The Most Rev. Michael Curry, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, delivers his sermon “Choose Love” during the morning worship service Sunday in the Amphitheater.
Trees have a prominent place in the Bible and in our culture. The Most Rev. Bishop Michael Curry illustrated this belief using words from three sources: the prophet Jeremiah, the Negro spiritual “I Shall Not be Moved,” and the poem “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer.
Curry preached at the 9:15 a.m. Monday morning worship service in the Amphitheater. His sermon title was “Faith: A Lesson from an African Tree,” and the scripture reading was Jeremiah 17: 5-8.
Curry referred to Jeremiah 17: 7-8: “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.”
Curry spoke the words of “I Shall Not Be Moved,” because, he said, “I was not gifted with the ability to sing.” The words he quoted were: “I shall not be, I shall not be moved. / I shall not be, I shall not be moved; / Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved, be moved.”
He recited the first and last verses of “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer, which he said he learned in second grade. “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree. / Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.”
In the Bible, the first tree was the Tree of Life. God told Adam and Eve that they could eat from the Tree of Life, but not from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
“God did not consult a child psychologist before issuing that rule. Any parent knows that the first thing a child will do is what you told them not to do,” Curry said. “The Tree of Life promises that we will have abundant life. To eat of its fruit is to help the world live as God intended.”
In the Christian scriptures, the Tree of Life is the cross. “The key to life is Jesus’ selflessness,” Curry said. “Being selfless leads us to our real selves. This is good medicine: When we give ourselves for others, we get blessed and we bless others.”
Then in the Book of the Revelation of John, “after all the craziness of the apocalypse, we see the Tree of Life, the same tree as in Eden, bearing fruit for the healing of nations,” Curry said. “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” He then asked the congregation to turn to a neighbor and say “We are talking about trees.”
Curry participated in a pilgrimage to Ghana — a pilgrimage to look at Episcopal relief projects, and for reconciliation. The group was all Episcopalians, and all from the United States. They represented descendents of formerly enslaved people and of former enslavers.
“But we were all part of the human family — a dysfunctional family, but family,” he said.
The group visited the northern part of Ghana where the Saharan Desert is rapidly moving south and the soil is becoming a mix of sand and dirt. The group went to a village where enslaved people rested after they had been forced to march from other parts of Africa, before the death march to the coast.
The people in that village, over the centuries, kept telling the story of what happened there “so that we will know of the evil of that painful time,” said Curry. The tree under which they rested looks much like a large bush with a huge root system. Hundreds of people could camp under the tree.
“It was an oasis in a barren land,” Curry said. “The tree was there when slavery happened. It was there when there was mercantile capitalism. The tree was there during the Middle Ages, colonialism and in the 1950s.”
He particularly mentioned the 1950s because Queen Elizabeth II made history when she danced with Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the independence movement in Ghana and its first president. The tree was also there when Barack Obama came and looked and bent his knee before it.
Curry said: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.”
The reason the tree is still there is that it is sustained by a deep root system, Curry said. “In good times and bad, good circumstances and bad, the massive root system goes deep to find water in the desert.”
He continued, “We have to go deep in the soil to find life as a nation and the world. When we go deep in the soil of who we are, we find that we all come from God.” The congregation applauded. “We are all kinfolk. Our dysfunctionality may be proof we are family.”
Curry cited 1 John 4: 7-8, saying “Our roots go down to love and give life. We got ‘plenty good room’ for all God’s children.”
In Buffalo in 1963, the school board decided to do some desegregation of the schools. Curry was going into fifth grade. He was in a group of students moved from East Buffalo to a school in West Buffalo.
“It was just across Main Street, but it was a different world. We walked from a Black neighborhood to an Italian neighborhood. I went to School 76, which is now the Herman Badillo School,” he said.
His teacher was Miss Lennie. “All teachers’ first names were ‘Miss.’ She was from Scotland and she was very good at storytelling. She loved this country and taught us about the Great Seal of the United States,” he said.
The motto on the seal is “E Pluribus Unum.” Curry called the motto the highest aspiration of our nation. “It is who we are meant to be and who we strive to be,” he said. “It is not our sins and failures that are our DNA, but ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ from many, one.”
During the pandemic, Curry asked his staff to look into the origin of the motto. The Founding Fathers lifted it from Cicero, the Roman statesman, but Cicero lifted it from the poet Virgil. And where did Virgil use the phrase?
In a recipe for pesto.
Cicero had lifted it to talk about the composition of the Roman family.
“America, hear me. E Pluribus Unum is who we are,” Curry said. The congregation applauded.
He repeated the words from “I shall not be moved.”
“I shall not be, I shall not be moved. / I shall not be, I shall not be moved; / Like a tree America planted by the water, We shall not be moved, be moved.” The congregation rose, giving him a standing ovation.
The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, senior pastor of Chautauqua Institution, presided. Sally Goss, a lay reader at St. John’s Church in Ellicott City, Maryland, read the scripture. The prelude was “Andantino,” from Sonata for Organ, by Florence Price, played by Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and the Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist on the Massey Memorial Organ. The Motet Choir sang “The Tree of Life,” music by K. Lee Scott and words by Kiràly Imre von Pécselyi, paraphrased by Erik Routely. The choir was directed by Stafford and accompanied by guest organist James Bobb, professor of organ and church music at St. Olaf’s College in Northfield, Minnesota. The postlude was “Finale,” from Price’s Sonata for Organ, played by Stafford on the Massey Organ. Support for this week’s services and chaplaincy is provided by the Samuel M. and Mary E. Hazlett Memorial Fund.
