What the Redwoods Know

There are places that become more than destinations. They become mirrors, revealing not only where you’ve been but who you are becoming.

For two weeks this summer, my son and I returned to St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in Inverness, California—a place that has quietly shaped my life for the past two years. What began as time away during my sabbatical became something far richer: a pilgrimage into priesthood, wonder, and joy.

The first days were spent preparing for Father Vincent Pizzuto’s twentieth anniversary of ordination. At the celebration Eucharist, seven priests gathered around the altar—some who had mentored him, others whom he had mentored, all bearing witness to the quiet, enduring work of a life faithfully given away. Twenty years is long enough for a vocation to leave fingerprints on countless lives.

When I first met Vincent several years ago, I recognized something I had not yet been able to name. Here was the kind of priest I hoped I might become, and our lives and vocations have been intertwined ever since. Standing at that altar only a month after my own ordination, I wasn’t simply celebrating his ministry. I was catching a glimpse of what a life of faithful priesthood might look like two decades from now. It was both humbling and profoundly hopeful.

Then my son Aidan and I set off to play for the week.

We wandered beneath the ancient redwoods of Marin County, watched fog pour over the Golden Gate Bridge, explored San Francisco’s neighborhoods, hiked coastal trails, and tasted our way through Sonoma. Those days reminded me that awe is not a luxury. Neither is delight. Play, beauty, and curiosity are not distractions from the spiritual life; they are among its deepest teachers. This stretch of my sabbatical became an invitation to recover those gifts, and there was no better companion than my son, whose questions and wonder continually slowed me down enough to notice.

The journey culminated in something I still struggle to describe. I had the privilege of presiding at the New Skellig Eucharist, the Celtic liturgy Vincent composed for his first community fifteen years ago. It remains the most beautiful liturgy I have ever experienced. There were moments when I felt almost outside myself, unable to believe I was the one standing at the altar. Yet paradoxically, I have rarely felt more fully myself. It was the most embodied I have yet been as a priest—fully present, wholly engaged in worship, and deeply aware that God had somehow brought me to this place.

(If you’re curious about the New Skellig Eucharist that so deeply shaped this part of my journey, you can read it here: https://www.stcolumbasinverness.org/new-skellig-eucharist.)

The sermon that follows grew out of those weeks. It began with a question my son asked while we stood beneath the towering redwoods of Muir Woods, wondering what those ancient trees had witnessed and what they might yet see. That question became a meditation on time, hope, and the hidden work of God. It is also, in many ways, my thank you to the community of St. Columba's, whose contemplative life has quietly formed me into the priest I am only just beginning to become.

As you read, I invite you not simply to move through theAs you read, I invite you not simply to move through the words, but to enter the story. Consider where you find yourself living "in between." words, but to enter the story. Consider where you find yourself living "in between."

Pay attention to the places in your own life where growth feels slow, where hope requires patience, or where grace may already be spreading beneath the surface, unseen.

My prayer is that somewhere in these reflections you, too, will catch a glimpse of the quiet work God is doing beneath your feet.

Sermon: What the Redwoods Know

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There are moments in life when we become acutely aware that we are living in between, and I have felt those moments deeply as I’ve been with you these last couple of weeks. I’ve spoken to several members of this community who are living between diagnosis and healing, between grief and hope. We’re all living between who we have been and who we are becoming.

We feel that gap especially this morning. Father Vincent is not at the altar with us because he is where he most needs to be—beside Forrest as he continues his journey toward healing. We hold their family in our prayers, trusting that even this space between illness and restoration is not a place where God is absent.

Perhaps many of you arrive carrying your own “between” today. Waiting for test results. Waiting for that hard conversation. Waiting for clarity, or justice, or peace.

In those seasons of waiting, time behaves strangely. Some days disappear in a blur. Others stretch endlessly before us. We find ourselves groaning for the day when we finally reach the other side.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the strange nature of time this week, not only as I meditated on today’s Scriptures, but because my son Aidan and I spent a day wandering beneath the towering redwoods of Muir Woods on Tuesday.

Like many of us who’ve seen these beauties, he became fascinated with the rings of the fallen trees. He would kneel beside a cross-section and begin counting.

“Fourteen, that’s my whole life,” he would say, holding up a couple of fingers to show just how little space those rings spanned. His entire lifetime amounted to only a few inches of growth in a tree that had been patiently reaching toward heaven for centuries.

Then he noticed something else with awe. Around the base of those ancient giants were tangled clusters of shoots, some green with new life, some already withering before their lives really began. These masses of shoots looked almost like redwood bushes springing up from the roots of the great tree. He walked over to one that was about as thick as his wrist and said, “This one could be my age too.”

Then he grew quiet. “If one of these keeps growing,” he asked, “It will become that size one day, hundreds of years from now,” he said, pointing to one of the massive trunks.

“Maybe,” I said. He looked back up into the canopy and asked a question that has stayed with me all week. “What will that tree see?” “Will it see the end of the world?”

Standing beneath those trees, time changes. We measure our lives in birthdays, careers, news cycles, elections, and the endless stream of breaking headlines. Redwoods measure life in centuries. Some standing today were already ancient when Francis of Assisi walked the hills of Italy. They have witnessed kingdoms rise and fall, wars begin and end, generations come and go. They remind us that God’s work often unfolds on a timescale much larger than our own.

I wanted to know more about the secrets of these trees, so unlike the weak and easily toppled Georgia pines I am used to, so I read more about them. What fascinated me was learning that these giants do not stand because they have extraordinarily deep roots, as I expected they might. Quite the opposite. Their roots are surprisingly shallow. What keeps them standing through centuries of Pacific storms is that their roots spread outward, intertwining with the roots of neighboring trees. They quite literally hold one another up.

It struck me as a beautiful image for us today—that forests endure what solitary trees cannot. These interconnected trees made me think of you.

Two years ago, I first walked into this community carrying a notebook and a stack of questions. I came as a researcher, hoping to understand contemplative congregational life for my doctoral dissertation. I thought I was studying this community.

I didn’t realize this community was quietly growing me. Over these past two years, many of you have prayed for me, encouraged me, challenged me, and welcomed me back again and again. Just a month ago, Father Vincent stood with his hand on my shoulder in the Cathedral of St. Phillip in Atlanta as my bishop ordained me to the priesthood. And now here I am, presiding at the Celtic liturgy that first captured my heart when I sat among you as a visitor. I still can hardly believe it.

Like you, I find myself, too, living in the gap. I am ordained, but not yet settled into my first call at my parish in Newnan. I am finished with seminary, but only beginning to learn what it means to be a priest. I am standing between one chapter and another.

And that’s exactly where Paul meets us this morning. He is writing to a church he has never visited, a community of Jewish and Gentile Christians trying to learn how to become one body in the heart of the Roman Empire. They are living under the shadow of imperial power, carrying old wounds, negotiating new identities, wondering how to follow Christ in a world that still looks nothing like the kingdom Jesus proclaimed. They know suffering. They know uncertainty. They know what it feels like to wait for God’s promises to become visible.

Paul doesn’t minimize any of that. In fact, he widens the lens beyond the Church itself. He says it is not only human beings who are waiting. The whole creation is waiting. The whole creation is groaning.

Notice Paul says, “The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.” That image matters. Paul does not say creation is groaning in death. He says creation is groaning in labor. There is all the difference in the world between those two realities because labor pain is different from death.

Labor hurts. It exhausts. It makes you wonder whether you can keep going. But labor has direction. It is pain moving toward life. Paul tells us that the suffering of the present time isn’t worth comparing with the Kingdom that is coming, so we should have hope. Life is coming.

“For in hope we are saved,” he says as he explains that hope is believing in what is unseen, and we are to patiently wait for this already and coming Kingdom.

Which makes Jesus’ parable we read in today’s Gospel all the more startling. Matthew tells us that Jesus is sitting in a boat just offshore, speaking to crowds gathered on the beach. He has begun announcing that the kingdom of heaven has come near. But there is an obvious problem. If God’s kingdom has truly arrived, why does the world still look so much the same? Why are Rome’s armies still in power? Why do the righteous still suffer? Why do evil and goodness seem to grow side by side?

Jesus answers not with an explanation, but with a story. A farmer sows good seed in his field. But under the cover of darkness, an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. As the plants begin to grow, the servants notice the problem.

“Master,” they ask, “didn’t you sow good seed? Then where did these weeds come from?” When the farmer tells them an enemy has done this, they immediately offer a solution: “Then do you want us to go and pull them up?”

It is exactly what I would expect to do: Remove the problem. Clean up the field. Separate the good from the bad. But the farmer surprises them. “No,” he says, “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”

Paul says creation is laboring. Jesus says, in effect, don’t pull the weeds just yet. At first, those two teachings seem unrelated. But together they reveal the same invitation: trust God’s timing.

That is not the answer most of us want. If we are honest, most of us are far more like the servants in Jesus’ parable. We look at the field and immediately ask, “Shouldn’t we do something?” Shouldn’t God do something about the evil that seems so determined to choke out what is good?

The question feels especially urgent in a week like this one: When we witness immigrant families living in fear. When violence steals lives that bear the image of God. When wars grind on. When our political life seems increasingly unable to imagine our shared humanity. When the earth itself groans beneath our feet in heat waves and fires. “Shouldn’t we do something?”

Many in Jesus’ day were asking exactly that question. Some longed for God to intervene dramatically, to judge Israel’s enemies, to separate the righteous from the wicked once and for all. But Jesus consistently resists that urgency. He insists that the kingdom grows more like seed than like revolution—quietly, patiently, almost imperceptibly, until one day the harvest reveals what has been happening all along.

The servants’ question is our question. “Master, didn’t you sow good seed? Then where did these weeds come from?” Notice that Jesus never dismisses the question. The landowner doesn’t pretend the weeds aren’t there. He doesn’t tell the servants they’re overreacting. He doesn’t say, “Everything is fine.”

He names the reality plainly. “An enemy has done this.” There is evil. There is injustice. There are forces that oppose the flourishing of God’s creation. The Gospel never asks us to deny that.

But the surprise comes in the answer to be patient and let both of them grow together until the harvest. The servants are so eager to rid the field of weeds that they are willing to risk uprooting the wheat.

How often have we done the same? How often has our certainty become more dangerous than our compassion? How often has our desire to fix the world become a temptation to divide it neatly into those who belong and those who do not? We become so intent on identifying weeds that we forget our first calling is to cultivate wheat.

Jesus is not asking us to become indifferent to evil. He is asking us to become patient in a way that looks remarkably like God. The patience of God is not passive. It is not resignation. It is not looking away.

The patience of God is love refusing to give up on what is still growing. It is the confidence that God sees possibilities hidden beneath the soil that we cannot yet imagine.

As I thought about this parable all week, I kept thinking back to those tiny shoots gathered around the base of the ancient redwood trees. Some of them would never become towering giants. Some would wither. Some would be broken by storms. When I looked at that tangled cluster of shoots, I assumed they were competing with one another. I told Aidan they must be jockeying for light and water, and the strongest would win out, and the others would die.

But again, what I learned about redwoods told a different story. Long before those trees reach toward the sky, beneath the surface their roots are already finding one another—intertwining, holding one another. Coastal redwoods often reproduce by sprouting from the root burl around the parent tree.

Those circles of shoots we saw are called fairy rings. Those little shoots are sharing their strength with one another. Even after the parent tree dies, the root system can continue sending up new shoots.

I think there is almost a sacramental theology in that — one life giving rise to many lives, a community rather than an isolated individual, and a slow, patient growth into maturity.

Jesus tells us in this strange parable about wheat and weeds that is how the kingdom grows too, not with dramatic certainty and not all at once. It grows quietly and patiently. Growth is hidden beneath the surface long before anyone notices what God is doing.

Perhaps that is why Paul speaks of hope in such an unusual way. He says, “Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?”

Hope is not optimism. Hope is not pretending that everything is fine. Hope is not closing our eyes to suffering or refusing to name injustice.

Hope is what allows us to look directly at the wounds of the world without surrendering to despair. Hope is what allows us to keep planting, even when the harvest feels impossibly far away. Hope is what allows us to remain rooted when the storms come.

That, I think, is what communities like St. Columba’s have taught me. You have not turned away from the groaning of creation. You have listened to it. You have listened to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

You have cared for this watershed, welcomed the stranger, stood with those pushed to the margins, prayed deeply, and loved generously—not because you believe you can fix the whole world, but because you trust that the Spirit is already at work within it. That is what it means to live by the Spirit, not escaping the world but remaining faithfully rooted within it.

It strikes me that the redwoods do not survive by growing faster than everything around them. They survive by growing together. Their roots become so intertwined that one tree’s strength becomes another tree’s stability.

This is why Paul never imagines the Christian life as a solitary journey. Creation groans together. The Church waits together. The Spirit intercedes for us together. We hold one another up until the storm passes.

That is one of the reasons why this place has become so holy for me. When I first arrived, I thought I was coming to study contemplative formation. Instead, I found myself being formed by a contemplative people.

You became part of the root system that has held me through discernment, through the long years of writing, through graduation, through ordination, and now into this strange and beautiful space before beginning my first parish.

I suspect many of you could tell similar stories. Only looking backward do we recognize the hidden ways God has been weaving our lives together. I believe that is why Jesus tells us to be patient—not because the weeds don’t matter. They do. Not because injustice doesn’t demand our attention. It does. Not because suffering isn’t real. It is.

But because God’s deepest work is often happening where we cannot yet see it. Beneath the surface. Among the roots. In the slow work of grace.

I keep thinking about Aidan’s question. “Will that little tree see the end of the world?” I don’t know. Perhaps it will still be standing long after every one of us has become part of the communion of saints.

But I find myself wondering if Paul would gently answer this question differently.

No, Aidan. Not the end of the world. The redemption of the world. Because that is the future toward which all creation is groaning—not annihilation but new creation. Not death. Birth. Not despair. Hope.

And until that day comes, we are invited to grow in the gap, to become people whose roots run deep into one another. We are asked to become people who can bear the weight of one another’s joys and sorrows, people who refuse to let fear have the final word.

So if today you find yourself living in one of those in-between places, do not mistake the waiting for God’s absence. The roots are growing. Stop as I did for a few minutes in those quiet woods this week and take the time to notice that grace is spreading quietly beneath your feet. Become attentive to how God is doing what God has always done—bringing life where we cannot yet see it.

And one day, when we look back over the rings of our own lives, we may discover that what felt like the longest seasons of waiting were, all along, the years in which God was growing us into the people we were becoming.

Amen.