Genesis 1:1-5, 9-13, 20-31
Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-24
Romans 8:18-27
I’m going to tell you a secret—a secret that the poets and the saints and the mystics all know. This isn’t The Secret, that spiritual hoax that is currently being perpetrated by the best-selling book and DVD of the same name, which promises you that if you just wish for something hard enough, then whatever it is you wish for—money, fame, health, love or happiness—will come to you through a mysterious force known as the Law of Attraction. No, today, I’m going to tell you a secret about how to save the earth, and a future for our children and grandchildren in the process. The secret is that the first step towards saving the earth is not taken through heaping guilt on oneself for how we abuse nature, nor through committing to acts of great self-deprivation, nor through the fear of what our future on a greatly depleted earth will mean. The first step towards saving the earth is not about guilt, or sacrifice, or fear. The first step is to simply wake up, open your eyes, and actually look at the beauty of the world all around you. The first step is taken in wonder, joy, and love, as we simply, perhaps for the first time since we were children, pay attention to the glory of God’s creation.
So says the Pulitzer-prize winning poet, Mary Oliver, in her evocative poem, “The Summer Day”:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down…
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass…which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Oliver somehow knows the secret, that paying attention to God’s creation is a form of prayer, and that part of our human vocation is simply to “be idle and blessed, to stroll through the fields” and enjoy nature.
And so today, right now, we are together going to take this first step. Are you ready? I want you to look around and really see the beauty of nature that you can observe right from your seat today. First, look outside our lovely, clear windows, which let in the light of the sun and the beauty of the trees and the sky…isn’t it wonderful that our sanctuary doesn’t block out the world outside the church but lets it in? Now, after you have drunk in the beauty of the nature outside our sanctuary, turn your attention to the nature that we have brought inside for this service. Notice all the little plants on the window sills—seedlings from people’s gardens, little children of the earth and the warm spring that will be planted and bear fruit in someone’s garden—maybe yours if you pick one up after the second service.
And now look at the living altar we have created….adorned with fruits and vegetables, plants and flowers, water, and the communion elements of bread and wine, gifts of the earth. We’ve even greened the cross—as a reminder that Christ’s resurrection brings redemption and renewal to all creation. We have greened our sanctuary today as a reminder that our worship of God should not exclude the natural world, but rather join with the whole chorus of creation in its praise to God, our maker. As the psalmist says, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth…” (Ps. 98). And so the first step toward saving the earth is to learn to truly love the world—because we cannot save what we do not love. And we learn to love the earth, first of all, by what William Least Heat Moon calls “the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention.”
So we’re all paying attention now, right? And what do we see? What we see when we open our eyes to the wonder of God’s creation leads to the second step towards saving the earth. This one is a little harder, as the quote by William Least Heat Moon suggests. Because when we open our eyes and pay attention, and see what is happening to God’s beloved creation, we feel pain. And pain leads to lament, as we hear the crying of the earth and take that crying into our own heart. The earth, and its myriad life systems are in distress. The headlines come almost daily now, about the stress that human activity is placing upon our planetary life systems. Most alarmingly perhaps, is all the news about global warming that has become a steady drumbeat in the press and in our own minds. In early April, you may remember hearing about the release of the fourth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which is an international body of over 200 scientists that has been studying global warming since 1988.
This panel, for the first time, asserted that they can say with very high confidence, meaning 90% certainty or more, that human beings are largely responsible for earth’s recent warming trend. The rise in earth’s temperatures over the next century will lead to increased and in some cases catastrophic droughts, floods, and storms. The rise in sea levels could lead to hundreds of millions of environmental refugees who will have to evacuate from low-lying coastal areas and island nations. Fresh water supplies will diminish as glaciers melt, and fully 20-30% of the earth’s species will be at high risk of irreversible extinction. Finally, the IPCC warned that the impacts of climate change will hit poorest nations and peoples the hardest, both because of where they are situated geographically and because of their lack of resources to address the climate crisis.
This last fact, the acknowledgment that earth’s distress affects the poor and the rich unequally, rips the cover off the myth that ecological issues are somehow separate from issues of human social and economic justice. In fact, justice for the nonhuman inhabitants of the earth is profoundly linked to justice for human beings. The death of ecosystems and species leads to the death of whole cultures and the suffering of innumerable people. As Henry Miller of Stanford University said after the release of the latest IPCC report, “Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic. A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We’ll see the same phenomenon with global warming.”
What can we do in the face of such awesome and terrifying facts? How do we keep paying attention? Well, we better pay attention because the younger generation is tuned in—our kids are much more plugged in to what is going on than we adults often are. A recent article in the Washington Post discussed the phenomenon that children’s therapists are beginning to see kids who are as anxious about global warming as earlier generations of kids were about nuclear war. As one college student is quoted as saying, “For, like, the whole history of the environmental movement, we’ve been saying, ‘Do it for your children. We have to protect the Earth for them.’ But that argument has shifted. I’m fighting for my future.” And so we must all take the time to weep, to lament for the loss of so many of the species and unique ecosystems that God has created on our planet-- to lament for the suffering that we are bringing upon ourselves and the earth.
For each of us, we might feel that pain in different ways…perhaps you notice the loss of songbirds as migratory bird populations diminish; perhaps you think about taking that Alaskan cruise now so that you can see the glaciers before they melt; perhaps you mourn over the probable loss of glorious creatures like the polar bear; or perhaps you fear the fury that increasingly severe storms and fires will wreak upon our homes and communities; maybe you even spare some time to worry about what will happen to the millions of people, disproportionately poor and third world people, who will be displaced by environmental disasters and lose their homes and livelihoods. Each of us, in our own way, needs to take the time to grieve over what we are losing.
With deep spiritual insight, nearly 2,000 years before our modern environmental crisis, the apostle Paul understood something of the suffering of creation and its linkage to the suffering of humankind. “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” Paul offered profound insight into the meaning and cause of this suffering. As he wrote, “for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
But what does this mean—this strange saying that creation itself was subjected to futility and is awaiting liberation from its bondage to decay? Paul’s text points us back to the beginning—the clue is in the first chapters of Genesis, which were so beautifully read earlier in our service. Not everyone realizes that we actually have two creation stories in Genesis—written at different times in Israel’s history and by different authors, each with its own unique theological message about God’s creation of the world.
The first story, in Genesis 1, is believed to have been written by priests during the exile, while Genesis 2 and 3 were written by a different author earlier in Israel’s history, and reflects the worldview of a community who lived close to the land through subsistence agriculture. Both of these accounts are stories of beautiful harmony, and yet each contains a discordant note—a note that either directly or indirectly warns of the alienation to come between humans and our nonhuman kin. Genesis 1 is famous for its stately description of God’s creation of the world in six days, culminating with the creation of humankind, male and female, in the image of God. But the role God confers upon humanity is ambiguous from the start, and when twisted to selfish ends, devastating in its effects upon the rest of God’s creation. In the famous words of Genesis 1:28, “God blessed them and God said to them, ‘be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion…over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Humans, in this story, created in God’s image, are God’s regents, God’s representatives ruling benevolently over creation, maintaining harmony and order through an enlightened dominion over the earth. Humans live within creation, and yet, somehow, are set apart, elevated above other living beings.
We turn to Genesis 2 and 3 however, and find a very different story. Here human beings have humble origins, created out of the dust of the earth. Adam (literally earth creature in Hebrew) is created from Adamah (earth, soil). From the same ground, Adamah, God creates all the other living beings that inhabit the garden of Eden. Humans and other living beings share the same Hebrew designation—all are nephesh hayya—living beings—sculpted from soil, sharing the breath of life. We are, in this story, quite literally kin to the earth and to all other living beings on the planet. And what is the human vocation in Genesis 2? Not to subdue and have dominion over the earth, but to “till it and keep it.” The word “till” here can also be translated to tend, or to serve. The word “keep” can be translated to protect or conserve. A much humbler role for humanity—humans in Genesis 2 are literally created to serve and protect the creation, rather than to exercise lordship over it. Old Testament scholar Ted Hiebert suggests that Christians need to reclaim the message of Genesis 2, which has been eclipsed by the message of human dominion conferred by Genesis 1. The humbler human vocation of Genesis 2, Hiebert argues, is desperately needed in a world where human power and abuse over creation has burst all bounds. And yet from the beginning, even in the second creation story, humans are dissatisfied with their role, and quickly transgress against the limits set for them by God, taking the forbidden fruit, and enduring its cascading catastrophic effects which destroy the harmony of creation’s original blessedness.
And so, in Genesis 3, we find reference to the curse which Paul speaks of in Romans. Through human sin, creation itself was cursed, subject to bondage and decay, not of its own will, but through human transgression against God and creation. In Genesis 4, that transgression leads to the first murder, as Cain kills his brother Abel, whose blood cries out from the very ground from which humans were made. And here, we see that human beings have already lost their way, as the human being that was intended to “keep” the creation protests to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Oh, yes, poor misguided Cain….you are your brother’s keeper, your neighbor’s keeper, the earth’s keeper. How could you have forgotten so soon who you were created to be? As the prayer from the UN Environmental Sabbath program laments, “We have forgotten who we are. We have sought only our own security. We have exploited simply for our own ends. We have abused our power. We have forgotten who we are. Now the land is barren. And the waters are poisoned. And the air is polluted. We have forgotten who we are.” This, my friends, is the basic insight of eco-justice—that earthkeeping and neighborkeeping are linked—that justice for the earth and justice for human beings are one garment rent and bloodied by our disregard for life in all its forms.
And yet, that does not have to be the end of the story. As Paul proclaims in Romans, there is hope for humankind and for creation, which waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. There is hope for us when we rediscover our true selves, our true vocation, and assume our true glory. And our glory will consist quite specifically in this, “that [we] will be God’s agents in bringing the wise, healing, restorative divine justice to the whole created order.” How do we do this? By rediscovering our vocation to serve the earth. Because when we take up our vocation of service, earth itself will be set free from its slavery to decay, and its bondage to human exploitation and misuse. Quite simply, through our service, creation is set free.
In the meantime, what do we do, poor, misguided earth creatures that we are, standing aghast at the ruin that we have caused, feeling despair as we listen to the crying of the earth. If the first step in saving the earth is to pay attention in love, and the second step is to lament, and the third step is to rediscover our true human vocation, then the fourth step must be to pray. To pray as if our life depended on it, which it does. And here we are not alone, because as Paul assures us, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” As Wright explains, “the groaning of the church, in the midst of the groaning world, is sustained and even inspired by the groaning of the Spirit.” The God within us prays to the God above and beyond us, when we are too helpless or scared to know how to pray. But as we pray, as the Spirit prays within us for the salvation of the earth, let us remember the African proverb, “when you pray, move your feet.”
For finally, our prayers must take living form as bold action to save the earth. The times require no less of us. Our vocation as earthkeepers awaits us. “Tell me,” the poet says, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” in New and Selected Poems, Volume 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 94.
Andrew C. Revkin, “Poorest Nations Will Bear Brunt As World Warms,” in The New York Times (April 1, 2007).
Darragh Johnson, “Climate Change Scenarios Scare, and Motivate, Kids,” in The Washington Post (April 16, 2007).
Theodore Hiebert, “The Christian Vocation: Origins and Transformation in Christian Traditions,” in Christianity and Ecology, Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 135-151.
U.N. Environmental Sabbath prayer, in Earth Prayers from Around the World, Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, eds. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 70-71.
N.T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, 10 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 597.