Garden and Wilderness

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

This sermon was originally for the service to bless Gardens and Bicycles at Knox.

Garden and Wilderness

Scriptures: Genesis 1:28-31Genesis 3:17-19

The story of the Garden of Eden is very familiar but our modern understanding of the age of the earth and evolution of species had led us to turn it into a children’s story, something that adults mostly ignore or maybe consider cute, or harmless.

The story of paradise contains many rich images that have influenced us in ways we don’t think about, ways we take for granted.

The whole idea is that Eden was God’s garden, a place where God could walk and enjoy the cool shade and the wonderful scents and tastes of nature. Humans were created as company, innocent creatures, without knowledge of good and evil and they were given the job of gardener, to tend Eden and care for it.

Eden was set up as a vegetarian paradise where every creature was given the plants for food. Bloodshed of any sort was not expected. It was like that song from Porgy and Bess: “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy”. There was perpetual good weather. The heavy lifting of creating the garden has been done and the humans have the job of looking after it for God.

The contrast when the humans are cast out of the garden is striking: they are cast into the wilderness; they have to cover themselves, partly for modesty and partly because of the thorns, because of the heavy labour needed to convert the wilderness into another garden, a farm, ideally a place of beauty and refuge safe from the suddenly hungry predators but still requiring a lot more work.

It’s remarkable that this is the image of paradise embraced by the Hebrew people because they were not a settled people for much of their history. They self-identify by saying “A wandering Aramean was my father”.

If you read through Genesis, you see the truth of this. Until the time of slavery in Egypt, the Hebrew people were nomadic. Their vision of paradise was settled land, ploughed fields, neatly planted orchards. There were sheep and goats, yes, but hopefully you don’t have to go too far from home to find grazing and water for them. They wanted to be settlers, wanted to tame the land.

And at the Exodus and invasion of Canaan they got their wish. They conquered an already settled land and they had to acknowledge in their worship that the first harvest they collected was the result of Canaanite hands. Like Eden, they were walking into a garden planted by someone else and even if God didn’t plant it personally, they still considered it a gift from God.

As nomads, the Hebrews were people on the margins. Their experience of the wilderness was tough. It’s hard to find water in the wilderness, to find good plants for your animals to eat. It takes a lot of wandering. If it was easy to live off that land, someone would have settled it already and would defend the land against these wandering shepherds.

It’s an ancient story going well back past the stories of the ranchers in the wild west hating the farmers who put up fences. It goes well past the European invasion of North America and the settling of nomadic lands and the taking of already settled lands by force. Different nations here had different cultures and some had farms that Europeans could easily recognize. The Wendat (Huron) were known for that: living around the great lakes, they were displaced to Eastern Quebec.

There are versions of this all through history including every continent (except Antarctica) and continuing to this day as the nomadic Masai cattle herders come into increasing conflict with the farmers who have settled their former grazing lands and as climate change forces them to find new pastures.

It strikes me as important to identify the biases we have cooked into our own origin stories and the assumptions we still make. We are starting to learn how important wilderness areas are and that they need to be preserved for a whole host of reasons just to keep our planet healthy.

There’s a story about the city person who visited a farm in the interior of British Columbia. The farmer was a child when his parents first settled that land and the visitor from the city was waxing rhapsodic over the lush fields and delicious fruit growing in the orchards. “Isn’t it wonderful what nature can do?” he asked, to which the farmer replied: “You should’ve seen it when nature was running it alone!”.

Farm = good; wilderness = bad: it’s a bias that has its roots in scripture and even before that, in our early struggle to survive.

We have new struggles now. We are not just a clever kind of ape, learning that cultivation can give us a steady food supply. We are the dominant species of the earth and it seems like we are intent on developing every green space we have.

Humans need to experience the touch and smell of the soil. We need to have a personal understanding of how things grow, of the rhythm of the seasons and what it means for food to be “in season”… or not. We need to understand that pollinators are bugs and that they are good and that some kinds of plants help other kinds of plants.

Gardens are our bridge from the cities we have built back to Eden: that wonderful image of a beautiful place where divinity and humanity can walk together and enjoy the beauty of living, growing things; where people can be active participants in God’s ongoing project of creation, giving new life to a world that has gone out of balance: where we have a hard time valuing any kind of life that doesn’t lead to profit or convenience.

We are here to bless our gardens and our bicycles too. Bikes can carry us to places of growth and life without burning fossil fuels and choking out anything that needs air to survive. We are here to bless these things but we should recognize them for what they are: they are blessings by their very nature and our involvement with them blesses us and brings us closer to God’s world.

Let us consider the blessing we have in the wilderness too. It’s not just a place of thorns and hard-scrabble soil that needs to conquered and settled but a place where bears can wander – hopefully without being shot by police or t-boned by overly-enthusiastic off-road cyclists – a place where bio-diversity can thrive and endangered species can be preserved. It’s a place where the uncultivated, unsettled parts of God’s garden can exist with all of their wonder and complexity and without too much human interference.

This Earth really is a kind of Eden, a paradise that feeds and sustains us. We can do things to live with a gentle foot-print: travelling with as little harm and pollution as possible at a speed that allows us to experience the living world; participating in the work of creation itself through planting, tending and harvesting gardens without poisons and in cooperation with natural pollinators.

These things that reduce our footprint also bring us into closer contact with the hand of God, who made this Earth, this Eden, and declared it very good, and who wants us to love it and to share the joy that God experiences walking in this garden.

Amen.