We were out in the wilderness, several days away from the nearest Forest Service road, by canoe. We were out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which spans from Northern Minnesota into Southern Ontario, where it’s called the Quetico – a maze of lakes that glaciers from the last ice age had carved out of the granite. No motors – only canoes and kayaks permitted – so after a few days out there you really start to settle into the slower rhythms of the greater-than-human world.

Pine, cedar, juniper; still waters under the stars, and the great sweep of the milky way; the iridescent billows of aurora borealis overhead. Loon-song fluting out over the waters, a lonesome sound that’s soon answered by another call from another lake between here and the horizon. The way the wind stirs the treetops from afar, then stirs the water from the shore, growing closer until your boat is rocking in the waves.

We had grown up together, the friends with whom I was venturing, guys from my neighborhood. We had long had this plot to cut loose from civilization and go out into the Boundary Water for a month, a moon cycle. We were in our early twenties and basically wandering our way through that time of life, unmoored from much in the way of real responsibility. One summer we managed to get away and make the trip happen.

Day after day we paddled across the waters and portaged our gear through the trails that connected one lake to another.

At night at camp we watched to moon. We were waiting for it to grow full. When the full moon was due to come, we stayed at our camp during the day, dozing around. Near sundown we broke camp. After nightfall we set out.

This was our full moon paddle.

It was dark enough that you could not tell the water from the surrounding darkness. It took an act of trust to sit down in that canoe and push out into the inky liquid unknown.

Our attention had to be completely immersed in the soft sounds around us, and the silver lines of detail that the moonlight painted over the water and rocky shoreline and trees.

It was a calm night, no wind. The lake reflected the stars and moon. We were floating through infinity. The rhythm and pull of our paddling drew our breath into a sway, like prayer:
“Holy, holy, holy.”

Later in the trip we made our way to a larger lake that had a bay which held several small islands. Each of us went to one of the islands to have solo time, for a day and a night. It was during that time, alone, on the little island that let me call it home for a little while, with its thick moss and scrubby junipers, in a big lake among lakes in Northern Minnesota, it was during that time that I remembered how to pray.

Something stirred in me, and cleared away the clutter, and shook me awake to what I think is well expressed by the medieval Christian Mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg:

A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air.
In the fire of creation,
God doesn’t vanish:
The fire brightens.
Each creature God made
must live in its own true nature;
How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God?
―Mechthild of Magdeburg

Not only did I remember how to pray, but when I prayed and laid out on the moss and listened to the wind weave through the trees, it dawned on me, for the first time hitting me fully between the eyes, utterly to my surprise, that I was meant to be a minister. It took several more years for me to fully surrender to this. But that moment planted a seed – or, more accurately, it was the first peek of something sprouting from a seed that had been biding its time in my soul.

I tell this story because I know that I am far from alone in having been gifted with a sacred experience that was personally significant when outside communing with the wider-than-human world of God’s Creation. I know that many of you have experienced a sense of the Holy, a presence of the Holy One when outside the doors of homes and human temples. The Bible itself, as Wendell Berry puts it, is “an outdoor book.” The patriarchs, matriarchs, and prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures experienced their revelations of God in wild places their people held sacred. Jesus had his own mountaintop experiences, he met the Holy Spirit in the Jordan River, and often retreated to the wilderness to pray.

“Remove your sandals, for this is holy ground”

One of the themes I’ve been exploring with you all the past several weeks is embodied spirituality. What does it mean, what does it look like for us as Jesus followers to really honor the fact that our faith is incarnational, about the in-the-flesh-ness of the divine, to honor the reality of our embodied natures as “embodied souls & ensouled bodies”?

Today I want to honor the implications of this in our relationship with the more-than-human world of God’s Creation. In the creation stories of Genesis, the first human, whom the Creator fashions from mud and breath-spirit, is called “Adamah.” This literally means soil-being, creature-of-the-mud, earthling.  In our language, this insight is contained in the etymological connection between “human” and “hummus” – soil – and “humble.”

There is truth to calling it communion when we commune with nature. The world can be our temple. Many folks are naturally drawn to feeling certain places in the wider world as being sacred places, locations where it is easier to feel the presence of the Spirit, to contemplate a harmonious holy intelligence interweaving Creation, to feel awe, reverence, beauty, humility, gratitude before our Holy Creator.

Where have you experienced that? Where are your natural temples? Where have you found wild sanctuaries, holy cathedrals not crafted by human hands? What does it mean to remove our sandals when we are on holy ground, to honor and protect it as we would an ancient cathedral?

When it comes to the Boundary Waters, there has been a big long fight over mining interests nearby that would release toxic sulfates into the watershed. A twenty-year mining ban was lifted recently, but as of August 18th a different block to mining was put in place. There are suits and counter-suits, and counter-counter-suits.

Would it be accurate to call this a struggle to protect sacred land and waters from desecration? The native Anishinaabe people sure think so. As do I. But many of my fellow Christians would call that blasphemy: the only thing that’s sacred is a book, the only places that are holy are churches built by human hands, the only really truly holy being is a person, Jesus, and only pagans would say otherwise.

I grew up in southern Wisconsin. A special place there where we’d go to hike and fish and swim is called “Devil’s Lake.” It’s a beautiful and geologically unique place formed at the edge of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. When we swam there it always gave me such a fresh and clean and alive feeling, which helped me feel closer to God. As a kid I wondered, why is this wonderful place called “Devil’s Lake.” My Dad explained to me that for the Native Ho Chunk people this was and is a sacred place, for special religious ceremonies. Their name for the lake means “Spirit Lake” or “Sacred Lake” (Day-wa-kahn-chunk-gera). But the European Christian settlers thought the Native people were worshipping the devil. So, they called it “Devil’s Lake.”

That’s always seemed bizarre to me, and sad. It’s a deeply impoverished understanding of God. God is present through Creation, even as God’s reality is beyond Creation … we can and do and should honor both the through and the beyond. This is not idol worship any more than gathering here in our beautiful church sanctuary is idol worship. God is both transcendent and immanent, both infinite and intimate. Through this beautiful and strange, wonderous and weird world we can glimpse some of the Creator’s fingerprints, and sense God’s life-giving Spirit.

For this I give thanks and praise to God.  Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, August 30, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.

The image is “Promenade de Julie et Saint-Preux sur le lac de Genève” (“Moonlight boating on Lake Geneva”) by Charles Edouard Le Prince.