The Rt. Rev. Ruth Woodliff-Stanley, Bishop of South Carolina, preached this sermon at Holy Eucharist at diocesan convention on Nov. 7, 2026.
Hello, Diocese of Maine! What a joy and honor to be with you! Thank you, Bishop Brown, for your generous invitation.
Bishop Thomas and Tom and their beloved family have been on our hearts and on the hearts of bishops across the church these past few days. We are holding you close.
I learned Bishop Thomas invited you to plant trees last year. That captured my imagination!
And, when he invited me to be with you, he offered a little extra encouragement: “You can stay and take in the fall leaves.”
Now, I’ve learned we’re past peak—so I’m advocating for an October Convention next year! Meanwhile, we’ll be chasing the blueberry barrens. I had to ask Siri what a barren was. I’m learning to speak Maine!
I came for you, truly. And I came for the trees—at peak, past peak, even bare, they have a singular beauty. Trees have a way of enfolding us, no matter the season. They teach us how to see.
Twenty-four years ago, my father died.
We were living in Colorado, and a snowstorm had closed our way home. We drove across the Southwest to New Mexico, hoping to catch a flight.
I called my brother and sister-in-law while driving across New Mexico.
“It’s too wide open out here,” I said. “Too much sky. I need trees to hold me—to frame my sight.”
I had grown up beneath old oaks, magnolias, pines, and pecan trees. I needed to get home to those trees.
When I was young, I would swim laps with my father in our backyard pool. Afterward, I would float on my back, looking up into the trees. Wondering what they had seen. I never imagined how important they would be to me when I lost my father. They framed my days with him. So, of course, I wanted them when he was gone.
There was so much life in those trees I did not yet know how to see.
Maine poet laureate Dawn Potter writes in “la terre perdue”—“the lost land”:
“back in my country
we hardly knew what a sunset was
the trees were so dense
weighted with lichen and time
at evening the shadows
of the pines the firs the tamaracks
would crowd the heavens
and on a summer night the sky
would sink into a blue so black
it was the wet ink of fountain pens
it was old work shirts forgotten in the rain
and now a lemony streak of light
would finger each giant’s shadow
and the day birds would cry out
their last words their last words
and now silence and now
the owl would begin to speak.”
How much life did the trees of my childhood shelter that I never knew was there?
John opens his Gospel with these words:
“All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
And then:
“In him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
And a few verses beyond today’s reading:
“The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
The Word through whom all things came into being has lived among us.
Not above creation. Not apart from it. Within it. Among us.
The Word became flesh within the tangled roots and thick branches of this particular, intricate, vulnerable creation, and the light shone through that dense thicket.
If this world matters enough for God to enter it, surely it matters how we inhabit it.
God’s nearness to creation did not begin with the incarnation.
Genesis tells us that God has been drawing near from the beginning—speaking life into being, beholding its goodness, entering into covenant with every living creature.
Every living creature.
As a vegan, I am particularly moved by this attention. Don’t worry—I’m not here to convert you.
But I am here to marvel at God’s choice to enter creation, to be with us—among the trees, the birds, the pigs and horses and cows. The great octopus, the tiny titmouse, the majestic deer—
Each has a life beyond its usefulness to us.
“In him,” Colossians tells us, “all things hold together.” The communion we seek begins in Christ. We are learning to live the belonging God has already given us.
Creation reveals God’s promise to gather what has been broken, to restore what has been divided, to make us whole together. This is the very substance of communion.
What changes when we cherish all God’s creation—each tiny ant, each giant whale—as holy, rather than as instruments to meet our desires?
“In The Forest Unseen,” Sewanee professor David George Haskell visits one square meter of old-growth forest at Sewanee almost daily for a year.
One small patch. A year of returning.
Each of us has a place to begin—a patch of this world calling for our faithful attention.
One winter day, attending to Carolina chickadees, Haskell takes an unusual step toward understanding their lives: he takes off his clothes.
Don’t worry—I’m not pressing you to try this either!
The cold stings almost immediately.
These birds can require sixty-five thousand joules of energy each winter day. Don’t ask me how big a joule is. But half that energy goes to shivering.
Imagine that. Half your energy spent shivering, simply to stay alive.|
There are people on our streets who know all too well this struggle simply to stay warm.
Haskell cannot inhabit the experience of the chickadee. But drawing near deepens his respect.
“Astonishment,” he writes, “is the only proper response.”
He teaches us to return, to attend, to let familiarity deepen into wonder.
This attention is also absolutely essential for us to give to the communities we inhabit, the histories we carry, the neighbors whose lives intertwine with ours. We must learn the wisdom of the forest. We must practice the return to our one square meter.
In South Carolina, we are learning this wisdom after schism and years of litigation. Congregations lost homes. Our LGBTQIA leaders endured having their dignity treated as a matter for dispute.
When properties returned, we asked: What are these places, entrusted to our care, meant for now? What do they call us to do? Who do they ask us to become?
We’ve walked them, prayed over them, worried over them—returning day after day, week after week.
And in returning, we’ve had to relinquish some of what we thought we knew.
We’ve begun to see what was there all along: wounds of exclusion borne by our African American congregations long before our recent schism. Voices silenced. Gifts overlooked. Leaders pushed to the margins.
We discovered that schism and historic injustice are not separate stories.
Bishop William Alexander Guerry, one of my predecessors, said, “We should strive for unity, not uniformity.” Unity is “organic, living, and capable of endless growth.”
He advocated for a Black suffragan bishop. In 1928, a priest opposed to his work for racial equality shot him. He died five days later.
The cost of communion is written into our history.
This awareness of the cost of following Jesus toward God’s communion shapes our rebuilding: investment in communities long overlooked, new uses for property, social enterprises that sustain ministry.
One example I’m excited to share—
We are beginning to plan a community where neurodivergent adults can live independently on land returned to us after the schism. This is an example of listening to the land with curiosity—to hear a new calling.
Our baptismal covenant asks something of us as we consider our buildings and budgets, as we assess our willingness to risk, learn, and adjust. The covenant calls us to practice courage.
And I see something of that same courage here in Maine.
In your Wabanaki relationships and commitment to sovereignty.
In your care for immigrant neighbors.
In Episcopal and Lutheran congregations worshiping together.
In your Earth Keepers—and your trees.
Where might your return to your familiar patch of land lead you? Who is not yet at your table, yet already living alongside you in this beautiful habitat?
New sight asks something of us.
You come from a land of dense trees, their roots intertwined beneath your feet, their branches sheltering lives you may never see.
What if the measure of our flourishing is not simply how well we stand, but how much life we shelter?
Beloved people of the Diocese of Maine, today we pray to be saved from the illusion that humankind is separate and alone. Your ministries give that prayer shape. You, too, know the cost of embracing God’s communion, the pain of separation. You too are questioning old ways and making new ones.
You are advocates, repairers, wisdom keepers, bridge builders, tree planters. Where will you make room next, and what resources will you give to that work?
For the Word who came to dwell among us calls us to make more and more room for the lives among whom we dwell.
The roots of injustice run deep. Some have secured their power by denying others room to flourish—crowding them out. But the gospel light shines through relentlessly.
The gospel does not call us merely to admire the life around us. It calls us to defend it, to nurture it, to make room for its flourishing.
Yet the life we are called to cherish and shelter is under threat.
Powers and principalities would turn our attention from God’s creation. Voices declare with false certainty that some lives are more worthy of our care.
That creation is our instrument rather than our habitation.
That we are lords, masters over the lives of others.
These voices would seduce us into division and rancor.
But we know these are lies.
We have not come this far to have God’s holy habitat disregarded.
We have not come this far to have God’s beloved people disrespected.
We have not come this far to have God’s unfulfilled hopes denied.
We have come this far by the Word who gives us life—the light shining even where we have not yet learned to see.
We have come this far by faith.
And we will not be moved.
So—
When a people’s history is buried—
unearth it.
When a neighbor’s dignity is denied—
defend it.
When a creature’s home is threatened—
shelter it.
When a community’s trust is broken—
repair it.
When a heart is aching with loss, hold it.
Let your roots grow deeper.
Let your branches make more room.
Return to your one square meter, with courage and conviction, until every living creature knows the shelter of God’s promise.
I think of your young trees. Who will rest beneath them? Who will nest in their branches?
I think of your old-growth trees, reaching heavenward.
And I am home again, flat on my back in the water, looking up, my father nearby.
So much life I had not yet learned to see.
So much life still waiting for us to discover.
Astonishment, Haskell tells us, is the only proper response.
And astonishment moves us to love: making room, repairing harm, sheltering life.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” Through the trees, dense-weighted with lichen and time, the light shines still.
Draw near. Behold.
May the wisdom of the forest be yours, now and always.
Amen.