage and say, “Me. I’m here. I belong, too. You can come to my house. I’ll sing you a song. I just learned the clarinet.”

These are just ordinary stories, really. Puzzles. Road trips. Middle school band concerts. Trying to survive the sixth grade. Worrying about what other people think of you. Getting bombarded by constant bad news. Being uncertain that you’re on the right track. Looking for the searchers outside the city gates. Thinking you know exactly what you’re looking for and then stumbling upon some other thing you’d never expected, but really needed. Getting invited over to a new friend’s house for dinner. Tearing up at a band concert because it’s such a terrible, beautiful world. 

“Jesus answered him, “‘those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and will come to them and make our home with them.’”

Oh God, how will all this fit? Will it ever make any sense? Bring us more pieces. Teach us to turn them around, study them, pause as we pass by, and let the picture unfold. Help us look outside the gates. Let the pieces we need just land in our palms. There is so much more out there to be connected to. Do not let our hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. Give us your peace. Invite us home.

Thanks be to God.