The trees on Easter morning

 John 20:1-18

Jesus Christ is risen today! Alleluia!

And far be from me to cheapen anything about this day, but there is a little secret you should be aware of: Jesus Christ is risen every day! This is merely the season when we feel it most acutely—when we celebrate Easter, and when the green shoots rise from the earth, and COVID-19 vaccines show us hope for a better tomorrow, and the long winter (which wasn’t that long this year but it’s North Dakota, so, hey, it feels that way regardless) gives way to spring, and the birds fill the skies on their way north, and the ice breaks apart, and the trees start to show their buds. It is a season of resurrection.

Now, about those trees…

You can trace trees through all of scripture if you want to. In the beginning, there was the tree of the life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—one tree to give life and one that was a harbinger of death. A few chapters later, there was the ark—God’s salvation in the form of Noah’s advanced woodwork—and then in the prophets we hear whispers of a root of Jesse—a reference to a royal “family tree” foreshadowing Jesus. Moses had a staff; Psalm 23 mentions a staff and a rod; the ark of the covenant was acacia wood; and Jonah hides under a shrub to protect himself from the elements. There are ships and bows left and right. You will not get very far in the Old Testament without running into a tree or the product of a tree, but it is the New Testament where the importance tree really comes into relief.

Two days ago, we remembered Jesus crucified on a tree. The cross is the tree that stands in the gap created by Adam and Eve tasting from that first tree long ago; it stretches back to the tree of life and the garden where we were created to roam. And let’s be clear here: it was not just Adam and Eve that put us in this predicament. Each of us tastes of that fruit—every day—all of us yearn to be like God, to become God, and that’s why Jesus had to come in the first place. If not for us, the tree of the cross would be unnecessary. That is the weight we feel on Good Friday; I suppose it is also the reason so many do not worship on Friday and skip ahead to Easter. It is much easier to imagine it is all fluffy bunnies, especially when the world out there is so full of brokenness and loss and grief.

But God knows us better. God knows what is required to bring us to Easter morning with a heart and a mind open to the resurrection. The only thing in the world required for resurrection is death; it is the thing we fear, yet the very thing that gives Easter its power. The cross should be preached not only on Good Friday but also on Easter morning because on this side of Eden, the bridge to the tree of life is the tree of the cross.

There is a lot of great news for us today. Because the stone is rolled away, you are free to live without fear of what may come. Today, this feels even more powerful, because we are living in a moment in history ripe for resurrection. It might not look like Easter morning, but then again, it might. After all, Jesus rose on that third day, but it was not apparent to anybody, least of all the disciples, that this was the case for quite some time. They were living in a moment drenched in resurrection without even realizing it, expecting that the dead stay dead and that the cross is an instrument of death, certainly not a gateway to new life. It takes time for people to risk believing that in resurrection—that the world we once knew is not in need of healing but rather it is dead, and the only hope for a dead world is to be raised. We are really good at trying to rehabilitate dead things when the promise of Easter morning is that we cannot nurse dead things back to life, dead things must be raised. Only if we dare to hope in something better will we discover a world absolutely drenched in resurrection.

At Red Willow, we feel this acutely, because last summer was a death for us (though perhaps less dramatically than it was for many of you)—a death of normal, a death of expectations, a death of our yearly rhythm and ritual. This year, we look not for healing but for resurrection. God, who brought us this far by faith, promises not to bring back what was but to do a completely new thing—like Jesus, who in Mark’s Gospel admonishes every person he heals, telling them “Say nothing of this to anybody!” because Jesus did not come to heal, he came to die and rise. So, we shall too. That is the absurd power of Easter morning—Christ is risen so we shall, too.

There is no better illustration of this in the natural world than a tree, which gives us air to breathe in its life but brings new life in its death. I remember visiting Yellowstone National Park as a child after wildfires had turned entire mountainsides black, burnt out stalks of pine trees stood as monuments to what the forest once was. It was sad. Yet, without fire, a forest grows old and slowly suffocates itself. At the base of those burnt-out trunks were the shoots of new trees emerging from the ash—not healing but resurrection.

It is no accident that Red Willow is named after a tree. Now, it is a tree that looks nothing like the tree on our logo—it is a shrub you might know as Red Osier Dogwood—seemingly unimportant, like that tree in the folk tale cut down to make the cross. Red Willow is little and easily overlooked, like most things that are holy, but it is always the little things that bear witness to the resurrection, because we have a God in Jesus Christ who came to rip the powerful from their thrones and lift up the powerless, a God who comes for the poor and little and the forgotten and the grieving and the weak.

Easter morning is a proclamation that little and overlooked things are the greatest testimony we have to a world where resurrection is true and it is ours in spite of what we deserve, in spite of how we are always trying to heal dead things, in spite of how broken and vulnerable we are. Easter morning is the green shoot we do not see until it has grown into something worth our interest, but it is there all along—not as a towering Redwood or a majestic. Rather, the good news of the resurrection is proclaimed by that one, poor, neglected tree on the edge of the field, the kind you might find in the ditches along North Dakota’s gravel roads, the kind that the glyphosate missed.

To see glimpses of resurrection, we have to be willing to look under what is dead. Never has that weight felt so heavy for many of us as it does a year into a pandemic, and that might not feel like good news in the slightest, but that is only because we often lack the eyes to see resurrection happening right in front of us. We still cling to the branches of the tree of knowledge, believing that we know better—that the dead stay dead, that if only we knew a little more, then we could figure out this life; that only if other people understood what we understood, then the world would be a better place, but that is not the promise of Easter morning. Easter morning is an invitation to simply let go, to wonder, to look for life where death seems to all the world to have won, and to embrace the littlest and the least because these are the ones through whom God is showing us resurrection every day of our lives.

So, if you are looking for Christ this morning, do not look in the tomb, but do not look in your Easter basket either, nor in the warmth of your home, nor even in the church. Yes, we celebrate the resurrection with the bells and whistles, but Easter is proclaimed by the green shoots rising where death seemed to all the world to have won. Look there! Find the weakest and least popular, the tree burnt to a crisp, or the person who nobody values. Seek out something that does not seem to matter, .and watch what God is doing where we have given up all hope.

Christ is risen!