Rooted and Fruiting

​The image from our readings that sticks with me is the tree planted by streams of water, sending out its roots, as Jeremiah says, and bearing fruit in due season in our Psalm.
 
We have a lot of water in New England, so vegetation thrives basically everywhere, including in places we may not want it. Healthy trees are not a big deal for us.
 
But in drier environments like ancient Israel, I can imagine thirsty travelers rejoicing when they caught their first glimpse of a green tree and knew that water was nearby. For them, trees meant refreshment and life.
 
Both Jeremiah and the Psalm teach that we are called to be like those trees: signs of living water, representing refreshment of spirit and true life in God. That is our calling especially when so much of what we see and read is the opposite: violence and suffering and meanness and greed.
 
But staying rooted in God and producing the good fruit of a holy life isn’t always easy. And that is what this commitment Sunday is all about: how we use our time and talents to stay rooted and to produce fruit.
 
I was reminded yet again last weekend that the best way to stay rooted is to stick to our religious disciplines, things like daily prayer.
 
People in my college class organized a joint birthday party for all of us who are turning 60 this year. It was Saturday night in New York City. On almost any other weekend of the year, I would have regretfully missed that party. But it happened to fall on Carrie’s actual birthday weekend, so we decided to go.
 
I love New York, and it was wonderful to spend time with old friends and to reconnect with people I have hardly seen in decades. But it was also a little challenging for me.
 
This will not shock any of you: In high school, I was not one of the cool kids. But in college, through the accident of random room assignments my first year, I found myself sharing a bedroom with one of the coolest of the cool kids. Through him I joined the circle of the cool.
 
In some ways that was a thrill for this nerdy young man. But in other ways it was hard. The fact is, I still wasn’t cool. So, hanging with the cool kids, trying to be cool myself, required me to put on an act, to pretend I was something that I wasn’t.
 
And anytime we put on an act, we run the risk of losing ourselves, of coming unrooted. That was certainly true for me during my college years. I still remember a conversation—from forty years ago!—that made me recognize even then that I was sacrificing something of who I was, and becoming someone I didn’t want to be.
 
At lunch one day I made a gossipy comment about an absent classmate. To his credit, a friend called me on it. He said that some of our friends made comments like that, that he himself sometimes made comments like that, but that I usually didn’t, that I was acting out of character. I thought to myself, I am glad my friend doesn’t think of me as gossipy. And, more importantly, I don’t want to be a gossipy kind of person.
 
In that moment, I realized I needed a stronger foundation, a stronger root system, that would help me be and become the kind of person I did want to be. At the time I was still too young and foolish to know how to strengthen my root system, but at least I recognized the need.
 
Forty years later, thanks to the kinds of things we talk about all the time, things like prayer and worship and Bible study and service, I have a stronger root system.
 
But my root system almost failed me last weekend, as I gathered with my old friends.
 
We’re all something like sixty years old. We have all changed and grown. And still we fell back into some of our old rhythms. In ways good and bad, I felt like I was eighteen again and back to hanging out with the cool kids.
 
Maybe that’s why I decided not to say Morning Prayer last Saturday.
 
Now whenever I travel, my prayer routine gets disrupted, and I don’t worry too much about it. The same is true for all my routines: exercise, eating, reading, whatever. That’s one of the reasons to travel in the first place—to break out of old routines and experience new things. So, when I travel, I do my best to pray as I can, and get back to my regular routine when I return home. All good.
 
But last Saturday, the problem wasn’t that other things were happening that prevented me from praying. I just didn’t feel like saying Morning Prayer.
 
And as I lay in bed, not praying, it was as if the Holy Spirit started whispering to me. I realized that I was facing the old temptation of my college days. Would I give up a little piece of myself, or would I stay rooted and at least try to live like the person I want to be, the person God calls me to be?
 
This was not a major crossroad in my life. But on that morning, I realized that I needed to pray. If I was going to be the person I want to be with all my old college friends, I needed to strengthen my root system in the best way available to me.
 
And as soon as I started to pray, it felt right. Just minutes before, I had not been in the mood, but now I felt a genuine delight in the law of the Lord. I was back to being who I am and back on the journey to who I am becoming.
 
That’s one of the main reasons we commit to regularly doing things like prayer and Bible study. We need to stay rooted in God so that we can face whatever challenges come our way as the people God calls us to be.
 
Back to last Saturday. That afternoon, I met an old friend. He was one of my very closest friends in college, but we had largely lost touch and our last interaction had been kind of awkward. I didn’t know what to expect.
 
He had never been religious, but at his suggestion we met at the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. He told me it is one of his favorite places in New York. We toured the Cathedral and got some tea. And we talked about how our lives were going, and about what we hoped as we entered this new stage of life.
 
My friend was not looking for any particular wisdom from me, and he didn’t get any. But we had a genuinely meaningful conversation which included an opportunity for me to talk about my faith. I was honest, and so was he, and we reconnected. That would not have happened in the same way if I hadn’t prayed in the morning. At least for that day, I stayed rooted, and was even able to bear a little fruit.
 
Today we will offer our commitments of time and talent to God. These commitments are some of the ways we aim to stay rooted in God, and some of the ways we hope to bear fruit.
 
My prayer for us is that God will help us to keep our commitments, help us to stay rooted in God always, and to bear fruit in due season. In Christ’s name. Amen.