Scripture Texts
Genesis 1:31a - And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Psalm 24:1 – The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-3 – For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.
John 1:14a – And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
Sermon
The assigned topic of this sermon is a Christian understanding of our place in creation. An adequate treatment of so complex a subject in a brief presentation is mission impossible. An extended series of lectures in partnership with copious reflection and dialogue might open the door to such understanding, but we would have to spend considerable time engaging each other honestly, fairly before any genuine consensus on this subject emerged.
Yet, there may be value in laying some of our cards on the table. By doing so, we might get a clearer idea of the hand God has dealt us in the created order. We might also sense a bit better how God wants us to play that hand with our environmental companions.
With that in mind, let us consider, in relationship to the environment, our state, our sin, and our salvation.
We human beings are inherently a part of the entire biosphere. From the moment we are conceived until the moment we die, we consume other forms of life and they consume us.
We depend absolutely on the resources surrounding us and those same resources interact with us.
Take a breath. You have just inhaled oxygen vital to staying alive, along with countless microscopic organisms that will either be destroyed by your immune system or will find a way to start dining on you. Eat some food. You will derive nourishment from the plants and animals sacrificed for your meal. In the process of digestion, you will slaughter millions of bacteria which help you break down your dinner into nutrients usable by your body. If you are unlucky, some little critters will sneak a ride in your food and perform very unpleasant games with your digestive tract. Drink some water, the absolute elixir of life. That, too, could result in an undesirable invasion.
However, as you swallow this fabulous liquid, think of the endless cycle in which water vapor from the seas is carried to the skies, becomes liquid again and descends to mountains and plains as rain and snow, fills streams, lakes and aquifers, and finally, assuages the thirst of all that lives. You might be drinking the same water that relieved the parched throats of an ancient family dipping it from a spring as they give thanks for its purity and life sustaining power.
I grew up in Suquamish, Washington, the ancestral home of Chief Seattle’s people. As a teenager, I cared for his grave. Thus, his words to President Pierce in 1855 play often in my mind. Chief Seattle said: "The air is precious to the red man. For all things share the same breath-the beasts, the trees, the man... What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth."
We could safely add to Seattle’s wise words, "Whatever befalls the sons and daughters of earth, befalls the earth." Our station in creation, our state of being, is utterly interactive, completely interdependent, absolutely connected to all that inhabits this good earth.
However, there is a wild card in the environmental hand God has dealt us. That card, the joker in the deck, is choice. We can decide, within certain limits, what we will do and how we will do it. Our response to nature follows our desire, our wishes as we try to express them.
With the development of technology, our choices relative to the environment have expanded exponentially. Whereas we once may have been confined to a small geographic area in a preset village life style, now we can all be Marco Polo, flight isn’t just a fantasy, and we don’t need faith to move mountains. At least here in North America, with a little work and a little planning, most of us can call the shots as to where we live, what kind of housing we call home, and how many things we add to our list of belongings.
The choices we make individually and collectively as a civilization determine what we take from the environment and the amount of waste returned to it for processing.
Mind you, like experienced backpackers we may try to tread lightly on the land, to have as little impact on ecosystems as possible. What we are able to do individually to create less environmental demand is commendable. Yet, much of what we decide to do is culturally determined. We are part of systems that have been developed over time through a series of choices, which may only be amended by another series of choices.
Given the complexities of our situation, we make mistakes. Even when we seek to do good we often sin. Flora, fauna and the habitats in which they reside frequently bear the scars of human activity.
Looking back into antiquity, patterns of abuse can be detected. Without fully appreciating the consequences, forests were cut, leaving land open to erosion. Irrigation projects were developed to improve agriculture, only to lead to salinized soil and barren ground. Villages became cities, concentrating population, overtaxing resources and creating lethal combinations of disease and disease bearing rodents.
With more knowledge, we prevent some of the errors the ancients made. Yet, utilizing land, water, and other resources appropriately still eludes us. And when we try to play the role of Mother Nature, strange things happen.
My wife’s grandfather was encouraged in the early 1940’s to plant Kudzu, an Asian import, on his farm in South Carolina. To his credit, or perhaps by sheer luck, he declined. Sixty-five years later, the disastrous results of this innovation can be seen along highways all over the south. Acres of Kudzu vines deal death to every form of plant smothered under their unforgiving weight. What was supposed to be a cheap, plentiful supply of fodder has become sheer folly and a stern lesson in environmental error.
We constantly sin against our surroundings, even if only by default. Whenever we intersect with any ecosystem, large or small, our actions can trigger the law of unintended consequences.
Sometimes to consume is to sin. In the act of taking what we need to stay alive, we
undermine the basis for future environmental health. Or, rather, we ignore the limits of need and move on to unlimited desire.
In this respect, virtually everyone in the industrialized world sins and shows no sign of repentance. It is not only the United States that pursues consumerist dreams. Everywhere the possibility of acquiring goods and services appears, demand for the infrastructure that supports such acquisition rises rapidly. People simply want the safety and satisfaction that come with modern conveniences.
Such an atmosphere means that want often outstrips proportion. Our desire blinds us to the effects our consumption has on both the human and natural order.
Oddly enough, desire also causes us to overlook diversity of supplies that could reduce imbalances we create. For example, moving toward energy sources not oil based might have a profound beneficial impact on conflict and energy scarcity worldwide. Or, adopting new culinary disciplines could reduce our dependence on a narrow range of food sources. In New York, once a year a select group is invited to dine on exotic (so we think) species such as cockroaches, spiders and snakes. The chef, an accomplished dietician, points out that these creatures offer nutritional value superior to many of our traditional foods.
But, alas, we live in cultures devoted to narrowly focused goals. Consumptive sin may be the most alluring of all.
To make matters worse, in a well-meaning effort to correct environmental imbalances we overreact. Rather than correct, we punish people groups and inadvertently cause another imbalance, sometimes worse than the original.
Usually, on a wave of public compassion (grounded, I think, on our collective consumerist guilt), strict regulation is put into place. This is what gave rise to the extensive system of National Parks and wilderness areas in the United States. Dedicated to the preservation of pristine wild habitats, they have in many cases become overcrowded with certain animal species, and reservoirs of possible wildfire and disease. The parks demonstrate that when we try to institute a positive outcome, a negative one always accompanies it.
The same may be said about protecting specific species by inflexible laws. When the protected proliferate unchecked, both humans and other animals suffer.
Or, again, we attack certain activities in the name of environmental justice. Some activists have made it their goal to ban the fur trade and at least some forms of hunting. In doing so, they would abolish the livelihood and culture of many rural peoples. I once asked a Nez Perce man what would happen to his tribe if hunting were outlawed. He replied that the Nez Perce would be no more.
Harsh, punitive environmental legislation only sets in motion forces in nature and reactions in human communities that will be extremely difficult to cope with later.
So, since all of us sin against the environment, how shall we be saved? What must we do to find our way through this enormously complicated, seemingly intractable, problem of Christian discipleship? I submit that two things are basic to finding our way.
First, we must learn to live synchronistically. We have to seek a reciprocal harmony with the interconnected biosphere that Chief Seattle spoke of. Looking to our own genuine needs, we must become skilled partners in nature’s dance, letting her lead in the complex pattern of steps necessary to well-being.
This cannot be accomplished if the human side of the dance continues to engage in fierce arguments over aspects of our relationship to the environment. Conflict over issues such as global warming, land use, conservation of wild areas, and many others cannot persist if we are to measure up to the dance for which we have been created.
Imagine a great square dance with urban and rural folk, Native Americans and peoples from every land practicing the many moves required for synchronicity with each other and the cue caller, The Domain of Life. Imagine missteps gradually becoming rhythms mastered until all glide corporately along paths directed by the cue caller. Imagine the benefit. Imagine the blessing. Imagine the joy.
Second, we must learn to contemplate sacramentally. When we look to creation we must put on Christ.
Eastern Orthodox Christians have always held that the elements of the environment are sacrament to us, teaching us of God’s power and grace. We are at table with Jesus with every contact we make in the world of nature. Thomas Merton puts it this way.
"We are not in a condition to make the best use of our own or of the world’s goodness. But we rejoice in hope. We enjoy created things in hope. We enjoy them not as they are in themselves but as they are in Christ-full of promise."
Or as one of my little guys, Jessie put it in Sunday school yesterday: "Jesus must be a tree hugger. He made everything!"
Isn’t that precisely what we encounter at the communion table? God in Christ offering to us the sustaining cup and bread, physical elements suffused with the sacrifice of our Lord. True response from us includes profound gratitude and worship.
When a wren warbles nearby, when a child smiles into her mother’s face, when a breeze flutters through Aspen leaves, when the dawn breaks chill and cold, when mountains raise snow capped peaks to God, when feeding cattle low softly, when our body stretches every muscle pushing our bicycle at top speed, when our hearts thrill to magnificent music, when any encounter with human or beast occurs, we awake from our lethargy and sing, "May Jesus Christ be praised!"
Any hope of "Greening the Kirk" depends on dismissing hubris and embracing humility. It is no accident that insurance policies refer to natural disasters as "acts of God". For, if they do not proceed directly from God’s hand, they certainly emanate from a primordial power with which creation is endowed. We are not in charge here. We exist together, all of us, as the environment permits and God’s grace sustains.
Amen.
1. Chief Seattle quote from "The Newton Reader," Eleventh Edition, Linda H. Peterson and John G. Brevaton, editors, New York, 2004, p. 611.
2. Merton quote from "Thoughts in Solitude," Shambala Pocket Classics, Boston, 1993, p.31.