"Knowing Our Place in God's Good Creation"
A Sermon on the Sunday after Earth Day
Genesis 1 & 2
Earth Day was yesterday. So this Sunday seems like a good day to
celebrate God’s good creation and to ponder our place in it. This is a day to reflect on what our faith
says to us about how we are called to live on the earth.
In this season of Eastertide, we are
celebrating good news: in raising Jesus
from the dead, God has broken the power of sin and evil and delivered us from
the way of death-- to life eternal and abundant. We
ponder what it means to live as Easter people… and what it means to live in the
ways of God here and now. And today,
especially, we are challenged to reflect on how we are called to live in
relationship with God’s good creation.
When we look to our scriptures, it
turns out that the Bible has a lot to say about creation and caring for
creation. There are over a thousand references to the earth and caring for
creation in the Bible.[1]
The first face of God we encounter
in the Bible is God as Creator, in the first two chapters of Genesis. In Genesis chapter one, we hear that God
created the earth and all that is in it, and blessed it and saw that it was very
good.[2] On the
sixth day, God created humankind in God's image and gave them dominion over
living things. But that isn’t all that
happened on the sixth day.
Barbara
Brown Taylor writes about noticing something new about day six, after years of
thinking that we humans had day six all to ourselves. She noticed that day six starts two verses
earlier than when humans were created, with the creation of land animals--
cattle, to be exact, along with unspecified creeping things and wild
animals.
“What a
comedown.” Taylor says. “A reminder that
although God may have made human beings for special purposes, we were not made
of any more special stuff than the rest of creation. We were made on the same
day as cows and creeping things and wild animals of every kind. God gave us dominion, it is true, but God did not
pronounce us better than anything
else God had made. ‘God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was
very good.
And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”[3]
But what
does “dominion” mean?
Over the years, there were
interpretations of “dominion” that taught people to view themselves as superior
to nature, and justified treating nature as something to be exploited. Some
have said, “I believe God gave us the job to do what we want with creation.
Which could mean, “I think the Bible says we have the right to destroy things
that get in our way. “Dominion” came to be understood by a lot of people as
doing whatever they wanted to creation, or even as “domination.”
But that has resulted in air and water
pollution, the loss of animal species, the loss of trees, environmentally
caused disease.
Christian
ethicist James Gustafson calls this “despotism”--
one of the historical ways that people of faith have interpreted the Bible as
their divine right to dominion over the earth. In this view, Gustafson says, “you don’t have
to ask a tree before you bulldoze it for a subdivision. You just knock it down,
push it into a pile with the corpses of other trees, and set it on fire. Then
you are free to scrape the clear-cut earth free of green moss, tiny wild iris,
toads, and a couple of thousand years’ worth of topsoil before calling the
pavers to come and cover your artwork with steaming asphalt. Oh, and if the
mountain laurels block your view of the river, just turn the dozer on them too.
The next time the river floods, the banks will collapse without those living
roots. The river will silt up eventually, until you can push a sharp stick
three feet straight down in the sandy bottom without ever hitting what used to be
the riverbed. But what the heck, if the trout die, you can still buy some at
the grocery store already cleaned and boned for just a few dollars a pound. You
are Lord over this playground, after all--God said so, right? It is all for
you.”[4]
When we
study the Hebrew word “rada” that’s
translated as “dominion,” we discover that the meaning is more like care-giving,
even nurturing-- not exploitation. Human
beings are created in the image of God, so we need to relate to nonhuman
creatures as God relates to them.[5] Dominion is about responsible stewardship.
In chapter
2 of Genesis, we have another creation
story, in which God formed Adam from the dust of the earth and put him in the
garden of Eden “to till and keep it.”
God’s first command to humanity was
given to Adam, to serve the garden
and to keep it. As God keeps and
sustains us, we are to keep and sustain God’s good creation.
The Hebrew
word translated as “keep”, shamar, is
sometimes translated as “guard,” “safeguard,” “take care of,” or “look after.” Shamar is about a loving, caring,
sustaining kind of keeping. In the blessing of Aaron in Number, “The Lord bless
you and keep you,” the word for “keep” is the Hebrew word shamar--the same word we heard in Genesis 2.
If we are
fulfilling God’s commandment to keep the creation, we make sure that the
creatures and other living things under our care are maintained so they can
flourish. As God keeps people, so God’s
people are to keep God’s creation.
In the book of Exodus, Moses is
minding his father-in-law’s flocks in the wilderness beneath Mount Horeb when
he encounters an angel of the Lord who appears in a flame from a bush that is
burning but not being consumed.
Moses hears the voice of God
instructing him, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the ground you are
standing on is holy ground.”
The ground on which Moses was standing
was wilderness. The name of the
mountain, “Horeb,” simply means “wasteland.”
There was no sanctuary there, no religious shrine, nothing to make it
seem extraordinary in any way. And yet
it was “holy ground.” So I hope that we’ll
all think and pray about what makes ground “holy.”
In our society, we can argue about
the politics of environmental justice. But
it has become clear that current trends in growth and consumption are not sustainable. Those of us who call ourselves Christians
need to take seriously what our faith says about Creation.
When it comes to the environment,
we need an alternative worldview. We
need alternative, faithful ways to
know our place in Creation that are not naïve or simplistic. For instance, recycling is a good thing to
do, and it helps. But efforts by individual and volunteer organizations to
recycle will not save the planet.
As one of my colleagues has said,
the issue is too global, too political,
too economically driven to be resolved by personal piety or individual good
intentions. The issue is ultimately theological—a
matter of faith—because it raises the question, “Who owns this place?”[6]
As persons of faith and as a faith
community, our task is to imagine how the world would look if God really is
ruling, and then to implement that vision—put it into action.
We need faith communities—people
like us—who know the earth is the Lord’s and that all the earth is holy
ground. We need to commit ourselves to
living and proclaiming that alternative vision to our communities and the world.
I was inspired by the Presbyterian
Church of Cameroon when I read recently about what they’ve been doing to care
for creation.
A little over twenty years ago or
so, Cameroon, along the coast of west Africa, had a rich tropical evergreen
forest that provided shelter for animals and birds of all kinds and enriched
the fertility of the Cameroonian soils. In the next fifteen or so years, this
forest was mostly destroyed. There were several causes, but a major one the
indiscriminate deforestation by foreign timber companies carrying out
unsustainable logging practices, in agreement with the Cameroonian government,
which was looking for ways to fill in budget shortfalls.
The result of this is climate
change, as dry winds from the Sahara Desert find their way easily to the south,
causing drought, which has endangered animal and human life. Water supplies
have been drying up. The dry season is
longer and hotter and is followed by more floods and longer rains.
Cameroon used to be a great exporter of food crops in all of Central
Africa, but has now been experiencing food insufficiency for its own
population.
The Presbyterian Church of Cameroon
started an annual event of tree planting every last Sunday of May to the first
Sunday in June. Every Presbyterian was asked
to commit to planting trees every year. At least 400,000 trees were planted
every year in an effort to “rebirth” the creation destroyed by irresponsible
human beings.[7]
The Presbyterian Church in Cameroon
committed to promote life through community action for water, clean air, flora
and fauna. They covenanted to undertake to minimize loss through faithful
stewardship of resources that encourages renewal, replenishment and abundance,
and to uphold the integrity of creation for abundant life for the world. The
vision statement for the seven year environmental plan is “Protect Creation, Save the World!!![8]
They’re still planting trees and
hope to plant trees in all the 10 regions of Cameroon and ensure water
catchments in communities are protected and developed.
This has evolved into an interfaith project, working to raise environmental awareness about tree
planting, not only within local Presbyterian churches but also with the local
Roman Catholic Church, Protestant Mission, and Muslim communities. They work through young people in Presbyterian colleges
and government schools to form clubs to plants trees and mobilize PCC movements
– the Christian Youth Fellowship, the Christian Women Fellowship and the
Christian Men Fellowship – to plant trees in identified communities nationwide
as volunteers. They’ve organized training workshops, worked through the media
and provided tree seedlings to be planted by volunteers, in collaboration with
the Ministries of Forestry, Environment, Agriculture and Research.
We live in a broken and fearful
world, but we are Easter people who follow the Risen
Christ. We know that we can trust in the power of the
Holy Spirit to give us the courage we need to unmask idolatries and to work
with others for justice, freedom and peace, for the welfare of all.
So… let us commit ourselves to live
as faithful stewards on this holy ground, and to care for the earth as a way of
worshipping and serving our gracious Creator God!
May it be so for you and for me.
Amen!
Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
April 23, 2017
[1] Preface
to The Green Bible: Understanding the Bible’s Powerful Message for the Earth.
New Revised Standard Version. Harper One Publisher, 2011.
[2] Genesis
1:1-31
[3] Barbara
Brown Taylor, “”The Dominion of Love,” in The
Green Bible.”
[4] Barbara
Brown Taylor, quoting James Gustafson, in The
Green Bible.”
[5] Terence
E. Fretheim, “The Book of Genesis: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,”
in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A
Commentary in Twelve Volumes (Abingdon Press, 1994), page 346.
[6] P.C.
Enniss, “Holy Ground,” in www.goodpreacher.com
[7] Carolyn
Bush, “Finding Our Place.” A Sermon preached at McCormick Theological Seminary,
in “Worship in Celebration of Creation, In Recognition of Earth Day.
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