Garden Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
11th of May, 2014
Genesis 2:4b-15
Jeremiah 29:4-7
Amos 9:13-15
“And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.”
The Book of Genesis gives us two versions of creation. The first story, which many scholars suspect is the later version, is a very balanced account of a creation by an extremely powerful god who creates through speech: “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” In this story humanity, male and female, is created at the very end of the process, on the sixth day, the same day on which God created the animals. God creates everything and sees that it is very good, but it’s a somewhat ‘hands-off’ creation.
The second story, the one we heard today, possibly the older story, is a much more ‘hands-on’ creation. Here God creates a man from the dust of the ground, and gives the man life by breathing into his nostrils. At that time, according to the story-teller, there were no plants because “the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground”. It is only after humanity is created that God plants a garden. The man whom God created is then put in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. In this second, earlier, creation story, the connection between humanity and gardens is an interdependent and beneficial one.
Throughout history numerous writers have reminded us of this connection between God, humanity and gardens. For instance, the sixteenth-century philosopher and essayist, Francis Bacon wrote in his essay ‘On Gardens’: “God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.” Some four hundred years’ later the author Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Adam was a gardener, and God, who made him, sees that half of all good gardening is done upon the knees.” Continue reading →
Rev Doc Geek 