Sermon given at the centenary Eucharist for Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Folly Mills, VA
I once knew a tree. I didn’t know it well. It was a tree I didn’t visit very often, but my father and his father and his grandfather knew it. It grew on their farm, and however it started, whether from a seed planted carefully and intentionally there on the hillside between the spring house and the family cemetery, or whether from a seed blown there by a chance breeze, the tree grew.
And this hillside was not the easiest place to grow a tree, or anything else. Its slope was broken by giant rocks, boulders buried deep in the soil. But the tree didn’t give up. It kept growing, year after year, decade after decade, for at least a century until its branches stretched out over the hill, strong and shady and providing nesting places for birds and squirrels, and its roots wound around and over the rocks like gnarled rivers, making places for children or travelers or farmers to sit for a while and talk or rest or look out over the land.
That farm is a bit north of here in a part of the country where miles of caverns exist underground and may well exist under that hillside and that tree. And if you’ve ever visited a cavern, you know that spending time underground is like spending time in another world, discovering depths of beauty and mystery, great cathedrals of stone that the ground above doesn’t even hint at. That tree might well have taken root in the soil above caverns, taking nourishment from both the solid earth and from mystery.
I think about that tree and those rocks and those caverns, when I look at the walls of this church, Good Shepherd, this dwelling place for God. For these rocks came from the farmland surrounding us. They were dug out of the land and hauled here, and a cornerstone was laid, and 100 years ago a church was planted here, built out of the earth itself, a church that became a place for people to nest, to grow, to learn, to find shelter, to sit and talk or rest a while, to look out over the land. And like a tree growing above deep caverns in the earth, a church, too, is built with its roots grounded in both solid earth and in mystery. Our faith is rooted like that. We live in two places – in earth and in mystery, in this world and in the next. We find our faith in what we sometimes call “thin places,” those sites and moments where, while our feet are still firmly planted on this ground, we also draw close to God and the vast expanse of eternity. Every baptism, every Eucharist, every consecrated place of worship is a thin place, a holy place. Tonight, we are standing in a thin space, on 100 years of holy ground.
Neenah Ellis, a writer and radio producer, at the turn of the most recent century, spent a year interviewing centenarians about their lives, for a radio series and eventually a book titled If I Live To Be 100. While I was thinking about how significant it is to reach the century mark, whether you are a church or a human being, I started reading her book. At the beginning, she writes about her first few interviews, which didn’t go as well as she’d hoped, and then she writes about a revelation. As she explains it, “I realized I wouldn’t get my answers by asking questions, I would get them by waiting…, [by] learning to listen.”
I wonder what we would hear if we listened to these 100-year-old walls, built out of the earth and stone of the land where we live. I wonder what we would hear if we listened in this thin, holy space.
Some of what we might hear can be found in tonight’s lectionary readings, which appropriately are the assigned readings for Thanksgiving, tomorrow’s feast day – liturgically and literally – and exactly 100 years from the Thanksgiving Eve when a group of teachers and students and ministers decided to plant a church.
The psalm tonight, Psalm 65, is a psalm of thanksgiving. Some call it a psalm of orientation, or re-orientation, because it begins with the recognition that we are human, we are imperfect, that our sins are stronger than we are, and yet it moves from confession to thanksgiving, to a recognition that God is stronger yet than sin.
Here at this church, we know and love in particular the image of the Good Shepherd, a metaphor for God in both the Old and New Testaments. Theologian Ellen Davis, writing about Psalm 65, suggests another picture of God that’s also connected to land and to the care of God’s creatures. She describes the God of this psalm as God the Farmer – a God who creates a sanctuary for us to live in grace and peace, a God who waters the earth with blessings, clothes the hillsides with joy, and plants fields of grain to nourish all creation.
Happy are they whom you choose and draw to your courts to dwell there! They will be satisfied by the beauty of your house, by the holiness of your temple…. May the meadows cover themselves with flocks, and the valleys cloak themselves with grain; let them shout for joy and sing.
The words of the psalm, and I believe the words we would hear if these walls could speak, are words of blessing, of celebration, of thanksgiving, expressed in the language of creation, the language of rocks and trees and hillsides, of planting, nurturing, the waters of rain and the waters of baptism, the grain that makes bread for all the Eucharists we celebrate – around the table at home, around the altar table at communion, as our people of faith have for 100 years.
And, if these walls spoke, I think they might tonight also speak the words of the epistle, in answer to the words of the psalm: “The one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.”
If the psalm voices our thanksgiving for God’s blessings, then the epistle gives words to what we do with them, what Good Shepherd has done with blessings for 100 years. We are to share abundantly. Sharing was part of Good Shepherd’s existence from the beginning. This is a church that took root in the desire to bring people together from a range of backgrounds and faith traditions to teach God’s word, to spread the good news, to share the abundance of God’s blessings through teaching, building community, breaking bread, singing, praying, and being the body of Christ, a tree planted on a hilltop. What blessings and what sharing of abundance is waiting for us in the next century? To what work is God calling Good Shepherd in the next 100 years?
The things that are planted – whether trees or fields of wheat – take deep root where they are planted with love and care. They bear fruit. They feed their people. Trees become shelters and homes for living things, holy spaces that are rooted in both earth and heaven. Wheat becomes the bread of the Eucharist, blessed, broken apart, feeding souls, and scattered back out into the surrounding communion of saints, from decade to decade, century to century, age to age and beyond. Amen.
— The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, Curate, Trinity Episcopal Church of Staunton
Thanksgiving Eve, November 22, 2023
Good Shepherd is online (and on Facebook) at this link.
