PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 52:8-9                                                                 A  Green  Olive  Tree
Sermon June 28, 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

As I have read and prayed the Book of Psalms over the years, there are certain phrases that have grasped my imagination and have shaken me awake.  My sermons this summer are about those phrases.  Today I’m looking at the phrase “a green olive tree.”  When I was a child I didn’t like the taste of olives.  It tasted spicy, not sweet; and the pimento slice in the middle didn’t help any.  Over the years I’ve come to like olives, although they’re still not my favorite food.  We Americans use olives mostly to brighten foods up, and the oil for salads and cooking; but in the ancient world the olive was precious—so precious that the earliest explanations of the fruit of the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil wasn’t an apple, the ancient people said it was an olive.[1]

Olive trees are evergreens.  They grow very slowly, but they live for hundreds of years and even in old age they produce bountifully.  They can grow in rocky soil, even in cracks on the face of a cliff; all they need is enough water.  Palestine has always been an area where olive groves were widespread:  the name “Gethsemane” means “oil press,” and the Garden of Gethsemane was on the Mount of Olives.[2]

            Old Testament writers used the olive tree as a metaphor for ancient Israel, so in the Jeremiah passage that was the First Lesson today,  the image of God’s threat to destroy Jerusalem for the people’s sins was an olive tree burning down.[3]  Since olive oil burns, that would have been a large, hot conflagration.  The ancient prophets may have been rough on their people, but they were wonderful poets. 

            So what does this image of “a green olive tree” have to do with us?

            Think of all the things that sustain your family life, your home, your health, your knowledge.  A building crew comes in, lays a foundation for your house, and uses wood to frame it in, places wooden doorposts, wooden floors.  You move your furniture in—some wooden chairs, tables, cabinets, maybe you still have a rolling pin.  Time to cook:  you reach up into the cabinet and take down the cooking oil.  Somebody turns on a light.  It’s cold, so you turn on the furnace and set the thermostat.  You reach into your medicine cabinet and take out the salve to soothe a blister.  Everybody sits down at the table for supper, and you pass around the salad dressing.  How did they do these things in the ancient world?  Everything I’ve just described in a modern home the ancients got from olive trees:  lumber, furniture, utensils, light, heat, medicine, food—the olive tree provided it all. 

            The “green olive tree” is a metaphor of all that gives life and light to your daily living.  It’s a symbol of “home,” of comfort and safety and plenty.  The word in the Old Testament that describes this is “shalom.”  It’s used as a greeting, a farewell, a blessing, a prayer—“pray for the peace (shalom) of Jerusalem.”[4]  The Messiah would be called “the prince of peace” (shalom)—of safety, well-being, home.[5]   We say “apple pie and motherhood,” they said “shalom,” and the symbol of “shalom” was the “the green olive tree.”  We need a few more “green olive trees” in our lives, and in our national life, I think. 

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            When King Solomon built the first temple in Jerusalem, he used olive wood for the door posts and lintels, for the great doors themselves, and in the very secret inner shrine, the “Most Holy Place,” the two cherubim were made of olive wood covered with gold.  They stood fifteen feet high, and each spread its wings to a breadth of fifteen feet; and the wings touched the walls on the outside and the wing of the other cherub over the Ark of the Covenant.[6]  Think of those pictures you’ve seen of winged bulls from the ruins in Iraq—those are cherubim.[7]  Now listen again to the verses from the Psalm:

What if the door posts and lintels, the great doors themselves, and the two cherubim were not dead, carved wood but alive?  “Green” olive trees![8]  The temple of God is felt to be alive and preserving “shalom” for God’s people. 

            The psalm-singer is saying that he, too, is alive and strong like the stamina of the olive tree that lives for hundreds of years and produces bountifully all that time.  In the temple of your heart, where you have met God and understood what God was doing in your life, stand the great “everlasting doors,”[9] stand the high cherubim plated with gold—the value and the strength God gives you for living, no matter what you face.  You are like “a green olive tree” in the temple of God:  “shalom” surrounds your life—well-being, hope and productive living. 

            I have known people whose lives carry the “shalom” and the strength of “a green olive tree.”  Harry Bracker is one of them.  He was the general manager of a retail coal and cement company in suburban Pittsburgh.  He was about my height but muscular—as a young man he had been a Marine Corps drill sergeant.  He stood straight as an arrow and looked straight ahead, not only with his physical body, but even more with his moral life and his family life.  He and Alma had two daughters, and then years later a son.  I had the privilege of performing the wedding for one of the daughters, and of baptizing their son.  Harry was a man of few words, but when he did speak, people listened—not just because of his firm tone, but even more because he made good sense.  I needed a friend like that supporting me and my ministry as I was just finishing seminary and beginning to learn how to be a pastor.  There was another man in the church who was a vice president of a large multi-national corporation headquartered in Pittsburgh; and this man, too, turned to Harry when there was a problem in the church to solve—and together they guided my growth in leadership. 

            Harry and Alma took the Bible seriously, and so when one of their daughters took up a lifestyle that violated their understanding of God’s plan for human sexuality, Harry remembered the verse in First Timothy describing a church officer with these words:[10]

This time Harry came to me for help.  It takes a strong, wise man with “shalom” in his heart to trust a much younger man whom he has nurtured to provide spiritual counsel.  When I think about that evening, even now, I am amazed at this “olive tree” man of faith.  He and Alma came to me and laid out what was going on, noted the scripture passage that seemed to blame Harry for his daughter’s choices; and he said he was going to resign from his leadership position in the church—he was no longer qualified.  We prayed about it, and then I told him, “Harry, this passage is not a list of qualifications for leadership:  it’s a list of characteristics.  You have done what you were supposed to do—you reared your daughter in faith.  Now, the very fact that she is bringing you this sorrow and upset will make you an even better church leader.  Who are people going to trust with their own disappointments with their children?  They’ll trust you more than somebody whose family never had a problem.  You are now in a position to be a better servant of the church.”  And he decided to keep his elected leadership role.  Not everybody could carry that kind of load.  Harry was, in terms of this psalm, “a green olive tree in the house of God.”  Several years later that daughter who had given him so much sorrow was the one for whom I performed the wedding.  Harry and Alma were almost the only people present, but they were beaming from ear to ear.

            And then there was Miss Sally Blunt.  She was ninety-five years old when I became the pastor of a formerly rural church in central Virginia where she was an active member.  She played banjo, and I tried to persuade her to perform in the talent show, but she answered, “No, the church people won’t take to the kind of music I play.”  I had to laugh.  I think Miss Sally wasn’t afraid of anything.  She had a spacious upstairs apartment that she had been renting to generations of students at the local college:  she started renting it back about 1950, and she was still charging $60 a month.  The students’ music didn’t bother her at all—mostly because she was very hard of hearing.  But every one of those renters she considered to be her own children for the rest of their lives—the preppy students from the 1950’s, the hippy long-hair students from the rebellious 1960’s, the disco kids from the 1970’s, the heavy-metal punkers from the 1980’s, the Gen-Xers that were renting during the time I knew her—all her own children.  She worked for two or three hours every day at sewing and knitting things to sell—her eyesight was better than mine.  In church on Sunday morning she was just barely able to see over the pew in front of her because she was stooped, and you could hear the high-pitched whine when she adjusting her hearing aid about two minutes into the sermon.  She didn’t hold any official office—she was just Miss Sally whom everybody loved.  They had to trick her into coming to her hundredth birthday party.  Her strength was in her longevity, her continuing to trust in God no matter who was living upstairs, her kindness to everyone, her deep sense of “shalom”—peace.  Miss Sally didn’t do spectacular things, but she was indeed “a green olive tree in the house of God,” all her days.

            You can be, too.  Many people who worship in this house are already known for their “shalom,” their inner strength and well-being rooted deep in the inner temple of God’s love.  It doesn’t take spectacular acts, or words to take people’s breath away, or a visible piety.  It takes a simple trust in the love of God for you, and living each day in that hope.  You can have such a blessing.

AMEN

 

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