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"Tending Our Gardens"
Genesis 2:4b-15
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
Earth Day
April 22, 2001
University Baptist Church
Minneapolis, MN
A few weeks ago, the youth of our church were asked during Sunday school about what they could do for the world on Earth Day. These youth grew up here, have seen this space as sacred for many years. This is the place where their faith in God was developed, enhanced, strengthened, even questioned and reevaluated. Here’s what they said: "Pick up trash; Recycle; Boycott fast food; Eat fish; Burn leaves; Plant a new tree; Have a tree on the Communion table."
You see, these youth don’t simply worship here amongst us. They run around this place. Here,they have their imaginations run wild. They have safety and a place where they can grow individually and collectively. One of the places some of them liked to play was in a tree out here by the portico. A few years back that tree succumbed to age and was replaced by a smaller one, but not without some tears by some of us young and old. One of the youth went up to the fallen tree and took a piece of it home. At the risk of being called a congregation of tree-huggers, I want you to experience this part of the earth with your hands, your eyes, your nose, your feelings. I want us to be connected to the ground out of which we came and remember that we are connected in a profound way with the world and the entire creation. (pass around the log)
Tatanga Mani (Walking Buffalo), a Stoney Indian, wrote: "Did you know that trees talk? Well they do. They talk to each other, and they’ll talk to you if you listen. Trouble is, white people don’t listen. They never listen to the Indian so I don’t suppose they’ll listen to other voices in nature. But I have learned a lot from trees: sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit."
There are two creation stories in Genesis. The first one is where God creates the world in six days and then rests on the seventh. We all know this one. It’s familiar. Creation begins as God brings order out of the primordial soup. Light, darkness, heaven, earth, plants, animals and finally humanity is created by the dramatic word and work of God who art in heaven hallowed be thy name. Everything is good. Nothing is bad.
But there is a second creation story, the beginning of which we read earlier this morning. Unlike the first story, God is not far off. In this story, God is the ultimate gardener, who exists nearby with us in the most beautiful garden imaginable. We are told to tend the garden. The garden is where it all starts and the first earth creature Adam is a play on words for the name for earth Adamah. It is also important to note that this first person is genderless until a second person was created out of the first, only then was there a distinction between the sexes. Into this garden, God creates more complexity. Not everything is good about creation. There are good trees and bad trees. Good fruits and forbidden fruits. There are serpents about calling the first creatures to forget the rules and eat the forbidden fruit. What we see in the second story is humanity moving further and further away from God until we can no longer live in the garden of paradise.
I’m not going to say that one story is better or even more holy or literally true than the other. But for the sake of this sermon and this day where we are focusing on the garden in which we exist, I am drawn to the story about the slithering evil nearby which seeks to destroy the garden, if not the goodness of all of creation.
Today is Earth Day. And it behooves us to look at the earth today. We are stewards of this place we have from God. Our creation stories grant us responsibility for the earth and its inhabitants. But we don’t have a very good track record on the responsibility end.
We have a wonderful garden here that we are called to tend—a garden that can flower and grow and provide enjoyment and beauty. I for one, enjoy tending gardens. I can’t wait to eat the pesto that will come from these basil plants. Our family used to support a family farm in California and for a nominal fee, we would get a basket of fresh grown organic veggies 50 weeks a year. The baskets would come complete with news from the farm and recipes. We got to know our farmers and even attended a workday or two on the farm. It’s called CSA, Community Supported Agriculture. I recently downloaded the Minnesota CSA directory of organic farms. While we won’t get 50 baskets a year, we’re looking forward to connecting with and supporting a local farm.
I got my love of gardening from tending the family farm outside of Cleveland in the summers for my grand father and great grandfather. On a much smaller scale, my mother still gardens, just like her mother, only much more meticulously. She will seek out those serpents and will spend weeks pulling dandelions out of the front lawn. She tells me, though that when she does that, she’s never closer to God. She and God have had many a conversation while tending tomatoes and basil.
I think of Bill Schafer pulling out the dead stuff in the portico garden on Palm Sunday, all the while singing the praises of Adele Fadden and her horticultural attentiveness.
Just to sing her praises a bit more, she has shepherded for the past decade or so a hunger garden at her church in Cleveland. She supervises a crew of people who tend a garden on the church property which provides produce for soup kitchens and food banks. It is holy work to tend a garden.
And I find myself wondering on this earth day, how we as a society are doing tending our garden.
Sanjai Tripathi wrote an article reprinted this week in the Minnesota Daily. She pointed out: We are 5% of the population of the world and yet we emit more chemical pollution than any other nation. She says, "Since we are the richest nation, we have no excuse to be the dirtiest." She’s right. From arsenic in drinking water, to further dependence on fossil fuel, to deregulating polluters to reductions in air quality standards to turning a blind eye to acid rain, this administration is in denial of the cold hard facts.
I don’t like to be so partisan in a sermon, but our current president gives us so much good material.
The president’s budget cuts in half funding for solar, wind and hydro-electric power as well as cutting funding for more fuel-efficient or alternative cars. A little-reported fact of the California energy crisis is that Pacific Gas and Electric, that oh-so-ethical company exposed in Erin Brokavich, pumped millions of dollars into a successful deregulation campaign. Once deregulation happened, they jumped up prices so consumers would pick up the price tag for cash strapped and inefficient nuclear power plants. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that nuclear power plants in earthquake country were never a very good idea. All the while, they did proportionally little to help the alternative energy sources. Now, there are mountains covered with wind turbines. When we would pass them in our cars, we were surprised to find that most of them were not operating. High winds and seemingly frozen wind turbines. The fact is, however, that the turbines create so much electricity, the transmission lines are maxed out. PG&E decided it was cheaper to turn off the turbines than to enhance the transmission lines. Me thinks there is a serpent in the garden.
Well, so what, you may say. That’s what our president seems to say. And lest I seem too partisan, there has yet to be a president who has really taken our fossil fuel dependence seriously enough to make the kind of changes needed. One could argue that such a person with such a vision could never get elected because of the lobby of the polluters.
If this is the case, are we thus left to celebrating earth day by picking up garbage and planting a few seeds? Perhaps. But the more important thing is that we are remember our story. We need to remember thjat from Eden to Gethsemene, gardens were where Biblical folks reconnected with God. If we forget to tend our garden, the earth, then we are by definition farther from God.
We remember the parents and grandparents who gardened for food, not just for enjoyment.
We remember that this land this earth is God’s and the fullness thereof.
We remember that we were created to tend the garden.
We remember that to tend this garden is holy work.
We remember that in tending the garden, we reconnect with who we are created to be.
We remember that in tending the garden, we find our souls and our connection to God.
What if we looked at our whole world as a garden?
What if we looked at ourselves as gardeners?
Good gardeners know for instance, that you can’t grow the same crops on the same land decade after decade. Ground needs to be rotated. It even needs to lie fallow every seven years or so in order to get the proper nutrients in the soil. There is divine wisdom in the Sabbath principal in agriculture.
Good gardeners know that you need a good clean source of water, and clean air and clean rain. Good gardeners know that there is nothing like a good tomato with fresh basil and a little olive oil as a reward for your hard work.
Everyone knows that nonrenewable energy, like coal or oil or natural gas will eventually run out. They will run out quicker if we don’t introduce and support something new. Some of us have even had discussions here about incorporating new solar technology when we get around re-roofing this great old building.
Good gardeners plan out their harvests so that there will be room enough for all the plants to yield food during the growing season. Otherwise tomatoes and Zucchinis clog windowsills during the harvest. Good gardeners would see that everyone got clothed, everyone got fed and every weed tended to.
Gayla Marty preached a fine sermon here a few months ago which she entitled "A Global Requiem". At the end of her sermon, she encouraged us to approach our ecological predicament with open eyes. She encouraged us to listen to the children who watch us.
You have had a chance to feel and experience part of the art the youth wanted to share with you today. Think about how this experience might make you a better gardener.
She also encouraged us to make the tending of our gardens, whether through activism, through conservation, through art, through dance, through music, through writing, to be creative and life-giving. I know we have the capacity for this.
For when we as a church as a people as a nation, are attentive to our gardens we reconnect with that sometimes seemingly elusive force called God. And we return to the place where it all began and hopefully where it can begin anew. The garden.
Let me close with a piece written by Ernest Callenbach:
Earth’s Ten Commandments