The Care & Keeping of God’s Body
Before Al Gore won his Oscar and became a big star in Hollywood … before the late Jerry Falwell claimed “Satan is using the talk about global warming among evangelicals to distract Christians away from preaching the gospel and toward environmentalism” … before the Exxon Mobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in an effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming … before any these things were said or done, the Bible was speaking eloquently, even poetically about creation care.
There is a collection of psalms known as “creation psalms” written to extol the beauty and grandeur of all God has created and all that we enjoy as our earthly home.
Psalm 8:3-4a - When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established (ordained); What are human beings, that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?
Psalm 19:1 - The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Psalm 65:9-10 - You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.
But that’s not all the Bible has to say on the subject. Go all the way back to the Bible’s beginning to the book of Genesis. There we find the story and intent of creation. In the first creation story in Genesis 1, God says, “Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over (them) …’”
And it seems that’s where the trouble began. The idea of dominion settled into the minds and hearts of the people of God believing God gave them the freedom, nay the right, to subdue and plunder the earth. Maybe political pundit Ann Coulter was closer to the truth than we like to admit when she cynically remarked, “God said: ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”
Maybe that’s why when Jesus was asked to describe hell he called it “Gehenna.” Gehenna is not this visionary place beyond the grave as a place where lost souls are burned for eternity. Gehenna was valley just south of Jerusalem infamous during the Jewish monarchy period for the practice of child sacrifices by fire. While the term had a deep significance in describing a place where the dead were burned, it was also a trash dump for the rubbish generated by the residents of Jerusalem. Jesus’ description of hell was a garbage heap! That meaning seems to say that when we destroy the creation, we’re creating a hell on earth and how then can it reveal the glory of God?
And in the midst of this transcendent dream scene John had in a moment of worship, he sees the wiping away of the old world and God’s re-creation of “a new heaven and a new earth.”
From a Papillon-like penal colony on the island of Patmos, John has a vision of worship and the exaltation of God and in the midst of his worship he envisions this astounding scene from Revelation 5 where the voices of a mass choir of singing angels breaks out in full voice, “Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” They are uncountable simply out of sheer magnificence and John doesn’t even try to count them; instead, he describes them as, “… myriads and myriads and thousands and thousands.”
And in response to the moving nature of the majesty of their singing, the earth itself cries out an antiphonal response. “Every creature in heaven and on earth and in the sea, all that is in them sing: ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’” Then the four living creatures add the coda: “Amen!” And the elders gathered around the throne of God fall down and worship.
This is not the first time we get the idea that the earth itself is involved in worship. It’s a distinctly Hebrew point of view that appreciates nature and senses that the trees and the mountains and the skies and the flowers and the sea creatures and the birds of the air are all a part of a holy choir that sings every moment of every day. Remember what Jesus said as he entered the city a week before his execution to the throngs of people who lined the path leading to the Temple? The Pharisees tried their best to restore calm by telling Jesus to order them quiet. Their voices could not be stilled, he said, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40b, NRSV). Jesus was tapping into that old Hebrew understanding that the created order was still mysteriously tied to the heartbeat of the Creator.
French paleontologist and Christian mystic Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin asked, “Is life an open road or a blind alley?” In answering his own question, he observed, “Man has every right to be anxious about his fate so long as he feels himself to be lost and lonely in the midst of the mass of created things. But let him once discover that his fate is bound up with the fate of nature itself, and immediately, joyously, he will begin again his forward march.”
Some mistakenly regard this understanding of the relationship between the Creator God and the creation as pantheism, the belief that God and the created order are one and the same. But what this seems to suggest is rather panentheism, the belief that God is immanent within the universe, while also transcending it. In panentheism, God is seen as creator and the animating force behind the creation. A deeper and more appreciative understanding of the relationship between the Divine and the creation seems to be in order. Our Native American tribes held the earth in reverence and seemed more connected to its beauty in a holistic way. That tradition would suggest we need to learn the truth about what is happening to the earth so we can make wise choices about its care. For too long, the earth has suffered from the mismanagement that our dominion thinking has caused.
A Christian theology of creation care is simultaneously personal and corporate. It is grounded on the teachings of the Bible. And it’s something that’s considered both globally and locally. Professor Richard Wilson prods us to change by giving us two different methodologies upon which to act. The watchword of our time is “think globally, act locally.” That’s a terrific approach to getting started! But we could just as easily reverse that thinking. Sometimes doing something tangible at the local level can stimulate our thinking at the global level. Sometimes making the slightest of changes can set loose other changes that would necessarily mean changes at a deeper level. What is important, Wilson says, is to see our work as a part of what God is doing as a part of redemption and reconciliation.
A poetic way of thinking about Earth Day today is to see the creation, the entirety of it, (not just those beautiful places where the nature shines) as God’s body. If we could take it in and see it as something God has created and given to all of us that inhabit it, would it make a difference? Would it be something we could see as a part of our fellowship with God that we would faithfully tend to it if we could see it as God’s body? I think it would make a world of difference.