By Reverend Laurie DeMott

While this tranquil domestic scene was playing out five feet from my picture window, another form caught my eye. Gliding down from the cloudless sky, a large broad shouldered hawk landed gracefully on an older birdhouse that stands a few hundred feet from my house. A pair of tree swallows had been investigating the house a moment ago but when the hawk appeared, they quickly departed and a stillness descended upon the meadow around him. The hawk preened himself, shook out his feathers, and then settled onto his post in no apparent hurry to hunt, content for the moment to simply watch and think whatever hawk thoughts came to him in the quiet of the morning. Mr. Bluebird had noticed the hawks' entrance and stopped walloping his grass long enough to consider the distance between himself and the hawk's perch, but having calculated it to be quite safe, he returned to the task at hand, and Mrs. Bluebird resumed her appraisal of his efforts.

I slowly moved toward the window, concerned that the bluebirds were being overly confident in the presence of their enemy, and my motion caught the attention of the hawk. We locked eyes, each considering the other, each in a sense an interloper on the peaceable kingdom at our feet. We shared an easy confidence of knowing that unlike the bluebirds and other songbirds busy building their nests that morning, we alone had no enemies to fear but could move unmolested through those fields as we chose. And even more, the hawk and I also shared a choice -- we could enjoy the peace of that place or we could destroy the peace of that place. Perhaps the hawk's ability to destroy was more elemental and part of the natural order of things but we nevertheless both had a power that the bluebirds, swallows, song sparrows, rabbits, mice, and other vulnerable species do not have. We held the fate of those others in our talons.

The hawk held my eye for a second more and then settled onto his perch in a sleepy contentment. He was not hungry; he would not be hunting that morning. And for that moment, I was not the descendent of Eve banished from the Garden of Eden, but I was at one with a perfect creation where a hawk and a human and a pair of nesting bluebirds could live in peace together.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and it was good. We read the stories of creation, look into the eyes of a hawk gazing back at us, and are moved to reverence. “Yes, it is good,” we say. The hawk, the bluebirds, the pines, the moon, and the stars: it is good. The hymnist, writing in a spirit of awe, sings, “In the stars His handiwork I see, visions of the things of majesty.” The natural world reveals God and we are moved.

If I were to ask everyone to think for a moment of a time or a place recently where you experienced God’s presence one of the most common answers would be: “I experienced God in nature.”

I want to talk briefly today about what it means to experience God in nature; to look out at a landscape and sense the creating hand of God. Many of us, myself included, gain a sense of God’s holy presence when we are outside close to the earth. We look at the magenta hues of a sunset washed across the sky and in the sweep of those rosy clouds feel a wonder akin to worship. For you, it may be the surf crashing on the beach, or a loon’s call trembling across a mountain lake, or the fresh scent of a daffodil waving bravely in the chill spring air; for some it is a stark desert landscape, and others quiet meadows; but whatever the particular source, most of us, especially in a rural town like Alfred, would say that nature inspires us and assures us of God’s presence.

Why do we find nature to be so inspiring? We might point to the stories of creation in Genesis, the description of the Garden of Eden, and say that, as the songwriter said, nature inspires us because it is evidence of God’s handiwork. We look at the natural world and we can see the hand of our creator all around us.

Yet how many of us looked at the tangle of rubble and gaping earth in Haiti and were inspired by God’s handiwork? An earthquake that kills hundreds of thousands of people does not have the same scent of holiness that a daffodil has, yet an earthquake is part of nature. And did we see God in the tornadoes that roar across the Midwest, ripping trees up by the roots and creating kindle out of houses? Yet tornadoes are part of nature. Do we see God in the slush on wintery sidewalks, or in flood waters seeping into our basement, in mildew, in the decomposing carcass alongside the highway, in viral meningitis, and tooth decay, and dung beetles, and tapeworms? Yet all of these things are part of nature as well.

The natural world has inspired thousands of centuries of believers; our experience of being awed by nature is too common to be discounted, yet not all of nature provides the same sense of reverence. While some biologists maybe able to look at the physiology of the tapeworm and feel some sense of awe, most of us feel only disgust at tapeworms and nothing akin to worship at all. So the natural world, in and of itself, is not what inspires. What is it that we are feeling when we sense God in a sunset?

The answer is in the second chapter of Genesis and the story of the Garden of Eden. In this story, Adam and Eve begin life in a wonderful garden, full of animal life and trees burdened with fruit. At the end of the story, they live outside of the garden where life, they discover, is broken and painful.

What is the difference between life inside of Eden and life outside? Inside of Eden, animals and human beings co-exist in peace; outside there is competition and fear as can be seen by the curse in which God describes the relationship between Eve and the snake. Inside of Eden, there is work to do. God creates human beings to till the land, but the work is satisfying work as the earth responds readily to the labor of Adam and Eve. Outside of Eden there is also work to do but it is back breaking work; there is pain and toil and suffering. Inside of Eden, Adam and Eve are help-mates; outside of Eden there is tension between husband and wife, and the children that Adam and Eve bring forth grow to a sibling rivalry that ends in murder and the shedding of human blood.

And so, the story-teller tells us, inside of Eden there is peace, wholeness, satisfying work, and good relationships with one another but outside of Eden there is competition, fear, antagonism, pain, hardship, and fragmentation.

When we look at a sunset streaking across the sky, we sense the presence of God because we sense the perfect beauty of that moment. Eden reveals itself again, and we see a world where everything might be in balance. When we hear a loon on a mountain lake, we thrill at the primitive unscarred world which for that moment is in perfect peace, unscarred by the soiling touch of the human hand. What we call a reverence of nature is actually a reverence for unity and balance, peace and wholeness, beauty and integrity. Intellectually we know that earthquakes, droughts, and even parasites are part of the natural equilibrium of the world but most of us cannot revere those parts of nature because we also know that they bring disruption and imbalance and disease and suffering to human hearts that we care for. An Eden-like world, a place where God is present in every moment and molecule, includes peace for both human and animal alike. Some environmentalists have such a deep despair over the state of the earth that they imagine that the perfect world is one in which nature is given free reign and it is human beings who are herded into small preserves where the fences will keep our dirty hands off of the rest of the earth. Nevertheless, the story in Genesis reminds us that perfect creation is not the pristine wilderness where no human voice speaks, no human foot walk, but is a place where humanity lives side by side with the rest of God's creation in a respectful peace. We nurture God's creation, we care for it, and yes, we live off of its produce but we do so with respect for what has been given. We learn the methods of sustainable harvest; we minimize the impact of our lifestyle on the land; we support efforts to combat global warming; we build birdhouses in our back yards.

The story of the Garden of Eden was not told simply as a Paradise Lost, but rather as a story of a Paradise that might-be. The Garden of Eden describes the world as God would have it be, and the story of the bible is the story of people attempting to respond to God’s vision so that together we might re-create the wholeness of Eden. When we experience those perfect moments -- diamonds sparkling on the water, baby swallows taking their first flight, rows of corn swaying in a summer breeze -- we are glimpsing shadows of Eden, and we are feeling the call of God that urges us to help bring Eden to life again. Jesus gave his life to the tilling of Eden -- the work of his hands brought laughter where there once had been pain, and hope where hearts knew only despair. He broke bread with the hungry and forgave the scorned and healed the broken. We know that he, too, felt that nature revealed God’s presence and vision for the world, but Jesus moved from worship to action by giving his own life to the work of restoring Eden in his midst.

I believe that the story of Eden is not a story that tells us about our past but that calls us to a future. As we fell God in the beauty of the world, so we are called by that same God to be partners in the on-going creation of the world by bringing healing to the earth, harmony between people, reconciliation where there is division, and beauty to all lives.