The goats greeted me on the driveway. Not from their pen behind my friend Catherine’s barn, where they were supposed to be, but out in the open on the driveway. Once again, they had found a gap in their fencing, slipped into the crawl space under the barn, popped up in the ram’s pen, and then jumped the fence.
The two male goats, Bolero and Newsy, trotted up toward me. The female, S’more, had her head stuck in a 10-foot-wide gate that is broken and no longer used. She tried to run but had to carry this heavy gate wrapped around her neck. This is one of her specialties: putting her head through fences and then not being able to get it out.
S'more and I spent about 10 minutes wrestling her head out of the gate. As soon as she was free, she trotted off as if nothing had happened.
I ran down the driveway and set up an alternative pen, ran up to their regular pen and got the charging unit to electrify the fence, ran up to the house and got a leash. The goats by this time were standing on their hind legs to reach green apples on a tree. I clipped the leash onto Newsy’s collar and led him down the driveway to the alternative pen. The other two goats followed—they stick together. I charged that fence to keep them in and then slipped out. They lined up at the gate, bleating their disapproval, but eventually they started to work on all the blackberry brambles down there.
God put Adam in the garden to take care of it. Sometimes taking care of the garden doesn’t go as planned!
In recent weeks we have heard sermons on how to respond to hate. There is so much going on in the world that can get us upset, feeling like things are broken. So today we shift gears to a new sermon series called “Church of the Wild,” which will focus on connecting with the Divine in nature, filling our souls by checking in with the rest of creation. We begin at the beginning, with the Garden of Eden, and we’re going to take a dive into some of the scholarship and language study in order to help us frame our understanding of this story.
The Garden of Eden is one of two creation stories that begin the book of Genesis. The other one is very orderly: for six days, God calls things into being—“Let there be light”—and then says it is good. And on the seventh day, God rests. Scholars believe that version came from what is called the Priestly source of Hebrew writings, which tends to be concerned with order, sequence, patterns, rules. God is a disembodied voice somewhere on high.
This second creation story, the Garden of Eden, comes from what is called the Jahwist source. Writings from this source often call God “Yahweh,” and portray God as more human-like, not a disembodied voice. Later in this story, God walks in the garden in the cool of the evening. One can imagine God stopping to collect a few raspberries or listening to a waterfall. How relaxing.
There are some words in Hebrew that help illuminate understanding of this story. The Hebrew word for earth is adamah. The Hebrew word for the first human is adam, or as we say, Adam. So “Adam” more or less means “earthling,” an appropriate name for one formed from the dust of the earth.
The other words to know are ish, meaning “man,” and ishshah, meaning “woman.” That helps Adam’s sentence make sense when he says, “this one shall be called Woman [ishshah], for out of Man [ish] this one was taken.” (Genesis 2:23)
The point of all this word study is connection and relationship. People of all genders are connected to each other. We come from each other, although usually it is the women who give birth to the men, not the other way around. Humans are made from dust, from earth. On Ash Wednesday we say, “Dust we are, and to dust we shall return.” We share atoms with all the rest of creation. We are connected. When we breathe in the air around us, our lungs know how to turn it into something our bodies can use. From our lungs, the oxygen travels through our blood vessels to our cells. It powers us; without it, we die in minutes. When we eat food, we turn the proteins, starches, iron, calcium, magnesium, vitamins into building blocks for our cells. The water that flows through our streams and lakes also flows through us—we are a high percentage of water. That’s amazing! We are earthlings, made of the very stuff of this earth all around us.
Another thing to notice in this text is that God is a gardener. God planted this garden. And Adam is put in the garden “to work it and take care of it.” (Genesis 2:15.) Maybe he had more luck caring for goats than I did.
We are connected to creation and to each other on the cellular level, on the atomic level, on the DNA level. But sometimes we forget about these connections. With our cars, phones, computers, closed houses, we become cut off. And maybe we think that what happens in creation is not about us or doesn’t matter to us. But it does.
Recently I was riding the Sounder train into Seattle from Mukilteo. The train goes right down the shoreline, and you can see the Olympics, seagulls, great blue herons, seals, and more. On this particular morning there were two bald eagles perched on the mast of a decaying ship on the shore. “Look!” I said to the woman sharing my compartment. She looked up from her computer, took out an earbud. “What?” she said. But by that time the eagles had slid from view.
At Seabeck church camp earlier this month our speaker was Victoria Loorz, who wrote Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred. In this sermon series, we’re going to explore ideas about church of the wild through the end of August. And I want to set up why we’re doing this by reading from the prologue of Victoria’s book:
This is a story about a land where the trees talk and the waters croon and the people fall in love with birds, who love them back. This is a story about an enchanted forest hiding in plain sight, invisible until, somehow, the veil drops—and what was unseen can suddenly be seen. You may catch a glimpse when you cross the threshold on the far edge of the abandoned field, or when, just for a blinking instant, you notice how the brambles of the blackberry bush connect you to everything….
Once upon a time, all humans knew their lives, their food, their survival, their sense of meaning and kinship with God or the gods was connected with all their relations: the hawks and soil and ferns and mosquitoes. Like all the other wild creatures, they belonged to the land, and they knew it. They were untamed and self-willed and listened to their own intrinsic authority. They were part of a grand conversation, a relationship of reciprocity and respect, connecting them with all the other beings and elements of life.
But there came a time when some of the people could no longer hear the conversation…. They rushed right past the burning bushes on the way to Importance, missing the message of the doe hiding in plain sight with her newborn fawn. They packed the bodies of sacred forest cathedrals onto trucks and shipped them to mills. They forgot that the thrush songs spelled out warnings and wisdom in octaves. Disconnected little by little, their voices went missing in the symphony of aliveness. The songs of the wild God cascading through the trees no longer guided their lives. And a deep loneliness [sank] down upon the people like a heavy fog nobody could see.
The time has come to lift that veil of fog and return to intimate relationship with the living world. More and more of us are taking our place, once again, as full participants in the web of life, which we remember is held together by love.
There are no magic words to incant, no spiritual laws to memorize, no ruby-slippered heels to click three times…. You simply need to learn how to listen. And allow your heart to be broken, just like you do every time you fall in love.
Because the holy is in your place too. You open the gates into this enchanted land, your home, with hands muddied from the soil outside your house and a raw, scabby, and unprotected heart. You enter naked and brave. [Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021), ix-xi.]
We read David Wagoner’s poem “Lost” earlier. He advises us to let ourselves be found in the forest.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
[“Lost” is by David Wagoner. Accessed at http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/09/lost-by-david-wagoner.html.]
As part of this worship series, I invite us all to make a spiritual practice of letting ourselves be found in the nature that is all around us. Maybe it’s paying attention to the wildflowers growing next to your bus stop, or the birds visiting the feeder outside your window. Maybe you take walks, or sit in your garden or on a park bench for 15 minutes a day, 5 minutes a day—whatever you can manage—but be intentional about it. Take time to look at a stick that has lichen growing on it and an ant working its way from one end to the other. Sit under a cedar tree with your back against the trunk and see what happens. Strike up a conversation—a relationship—with nature, and then listen for what it tells you.
After finding the goats’ likely escape routes, blocking those holes with branches and lumber, and tying everything in place with baling twine, I led the goats back into their main pen, closed the electric fence on my way out, and turned it on. I walked up the field to my house, tired but having more or less solved the problem, cared for the animals, at least for now.
As I rounded the corner of my house to climb the steps to the deck, a doe lifted her head from where she was grazing on my driveway. We looked at each other. When I first bought this land, the deer would go bounding away sometimes at the sight of me, especially if I moved suddenly. Now they pause, look at me, as this deer did. Then she returned to grazing my driveway. I stood and watched her for a few minutes, feeling my breathing slow down. When she moved a little farther off, I picked up some loppers and trimmed some blackberry vines to take to the ever-hungry goats. The doe and I are both taking care of the garden.
The Rev. Steven Garnaas-Holmes writes this poem about Eden:
Out beyond Eden it was also garden.
Still is. And we are still here.
The tangled roots of the Tree of Life
hold us, have never let us go.
Fruit trees gladly share with us,
the grasses embrace us,
the ocean bows at our feet,
forests lift their arms in prayer.
Currents of air and ocean swirl
like Vincent’s starry skies—
too much paint! too much energy!
too much color! wild, unleashed!—
all speaking the language
of beauty and overabundance.
Every creature has its part,
receives its blessing, offers its gift.
The toad is not ridiculed for its looks.
The slug is not accused of being lazy.
The worm is not thought of as lowly.
The crab with its little tweezer hands,
the woodpecker whacking away,
the desert scrub, the barnacles
waving their silly little fronds,
all find their food.
Every great predator contributes.
The lions are subject to the fleas.
Vines grow in Chernobyl,
blossoms, every year, at Auschwitz.
There are dragonflies.
The great power each is given
is not to dominate, or even to survive,
but to belong.
[Rev. Steven Garnaas-Holmes, https://unfoldinglight.net/2025/07/08/eden/]
Amen.