> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Between Sermons - URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons/ - Published: 2026-07-03T15:40:47.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-02T19:51:15.000Z - Description: Between sermons, I have been working on something. - Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach ## **Part One: Something Already Singing** Between sermons, I have been working on something. It started nearly ten years ago in a conversation with our then Curate, Jesse. It started, as most things here eventually start, at the water's edge. We were thinking about ways to engage our whole community in deeper reverence for our grow-to-give garden. As I prayed about it, I realized the vision was beautiful. But it wanted to grow. I was leaving the church on a Thursday afternoon in March and heard the spring peepers for the first time that year. Small voices rising from the shallows. Cold air. The daffodils just coming up. The swans back at the nest. A hard wind pushing against every sign of spring. The peepers did not negotiate with the wind. They sang. I stood there longer than I meant to. The pond was doing this before we arrived. Before this harbor had a name. Before there were ears to receive it as anything. The peepers were not performing for me. The pond does not require our attention to be what it is. Something is happening here that is not about us, has not waited for us, and will not stop when we leave. That is the thing I have been working on. Nearly ten years now watching this pond freeze and thaw. The brook that feeds it carves winter channels through October sedge. At the marsh's northern edge, where Cold Spring River starts its run to harbor, great blue herons stand motionless in September shallows. I call this BlueGreen Theology. Blue for the pond's surface tension holding mayflies at dawn. Green for the *Phragmites australis* that has taken the marsh's edge, crowding out what grew there before, surviving every winter, returning every spring. Not nature as abstraction. Not the environment as political cause. This cattail stem. This snapping turtle's mud-slick shell. This exact osprey returning each April to hunt from the cross in our steeple. The tradition speaks of revelation through text, through history, through reason. But here instruction arrives in forms the church has not learned to read. A great horned owl calling across December ice. Spring peepers beginning their chorus while snow still covers the access road. Teachers we have refused as teachers, speaking in frequencies we have trained ourselves not to hear. The work has produced three academic articles, a longer manuscript still in progress, and the Sunday podcast series some of you have been listening to. It has sent me back to Genesis and the Psalms with different questions than I brought before. It has changed how I understand what we do at the font and the altar and the graveside. I want to share some of it with you. Not the academic version. The version I actually believe. The one that starts at the water's edge on a Thursday in March with something singing that cannot stop. Here is the simplest way I know to say what I have learned: The pond is already alive before God. Not because we have prayed over it or paid attention to it or declared it sacred. It is. Peepers praise in the shallows. Wood duck nests in cattails at the northeast corner. Heron stands at the edge, unbothered by ambiguity. The pond pulses with what was never absent. Psalm 148 summons sea creatures. Mountains. Flying birds. Storm wind. Each called to praise directly, not as metaphor, not on our behalf. As themselves. The grammar is not figurative. The assembly breathes. The assembly is real. We are the newest members of it. That is not a diminishment. It is an invitation. If the pond has been praising when the parish was not yet a thought, then our work is not to make it sacred. Our work is to learn to recognize what is already happening, and to take our place in it. That requires a different kind of attention than most of us were formed to pay. Over the next few weeks I will share three more pieces from this work: on what it means that creation praises; on how our own liturgical practices have been enacting this all along, whether we knew it or not; and on what the pond is asking of us. For now: if you find yourself in the meditation garden, sit for a moment with the pond. It does not require anything of you. Neither does this. Just be there. It started before the building did. It has not stopped. That is where this starts. *This is the first in a series of four pieces.* [The second is here.](https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons-ii/) [The third is here.](https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons-iii/) [The last is here.](https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/between-sermons-iv/)