Back to the Garden

Sermon preached at St. Margaret's Anglican on August 21, 2022. Appointed readings:  Jer 1:4-10; Ps 71:1-6; Heb 12:18-29 Introduction If you have a Bible with you this evening, it may be helpful to have it handy as this will be one of those sermons that a friend of mine once described as “A Bible in one hand and more Bible in the other.” Now, I am far from a Greek scholar as my seminary transcripts can attest to, and I generally have a rule against appealing to biblical languages in the pulpit. But, just this once, I want to draw your attention to a little bit of text criticism as our way into our epistle reading this evening.   Our lesson from Hebrews begins “You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest… etc.” But what is this “something” that is being referred to? The Book of Hebrews, true to its name, sets out to explicate the gospel of Jesus Christ by way of a close reading of the Hebrew scriptures. With that in mind,

             The tradition of agrarian theology that I seek to dialogue with in my research and in this blog owes much to the writing of Wendell Berry and his interpreters. Agrarianism, in its North American register, is inescapably bound up in the structures of settler colonialism that has been incredibly displacing to the indigenous peoples who have called these lands home from time immemorial. [1] This form of agrarianism has had such a displacing edge specifically because it has been driven by the settler demand for new land. The agrarianism that shaped my own life in Western Canada was largely created by a race between new immigrants and American ex-pats who were hungry to swallow up land as quickly as the Canadian government could sign treaties with the remaining indigenous nations that centuries of war, famine, and disease had not already extinguished. [2]             With this settler-colonialist edge, agrarian thought, particularly as it has been popularized in Berry’s wr

Over a hundred years ago, Canada and the United States began setting aside large tracts of land as parks. The parks movement was largely inspired by the writings of American transcendentalist conservationists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Particularly in the work of John Muir, the “pristine, untrammelled” wilderness of the Sierra Mountains represented a cathedral of nature. A place where, due to its supposed distance from the effects of fallen humankind, shards of edenic innocence had been preserved. The first national park was created at Yellowstone in 1872. Soon there came to be a philosophical divide in this burgeoning ecological movement. Some believed, as Muir did, that the land set aside in the parks should be “preserved” for their transcendent and aesthetic, as well as their ecological value. Others believed that careful, limited resource management could be attempted within the parks including allowing grazing animals, limited forestry, and in some cases, limited mining oper

Intro One of the many peculiar graces of my upbringing was the opportunity to grow up in a community that put a high value on reading the Bible. Now, keep in mind, I grew up in a pretty small town, and there weren’t a lot of things to do, but I remember one evening being invited over to my friend’s house where we sat around in a circle and read through the 4 gospels aloud out of a chronological bible my one friend had. Who does that kind of thing? Well, we did. You see, one of the programs our church offered was something called “Bible Quizzing,” and yes, it’s exactly as nerdy as it sounds. Essentially, we were given portions of the new testament every year that we were supposed to memorize. Every week we would learn a new chapter of the material and then every few months we would get together with teams from other churches all across the Prairies for Quiz Meets where we would be tested on our bible memorization. The “game” aspect of quizzing was sort of like “Reach for the Top.” T