"If a Tree Falls..."
This summer at Tobermory United, we're offering a worship series about Sacred Space - how to identify it, how to create it. On July 19, we explored Sacred Space in the Natural World, riffing off some ideas regarding the two trees in the Garden of Eden. Here's my sermon:
“If a Tree Falls…”
Genesis 2:4-9, 15-17
July 19, 2026
Let us pray: Holy and gracious God, these words were created with love for you and in humility. May they also be received in the same way. Amen.
As I mentioned, I spent last week in B.C. For the first few days, I was visiting beloved friends on Vancouver Island, and I made a request. I asked if I might see an old-growth forest while I was there. I’ve seen pictures, of course, of the massive Douglas firs and redwood trees that still exist on Vancouver Island, but I’d never seen one up close. I made a dumb tourist mistake, though… I thought we’d just go to the ‘tree museum,’ or the equivalent of it, and I’d get out, take a few pictures, and off we’d go… I didn’t realize that in order to see old-growth trees, you have to drive up a mountain, on narrower and narrower and steeper and steeper logging roads. We were headed to Eden Grove, and that certainly fits in with our text today… The map we had suggested a 4X4 vehicle, but surely the map-makers were just being cautious. Well, they weren’t. We got within two kilometres of Eden Grove before we bailed. Or, more correctly, I bailed. I was on the passenger side, and I could see the drop offs below us. I was imagining falling over the edge, or something happening to our car up there and no-one – ever – coming to help. There was some panic, but most of all, I was left with sadness. Sadness that all the old-growth was gone except for these few hard-to-reach stands, only there because folks fought for the trees’ right to remain rooted where they’ve been for a thousand years… The whole situation was summed up in words that someone at some point had spray-painted on the bridge that crosses the Gordon River -- part tribute, part warning, part command: “Defend the Sacred” the message said. Defend the sacred.
Our summer worship series is focused on sacred space, and it occurs to me that we haven’t really defined sacred. We had a good conversation at the Friday morning coffee chat about that very thing, and I think we were on the right track. Brittanica.com defines sacred as “holy and deserving respect.” There is also an idea of sacred things being set apart from the ordinary…
Our text today tells us about two trees in the Garden of Eden, surely the most sacred of all sacred places. There is the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God creates an earth creature and tells the earth creature, “you can eat of anything in this beautiful garden, anything your heart desires, but don’t eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for you will surely die… And we know what happens, the earth creature and his partner, they pick the fruit of that tree – on the advice of a snake, it has to be said – and then everything changes…
There’s lots of commentaries to be read about what’s going on here, but it’s the one in the Inclusive Bible that seems to make the most sense. It reads:
"The two trees represent the tension between unity, seeing all things as interconnected (the Tree of Life), and dualism, seeing things as right or wrong, black or white (the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil). Paradise is here depicted as the state of living in unity with all things, eating the fruit of dualism – seeing all things as separate, and ourselves as alone – is indeed death.”1
Right now, forests are burning throughout north-western Ontario. Often, when such things happen, it is easy to have a distanced compassion. Some sympathy, maybe a prayer, and then we get on with things. But this week, the smoke from those fires has drifted here and elsewhere, making it hard to see, hard to breathe. It is a visible sign of the tragedy that is unfolding. The ash on our decks, the smoke in our lungs – that’s the
boreal forest – burning. That’s God’s creatures running for their lives. That’s families, whole towns, communities and First Nations fleeing burning homes and businesses. The smoke and ash reminds us of all this.
So, guess what, we are all connected… Indigenous peoples have lived and breathed this knowledge since time immemorial. When the first colonists from Europe came to Turtle Island, the First Peoples couldn’t understand the newcomers’ lack of relationship to the land and all of Creation. Chief Seattle, who was born in the 1780s in what is now Washington State, is said to have said:
This we know, the earth does not belong to us,
We belong to the earth.
This we know, all things are connected,
Like the blood that unites one family.
This we know, we did not weave the web of life.
We are merely a strand in it.
This we know, whatever we do to the web,
We do to ourselves.
Is that what is happening right now? Western civilization’s insistence on separateness from the natural world, on subduing and domination, on extraction and processing, plus, there’s the further insistence on resisting the warnings of climate change, because of convenience and the money to be made… Is it all coming back on us?
Big, Lonely Doug is one of the world’s largest Douglas Fir trees. When Doug was set to be felled in a clearcut in 2011, a logger put a band of green tape around him, with the words “Leave Tree.” So Doug still stands, all alone. Forest ecologists figure that Doug emanated from a seed that took root a thousand years ago. The diameter of his trunk is 12 feet across, and Doug stands 216 feet high.2 If you asked that logger why he put the tape around the tree, would he be able to express that it was because he felt it was sacred? Holy and deserving respect? If I had got to see Big, Lonely Doug, I don’t know if I would have been in awe of him, or if I would have just been overwhelmed by his loneliness… Maybe both.
What we need to remember, though, is that though humanity may have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the image of the Tree of Life, and the unity it represents, still exists… The Rev. Dr. Andi Lloyd, a forest ecologist who felt called to a second career as a minister in the United Church of Christ, writes:
"The image of Paradise, which is, after all, an image of the world as God made it to be, points us to the world as it ought to be. The Tree of Life stands as a guidepost to an ethical life and a witness to the kind of world that God intends."3
“On earth, as it is in heaven.” We say that every week. That’s what the Tree of Life represents…
Joni Mitchell put it another way in her song “Woodstock”:
"We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."4
May it be so.
Amen.
1 Priests for Equality, The Inclusive Bible, “Genesis,” p. 6
3 Andi Lloyd, “A View from the Ecotone,” https://substack.com/home/post/p-203128877
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