Rooted in Love

February 16th, 2025                      “Rooted in Love”                      Rev. Heather Jepsen

Sermon Series: Living Love

Jeremiah 17:5-10 with Psalm 1

          Friends, this whole month we are focused on the good work of Agape love.  How can we follow the path of Jesus Christ, the path of the self-sacrificing servant, as the world around us tell us to grasp after all that we can get?  Valentine’s day is over, and the heart candy and decorations are in the sale bin, but here at church we remain focused on our commitment to demonstrating the love of God in the world.

          Both of our readings for today are about the inner life of faith.  If we remain rooted in our faith, rooted in the practice of love, then we will be able to weather whatever storms come our way.

          I want to spend most of our time this morning with Jeremiah.  Once again, we have a prophet writing in a time of political transition and upheaval.  The Babylonians have taken over Isreal, the temple is destroyed, and the people have been taken as slaves and held captive in Babylon.  In the midst of this situation, it might make sense to trust in fellow humans to save you, but Jeremiah warns against this.  Those who put their trust in man will surely be disappointed.

          Jeremiah warns us that we cannot put our trust in men because they always turn away from God.  This is as true today as it was in Jeremiah’s time.  Those who rise to levels of wealth and power are always corrupted.  Even if they intended to serve the people honestly, they always seem to turn to enriching themselves instead.  Jeremiah warns that if we place our trust in the systems of men, we are bound to be disappointed.  When the tough times come, we will be like the desert shrub, blown away like a tumbleweed. 

          Jeremiah tells us that if we put our trust in God instead, we will be blessed.  Like trees planted by the stream we will drink from the deep waters of our faith.  As the times of hardship come, we remain rooted and strong, even producing fruit in the difficult growing season of drought.

          Jeremiah reminds us that it all comes down to our hearts.  If our hearts are rooted in love, if we remain grounded in our faith, then we will be able to withstand times of hardship.  Notice that there is no promise that hard times will not come.  The drought falls upon all the land.  The difference is not in our experience of life, it is in how we respond to it.  We all have tough times, but those rooted and grounded in faith will survive and thrive.

          These themes are echoed in the Psalm.  Here the writer encourages us to meditate on God’s law day and night.  If we are focused on God’s word, then we will again be like trees with deep roots.  Those who are not rooted in God are blown around like miniscule pieces of chaff.  When hard times come, flip flopping back and forth, they have nothing.

          We return once again to our theme of the month “what is mine to do?” and we find that the answer this week is to remain rooted in love.  Both of these readings are about cultivating the inner life of faith.  Your inner life, the matters of your mind and heart, are what govern your outer actions.  Tend to your own inner garden, plant your tree by the stream of God, and you will be rooted and grounded when the storm hits.

          The Psalmist suggest that we do this by studying the word of God.  For them the answer is to read the ancient texts of their faith and to find meaning there.  They are focused on remaining in the presence of God and living a daily life of obedience.  Today this would look like regularly attending church, reading your Bible at home, cultivating a private prayer practice, and things like that.

          But, if we are being honest, then maybe that’s not your jam.  I know for lots of us those things sound stodgy and even foreign.  Reading the Bible is a great goal, but the further we dig into it, the more messy it gets.  I think we actually do better when we read it together.  Personally, I have found more luck with the other things.  Attending church regularly is a faith practice for me (and a job of course), but so too is cultivating my own spiritual practices.

          The fact is I lean more toward Buddhism at home.  I meditate and practice yoga every day and I have found that these practices better help me to remain calm in the midst of storms.  I do yoga twice a day to prepare my heart and mind to focus.  It is like an embodied prayer for me.  And then meditation helps me to center in, to be grateful, and to notice all the blessings I have every day instead of obsessing over how upset I am by the way the world is right now.  Again, what is mine to do?  The answer for me is cultivating a deep inner spiritual life to ground me in difficult times.

          I am currently reading a book by Pema Chodron (a Buddhist nun) called “Welcoming the Unwelcome”.  (Which, by the way, I encourage anyone to pick up, as it is a balm in these difficult times.)  The portion I was reading this week sounded exactly like trees planted by a stream to me.

          She was writing about how our inner thought patterns govern our lives, and she says:

“Every time we catch ourselves going down the rut of a habitual reaction, we have a chance to interrupt the momentum and discover a whole new direction and depth to our life. . . For example, consider looking down and seeing a fly on your leg.  If you have a tendency to feel aggressive toward flies, you could go with that feeling and slap – kill the fly.  That becomes a means of further blockage, you sow more seeds of aggression and insensitivity, which hinder the process of awakening the heart.  On the other hand, even if this goes against your tendency, you could try having a friendly response to the fly.  You could just look at it in a kind way and either let it be there or gently put your hand near it so it will fly away.  This transforms the fly’s visit from an annoying event into an opportunity for sowing seeds of kindness and tolerance and appreciating the sacredness of life.  It turns into a small way of becoming more open-hearted and open-minded - in other words, of freeing yourself.”

          No matter how you personally feel about flies hopefully you can get the idea.  Her example reminds us that planting seeds of kindness in our hearts is something that we can work on anew every moment of every day.  I think that if we plant enough seeds of kindness, we can grow that tree of love. 

This is about building patterns into our lives.  If you have a pattern of lying all the time, then each lie gets easier and easier to tell.  In contrast, if you have a pattern of always being truthful, then telling a lie will be very difficult for you.  We have the freedom to build our own patterns or to change the patterns in our lives that we don’t like.  We can choose be rooted in kindness, openness, compassion, love, mercy, and not only will we be more grounded as individuals, we can also make a difference in the world for the better.

          My friends, today we continue to ask, “what is mine to do?”  The world remains a crazy place where it can be so easy to lose hope.  As people of faith, we are called to remain rooted in our faith practices.  Be it Bible study and prayer, or meditation and gratitude practices, or even welcoming the presence of the fly, we have unlimited opportunities to root ourselves in love every day.  This week I hope you can root yourself in your spiritual practices, nurture your faith, and enter our shared world in love.  Amen.