Created for Connectedness
NL Year 2 • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Today is an exciting day! We are celebrating the 10th anniversary of God’s Work Our Hands with the entire ELCA as well as beginning the second year of the Narrative Lectionary. And I’m not sure of a better combination than these two things coinciding because the text we are focusing on is Genesis 2 where God creates the world and we focus in on the Garden of Eden. Why this is so perfect is that we see one of the reasons God created the human was so that the human could farm and take care of Eden. God wanted a creature to care for the creation God was putting into order.
If we take a look at verses 5 and 15 we see that the author of Genesis mentions twice that part of the reason for the creation of the human was to farm the fertile land that God had created. It seems pretty clear to me that a very integral part of our created nature is to care for the creation that God made. Now God’s Work Our Hands is more than just about gardening, but it is about caring for the world and everything God placed in it. It is a day to come together for intentional service to help remind us that from the very beginning of creation we were created to care for this world that God has blessed us with.
Growing up my family had a home that had 3/4 of an acre of land that had an orchard of various fruit trees in the front yard and a pretty sizable garden in the back yard along with plants indoors and in our patios. To be completely honest I wasn’t a huge fan or gardening. I enjoyed picking the final product when I wanted a snack from the garden or grabbing an orange from the orchard, but when it came to weeding, picking up rotten fruit and dead vegetables that were now out of season was not something I enjoyed and generally tried to get out of doing if I could. Which hardly ever worked. So it seems rather ironic that I have been into growing vegetables in a garden and having house plants in the house and back patio. I always shake my head and smile when I realize those childhood chores I had to do as a kid are now the things I enjoy doing as an adult.
Now as I said, the care of the land is only part of the reason that God created the human, but there are times when I’m planting or transplanting and trimming my plants and I wonder if in some small way this is living into one aspect of what God created us to be. I have been emphasizing the idea that farming the land is only part of God’s intention for us because it is true, but I also don’t want to alienate anyone who is hearing this gardening conversation and thinking they need to pick up gardening to fulfill their purpose as a human and a child of God. Whether or not we farm the land or not, whether on a small scale of a personal garden or a large farm, I think it does help us to understand the importance of caring for the earth that God has given us, and how much God put into creating this world for us and for God. I also think the way this congregation supports the Harvest of Hope is a beautiful example of how even though we cannot all directly work the land, we can all do what we can to help those who are able to farm the land so that it goes out and helps those who are in need. Which is the purpose of God’s Work Our Hands as well as every other day that we serve God through what we do.
Even though there is so much that could be said about this passage the other main focus I want us to look at is the idea of connectedness. We see this idea woven throughout our story today. So let’s look at all the connections we see. We see that God created the heaven and earth and that there was land, but there also happened to be a part of the land that was fertile because of the water that ran through it. It was this fertile land that God decided to create the human from, and not just the fertile land, but from the topsoil of the fertile part of the land. Topsoil in our modern terms of the word is where the seeds germinate the best due to the abundance of nutrients its ability to retain water which all allow for a plant to growth a healthy root system which then promotes an overall healthy plant. God didn’t just find some dust for us to create us but found the topsoil that was a part of the fertile part of the land to create us.
This gives us the sense that God very purposefully and intentionally created us from the land. It also gives us this sense that God’s own hands, if we are to imagine God with hands, formed us out of the best part of the soil and as a farmer carefully planted and created us. Or to use the actual imagery of the word formed, we can also imagine God as an artist or more specifically a potter forming the human until it took the shape that God was pleased with. So God not only is connected to the earth by creating it, but God also used that creation to create the human and in a sense getting messy with the water and top soil. So God is connected to the fertile land and we are created out of the fertile land.
Which means that we are integrally connected to the earth out of our very creation. We are also connected to God by being formed by God, and not just formed by God but by the very breath of God which is what brought us to life. So in our creation we are connected to both God and the earth. We are then brought from our place of creation and placed into the Garden of Eden where God’s desire for us is to care for the garden, to care for the fertile creation that God had made. So now we are connected to the care of the trees and the land and offered the bounty of what is produced from our labor.
Then as we move through the story we see that God wants us to have other connections becuase being alone is not good. So God, in a similar way to creating us creates all the animals from the fertile land. We are connected to the animals through our similar creation, but we are even more connected by God giving the human the task of naming the animals. Unfortunately there is no perfect helper found by the human.
God then put the human to sleep and even though almost every translation says God took the human’s rib, the most literal translation from the Hebrew is side or half. So God took half of the human and made a second human. So the human literally had what God had hoped for; a perfect helper, becuase the helper or companion was literally half of the human’s own self. So now they are connected to one another because they were literally created out of each other.
This creation story from Genesis 2, I hope you can see is gushing with words and imagery of connectedness. It is littered with imagery of both God and people working together to care for creation, to give names to the animals, and to be in connection or relationship with one another. While God did use God’s hands in this intimate reading of creation, I don’t think it’s too hard to see that our modern phrase God’s Work Our Hands, is rooted deeply in this Genesis story. We are all here to connect to this world and one another, and through our connectedness we are to promote the fertile land that God has blessed us with so that all may eat our fill. So as we pack the blessing bags may we be mindful that the hands we use to do this act of service is a beautiful example of our continuing to connect ourselves to God and to one another, just as God intended from the very beginning of creation. Amen.