God’s Earth – Our Responsibility

Early last Monday morning Martha Lumia was told that her daughter was on her way to the hospital to give birth to her first child, a baby girl. So Martha got on the first plane down to Los Angeles to be there for what many of you know to be the holiest of times: the miracle of new life springing fresh from the womb.

And then there is the high and holy responsibility of parenting, when this fragile little life is placed in her mother’s and father’s arms. She is in your care. Without words to adequately describe it, everyone knows that God is truly in this.

The opening chapter of Genesis is about this. It is not about how the world came to be, but the holiness of it, the who behind it. You will notice that God is the subject of every sentence – thirty five times, "God." Creation springs forth from God’s heart, from God’s mouth ("God said"), from God’s triune being.

Genesis 1:1-2:4 (Read by three readers with inflatable earth ball being blown up.)

Sacred creation – from God’s very mouth, spoken and breathed into being. From what is inside God, creation came to be.

In the fourth century the world was taught the doctrine of creation out of nothing – creation ex nihilo. In other words, there were no raw materials for God to work with; the ingredients themselves were produced by God. God made everything out of nothing.

But the Celts would differ with the wording of this doctrine. The Celts would say that creation does not come out of nothing – it comes out of the womb of God. To say that creation comes from nothing can cause us to view it as neutral, having no value in and of itself. But for the Celts creation flows from the heart of God and is sacred, and reveals the sacred one to us.

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.

One of the great treasures you will find when traveling in Ireland and Scotland are the high standing crosses, outside, in the open, carved full of biblical stories. They are huge and ancient, and they weave together the twin loves of Celtic Christianity: love of Christ and love of creation. For the Celts these two loves go together; they are always interwoven. And so the high standing crosses are outside in the sanctuary of earth and sky, pointing to the Christ mystery and the earth mystery at the same time, because both share the same center: both come out of the Father’s heart.

And a sacred trust. At the end of the sixth day, after everything else was spoken into being and God saw that it was good, God decides to make male and female in God’s own image, just "a little lower than God" in the words of Psalm 8.

What does it mean to be made in God’s image? We wrestle with that question regularly when we read Genesis 1 with our new members. But we are told right away what it means.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the seas.

God said, "Let us make humankind in our 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."

"And God blessed them." That blessing is far more than the bestowing of some special favor. It is a mandate, a responsibility. This blessing is a description of our function in creation. It is God saying, "Here, this very good creation that comes from my heart, birthed from my very being, is entrusted to you." Like a mother being handed her miracle child, "You take care of her."

We are made in God’s image to use our power like God uses power. How does God use power? We see it in Jesus, which is like a Good Shepherd, to serve, to tend, to protect life and bring forth more life, like a wonderful gardener who does what will make the whole garden thrive.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

Sacred creation. Sacred trust. This is the covenant God made with creation at the very beginning, the delicate bonding of God with creation, the powerful calling God planted within us to care for God’s good creation. It is an irreversible covenant that was renewed after the flood (Genesis 9:8-17). God’s baby has been handed to us.

You don’t have to see the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" to know how far we have fallen from our divine calling. You can go see "Happy Feet."

Last week two people told me on the same day, "You know, ‘Happy Feet’ is not a happy movie." It’s not? And so I watched it and it does have this tragic sub-plot. Underneath the story of this darling little tap-dancing Emperor Penguin is the threat of the "alien" power (aka humans) that is taking all their fish with no thought of what it is doing to them until this tap-dancing penguin gets their attention.

We don’t have to go to any movie to know that this tragic sub-plot is true. Just read the news every day: the April 9 issue of TIME, the April 16 issue of Newsweek, the recent report of the U.N. sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

I know there are those would say that this is all the drummed up hype of special interest groups, and I have read some of those articles myself. But in spite of the claim that global warming is mostly the result of natural shifts in weather patterns and is not as dire as environmentalists and politicians would have us believe – it is not just global warming and the loudness of its tap-dancing that is showing us that this tragic sub-plot is true. All that we need to do is examine the way most of us live our lives everyday to see that we have, indeed, forgotten who we are.

Created to be God’s caretakers, created to tend to the welfare of the earth like a mother with her child, we don’t have to search very far to discover that, instead, we are well-trained consumers, ignoring the canaries in the mine wherever they might pop up because they would force us to face the ugly truth about ourselves and change.

We have forgotten who we are: made in God’s image and blessed by God to tend his garden called earth. Sacred creation. Sacred trust. We have broken God’s covenant, and the very first step in finding our way back is to repent and be healed.

We need to make our way back to the high standing crosses, so Jesus can put us back together again with our high calling to take care of the great sanctuary of creation. That’s what the cross and the resurrection are about – the Messiah suffering and rising from the dead on the third day, proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name (Lk. 24:45-47), restoring us to covenant faithfulness.

Back in November I had the chance to hear Jared Diamond speak in San Mateo; it was a part of the Peninsula Speaker Series. He is Professor of Geography at UCLA and author or "Guns, Germs and Steel" and the recent bestseller, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," which was the focus of his talk.

He has studied civilizations down through the ages that have collapsed, like Easter Island, and the factors that have contributed to it. Many of those factors are beyond human control, but most had had to do with bad choices, like deforestation, overhunting, overfishing, basically with societies functioning as consumers instead of caretakers of the earth.

He talked about the alarming trends he sees today, especially in how slow we have been to respond to climate change. "Never before have we had the capacity to impact the environment so drastically. Imagine Glacier Park with no glaciers in 20 years." His intent was not to be doomsday-ish but to help us learn from the past and move in a more sustainable direction.

During the Q&A at the end he was asked what role religion played in the collapse of civilizations. I expected him to take this opportunity to denigrate Christianity. But he said, "It is my hope that Christians will rise up on behalf of caring for the earth as they did for the civil rights movement."

His words struck me as profound and prophetic. Jared Diamond, of all people, was calling the church to lead the way in remembering who we are. Back to our beginnings, our birth, geneseos. Sacred creation. Sacred trust. It is the call that is sounding forth around the world, perhaps the one that will truly bring revival and renewal across the globe as we repent and ask God to restore us to our original goodness, which only God can do.

We must confront our consumer ways and pay attention to how our choices impact God’s earth and whether we are being the caretakers God created us to be. We begin there, with repentance and healing through the power of Christ’s death and resurrection, a new birth. And the genuineness of it will be seen in how we live our lives, at home, at work, in our communities, as a nation.

Repentance is seen in the little things we do every day (cf list in the bulletin, 10 things you can do today).

My sister lamented the hypocrisy of our twenty-something niece living in her home. "She talks about the importance of caring for the environment, but leaves the water running when she brushes her teeth and runs a load of laundry with one top in it." This Christian sister of mine, without even knowing, made me proud when she said, "I have become the water police in Visalia, riding my bike home from work late at night and seeing these sprinkler tops popped off and nobody sees the waste. The Save Mart parking lot was full of water and I went in and talked to the manager. And the landscaping business, creating yards that were never meant to exist in our dry climate. Where will this water come from?"

She is making good choices in her home, in her family, in her neighborhood. They seem so little, accomplishing nothing, but they add up, don’t they? And so do ours.

When I attended Mayor Tom David’s "State of the City" breakfast several months ago, I was so pleased to hear that one of the city’s core values is care for the environment. We have an impact, here in our church (no Styrofoam, earth friendly coffee, just a start), and where we live and work.

What kind of impact are we having? Who is encouraging earthcare innovations with our construction and in restaurants and hotels? We are when we ask for it – the best way for us to exercise our power as consumers.

The time for repentance and renewal is now, this first Sunday after Easter. We have been put in charge of this holy garden called earth; made "a little less than God" for that very purpose. By God’s grace, let’s act like it!