Back in 2023 a well photographed tree on Hadrian’s Wall got cut down. Across the UK there was uproar! But now there are headlines to say the stump is growing saplings and some of those saplings are being planted in communities across the UK thanks to the National Trust. Here’s the article – ‘Flourishing’ Sycamore Gap Tree Has Ring of New Shoots Already 3-Feet Tall
A few weeks ago our vicar did a sermon in which she compared sycamores, and especially the helicopter seeds, as how faith can be. These tenacious seeds spiral and fly all over the place and land in the most random of places. We’ve got a sycamore tree at the back of our houses and often have to pull young growth out of our back wall. There is a sapling growing randomly in the council’s flowerbed which, because we don’t have regular council people employed to pull it out is growing quite nicely. There is also a random one in our local park which marks the little crossing over one of the ditches that take the pond water out to the sea.
Random sycamores all over the place, and this is what I took from what our vicar was preaching. Our faith is random. It blows where it will. It can appear where we don’t expect it.
So back to the one that got chopped down and is now regrowing. What if that too is like faith? What if it was never meant to be alone there? What if it was never meant to be photographed by so many? The article says that it is sprouting so well because the soil isn’t so compacted because people aren’t coming to see it.
So regarding church – how often, I wonder, does church become a memorial? A “this is how we do it”? A “this is how it always is”? And faith is contained within it. Actually the curate we had preaching this Sunday just gone was talking about the Book of Acts and of how God often sent persecution to get the church to move “out to the ends of the world”. Like the iconic sycamore tree it had to be cut down to move out.
I wonder how often we try to keep things as they are, as what we know, as what we like, and I wonder how often we don’t want to move out of what we know and just see where our faith might be replanted?
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