Sermon for Sunday, February 16, 2025 || Epiphany 6C || Jeremiah 17:5-10

Today I’d like to talk about roots. Where do you sink your roots? In what are you rooted? Trees weather storms and high winds both because they bend and because there’s as much of the tree rooted in the ground as there is climbing to the sky. In these days of tumult, confusion, and dislocation, where we are rooted is so vitally important. So let’s talk about roots today, and I’m going to start with a story about my parents.

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Edna and Bill Thomas got married in the fall of 1973 when they were twenty and twenty-one years old. For the next decade they moved around New England quite a few times, never staying in one place more than a year or two. Then, in the early 1980s, with one small child and another on the way (yours truly), they moved to Freeport, Maine. They settled down. They joined a church called St. Bartholomew’s. They made some lifelong friends. One day, some of these friends came over and brought with them a glass jar about the size of a spice container. Inside, suspended in rubbing alcohol was a small root system pulled from an unknown plant in their garden. Two tendrils of root, the color of an elephant’s tusk and about as thick as a jump rope, floated in the alcohol. “These are your roots,” they told my parents.

We moved away from Maine in 1985 and took the jar of roots with us. Everywhere we moved after that – New York, Wisconsin, New York again, Rhode Island, Alabama, West Virginia – everywhere we lived, the roots went with us. They sat on top of the refrigerator in every house we lived in. After I moved out, my parents moved a few more times – to North Carolina, to New Jersey, and back to North Carolina. When they built their current house in retirement, the house they would remain in for good, they “planted” the roots in the front yard.

For my entire childhood, those roots were symbolic of our family’s values. We may not have been “rooted” to a particular place, but we were rooted as a family. We loved one another and supported each other through every dislocation and relocation. The roots were the symbol of my family’s closeness. Whenever I looked up at them atop the refrigerator, I remembered that we had come from somewhere and were going somewhere, but at that moment we were where we were. We were together, and that was enough.

In today’s reading from the Prophet Jeremiah, the prophet speaks to a people in the midst of tumult, confusion, and dislocation. The Babylonians are clearing out Jerusalem, taking people into exile. The people of Israel identified greatly with the place they lived; they believed it to be the Promised Land that God had given to their ancestor Abraham. So being forced to live elsewhere was a horrible reality for the people. But Jeremiah tells them that their roots are not to be sunk in a place; they are to be sunk in the God.

Blessed are those who trust in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
It shall not fear when heat comes,
and its leaves shall stay green;
in the year of drought it is not anxious,
and it does not cease to bear fruit.

The people who trust in the Lord are blessed, Jeremiah says, because they are like trees that can withstand a drought. Trusting in God does not mean the drought will not come. Trusting in God means reaching our roots toward the nearby stream so that we need not fear the heat. For Jeremiah, we can root ourselves in trust or we can root ourselves in fear, but only trust is lifegiving.

My question for you today is this: where do you sink your roots? In what ways are you like a tree planted by water, sending out your roots by the stream?

Do you sink your roots into fear or trust? Fear stifles us and shrinks our imagined possibilities to the least risky ones, the least generous ones. Fearful roots wither in nutrient-poor soil. Trust, on the other hand, expands us and opens our imaginations to new possibilities, new relationships, new outcomes.

Do you sink your roots into scarcity or abundance? Scarcity makes us hoard everything from material resources to our perceived places in social hierarchies. Scarcity roots try to keep any other root from taking hold. They make us fall for the trap of zero-sum thinking, assuming that when someone else gains something we must have lost it. Abundance, on the other hand, allows us to give freely, even when we have very little, because the most important things like love and kindness remain with us even when we give them to others.

Do you sink your roots into retribution or justice? Retribution narrows the stories we tell ourselves until those stories are all about real or imagined grievances perpetrated upon us by nefarious and nebulous others. Retributive roots get tangled up in the thicket of propaganda and get choked by the lies of demagogues. Justice, on the other hand, broadens the stories we tell to include the stories of vulnerable and marginalized people. Justice takes the world as it is and systematically turns it into the world as it should be, where everyone has enough to thrive and where everyone is able to claim their inherent dignity.

Finally, do you sink your roots into isolation or compassion? Isolation keeps us from forming any sort of relationships at all. In the name of security, in order not to feel pain, we cut ourselves off from others. Isolating roots do not mingle with the roots of other trees, do not share information about weather and soil and pests, and ultimately do not thrive. Compassion, on the other hand, knows that relationships will hurt but enters into them anyway. For compassion means “to suffer with,” to sit in the hospital room holding a paper-thin hand, to endure ridicule in order to speak unpopular truths, to risk retribution by marching in solidarity for rights that you enjoy but not everyone else does.

My family’s roots connected us to one other in times of dislocation. Jeremiah’s roots by the stream allows the tree to weather the drought with leaves still green. Where we sink our roots matters. The soil around our roots can nourish us with its lifegiving nutrients. Or it can starve us with leaching, death-dealing priorities that leave the soil as lifeless dirt. Through the prophet, God calls us to plant ourselves by the stream of God’s trust, abundance, justice, and compassion. So sink your roots into God’s soil that forms the foundation of your being. Sink your roots deep, and in the year of drought you will not be anxious; indeed you still continue to bear fruit.