The Trees as Witness

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“The Tree as Witness” April 26, 2026 Cobleskill United Methodist Church

Pastor Anna Blinn Cole

Psalm 23; Acts 10:34-43

Fourth Sunday of Eastertide

Psalm 23 23 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

Acts 10:34-43 34 Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35 but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness [a] is acceptable to him. 36 You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. 37 That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: 38 how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. 39 We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, 40 but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, 41 not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42 He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. 43 All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Have you ever imagined what the trees see? …What life on earth is like from the tree’s perspective? This Eastertide, the season after Easter, we’re doing a series on trees. In the Bible, trees take on both real and metaphorical value and in this season around Earth Day and Resurrection and spring, we are bringing the lessons trees teach us into focus.

As I mentioned last week, aside from humans, trees are the most frequently mentioned part of God’s creation in the Bible. Trees are focal points of scripture, metaphors in parables, and, as we hear today, witnesses to human activity. This last piece… witnesses to human activity is where we’re landing today. Of course, the trees are witnesses to human activity but it’s not often we think of it like that.

Let’s imagine that the Catalpa tree standing by our church and sheltering us with her branches during outside worship and witnessing the way we sing our hymns and receive communion at her base. The way the children play hide and seek around her trunk. Imagine trees of your childhood witnessing you climbing their branches as high as you could go, finding just the perfect place to sit in the crook of a branch, feeling both delightfully lost and divinely found at the same time. Imagine the trees in the yard that witnessed your wedding or the trees on the school hill that line the paths of your school days.

Today I want to ask the question, what do the trees witness and does it matter? Happy times, no doubt. And also challenging times. We heard last week about the trees God created in our origin story. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As part of this story, Adam and Eve cannot resist the fruit of the later tree even though God has asked them not to eat it. What did this tree witness? A strained, perhaps even broken relationship. Broken relationships between God and humans and humans and the creation did not end in the Garden of Eden. It was just the beginning. The desire for possession and power and dominance plagued humanity as they lived their lives alongside trees that continued to look more useful than they did beautiful. Trees were felled to build empires, boats to expand kingdoms, timber to raise walls, and eventually, crosses, too.

In the weeks that follow Easter, the disciples were trying to make sense of the crucifixion and resurrection. And so, we see in the book of Acts a lot of wrestling with what it all meant. In our reading for today, Peter is speaking to his friends and fellow disciples. Imploring them to think about how important it is that they lived side by side with Jesus , and witnessed with their own lives the death and resurrection of Jesus. How this witness gives them a mandate to share the story of Jesus wide and far. Often within the book of Acts the crucifixion of Jesus is referred to by saying Jesus hung from a tree. We heard that today in Acts 10. We know that the cross is made from wood, but to call it a tree in this scripture gives it a different presence, don’t you think? It almost puts back into the inanimate object of two wooden beams a life and identity that exists in God’s eyes. To call it a tree names that God’s creation, too, in some way, was a witness to this horrific event. Wood is a passive by-product. A tree, though, is an active character. And here, like in the creation story, the tree is central to one of the darkest valleys of our faith story. What did that tree witness? Was it something like death? Was it a wound to the very heart of God’s creation that perhaps the tree also felt in its depth. Have you ever seen a wound on a tree? Maybe the initials of two people in love carved about 20 years ago into a smooth tree trunk. Maybe a trail marker disc that has been nailed into the side of a tree way out in the backcountry. Maybe a place in a tree where a limb was cut off for one reason or a another. What happens to these wounds? In moderation, the tree can absorb them. The tree will grow around them. Not fast, but the pace of wood growing—slowly, slowly—it encapsulates the open, vulnerable place in itself. The trunk swells around the carved-out letters. It encapsulates the nail holes and metal disc of the trail marker (sometimes even swallowing it with its growing trunk). It bulges around the place where the limb was taken.

Those of you who were around in 2019 remember how the Catalpa tree was struck by lightning. A bright white wound was exposed on its body from the highest twig all the way down to the base. We wondered if the tree could survive such a 3 traumatic blow. And yet, year over year, the tree’s bark has begun to reclaim what was opened in trauma. That stripe of injury is barely recognizable now as the tree transforms its wound into something whole again. The trees knows how to heal. The tree knows what’s possible in God’s creation. A rhythm of sunlight and rain and sugar flowing in the veins, the tree transforms. I believe the naming of the wood in the crucifixion as the tree that it was, bears witness to the fact that Jesus’ death was not an ending point any more than any other wound on a tree is an ending point. The life force of God’s creation will stand as witness to the violence humans can cause one another, and then slowly transformation can and will happen. The damage caused in pride and pursuit of power is undone by rhythm of healing that God brings. It’s a cycle of death and resurrection that the tree bears witness to.

So what do the trees see and why does matter? The tallest Redwood stands over 380 feet tall, taller even than the Statue of Liberty. The oldest Redwood is more than 2,000 years old. Older than Jesus himself, witnessing two millennia of years go by. This past summer we visited Redwood National Park and we walked through stands of these very old and very tall trees. They dwarfed us in every physical way. And yet the tallest of these trees has now had a barricade put around it to keep humans away. The humans were doing too much damage and in order for this massive tree to be able to sustain its vitality against the much smaller humans, it needed a fence. What do these trees see and why does it matter? I have a story to tell you. It’s not so much about trees themselves, but about what the trees see. About what creation sees when it looks at us and … shakes it head.

When we went to visit them this summer on our camping trip, I didn’t realize how close they stand to the ocean itself. It was striking to stand there and see so many large pieces of redwood drift up on to the beach. We were so thankful to have finally made it to the Pacific Ocean one afternoon we just stayed on the beach and took it in. The waves, the driftwood, the rawness of the landscape. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for achieving the victory that is in parenthood you remember all the things your child needs for the outing and also remember to bring your own favorite beverage to enjoy. Quite a victory. And as we were sitting there, I started to look at the beach ground. An old habit, looking for interesting and beautiful things. I couldn’t help but notice there were things on the beach that were bright blue. I took a closer look and to my horror discovered they appeared to be plastic pods… with a goopy blue substance oozing from them. Tide pods I realized. And not just one errant tide pod washed up on the beach, but the beach was littered with hundreds, no thousands of them, the closer I looked. I was aghast. I couldn’t believe that these Californians were standing for this kind of pollution in their waterways. I thought about how someone should make a display at the beach entrance highlighting the problems of these plastic washing machine pods that don’t fully dissolve and the ways they litter the beach. I also knew that I couldn’t just stand there and complain about the problem. I didn’t have a bag, but I did have my empty tea mug.

Knowing that I was an upstanding caretaker of God’s creation, I decided to do the ultimate act of service, you’re welcome, and I started picking up the tide pods and putting them … in my empty mug. It filled up fast and I used a stick to cram them down so more would fit. As I was doing this, people would come up to me and wonder what beach treasure I had found. I would then tell them about the horror of this beach pollution. How Tide pods don’t fully dissolve and look at this beach! After I had crammed about as many oozing Tide pods as I could into my beloved coffee mug, a 9 year-old boy came up to me. What are you doing? I launched into my tirade. 5 And he looks at me and then looks at the contents of my tea mug and he says: Those aren’t tide pods. They’re blue sailors. A kind of jelly fish. No, I tell him. I know what Tide pods look like and these are Tide pods. Thank you very much. He continues to insist they are a living creature not trash. Just at that moment my beloved husband walked up with the internet in his hands and googled Blue Sailor. And levels of shame descended on me that you would not believe. As fast as I could, I start dumping these hundreds of now crushed jelly fish from my tea mug in a hope that I have not killed them all.

It's shocking to me to reflect on this experience that the wise, old Redwoods witnessed with amusement. Here a woman from the east coast who had never, not once, ever, seen the Pacific Ocean could stand on its shores and think she knew everything there was to know. That her knowledge was the greatest. That sense of what was good and best put blinders on that prevented her from seeing the truth. What have the trees and all creation witnessed us as humans doing? Our hubris. Our mistakes. Our pollution. Our violence. And yet, this trauma we inflict on one another and on creation itself is not the last chapter. The trees have also witnessed what God can and will do with the harm we inflict. The know how hurt can be transformed into something stronger and more resilient. The tree of Jesus’ last breaths was inhabited by the Spirit of God who knew this death wasn’t the end. That restoration and reconciliation is possible. Life can recover. The important lesson I learned was to acknowledge the limits of my own knowledge. To seek forgiveness for the ways I made presumptions. The ways creation was harmed in my hubris. And in the midst of my own asking for forgiveness, I received a reminder from creation itself that God’s life force is stronger and more powerful than all our mistakes combined. And when we ask for forgiveness, God gives us a chance at reconciliation.

Two weeks later, standing on the shores of Iona, Scotland, half a world away from the Pacific coast, I look down at my feet and see a healthy, glimmering Blue Sailor. A sign, from God, I believe that I had been forgiven. A sign that God’s creation contains a resiliency that outlasts human folly. A resiliency that witnesses to us the capacity for our own transformation and change. Today I want to ask the question, what do the trees witness and does it matter? In our own darkest valleys of challenges and mistakes, pursuits of power and pride, the trees bear witness to the capacity for transformation and change. They outlive us by decades and see beyond our small footprint. They see the bigger picture and the ability of a life-restoring God to heal what we may ourselves break. 6 I want you take a moment to yourself and name ways you have made mistakes in your life. Ways you harmed or broke relationships with creation or God or other human beings. Ways you wish you had done better. Silence. Now hear this good news. With the forests and the oceans and all the living creatures as our witness, God receives your honesty with joy. God promises that the worst day of your life will not be the last day of your life. That transformation is possible. For the Cross of Christ, the Immortal Tree on which our reconciliation is born, we say thanks be to God.

Grace and Peace, Pastor Anna