Sacred Garden (sermonette)
Sacred Garden (sermonette)
May 3, 2026
Minister: Rev. JT Smiedendorf
Readings: Genesis 2:4b-9, 15
Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.
CENTRAL FOCUS:
The sacred garden of earth calls for
our responsible stewardship and spiritual connection.
HEAR THIS ANCIENT STORY of Genesis ANEW:
“In the days of Creation, when nothing had yet come up to grow since there was no rain yet caused by Creator and no one to till the earth, then did a stream rise up and then did Creator form of the earth an Earthling. And Creator breathed the Breath of Life into Earthling, and it became a living thing.
And Creator planted a Garden of Delight in the east and put the living Earthling in it. It was a Garden of beauty and good eating. Every tree and plant was there. Even the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Creator told the Earthling to till and keep the Garden.”
These are the words of our ancient tradition.
May the Living Word of God in Scripture be alive within us, among us, and beyond us.
I begin with a word of thanks to our young people for leading us this morning. With song and symbol, you are reminding us of what is true and important for living wisely and well, for receiving and giving life, for being an Easter people.
Theologian Thomas Berry says,
“The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects….The world about us has become an it rather than a ‘thou.’”
Our ancient Creation story, spoken moments ago from chapter 2 of Genesis, has no such distance and objectification. Our ancient sacred story tells of a Creator who seems to have hands to form an earth creature out of the earth and who seems to have a mouth out of which comes a Divine breath that gives life to this creature made of earth.
And that is exactly what we sense if we know Hebrew and the Hebrew wordplay we miss in English; the ah-dam (Hebrew) is made of the Ah-damah (Hebrew for earth/soil). That is why this story is more aptly translated as God creating an earthling or “soil creature” than creating a male person with the proper name, Adam.
In the story, there is an intimacy not only with a God who seems to form humanity with the Divine hands and give life with the Divine breath, but an intimacy with the earth out of which humanity is made. And in the perspective of this source of ancient Hebrew story, this is a world in which humanity’s intimacy involves a relationship and a responsibility for tending the earth. In the semi-arid world out of which this story comes, gardens are the idyllic place that represent where the life force is strong and where earth and the earthlings flourish. These sacred gardens need water and someone to tend them.
Dr. Ted Hiebert, a professor emeritus at McCormick Theological Seminary [podcast], who has studied this story goes so far as to say that it could be translated as “out of farmland was a farmer formed” because the story comes out of an agrarian society. The people then were so much more broadly in touch with the soil, the power of life in a garden or a farm. They understood that there was a sacredness to the relationship with the land and that in some way their responsibility was to serve the land as a sacred call, to serve its fertility and wellbeing. The earthling was put into the garden to serve and keep the land, we could say.
So many of us have heard the English translation of the first story of creation in Genesis 1 as including the word dominion, and that this was a kind of permission given to humans to rule the earth. No doubt this view was furthered by historian Lynn White’s influential 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” published in Science magazine where he argued, among other things, that the Bible gave humanity a mandate to control and exploit the natural world.
Fortunately, we have rabbis to consult when it comes to Hebrew stories and Rabbi Ellen Bernstein has studied the context and original language of Genesis. She realized that dominion did not mean domination. Says Bernstein,
“The understanding of dominion as domination (as critics suggest) assumes that we humans stand over and above the whole creation, entirely separate from her. And yet we could not be more intimately related. The very goodness—the ultimate goodness—proclaimed on the sixth day, after the entire creation has been completed, alludes to all the creatures together—the web of life—and not just compartmentalized humanity as many moderns surmise. Since we are all born of the One, we are kin to the earth and its creatures.”
This rabbi reminds us that the story places human creatures as an integral part of the whole natural system of goodness.
The spiritual shift invited here is the shift to an earth story of sacred relationship, of communion. I believe it is from this place of relationship and kinship that we will best serve God’s Sacred Garden called earth. This ancient and new earth story will be about communion, the community of many forms and the union of all those forms in interdependent Oneness, into Beloved Community. This earth story is from our own tradition. People talk about earth-based traditions and often mean “in contrast to Christianity.” I quietly smile and disagree. Confused by cultural conditioning, bad theology, and poor English translations, we in Christianity have missed that we have an earth-based spiritual tradition! We have a sacred earth story! It is simply hiding in plain sight. As plain as Genesis 2, where we are made of earth.
The earth story that we receive from our ancestors of faith is that we are earth and that the Divine Breath and Blessing is in our very deepest origins. That earth story calls us to till and keep this Sacred Garden of earth, as many First Nations would say, to the seventh generation and beyond.
May it be so. AMEN.