Like Trees by the River

Psalm 1:1-3; Luke 19:1-10
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost 2010

Note: First Baptist Church of Greenville, S.C., was officially organized on November 2, 1831. Since the congregation’s year-long celebration of its 175th anniversary in 2006, it has become our custom to celebrate the last Sunday in October as “Founding Sunday.”

In the 1820s, when William Bullein Johnson began a preaching mission at the newly constructed Greenville County Courthouse in the town of Pleasantburg, as Greenville was called then, he could not possibly have imagined that it would come to all this. It’s not that Johnson lacked for vision. He was one of the founders and a president of the first general convention of Baptists in America that began in 1814 in Philadelphia. He was one of the founders and the second president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention that began in 1821. He was the instrumental force in the founding of the school that eventually became Furman University in 1826. And then, when sectional rivalries and the great debate over slavery destroyed the unity of Baptists in America, he became one of the founders and the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention that was formed in 1845. He is credited with having been the catalyst for the founding of the First Baptist Churches of both Columbia and Greenville, South Carolina. It’s not that William Bullein Johnson lacked for vision. But neither he nor anyone else could possibly have imagined what God would grow from what began with Johnson’s preaching in the courthouse of Greenville County.

To paraphrase the apostle Paul, William Bullein Johnson planted, others watered, and God gave the growth (1 Cor 3:6). In the case of this particular congregation that he planted, from its beginnings in the courthouse in Pleasantburg in the 1820s to its formal organization in 1831 in what had only that year begun to be called the town of “Greenville,” this congregation’s life together as a people of God and a body of Christ has grown and developed and matured no farther than a few blocks away from the Reedy River.

As rivers go, the Reedy isn’t all that impressive. It’s only about 70 miles long from its headwaters in northern Greenville County to where it joins the Saluda River at Lake Greenwood. For more than a century, it was little more than an open sewer line running whatever color of dye the textile mills along its banks were discharging into it that day. It has been identified as “the historically most polluted river in South Carolina.” Even now that it has been cleaned up—and it has—bacteria levels in the Reedy continue to run some eleven times above the safe limit under Federal clean-water guidelines. Don’t wade in that water!

But here’s the thing. From the Cherokee villages that once dotted its banks to the giant mills that once drove Greenville’s economy to beautiful Falls Park and the Swamp Rabbit Trail, the Reedy River has seen it all. The Reedy River has flowed through every era of this region’s history from Cherokee hunting grounds to the District of Spartanburg to the District of Greenville to the town of Pleasantburg to the City of Greenville. For the last thirty-six years, this congregation has been situated directly on its banks, but from its very beginning, this congregation has never been any farther than a few blocks from the river. We have always been, as we are now, planted like trees by the river.

It’s a biblical image from the very first psalm: “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on [God’s] law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.” A contemporary psalmist has written it this way: “We were made for the banks of the streams of life, and we were meant to thrive like trees by the river, roots deep in the river, tall trees by the river, strong and green.”

It's a biblical image that fits this congregation in our location and in the architecture of our sanctuary. I’m going to climb out on a limb here to suggest that the largest tree along the entire course of the Reedy River is the central architectural feature of this room, the trunk of which rises more than 60 feet above the floor and the limbs of which extend some 90 feet over your heads right now. When this sanctuary was planted like a tree by the Reedy River, a claim was laid to a biblical image and a spiritual reality of this congregation’s life: like trees by the river.

This morning’s gospel lesson takes us to a city famous for its trees. It was known as “the city of palms” in antiquity, according to the book of Judges (1:16; 3:13), and its name means “fragrant.” Jericho is watered by streams that flow from underground springs. It was a crown jewel and playground of the powerful and privileged for millennia. Members of the Jerusalem aristocracy wintered there to escape the cold winds and occasional snows of the mountains. Jericho counts among its proud owners no less than Cyrus the Great of Persia, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Mark Antony of Rome, and Cleopatra of Egypt (who received it as a sign of his love for her from Mark Antony). Herod the Great rented Jericho from Cleopatra and then went from renter to owner after her untimely demise.

I think it’s no wonder that the traditional location of the Mount of Temptation where Jesus was tempted with “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (Matthew 4:8) towers high above Jericho to the west of the city. It is as though Jesus was invited to add his name to the long list of illustrious and powerful owners of the city of palms.

In the gospel tradition, however, Jericho is most often remembered not for its famous owners or for its palms but for a sycamore tree that was reportedly climbed by a tax collector of great wealth but small stature, a man by the name of Zacchaeus, who on account of the crowds could not see Jesus as he was passing through Jericho one day. On account of climbing that tree, the story goes, not only did Zacchaeus see Jesus but Jesus saw Zacchaeus and invited himself to Zacchaeus’s house. Onlookers scoffed that Jesus would make himself the guest of one who was a sinner, but in gratitude for the grace that Jesus extended to him, Zacchaeus committed half of all his possessions to the poor and promised to restore four-fold whatever he had acquired by fraudulent means—and tax collectors for Rome were famous for their fraud (those folks who scoffed knew whereof they spoke!). Encountering Jesus changed Zacchaeus’s life, and it changed the lives of others around him; on account of that change, Jesus pronounced, “This day salvation has come to this house.” There is a world of different ways to preach Zacchaeus and Jesus, Jesus and Zacchaeus in this passage. But this morning I’m preaching the tree in the center of the story. The sycamore tree.

The kind of sycamore tree that grew in Jericho was a fruit tree native to southern and central Africa that was introduced into Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. The sycamore fig was highly prized by the Egyptians in antiquity. We know from Egyptian art that it was a featured specimen in Egyptian gardens, no doubt because it flowers and fruits year-round. What gardener wouldn’t want such a specimen in her or his garden—flowering and fruiting all year round? Perhaps on account of its constant flowering and fruiting, in ancient Egyptian mythology the sycamore fig is depicted as a tree of life standing at the threshold of life and death, connecting the two worlds of life here and life hereafter. It was a favored wood for the caskets in which Egyptian mummies were placed.

Zacchaeus could have shimmied up one of the famous palm trees in the “city of palms.” But instead, he happened to climb a tree that was considered in antiquity to be a “tree of life” and a tree that the prophet Amos in the Old Testament is said to have made a living cultivating (Amos 7:14). This is no ordinary tree, you see. It is a tree with a rich and powerful symbolic history that tells us who we are like trees by the river. It is a tree of life cultivated by prophets, flowering and fruiting year round, a tree from which people can see and encounter Jesus, a tree that leads to provision for the poor, the restitution for wrongs and salvation in sinners’ houses.

Cultivated by prophets and proclaimers of the word from Amos to William Bullein Johnson to Leon Latimer and L. D. Johnson, among many others, we are trees by the river on account of whom others can see and encounter Jesus. It is in our Christian nature to flower and bring forth fruit year-round, what the apostle Paul calls “the fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Bearing that kind of fruit makes us like trees by the river on account of whom others can see and encounter the Jesus who invites himself into the lives of sinners, rich as well as poor, powerful as well as powerless, urban and urbane as well as rural and simple. We existence in this place on the bank of a river so that others may see in Scripture and in the light of Christ and in the waters of baptism and in the table of the Lord and in the empty cross and in the tree of life the one who is found always in “the least of these” who are hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison.

We can see ourselves as Zacchaeus, small and struggling to see Jesus moving among us. We can see ourselves called to become like Jesus, buried with him and raised to walk in newness of life. But this morning, even more, you and I, together with those who have gone before us for the last 179 years of this congregation’s life, are the tree planted here never more than a few blocks from the river as a way for others to see and encounter Jesus.

William Bullein Johnson could not have imagined the particulars of all this. But he understood this part at least as well as we do and maybe better: not for the benefit of ourselves but for the sake of others to see and encounter Jesus, “We were made for the banks of the streams of life, and we were meant to thrive like trees by the river, roots deep in the river, tall trees by the river, strong and green.” According to the psalmist, you see, we are all the sycamore tree, “those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers. . . . [We] are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.”

Jesus still passes by. Let them see Jesus because of you. Let them see Jesus because of us.

Photo of the Greenville County Courthouse, ca. 1905, from the Coxe Collection of the Greenville Historical Society.
Photos of the Reedy River by Walter Ezell, used under license of Creative Commons.
Photo of Jericho by Stephen Conger, used under license of Creative Commons.
Photo of sycamore figs by Ferrell Jenkins.
Photo of the Mount of Temptation © 2007 Francesco Dazzi, All Rights Reserved, http://www.francescodazzi.com/.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.