Scripture Text
Genesis 2:4-17
Sermon
Ever since I first read them, I have loved the opening paragraphs of Ferrol Sams’ wonderfully funny book, Run with the Horsemen, a fictionalized account of his growing up on a farm in middle Georgia between the world wars:
In the beginning was the land. Shortly thereafter was the father. The boy knew this with certainty. It was knowledge that was in his marrow. It predated memory and conscious thought as surely as hunger and thirst. He could not have explained it, but he knew it.
The father owned the land. He plowed it, harvested it, timbered it, and hunted over it. It was his. Before that it had been the land of his father and his father’s father . . .
The boy knew all this. No one told him. He also knew that in turn the land owned his father. Everything the father did eventually revolved around nurture of the land. Without the land there could be no family. The ungodly were not so and lived in town. They were like chaff which the wind bloweth away. Their feet were not rooted in the soil, and they were therefore of little consequence in the scheme of things.
Those wonderful paragraphs describe a sense of connection to the land that is utterly lost to those of us who have come of age upon the sidewalks of suburbia. Not so very long ago, most Americans had at least some connection with a family farm, some feel for what it meant to live so close to the land. Now the closest contact many of us have with farming comes through the closed windows of the car as we zip past on a country road, or through the window of an airplane as we soar across the grain fields of the Midwest at 20,000 feet. Not so very long ago, God’s instruction to Adam to work and keep the land would have struck a deep emotional chord of understanding and experience. Now it barely registers with us at all.
And that is not good. In an age in which the actual amount of living material on the face of the earth has actually decreased by four percent in the last fifty years , maybe more than ever we need to listen to God’s instructions for how we are to live upon the land. In an age in which there are tens of thousands of toxic waste sites in our country alone, maybe more than ever we need to hear God lay out for us again the terms for how we are to live on the face of His creation. In an age in which the very air we breathe and water we drink can make us sick, maybe more than ever we need to be reminded by God of our responsibility toward the earth that He has made. Maybe more than ever we need to learn what it means to be stewards of creation:
Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food . . . The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
"To work it and to keep it." From the very beginning it has been God’s intention that those two tasks would be practiced together, held in harmony with one another. We are to work the garden – to till it, to labor upon it, to draw from the earth that which shall sustain us in life, that which will clothe us and feed us and shelter us. But we are to do so in a way that also keeps God’s garden – protects it, preserves it, renews it, restores it. We are to work God’s creation in such a way that it can continue to provide for us and for all living things. We are to keep creation in such a manner that we may continue to work it to provide for life, generation after generation. To work the earth and to keep the earth were intended by God to be one and the same thing – one and the same way in which we are to relate to the creation and draw from it our life.
But this is our sin, this is our failing before God and before our fellow creatures: we have allowed these two tasks to become separated, divided, pulled apart. The result being that we no longer live in a creation governed by a harmony of working and keeping, but rather by a disharmony in which working the earth and keeping the earth have come to be perceived as polar opposites, as utterly incompatible actions. In our day and age, we have come to believe that one must choose either to be a tree-hugger or a tree-cutter – that there is no third way. Instead of developing economic and ecological practices in which we are able to work and keep the earth at the same time, we have come to employ an economic and ecological practice in which we first work the land by exploiting it, devastating it, stripping it bare and crushing it; and then, when we are done, try to keep the earth by launching extraordinary rescue efforts to clean up and restore the damage we have done.
The result is a sort of cultural schizophrenia in which one minute we are almost gleefully lopping the tops off of mountains and paving over meadows, and then the very next wringing our hands in remorse over the mess we have made and worrying about global warming. God meant for working and keeping the earth to be one and the same thing – a single way of living upon the face of the earth that would sustain life as well as sustain beauty. This is our sin, this is our failure before God and before our fellow creatures on the face of the planet: that we have turned working and keeping into enemies – and so have harmed the garden God gave us to tend.
So what can we do? What can one Christian possibly hope to do in a world of corporate conglomerates and agribusiness and global economies of scale? What can we possibly do in the world such as it is to bring back into harmony our charge to work and to keep the earth? To begin with, we can start to reclaim that connection in our own lives. We can start to reclaim for ourselves the Word of God that instructs us both to work and to keep the earth. We can start by reclaiming our connection to the land.
Within our Scripture this morning is a wonderful play on words. The Hebrew word for dirt is ’adamah. The word for human being is ’adam: "Then the Lord God formed the ’adam of ’adamah." We are not only to work and keep the land, but we are formed from out of the land, ’adam from ’adamah, man from dust, humans from humus. So we are made, and so we are to live – closely connected to the land. With every living thing we have this one commonality – like them, we too are formed from the earth.
So at the very least we can begin by reclaiming that connection to the land in our daily lives. In this age of cyberspace, cell phones, and shopping malls, it is very easy to forget the land upon which we live. It is very easy to overlook it, to never see it, never think about it. But as stewards of creation, we can begin by starting to pay attention to the world God has made. Annie Dillard tells of walking down a city street and being utterly startled and delighted by a reminder of creation’s goodness and beauty:
About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
The least we can do as Christians seeking to reconnect the working and keeping of the earth is to keep our lives connected to the earth – remembering our origin as ’adam out of ’adamah. We can plunge our hands into the good soil of a home garden, we can look up in awe at the mountains around us, we can listen attentively to the sounds of doxology to God that fill the backyard at night. We can learn to love the land as our Creator loves the land – to see what He saw when He stepped back and looked over everything that He had made, and said to Himself, "This is good, it is very good."
And second, as Christians seeking to reconnect the working and keeping of the earth in harmony before God, we can use our power as consumers to reward businesses who are seeking to do the same; and to punish those businesses who see the earth merely as a commodity to be ruthlessly exploited for profit or who are indifferent to the way their working of the earth may be destroying it. We can remember that our consumer choices have consequences, and should honor God and His intentions for us. For example, an evangelical pastor named Jim Ball started a campaign a couple of years ago with the slogan, "What would Jesus drive?" He wanted to get Christians to make the connection between the cars they choose to drive and the larger implications of those choices for their discipleship. In an interview, Ball said, "Most people don’t think the kind of car they drive has anything to do with their faith. We want to show them how it does . . . Evangelical Christians ought to relate everything we do to the Lordship of Christ."
Another example can be found right in our backyard in the form of the Happy Cow Creamery, a dairy farm owned by Tom Trantham and his family. Trantham began as a typical dairy farmer. In an interview with the Greenville newspaper he confessed, "I was one of the top uses of chemicals. I thought that’s what farming was, using chemicals." He would spray to kill weeds, plant his crops, and use fertilizer to help them grow. Then he would mow them down, put the grain in the silos, and allow the cows to feed. The cows were confined on concrete floors, and were never allowed to graze – a typical modern dairy operation.
Then one spring, he says, the cows took matters into their own hooves. The bank was about to foreclose on the farm, and Trantham hadn’t been able to afford any weed-killer. The cows broke out of their concrete pen one day and went into a field choked with weeds, and began feasting. Within a day, milk production had increased by two pounds per day per cow – five pounds per day per cow within a week. Trantham had stumbled onto a secret that has vastly revolutionized his dairy farm. Now his cows graze freely and he no longer uses chemicals or fertilizers. He has a rotation of things growing in his fields so that the cows may always eat what they want and need – and his milk production is higher than it has ever been. And if you have ever tasted milk from the Happy Cow Creamery, then you know how much better it tastes than milk from unhappy cows.
In 2002, Trantham was named the first recipient of the USDA’s Patrick Madden Award for Sustainable Agriculture. "To work and to keep the land," instructs God – and you and I can reconnect to that commandment by rewarding businesses that are seeking to do the same, and by seeking to punish with our consumer choices businesses that are merely exploiting the earth for easy profits without regard to its long-term health.
And last, as Christians seeking to reconnect the working and keeping of the earth in harmony before God, we can add our labor to the task of repairing the damage we humans have already done to the environment. Paul, writing to the Romans, states that not only we human beings, but also creation itself is groaning in anticipation of being redeemed. We can hear and heed creation’s groaning – and as good stewards of creation, work with God and with one another to redeem the earth from the harm we have inflicted upon it. We can join our church group in cleaning up the landscape along Highway 135; we can recycle our refuse, which the City of Easley makes so easy for us to do; we can give our money to organizations that are working to clean up the earth; we can work to make healthy and beautiful the places in which we live.
"Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." Caring for the environment is not a liberal issue or a conservative issue. It is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. It is a Christian issue. And, most of all, it is not optional. It is a matter of living upon this earth in obedience to the instructions of God regarding the earth; it is a matter of caring for God’s creation as God Himself cares for it; it is a matter of taking seriously our God-given vocation – to work and to keep the earth, until the Kingdom comes.
Ferrol Sams, Run with the Horsemen (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1982) p. 1.
Cited in Ched Myers, "To Serve and Preserve," Sojourners, Vol. 33, No. 3 (March, 2004), p. 28.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 7-8.
Genesis 1:31.
Quoted in Katherine Ellison, "Stopping Traffic," Christian Century, Vol. 119, No. 24 (November 20, 2002), p. 8.
For more information on the Happy Cow Creamery, as well as a fuller account of the farm’s transformation, visit their website at http://www.happycowcreamery.com/
Romans 8:18-23.