God So Loved The Earth

“If the earth is God’s body, and we discover God’s presence in relation to the earth and the creatures of the earth, including our fellow human beings, that suggests a very different Lenten discipline.”

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth." (vs. 11)

T here is a certain irony reading this text from the 9^th chapter of Genesis some three thousand years after it was first composed. God promises Noah never again to destroy the earth in anger, while we sit on the precipice of destroying the earth all on our own—something the ancients, in their wildest imaginations, never would have supposed to be a human possibility.

It might seem somewhat odd to focus on the environment during the season of Lent, this most introspective of seasons in which we ponder the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion. What does Jesus’ death on the cross have to do with global warming? In fact, as we will see, they have a great deal to do with one another. Yet it is not our intent to focus on environmental causes over these next five weeks as some sort of political science class, as it is to reflect more deeply about the nature of God and human life. How we think about God, who God is, what God is like, and who we are, and who we are supposed to be, is very much wrapped up in how we treat the earth, not to mention the 6.7 billion people who share the planet with us.

Sallie McFague, retired professor of theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School, suggests, first of all, that it matters how we understand our relationship to the earth. Do we think of the earth as a hotel, or as a home? If the earth is like a hotel, then we inhabit our rooms for a few days, throw our dirty towels on the floor, order food from room service, and then move on down the road to the next hotel. We aren’t much concerned about those who stayed before us, or those who will come after, and generally we leave it to someone else to pick up after we are gone. Moreover, it is both our right and privilege to pay for the nicest room we can afford; it’s not really a part of our responsibility whether those who are not us can afford the same hotel or not. It’s simply not a part of our concern.

That is, arguably, the model we live by in the Western world. The earth is a commodity, like everything else, ours to use as we please, to maximize our individual comfort to the limits of our income, and we bear no particular responsibility toward others, toward the earth, toward those who come after us. We do not see ourselves as part of a larger whole, and as individuals living in a consumer society, we resist the very notion of government intrusion into our private choices. Yes, we want to government to bail us out when we are in trouble, and to protect us when we are under threat, but otherwise, we want others to stay out of our personal choices. Who are you to tell me that I can’t drive the biggest, fastest car I can afford, or live in the largest, most expensive house I can find, or heat my pool in the winter or leave the lights on all night long if that’s how I choose to live? In fact, it is assumed that our economy depends on people making exactly such decisions in order for our economy to grow.

But what if we saw the earth as our home? If the earth is our home, then we might understand that we are required to live by certain rules of the house. Basic, simple ones, like clean up after yourself, take only your share, and keep the house in good repair for others. Is the earth a home or a hotel?

S imilarly, McFague suggests, it matters a great deal how we understand the nature of God. How distant, or how close, is the relationship between God and the world? Is the relationship like a potter and a bowl, or more like that of a mother and a child? Is God only “spirit” while the world is only “matter”? Did God, like a clockmaker, set the world on its courses, and then withdraw to some distant place, leaving us to our own devises? Does God have power over creation, or are human beings also responsible? Are we puppets, or partners?

And the end of human life, the goal of religious devotion– is it to follow the right set of religious rules so that we might go at the end of life to be with God in that far off distant place? Or is, perhaps, God close at hand, intimately involved in the fabric of life? If we say that God is interested in spiritual and not secular things, and therefore unconcerned with things like the kind of car we drive, or the sort of house we live in, then we are implicitly stating that we believe in a distant God in some far off place, whose only role is to reward or punish us, and occasionally intervene in some miraculous way, but otherwise, like good government, to stay out of the way.

W hat if, instead, McFague wonders, we thought of the earth as God’s body? What if we understood that God is as close as our breath? That is how Paul put it at the Areopagus: God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Or what if we thought of the world as the womb of God? Not a clockmaker setting the clock on it courses, and then departing, but God as the source of all life, a creation still in the process of being created? Or what if, as the 12^th century mystic Julian of Norwhich put it, God holds the world as one holds a hazelnut in one’s hand?

Such models would require us to think very differently about our relationship to God. To think of the earth as God’s body means that we and God are in the same place. It would mean, McFague writes, that

“We meet God in and through the world if we are ever to meet God. God is not out there or back there or yet to be, but hidden in the most ordinary things of our ordinary lives. If we cannot find the transcendent in the world, in its beauty and its suffering, then for us bodily, earthy creatures it is probably not to be found at all.”

W hich brings us back to Lent. As I mentioned at our service on Ash Wednesday, Lent does not have a long tradition in the Presbyterian Church, but whether we grew up in the church or not, we all have some vague notion that we are supposed to “give something up” for Lent. In our individualistic culture, that usually is understood as some sort of self-improvement project, like giving up chocolate, or going to the gym. But if the earth is God’s body, and we discover God’s presence in relation to the earth and the creatures of the earth, including our fellow human beings, that suggests a very different Lenten discipline, very much aligned with our particular moment in time. As Western Christians, who consume a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, the most urgent spiritual task we face is to learn to live more simply so that others might simply live.

This is the pattern at the very heart of Lent: God gave God’s own self to the world in Jesus Christ. Jesus gave himself away so that we might live. God’s own self-emptying in Jesus Christ is at the heart of the Lenten journey. The theological term for this is kenosis, which means “self-limitation.” God limited God’s own self in order for the world to exist, Jesus limited his own self for the sake of the world God so loved. As McFague puts it,

“Kenosis—self-limitation so that others may have place and space to grow and flourish—is the way God acts toward the world and the way people should act toward one another and toward creation.”

[The model of the world as God’s body] focuses attention on the near, on the neighbor, on the earth, on meeting God not later in heaven but here and now. We meet God in the world and especially in the flesh of the world: in feeding the hungry, healing the sick—and in reducing greenhouse gases. An incarnational understanding of creation says nothing is too lowly, too physical, too mean a labor if it helps creation to flourish. We find God in caring for the garden, in loving the earth well: this becomes our vocation, our central task.

A t the center of our sanctuary is the communion table. As Christians we believe that this is where we meet Jesus Christ, the one who welcomes us to share in his own body. We don’t often think of communion as having a connection to the earth, but in fact it is in the center of our liturgy, as we sing together, “heaven and earth are full of God’s glory.” The biblical image of renewed and restored humanity is not just of restored human relationships, but of a restored earth as well. Indeed, in our text this morning, God establishes a covenant with Noah not just for the sake of Noah and his descendants, but with the earth itself, with “every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” Our architecture has a way of shutting the earth out, so for this season of Lent we have brought a bit more of the earth inside.

So it is at this table that we learn the rules of the household of God, that Jesus embodied in his own ministry: To welcome the stranger, to feed the hungry, to share what we have with others, to work for peace, to ensure that we clean up after ourselves so that those who come after us will still be able to gather in peace and be fed. Let it be so. ✞