Inheriting the Earth

“To imagine that God set us on the earth to despoil it for our own pleasure before we move on the life hereafter is to badly misunderstand God’s intent in the very heart

of creation.”

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous." (Gen. 17:1-2)

O ne of the things I most love to do, though I don’t do it very often, is to climb to the very top of a mountain peak. The first time I did so was on a hiking trip in Wyoming in high school. There is, for my money, no more exhilarating experience than reaching the summit, and suddenly being able to see in all directions at once, with the clouds literally at your feet. I understand why we refer, by analogy, to other peak experiences in life as “mountain top” experiences. There is nothing else quite like it. I can’t imagine climbing Mt. Everest, but I understand why people are driven to do so.

I find myself in such moments drawn in two directions at once. The first is to be aware of our smallness amidst the vastness of the universe. When you look down from the top of a tall building, people look like ants down below. When you are on the top of a mountain, you feel like an ant yourself. You feel small. The grandeur of the world overwhelms you.

At the same time, I discover a second impulse somewhat in tension with the first. Who else but human beings climb mountains just for the fun of it? We may be just another part of the created order, but we are a unique part of that order. No other animal, so far as we can determine, ponders the nature of their own existence. No other creature is conscious as we are. God may love the sparrow, but so far as we know, the sparrow does not pray. So the psalmist can wonder,

I f God has indeed done as the psalmist suggests, given us dominion over the works of God’s hands, and put all things under our feet, one might argue that God made a monumental mistake some years back. Some environmentalists have actually gone so far as to classify humans as “plague animals,” like rats and crows, who feed off others, despoil their nests, and move on when the food is gone. Americans, of course, lead the way in this, in terms of personal daily consumption, per capita production of garbage, number of cars and the number of miles driven, the size of our homes, and output of both hazardous wastes and carbon gases.

This has led many thoughtful observers to lay our current environmental crisis at the feet of the church. It is passages such as this that have led modern humans to imagine that the earth is nothing more than a tool to be used for our own selfish purposes, to be used as we see fit, and to insist that our needs, however we might define them, take precedent over the welfare of the earth. God forbid that we should drive more fuel efficient cars when there are still oil reserves just below the tundra. Drill, baby, drill!

Of course the ancients never imagined dominion in the way in which we are now capable. They could, long before the time of Christ, clear-cut a forest, and ancient Rome was, by all accounts, something of a cesspool until they devised new sanitation systems, but global warming and nuclear winter were not yet on the horizon of human possibility.

Moreover, I am persuaded that a closer reading of the scriptures will lead us in a very different direction. Let me identify three helpful directions that we might explore further in the weeks ahead.

T he first insight comes from Stan Saunders, professor of New Testament at Columbia Seminary in Atlanta, with whom I spent some time last month. He points out that in the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis, the creation of human beings is not the highlight, the culmination, of the story. We are not the center of the story. It’s the sabbath day. It is not the days of labor that are the point of it all. It’s the day of rest. Human beings were not created to till the soil, though till the soil we must do. Human beings were created to praise the creator. We were created for relationship. We fulfill who we are most deeply called to be when we pause to consider the grandeur of God, not in the frenetic pursuit, as Wendell Berry puts it, of “the objective.”

T he second comes from Old Testament professor Terence Fretheim. Fretheim points out that in the act of creation narrated in the book of Genesis, God does not create the world alone, but rather creates human beings to share in the act of creation. This act of divine self-limitation, which we named last week using the theological term kinosis, is at heart an act of divine hospitality. God makes room for us in the act of creation, and we, therefore, created in the image of God, are called to make room for others. Stan Saunders summarizes Fretheim’s insight in this way:

Making room for others requires giving up some of one’s own space and power, as God does in the creation stories. Real relationship is impossible without sharing space. And real sharing cannot take place without self-limitation. The God of Genesis is the author of a world created for the sake and by means of relationships of mutuality and caring... Without ongoing acts of mutual hospitality, creativity, and self-limitation, none of the relationships God has brought into being can be sustained, and the ongoing process of creation itself is imperiled.

T he third insight comes from our text for today. Abraham and Sarah were not called for their sake alone, but for the sake of Israel. Israel was not called for its sake alone, but to be “a light to the nations.” And the church is not called for its sake alone, as some sort of divine rescue mission to save as many souls as we can for heaven, but rather for the sake of the world God so loved, (as we put it on our bulletin cover) for “God so loved the earth.” However we might understand the words “stewardship” and “dominion,” to imagine that God set us on the earth to despoil it for our own pleasure before we move on the life hereafter is to badly misunderstand God’s intent in the very heart of creation.

What we pray in the Lord’s Prayer is “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It is, indeed, one of the most subversive prayers we can offer. Indeed, as Saunders suggests, take the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer and reverse them, and you come pretty close to the distorted values of American culture: hallowed be my name; let me and my party rule; may my will be done; give me what I need today, tomorrow, and the day after, so there should be no limit to what I can take. Instead, we pray as Jesus taught us, to use Phillip Newell’s paraphrase: “May there be food for the human family today and for the whole earth community... for the light of life, the vitality of life, and the glory of life are yours, now and forever. Amen.” ✞