Rev. Jonathan Roach

Putting Down Roots

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

One day a very old man was planting three jaboticaba trees in his yard. He carefully selected the best site for the new trees. After considering the amount of sunlight and water they would receive in various locations, he found just the right place for them. He slowly dug three holes for the trees, filled each hole half way up with rich compost, and then he gently took each seedling tree and loosened up their root balls. He spread the roots out. He wanted the roots to grow deep and strong. He wanted each tree to be able to withstand droughts and grow tall. As the old man was taking a break from his work, a foolish young man saw what he was doing and came over to give the old man some advice.

“Old man, why are planting jaboticaba trees? Jaboticaba trees take a decade to give fruit. And it will be quarter century before these trees are mature. Why are you wasting your time? Plant trees that grow faster and you might even taste the fruit in a year or two.”

The old man looked up at the foolish young man and finally answered, “Young man, jaboticaba trees grow very slowly but they send their roots down very deep. Their roots find the water deep underground and their deep roots anchor their trunks firmly into the Earth. In times of drought when other trees with shallow roots can’t produce fruits, the jaboticaba tree feeds the people. Each of these trees will send out roots that will interlace with the other trees making them stronger together than alone. When hurricane winds blow other trees down the jaboticaba trees’ interlaced roots will hold these trees upright. You can never go wrong planting a jaboticaba tree, young man.”

The young man’s face had turned red and his voice was now filled with ridicule. “Old man, I don’t need your lessons. And you missed my lesson. You are an old man. You don’t have many years left. You will never eat the fruit of these trees. You will be long dead before these trees bloom and send forth their first crop. Old man you are fool to waste your time planting jaboticaba trees.”

“Young man, I understood your point the first time. But luckily for all of our people, everyone is not as foolish as you. I eat jaboticaba fruit because my grandparents planted them. Old men, like me, plant trees whose fruit we will never taste because we want children who we will never see to have jaboticaba fruit to eat. You can never go wrong planting a jaboticaba tree, young man.”[i]

I love this parable. It is so rich and deep and like our passage from Jeremiah today, it has so many lessons to teach us. We have been reading passages from Jeremiah over the last two months. Over and over we heard Jeremiah warning his audience. He pleaded; he yelled; he tried to reason with them; over and over he attempted to convince the people that unless they changed, their nation was going to fail. And sure enough when they didn’t change, it did fail.

In the year 597, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar got tired of this little kingdom mouthing off to him. So he sent an army and conquered them. Nebuchadnezzar took the king, priests, scribes, and many of the kingdom’s leading citizens as hostage, he installed a tributary king who would follow his orders in Jerusalem, and he took the hostages into exile in Babylon to work in his kingdom. In our passage today, Jeremiah is writing a letter to those people who are now living in exile. These exiles have no idea what is going to happen to them. They are being consumed by their doubts and fears.

In the passages around the verses we read today, Jeremiah finds out that other religious leaders in Jerusalem are writing to the exiles and advising them to resist settling down. The other religious leaders are telling the exiles that they will be coming home soon: so don’t build new homes, don’t make local connections, don’t get comfortable, don’t make new friends. They are telling them not to put down roots. But Jeremiah writes his people with the opposite message. He tells the people to embrace their new reality; to put down roots in this strange, new city. Jeremiah writes “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.”

Jeremiah gives the people in exile such a beautiful message, but it is also so challenging. Putting down roots is so hard. Turning a house into a home is difficult. Starting over after a natural disaster is never easy. Whether it is a move that we didn’t want; facing the reality of life altering illness; or waking up the day after a funeral and knowing this is the new normal. Putting down roots is hard after a life altering change.

I want us to take three important takeaways from our message today. First, Jeremiah is telling the exiles to live in today; to put down roots where they are right now. This advice is profoundly spiritual and practical. Jeremiah is suggesting that people put down roots where they are. Not to try to live off the roots from their old reality and not to wait to put down roots in some future, hoped for reality. But to live right here, right now. Jeremiah is reminding us to live in today; not yesterday; not tomorrow; but today. We need to put down roots in our present. Roots allow us to draw nourishment from the soil, to grow stronger and taller and reach out. We need roots in our surrounding neighborhood, in our communities, in our churches, to sustain and nourish during life’s disasters. Like a tree without roots, a people without networks to nourish them willlll wither and die. But when we have something to live for, when we have homes, gardens, families, communities of faith, then we have roots to nourish ourselves. Jeremiah is telling us to be present in today; not live in the past; not to wait to live in some possible future but to live in today. To put down roots where God has brought us today. Our first takeaway, Jeremiah is telling the exiles to live for today; to put down roots where they are right now.

Our second takeaway today is that Jeremiah is reminding both the exiles and us that we need roots to anchor us. During the storms of life, roots keep us from being blown away. They hold us upright when everything around us is falling apart. I am a gardener, and I know that a plant is only as strong as its root system. Besides nourishing a plant, roots anchor a plant. Wind, rain, the storms of life pull at people and people without strong roots have nothing to hold them. Jeremiah is reminding us that we need roots to anchor us during the storms of life. We all face times of upheaval and crises in our lives, periods when we feel like exiles, failures, a time when we are living forced into isolation, when we are mired in loneliness and depression. Jeremiah gives the exiles some incredible advice, and it is still good advice for us today. Our second takeaway today is that Jeremiah is reminding both the exiles and us that we need roots to anchor us.

Our final takeaway from Jeremiah today is that we need to seek the welfare of the city where we are. In other words, it is about community. Jeremiah reminds us that our relationships and our communities matter. He is telling us that individuals can have amazing deep and strong roots but in times of crisis one person can’t go it alone. In my story about the jaboticaba trees, the old man wasn’t just planting one tree. He was planting three trees because as those three trees’ root systems grow together and as they interlace with each other; they are stronger together than alone. The tallest trees in the world, the coastal redwoods of California; trees that grow 350 feet tall, but they have a root system that only go down 12 to 15 feet and only spreads out 50 to 80 feet from the base of their trunks. Why don’t they fall over? Because they grow in groups as groves. Their roots interlace with other redwoods and together they are stronger. Very few people have roots strong enough to withstand a hurricane by themselves. But with community; with our roots interlaced and supporting each other we have a better chance to survive and to thrive. Together we are strong enough to stay upright through decades of storms. Our final takeaway from Jeremiah today is that we need to seek the welfare of the city where we are because we are stronger as community.

My friends these are our lessons today: roots nourish us, roots anchor us, and roots form us into communities and communities are stronger together than as individuals. We need to put down roots.

Bibliography

Bonging, Charles. 2006. Florida’s Best Fruiting Plants. Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press.

Bright, John. 1965. Jeremiah: The Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday.

Clements, R.E. 1988. Jeremiah. Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press.

[i] Revised and Expanded retelling of a Brazilian proverb from Charles Bonging’s Florida’s Best Fruiting Plants.