Sacred Spaces | The Garden: Where God Places Us - Fr. Aaron Damiani

A reading from the Book of Genesis.

These are the records of the heavens and the earth concerning

their creation. At the time that the Lord made

the earth in the heavens, no shrub of the field had yet grown

on the land, and no plant of the field had yet been sprouted for

the Lord. God had not made it rain on the

land, and there was no man to work the ground, but the mist

would come up from the earth and water all the ground.

Then the Lord formed the man out of the dust from the ground and

breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became

a living being. Then Lord God planted a garden

in Eden in the east, and there He placed the man he had formed.

The Lord God caused to grow out of the ground every tree

pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of

life in the middle of the garden, as well as the tree of

the knowledge of good and evil. A river went out from Eden to

water the garden. From there it divided and became

the source of four rivers. The name of the first is Pishan,

which flows through the entire land of Havilah, where there is

gold. Gold from that land is pure.

Delium and Onyx are also there. The name of the second river is

Kihan, which flows throughout the entire land of Cush.

The name of the third river is Tigris, which runs east of

Assyria, and the fourth river is the Euphrates.

The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden

to work it and watch over it. And the Lord God commanded the

man. You are free to eat from any

tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the

knowledge of good and evil, for on the day that you eat it, you

will certainly die. The word of the Lord.

Well, we are starting a new series called Sacred Spaces, the

Holy ground where God meets us. Sacred spaces are those places

in this physical earth where we encounter the living God and are

set apart in a special and unique way for the mission that

He has. We're going to be starting this

morning in Genesis and we're going to be working our way

through the Scriptures all the way to the new Jerusalem in

Revelation, looking at all the ways that God meets his people.

We're going to start in the garden and then we're going to

look at the altar and then the Tabernacle, the temple.

We're going to work our way through the mountain and then

finally to the to the the new temple in Jesus Christ and then

the new city that he brings. So I hope you join us for the

series. I wonder if there's anyone among

us who've brave enough to try those 1000 piece puzzles.

Have you tried putting one of those puzzles together?

Now here's a here's probably, you know, the biggest challenge

of them all. Have you ever tried to put one

of those puzzles together without the aid of the box, The

picture on the box where you have to deal with all these

scattered pieces? You don't know how they connect.

Sometimes you're forcing it and sometimes you're not.

And sometimes like maybe a piece that's a, you know, with another

one over here, but overall, it's just a lot of like pieces

scattered around. There's no vision bringing it

all together. Sometimes that is what it can be

like to live the human life without any kind of vision or

purpose of what God intends for your life.

You have all these pieces everywhere.

You've got your gigs and you've got your work and you've got

your friends and you've got friends over there and friends

over here and you've got church and you've got, you know, like

all kind of hobbies and interests and pain and setbacks.

You're like, how does all of this fit together?

What's the grander beautiful picture for my life?

A recent study found actually that well over half of Gen.

Z feel like their lives lack that picture lacks meaning and

purpose for their lives because there's nothing coherent and

beautiful and complete that they feel about their life and their

work. And the truth is like it doesn't

just, it's not just Gen. Z, it's every generation.

If you don't have that bigger picture, you don't know how your

life is supposed to coalesce and come together.

That can be very discouraging when you ask what's the bigger

picture? What's the bigger purpose for my

life? Now reading from Genesis 2 is

like a picture from the Lord God for every generation.

Here's what it looks like to be a full and complete human being.

Here's what I can do with your life.

Here's what I intend. We see the original sacred

space, which was a garden. Isn't that cool?

A garden was the original space where God wanted to encounter

human beings, where He brought them to life, where He placed

them and gave them a purpose. He gave them abundance and lush

rivers and delicious food. The garden is the place for

God's people return to again and again to hear God's call on

their life and know His presence and join His work.

So it's true that we don't live in this garden.

What's described here is no longer our full and complete

reality, but the picture of it was kept for our benefits so

that everyone from every generation who struggle to know

their bigger picture, the bigger picture of their life and their

purpose can return to it and say here's what God is doing with

your life and here's what God is doing with the world.

So I invite you to turn there now.

Genesis 2, I think it's on page nine of your programs.

You can obviously turn there into your Bibles.

That's the first book of the Bible, Genesis 2 four and

following. Now when we think about the

picture that Genesis 2 is painting, here's the first

feature that we need to know. The first feature of this

picture is God who is Lord over both lack and abundance.

God who is Lord over over lack and abundance.

We missed this. We missed the picture of the

meaning of our life. You, you might be here and

you're you're facing lack. You might be here and you're

facing abundance. If you cannot see a God who is

Lord over that, your life is going to lack meaning and

coherence because Genesis 2 presents a very interesting

world. It's it's a world that is both

desolate and desirable, and God is Lord over both circumstances.

Look at in verse 4 and following how He is present even in the

barren times. Verse 4 says these are the

records or the genealogies or essentially like the the the

original story of the heavens and the earth concerning their

creation. At that time the Lord God made

the earth and the heavens. No shrub of the field had yet

grown on the land. That's the first negative thing

#2 no plant of the field had yet sprouted.

Second negative thing for the Lord God had not made it rain on

the land. There's the third you could call

it a negative reality or something that doesn't yet

exist. And then finally, there is no

man, no human being to work the ground.

Go back and a lot of people agree on this.

People have different perspectives on the origins of

our world will agree that there was a time without people and

there was a time where things were desolate and there was a

time when a lot of what we know now that's lush and beautiful

and good and civilization and art and and and Thai food didn't

exist. And yet given this lack of rain,

lack of trees, you don't see God panicking.

You don't see him distressed. He's he's ruling and reigning.

He's the Lord God has all the time in the world to deal with

this situation, to deal with this lack, and to wait for the

right time to act. And sometimes it's just good for

us to remember that God can handle desolation.

He's lured over the lack. In fact, in Genesis 1, we see

the Spirit of the Lord hovering over the chaos of the earth.

It's chaotic and dark things don't exist yet.

And the Lord God is right there hovering, and He creates

beautiful order out of that situation.

Psalm One O 7 puts it this way. He meaning God turns a desert

into a pool, turns a desert into a pool, dry land into springs.

The Lord God can take lack and turn it into abundance.

But you can also do the reverse. Psalm one O 7 says he turns

rivers into desert, springs into thirsty ground, fruitful land

into salt, salty wasteland. So the Lord God has seen

ecological like change and he's not afraid of it.

He's Lord over it and he's Lord over lack in abundance and can

turn 1 into the other depending on his purposes.

He's not afraid of lack and he's not enamoured with abundance.

I would say this is really important for us because we are

tempted to believe that the purpose of our life, the picture

of our life, is success, however we define it.

That if our goals are unmet, if our lives feel desolate, we

might assume I've lost the plot and purpose of my life.

It's just a bunch of pieces. And we just assume like, OK, if

I failed at something, that means my life is futile.

And that's just not true at all. The purpose of our life starts

with God, who is Lord over lack and abundance, and he's Lord

over He's Lord over both. Whatever circumstance that we're

in now, what does God do in this dusty and desolate world?

Well, he brings life. Verse 7, the Lord God formed the

man. The verb here for formed is what

the ancient Near East would refer to like a Potter making

clay or making making up like taking clay and forming it.

God is forming the man out of the dust from the ground, and

verse 7 says he breathed the breath of life into his nostrils

and the man became a living being.

And here's one thing I want us to notice.

I just want us to notice the grace of verse 7.

Just pure grace. What's the human being doing to

exist? He's not winning any

competitions, not proving himself, not working really hard

to exist, not getting God's attention, doesn't exist at all.

His life begins with God's mind, God's heart, God's intentions,

God's creativity, God's breath of life.

God's does everything. The human being does nothing.

It's God's greatness and God's grace that fills his life with

purpose and and that just we can never forget that, friends, we

can never forget that our lives begin with grace.

We did nothing to exist. We are hereby God wants us here

and placed us here and he made us and everything about us

belongs to him and starts with him.

Verse 8, the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the East, and

there he placed the man, the human being that he had formed.

And notice just how much the Lord God is being intentional

here. He's he's planting a garden that

takes if anyone here has planted a garden, you know how much

intention that takes. Then he places the human being

in the garden. So there's more initiating grace

from our Lord here. He creates the abundance that

the man will now live in, like thrive in.

And in verses 9 through 14, we actually see a world dripping

with abundance. We we started in desolation, but

now we see that the Lord is abundant.

Abundance comes from His grace. Verse 9 talks about beautiful

trees with delicious food. It's sort of aesthetic and

delicious. And then verse 10, God provides

a water source. It's a great river that brings

life. And in fact, the the river, what

happens is that when the river hits Eden, it divides into four

parts. And many scholars believe that

this is sort of an ecological clue that that the garden, like

Eden, is like a great mountain. The garden is at the top of the

mountain. The water flows into the garden

and then divides in four different ways to irrigate the

four corners of the earth. And then Genesis 2 goes on to

describe the existence of precious metals and, and, and

then also, best of all, there's a human being placed in the

midst of all of this, the vegetation, the water, the gold

and the dellum and Onyx to cultivate all of it.

This past April, Laura and I went on a marriage retreat.

And one of the things we did was we, we hiked up a mountain in

Georgia and I did not bring water with me.

And man, I was like, what am I going to do?

We're not even at the top of the mountain yet.

And I'm really thirsty. And we got to the top of the

mountain and we were shocked to find order and beauty.

There was this Japanese koi pond that was really well maintained.

There was vegetation everywhere. There was this historic

renovated guest house. That was all like ready.

And then best of all, there was a fountain of drinkable water.

And it was like there was past intentions that had placed all

of that together, put all of that together right atop of the

mountain. So what did we do?

We refreshed ourselves in the water and poured it on our heads

and drank it and, and then we just took in all of the beauty.

We took in the beauty of the house and the koi pond and

looked out into the valley and saw all the, the, the fresh

Georgia landscape and trees. It was just absolutely gorgeous.

The original sacred space was kind of like that, except way

better. Purposeful, beautiful,

delicious, teeming with life. This is from God.

He's generous and He loves to provide abundance for his

children. But if we think that's the

meaning of our life and we don't see the God behind the

abundance, we will lose the plot.

We will lose the purpose for all of the abundance.

We will lose the personal intention designed behind it,

that fruitfulness. Ask anyone who has everything

they've ever wanted in this life.

They finally get it and their lives in some ways are more

desolate and empty than when they were just struggling to get

the next meal. The Lord God is over lack and

over abundance, and that is one of the most that is the primary

feature of this picture of what it means to be human.

It's just pure grace flowing from Him no matter what the

circumstances are. Yet we do have a role to play,

and that's the second feature of this picture of what it means to

be human in this sacred space, the garden.

The second feature of the picture is a human being trusted

with great freedom and responsibility.

A human being trusted with great freedom and great

responsibility. It starts with God, Lord over

lack in abundance, and then it moves to the human being trusted

with great freedom and responsibility.

Verse 15, the Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden

of Eden to work it and to watch over it.

Really important words. We see it repeated in other

sacred spaces in Scripture like the Levitical priesthood.

They were to do this exact same thing, work it and watch over

the Tabernacle, the Hebrew word for work.

The first of that pair avad and this carries a sense of applying

human effort, labor, intention to make a problem better.

It is applying creative effort to cultivate something within

creation. Adam is supposed to cultivate

the gold, harness the river, raise a family, build a

civilization, tend the garden. That is a high calling avad,

Avad this place, Adam. But how does Adam's work in Eden

relate with ours? What about our work of evading?

One pastor explains it this way. Gardeners like Adam take an

active stance toward their charge.

They don't leave the land as it is.

They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind

so that it produces food, flowers and beauty.

And that is the pattern for all work.

It is creative and assertive. It helps people thrive and

flourish. What does it look like to apply

creative, active work in our world, rearranging it so that

our lives flourish? A psychologist takes the

insights on human nature and applies it with skill and

compassion and relationship to their clients.

As a result, fear and shame give way to strength and courage

among the people that they serve.

A young artist applies hours each week to train their hands

and their minds to master a craft and master the notes.

They learn to take the the raw material of their craft, the

notes in the strings, and they learn to make something

beautiful and inspiring. An entrepreneur notices a local

population getting exploited for their natural resources, but

instead of passively letting it happen and passively profiting

from it, they take an active creative stance.

They connect law enforcement with the business community, and

they come up with a sustainable plan so that this community is

able to profit from and flourish in their natural resources of

their own property. A grad student builds upon

arguments from leading scholars to craft a thesis which advances

the field of study. A young dad notices A chaotic

pile of laundry higher than Mount Zion itself, smelly and

undifferentiated, and applies effort and skill and hard work

and intention to turn that into beautiful, differentiated, good

smelling piles of laundry for each member of their family.

Work the garden. Take an active creative stance

of the things that are right in front of you as part of Our

Calling friends, as part of our work.

John Wesley put it this way. Do all the good you can by all

the means you can and all the ways you can and all the places

you can at all the times you can, to all the people you can,

as long as you ever can. Now, one of the best examples of

this that I've seen is from a man whose name is Gary.

Gary's story goes like this. All he wanted to do was be a

foreign missionary. He that's the call he got from

God as a young boy and a young man, and he pursued it into

adulthood. He got his training.

He, he, he married his wife, Carolyn.

She also wanted to go to the mission field.

They work towards it. They did.

They jump through every single hoop they could to fulfill their

call and dream. And once they had jumped through

every single hoop, the door slammed in their face and the

mission board basically told them you can't go, you can never

go. And they were, I mean, there was

absolutely disillusioned. Like I think they were like 30

or above at this point and had worked for years for this.

So they just did the next right thing.

He took a job as a a pastor of youth and young adults in North

Carolina and he just started pastoring them and they started

coming up with him with, you know, relationship problems,

which probably seemed trivial to him at the time, but he was

like, OK, So he started to counsel them.

He started to pastor them and he started encouraging people and

they're engaged couples and married couples.

And, and then he started noticing patterns.

God started to give him insights.

Here's some helpful things for you to shepherd these young

couples. And so he found that it was like

so helpful for them that he decided that he would write it

down. And he's like, I don't know.

We'll call it the five love languages.

Fast forward now, his work on the five love languages has been

translated into 50 different languages, actual languages.

And he continues to write, speak and minister not just

relationship wisdom, but also the gospel of Jesus

internationally all year round. He's 87 years old.

Sometimes he speaks every night of the week and encourages

people and preaches the gospel. I don't think he could have ever

seen that coming. But he just did the next right

thing and God made sense of the whole picture.

God calls Adam to work it a VOD, but he also calls them to watch

over it. Shamar, this is Guardian

language. This is the language that refers

to protection. Be on the lookout, be a

watchman, because there's going to be there's going to be people

who are going to come against this work.

Evil will come against it, and you must guard it.

This means that anything destructive or contamination

needs to be kept out because sacred space is meant to stay

sacred, not be defiled, not be trampled on, not be treated with

disdain. And so further instructions on

that are in verse 16 and 17. The Lord God commanded the man,

You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must

not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for

on the day you eat of it, you will certainly die.

And soon after an evil minded snake like creature comes with a

lie. And this is Adam's first Test.

Like, will he shamar sacred space?

Will he keep evil out? Will he confront it?

Will he put his own life on the line to protect what God has

called sacred? That was part of his

responsibility. That's what part of what God

gave him to do. God trusted Adam and Adam

betrayed that trust because he did not shamar sacred space.

He, he did not take an active creative stance.

He did not guard it. An evil trampled evil even

worked through his own heart and Adam's own disobedience.

And there's this just sense of breakdown of trust.

And this is what it means for sacred space to be violated.

Ever since, you know, Adam's sons, you, you watch what

happens and, and sacred space gets more and more violated.

In fact, Adam's descendants tried to make, they tried to

recreate even, you know, but they did it through violence and

extortion. And instead of recreating even

they, they made things like the Tower of Babel or the city of

Babylon, just more injustice and more pain and more exploitation.

And we see this in our world, don't we?

We see this when when a person or group exploits the

environment for their own profit, but without thought for

coming generations, or when a powerful person violates

someone's innocence, or when God entrusts us with an assignment

and says work it and keep it. And we were like, it's too hard

and this is not what I imagined for my life.

So we quit. See, it's not just our puzzle

that's scrambled. It's the whole world.

It's just all these pieces everywhere, broken, like, torn

apart. Like, how is this going to be

put back together? Shattered, Shattered remains,

broken glass. Let's see.

There was one son of Adam that was different.

Yeah. Bringing the whole point home

there. One of Adam's son's friends went

back up the mountain and found a garden there.

In fact, we have a visual illustration.

There he is right there, the second from the last.

You see him up there, Jesus Christ in Gethsemane, praying in

the garden, confronting the snake.

Instead of falling down on the job, He sweats drops of blood

and prays all night. Father, thy will be done, not my

will, Thy will be done. And the snake, you know, tried

to deceive him but couldn't. So the snake pierced him.

And from his wounds, from the wounds of Jesus, flowed living

waters to irrigate the four corners of the earth, to bring

refreshment of spiritual life and renewal to anyone who would

turn to him. He would give healing to the

nation's and Adam's son, God's Son, Jesus Christ has become our

new garden, the new Eden and the new gardener within Eden.

For all of us who have tasted the the fallout of our own sin

or the sin of other people, when we feed on him, this, this new

garden, we will surely live. I heard about the story of a

jazz musician named John. You know, John tragically lost

his dad at age 12. And so as he came of age and

realized that he had a dream of becoming a jazz musician, he was

always looking for those father figures, you know, is that void

in his life, always looking for mentors who could take him to

the next level. He'd play with any band that

would take him, basically practice as much as he could.

But one of those father figures, as it happens, like passed on

heroin addiction to him, which was rampant in the jazz

community at the time. And so, but he's he's struggling

and he's he's working at it. And then finally, John gets his

big break. Miles Davis invited John to join

his quintet. He starts playing with Miles

Davis, but the only problem is his drinking and his heroin

addiction had gotten so bad that he, like his live performances

were were erratic. And Miles Davis was like I got

to let you go man. This is not working out.

And just imagine like what a low point you would be.

You've worked all your life for a goal.

You finally meet that goal to do what you think you're calling

is, but you screwed it up and you missed your greatest

opportunity. And something really interesting

happened in John's life is that that became a moment where he

was like, OK, I'm going to face the snake.

I'm going I'm going to face the darkness.

And he actually, he locked himself, not advising this, but

this is what he did. He locked himself in his

Philadelphia home to go cold Turkey off heroin and alcohol.

And it got so bad, his withdrawal symptoms, his

daughter thought he was going to die.

But instead of dying, he actually encountered the living

God. And Jesus Christ changed his

life, changed his heart. And he said God, like he, he

said, God, I want you to give me an opportunity.

Would you help me make beautiful music to bring joy to people's

lives? Would you help?

Would you restore my broken life and help me and help me, help me

with this craft? And he came out of that

Philadelphia home and he recorded his album and he called

it a Love Supreme. And when you listen to John

Coltrane's album Love Supreme, it's like you can hear all the

picture, the picture of his life, all those shattered pieces

and shards of his life come together and the most beautiful

mosaic ever. All like the pain and the

missing dad and the, and the notes and the years in the

wilderness and the failure and the grace and the hope.

You can hear it. And this is what Jesus can do

with every human life. Every time we have failed and

every time we've missed opportunities and every time we

feel like it's it's broken and UN unredeemed and we have no

idea how it's all going to fit together.

This is what the new gardener does.

See, there's all the pieces together and he says, let me

make something of let me recreate Eden one person at a

time. And if you're here and you've

never met him, you can turn to him now, just like John did back

in the year 1957. I I love what he says in his in

his liner notes. He said this album is a humble

offering to him and attempt to say thank you God through our

work, even as we do our they do in our hearts and with our

tongues. May he help and strengthen all

men in every good endeavour. That's true.

He can do that with you and me one day.

I know it. We're, when we turn to him,

we'll see the whole picture. We'll see the puzzle come

together and, and it and we'll say all praise be to God.

But in the meantime, it's still a puzzle, isn't it?

The pieces, how do they all fit together?

I'm not exactly sure. You're not exactly sure.

We're just doing the next right thing.

We're just Avadh and Shamar watching and and working the

little plot of the garden in which God has placed us.

And we're asking him to make it sacred again to the glory of

God. So, so let's just bring it back

here today. What are we going to do?

Got a practice for you that you can try it.

We'll call it the garden practice because why not?

And this is for every stage of life.

I've got some prompts for you here.

You can write it down or not. We'll we'll figure out a way to

send this out. But this can help us realign

with God's purpose for our life. And it starts with people.

People who are the people that God has asked you to love and

serve on a consistent basis? Are there people in your life

God has asked you to love and serve on a consistent basis?

People, projects. What are the projects?

You could call it a craft or, or the next right thing that the

Lord has asked us to invest our best efforts, our best efforts,

our creative, active stance. That's projects #3 problems,

problems. What's your mound of

undifferentiated Mount Sinai dirty laundry?

What's your version of that? What issues in this world has

the Lord asked you to confront, to guard, to watch over, to do

something about problems #4 provision, provision.

What blessings or graces has God provided?

Or would you like Him to provide for you, to flourish in your

work? And then finally, prayer.

Prayer. Where do we need God's help to

work and steward the garden unto His glory?

Maybe it's grace for the failure.

Maybe it's strength of the task. Maybe it's wisdom from above,

people, projects, problems, provision, prayer.

Let's end with prayer now my friends, as we seek to be

faithful in the garden. Lord, we just give you all of

the pieces of our life. We don't know how they fit

together. Thank you that you are the

picture, that you can see the picture, and that you are making

all things new in our life. Thank you that you formed us

from the dust and that you placed us here with purpose.

Lord, would you teach us to to work with joy and to keep watch

with joy unto your name. And Lord, help us trust you with

the with just the story. We don't know how it will come

together, but thank you that you're bringing all of the

broken pieces of our life and all the gifts of our world and

even our hopes and dreams, Lord. And you're making a beautiful

picture of grace and mercy in Christ and with Christ and

through Christ to the glory of God the Father, who pray this in

Jesus name, Amen.