Life Together: Creation and the Environment—A Beginning…

From a talk I recently gave to Lutheran undergraduates. (We began with an Afternoon Office that included Psalm 148):

What, you might ask, does something like Afternoon Prayer, have to do with thinking about Creation and the environment?

My answer is everything.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote a small book for an underground seminary he helped establish in Nazi Germany. He called it Life Together. Bonhoeffer talks a lot about what sorts of ways and guides will best keep this community focused on the worship of God and the service of the community and the world. His suggestions aren’t always easy to live by. No gossiping, for example. He tells us never to say anything about someone else except in their presence. Not easy. But Bonhoeffer doesn’t begin with a bunch of rules or advice for how to live together. He begins with talking about trust in God, gratitude, and prayer.

Our life together as Christians begins not with ourselves, but with God’s work for us in the Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ, now present to us and in us by the power of the Holy Spirit. God’s service of us in Christ and by the Spirit, we call Liturgy. Liturgy is about God’s continuing working for our good even now in all of our mess, and our response to that working as shown forth in Christ.

This is a God of gifting.

Something hard to for us to truly comprehend in our world of limits, where we tend to assume that if that person gets, then we must go without. So we get caught up in taking as much as we can so that we’re not left without. And we assume, God is just like that too.

But our response, which is already God’s working in us, is found in singing and blessing and thanksgiving and praise.

Gratitude marks our life as Christians. Gives us a different lens from the “winner takes all” perspective.

Bonhoeffer writes of the importance of our common prayer, like the afternoon prayer we just prayed, for the continued shaping of our lives in Christ by the Spirit, which is a life shaped in and by thanksgiving and praise.

In our time, I think we are learning that our life together isn’t only about how we are as Christians together, or even about how we are as human beings together. It’s not all about us. Our awareness is being stretched to encompasse the complexity of the relationships of the many species that inhabit this planet, of the effects the environment has in affecting the shaping of species and of our own cultures, of the biomes that support our existence, of the limits within which we exist. Of God’s care for all of Creation. Our life together in Christ is taking on a more global perspective.

So as Christians, as we are turned again and again to this Gospel, this Good News of a God of gifting, a God who gives grace upon grace, or gift upon gift as St. Paul puts it, we’re asking ourselves in our time and in our cultures, in our situation and in our condition, how shall we live out our response of praise and thanksgiving in our daily lives? This is the heart of what is called “ethics”. What Martin Luther calls the liturgy after the liturgy? Or, where are we called to name what is God up to in the world?

Before we can do get to that, though, we need to

Rethink Some (Mis)Conceptions.

Lately though we Christians have gotten a bad rap in our thinking about Creation and the environment. Part of this has to do with what Christians are or are not saying in the public sphere. Part of this has to do with who gets sensationalized in our media. But part of this has to do with our not thinking and talking about this in the places where most Christians learn together, think together, ask questions together, reflect together—in our congregations and parishes.

One bit often used to justify doing whatever we want is God’s giving of dominion to human beings over the Creation and other creatures in the book of Genesis. This dominion is related to human beings being created in the image of God.

We tend to think of this as that we lord it over Creation and other creatures, doing whatever we want. We’re in charge after all, aren’t we? For example, I once had a pastor tell me that God created animals for us to use as we wished. “Isn’t that what they’re there for?” he asked. Other creatures exist for us in this way of thinking. Including the soil, the minerals, the sea, the air and everything else. So why not get the most out of it for ourselves?

But is this what dominion is about? I don’t think it is, but I have to winde out a bit before getting back to it.

I remember when I was about eight years old that the then Secretary of the Interior suggested that we should strip the forests bare because God’s going to destroy the earth anyway. We might as well use it up…it exists for our use anyway, right?

A lot of end-timey apocalyptic thinking that we encounter in books like the Left Behind series doesn’t have a lot to say about protecting the environment or saving species. Use it up. It’s ending anyway. God will take care of the rest.

But what about this end? Besides what looks like desiring revenge on others, it’s a reading that doesn’t pay close attention to the historical context of books like Revelation.

After all, often the Book of Revelation is quoted as justification for this way of thinking. Or bits from Daniel or the Prophets. All the earth will die. We’re good, they’re evil. We’ll be saved. Everything else will be damned or destroyed.

But the historical contexts are important. Revelation, scholars tell us is a liturgical book, describing a response to God, perhaps actually in an early local community: incense, prayers, thanksgivings, shouts, visions of a new community. A book about God’s coming to us in Christ and bringing to an end all that destroys life and holds in bondage. In the lives of these early Christians, this meant the Roman Empire. Revelation is really a long text that encapsules the earliest Christian Creed, “Jesus is Lord!” Not Caesar. Not the Empire. Not world Economies. These shall pass away. Just look at the history of human empires. But not so with the Economy of God. God’s reign shall endure forever, even should all go to “hell in a hand basket”. Even right now, God is working.

So rather than talk about the end, I want to speak a moment about the beginning. If you open most bibles, Genesis opens with “In the beginning God created…”. But another translation, and I would argue better translation, of the Hebrew reads “In the beginning when God began to create…”

When God began to create… This shifts things. Creation isn’t simply something in the past. Creation is ongoing, happening in every moment. Our each moment depends on God. God is working right now.

Fundamentally, the point of the opening of Genesis is that we are dependant on God and our existence rests in God’s hands. That God’s creating is in this moment. That our existence is gift, something we are ourselves wholly incapable of of our own.

If we think about the opening of the Gospel of John, for a moment we get another restatement of this point. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.”

Again, the point is that our existence depends on God who creates us and who has been working among us and for us all along though we could not see this; finally God shows himself to get his message to us and his purpose and hope for us.

All of this has important consequences for thinking about the end like Revelation.

Our ending also rests in God, not in the rise and fall of empires, or our own devices. Revelation closes with the Lamb saying, “I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end…” The point of “beginnings” and “ends” isn’t about back in the past when God created and let the clock winde down to the present moment. It isn’t about God’s wanting to destroy us. The point is that all depends upon, rests in, exists because of God’s care. At heart, this God who shows himself as one of us in Jesus Christ is our beginning and our end.

So God, not empires, rulers, and powers, not our own devices, is our hope. In Genesis, John, and Revelation, in the beginning and in the end, we get a taste of Martin Luther’s reforming insight—Justification. That we are not saved by our own efforts, but God saves us by grace, by God’s gifting upon gifting. We don’t make it right with God, God makes it right for and with us even in the midst of our yet being sinners. This frees us up from frantically worrying about whether or not we’re getting it right, so that we can live a life from this graciousness focused on the needs of others.

The point is not to be scurrying about, fearful, in thrall to wars and rumors of wars, anxious about “it’s all going to hell in a hand basket” like the Left Behind series would have us be. The point is “rest”, “relax”, “trust” in God. What Paul and Augustine and Luther call faith, which is God’s gift to us.

Does that mean we can just, as a colleague of mine often says, “Praise Jesus and forget the rest?” Well, no. But I need to say a bit more about

Creation first.

I love the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Why? Because this Creed is a praise of God’s might acts for us and tells us who it is that we worship.

We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, visible and invisible.

The Creed lays the groundwork for thinking about Creation. A little history here.

What does this say about this God? That the good God is the creating God, the maker of all that exists. This counters some early theologizing among certain groups of Christians, sometimes called Gnostics, who thought that matter and the material world were not good, and so surely any god who created this was not the truly good God. They decided there was a lesser evil or stupid god who created, and a true good God beyond this that had nothing to do with the material world. To them, Jesus, who revealed the truly good God, could not be God Incarnate, but only appeared to be a human being. This is called docetism—in the appearance of. But this view was countered by insisting God did become a human being—became flesh and material in Jesus, and this Jesus is the revealed true good God, so God has everything to do with the material world. As God does in Genesis, pronounces Creation “good, indeed, very good.” Not because of itself, but because it is the handiwork of the God who is good, true, and love.

What does all of this have to do with the environment? Quite a lot, actually. William Temple, a former Archbishop of Canterbury and one of my favorite theologians once wrote, “Christianity is the most materialistic of religions.” What he meant by that is the material matters so much to God, that God is willing to become flesh, to become one of us human beings.

In essence, matter matters for Christians. Creation, environment, other creatures cannot simply be ignored or used up without

Losing Sight of the True Good God.

We can’t listen to the radio or watch television or read the newspaper these days without hearing about destruction of the environment. Climate Change. Pollution. Toxic chemicals. Deforestation and desertification. Dying reefs. Extinction. You can probably think of others?

And all that these lead to—Cancers. Starvation. Threats to life everywhere.

It can all be overwhelming. I know I’ve asked myself many times, “What can I do to change this?” There’s so much that I cannot directly affect. So much that’s not in my control. And so much of our modern life that is built on things that harm our environment: driving cars, over consumption, oil and natural gas use. The list can go on and on.

Hannah Arendt, a philosopher, warned us against over general scenarios. Arendt speaks to us from her examinations of the Shoah in Nazi Germany, in particular. She was interested in those who chose to rescue Jews and others “not fit to live” as well as those “who followed orders”. She tells us that a “big-picture” approach by itself would paralyze us into doing nothing because the problems are simply too much for us to fathom. We are bombarded almost daily with news of environmental damage somewhere. The world is falling apart. Why bother?

The easiest response to this is to think, well perhaps I can save the world. If I do X, Y, and Z, I’ll be pure and right and so will the world. That I’ll contribute to the solution rather than be a part of the problem if I don’t do A, B, C, and D. But I just don’t think life is that simple. This kind of thinking lets me off the hook and too quickly leads me to point out everyone else’s shortcomings. Martin Luther, commenting on Genesis, put it this way, “sin wants to be righteousness”. And righteousness, rather my own or someone else’s often works to drive others away.

I remember once, having been in university classes all day, showing up to my work as an usher at the Performing Arts Center in Eugene , Oregon to work a shift for the Bach Festival. I was tired. I hadn’t eaten anything all day. At intermission, I purchased a cookie in the lobby. As folks poured out of the concert hall, a young woman came up to me, snatched the cookie out of my hands, and proceeded to give me a lecture on how what I was eating contained cows milk. How I should be vegan. Better for the environment. Doesn’t harm animals. In the meantime, my cookie was ruined. A mess of crumbles on the carpet. I was still hungry. And now I was angry. And her tirade had done nothing to convince me of going vegan. If anything, I wanted to grab a gallon and drink it in front of her. She didn’t know my situation, and seemingly didn’t care; what mattered was her sense of rightness. The encounter reminded me a little too much of my growing up in a Fundamentalist Pentecostal home.

We want to be pure and right. But no matter what we do or don’t do, we’re kind of stuck, it seems to me. We cannot seem to escape doing harm in some way or another. I give up milk and drink soy, but even if the soy’s organic, it’s transported from 2,000 miles away. Perhaps the milk came from a local dairy? In the end, the soy may do more harm than drinking the milk.

So I return again and again to this reliance not on ourselves, but trust in God’s promises. God is our beginning and our ending, who makes things right for us (sometimes if not oftentimes despite ourselves). And I return to Bonhoeffer’s insight that we begin by responding to God in the midst of all of this crisis with prayer and thanksgiving. These set our orientation for a life of

Service.

What do you think of when you hear the word “ethics”?

A lot of times, we think of ethics as some sort of list of rules to keep, or principles to apply to a given situation.

So I’m not going to tell you what to do. Guilt you into doing something. But I can invite you into considering ethics that begins with (the Benedicite, omnia opera Domini):

Glorify the Lord, all you works of the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
In the firmament of his power, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, you angels and all powers of the Lord, *
O heavens and all waters above the heavens.
Sun and moon and stars of the sky, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, *
all winds and fire and heat.
Winter and summer, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, *
drops of dew and flakes of snow.
Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, O nights and days, *
O shining light and enfolding dark.
Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Let the earth glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills,
and all that grows upon the earth, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, O springs of water, seas, and streams, *
O whales and all that move in the waters.
All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, O beasts of the wild, *
and all you flocks and herds.
O men and women everywhere, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Let the people of God glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O priests and servants of the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Glorify the Lord, O spirits and souls of the righteous, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
You that are holy and humble of heart, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

Let us glorify the Lord: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
In the firmament of his power, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

As I mentioned at the beginning, ethics is about how shall we live out our response of praise and thanksgiving in our daily lives? What Martin Luther calls the liturgy after the liturgy? Or, where are we called to name what is God up to in the world?

Our response begins with Blessed are you…We give you thanks…we praise you…

Just like our prayers before meals and our prayers at Eucharist…which is God’s thanksgiving for us, on our behalf, and into which we are caught up in Jesus Christ by the Spirit. As I mentioned before, we are freed up by God’s making

Things Right.

As I said, if God makes things right, we’re freed up to be concerned about others. God’s gift of faith not only turns us to praise and thanksgiving of what God has done and is doing for us, but turns us toward our neighbors in service.

Martin Luther puts it this way:

"A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none; A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all". (from “Freedom of a Christian”)

Which returns us to thinking about dominion for a moment. Our dominion is a dominion of service of neighbors. We’re not given authority to lord it over others and use others up for whatever we wish. In Christ, we’re given authority and the freedom to serve others so that they might have what they need in order to live and flourish. The image of God, for us Christians is not some brutal task master, but Jesus Christ, whose washing of the disciples’ feet, a task of the servant and a task of desert hospitality, turns upside down and inside out our notions of what’s what. Just as God first serves us in Baptism, washing us, and in Eucharist, feeding us, so we serve our neighbors in need.

Luther’s understanding of neighbor is interesting. Luther reconnects the Word with the World. God is at work in the world, not closed off in the Church only. This means that our tasks in the world are not irrelevant to our own life of faith, but are exactly where we should be attendant. Luther also undoes centuries of a type of spirituality that lauds suffering for suffering sake, that tells those who are in need that because of their lack they are closer to God, that determines we can get kudos with God if we do something for them. We don’t love and serve the neighbor to get kudos with God—God has already done the kudos for us. We don’t love and serve the neighbor as a means to pat ourselves on the back or to see past or through the neighbor to Christ. We love and serve the neighbor because our neighbor is in need. We serve our neighbor to relieve their want and lack.

What Luther does won’t be discovered otherwise for another two centuries or so. Luther is saying that neighbors are ends unto themselves because they are God’s creatures and not means at the disposal of others whims or means to our own spiritual hoohaa or woowoo moment.

Which means having to deal with particular lives, with real persons, and not abstracts or causes. We cannot reduce a neighbor to an abstraction or their needs to a cause. All of this tweaks the “heart”, if you will, of our reasons for community organizing, organizing for concern of the environment, and why we do what we do in our own lifestyles. We don’t have to get kudos from God, or make it right, and so we are freed up by God’s grace from a tendency to want to guilt ourselves and others into something as motivation.

Dr. Michael Aune is fond of saying that Lutherans see a world full of neighbors, and I don’t think we need hold this simply to human beings. None of us exists only for ourselves, though we humans have a terrible tendency, what we call Sin, to think it's all about us, funneling all of Creation to our will. In doing so, we forget our own place, becoming task masters rather than tenders of the garden.

Again we often times forget that it’s not all about us—we human beings. It’s about the whole of Creation of which we’re a part. Not only human creatures, but all creatures. An on-line friend of mine, a Lutheran, does a lot of blogging about the environment and animal rights, often by way of reading theology. He once wrote a rather striking line thinking about bats and dogs and all the many species that inhabit the earth: “There are kingdoms of which we know little or nothing about.”

God desires goodness for the rabbit in the field and the sparrow soaring over the plain, for the redwood on the shore and the kelp in the middle of the sea for their own sake, and not only because they are of use to us. We have to ask ourselves what service might we render such and such given the type of creature such and such is? The more we know about such and such creature, the more we may come to forbear in satisfying our own wants and needs. And when necessary, do so with thanksgiving rather than entitlement.

Who is our neighbor has something of an expansive quality about it. But

How to Respond?

Responding to the needs of neighbor can be helped by a rule of life, like Bonhoeffer’s Life Together or The Rule of Saint Benedict. Believe it or not, the Ten Commandments too have something of this quality about them as Luther notes in his catechism, something I am repeatedly amazed by in his excellent reading.

These rules though aren’t fundamentally about a bunch of shoulds and shouldn’ts or this is exactly what you should do in every situation. After all, to respond to neighbor, we have to respond to a particular creature in a given moment with his or her or its needs, and not a general creature only, for no such thing exists. And that’s somewhat scary, because it’s easier to have it neat, black, and white, and I’ve got it right, to justify ourselves, rather than depend and trust first in God as we go about responding to our neighbor’s needs with the best we can offer.

Rather than giving us a simple list of shoulds and shouldn’ts in how to exactly respond in every situation and to every need, these rules are about describing how to live out a way of life lived in response to God service of us by our praying and our serving others in daily life.

These ways begin with love of God. Thanksgiving, praise, prayer.

These ways offer a way to be with neighbors. For example, Benedict instructs his monks to eat moderately, be quick to confess faults against another, fast—traditionally on Wednesdays and Fridays, treat all things as if they were vessels on the altar, greet all guests as Christ. You might think such things irrelevant to the environment, but not so fast…

Benedict goes so far as to recommend vegetarianism, and at the least, to not eat creatures with four legs, not to get kudos, or to make a fast and hard law, but because such fare is hard to digest (the elders suggested it made us sluggish), according even to the understanding of his own day, and I suspect with some recognition that animals (and within his framework, especially the four-legged), had their own lives, could suffer. Benedict, after all, was himself saved from poisoning by a raven. Animals and Creation have an important place in Benedictine life.

But again, it’s not about showing how good I am because I’m vegetarian, it’s about responding to God’s service of us with thanksgiving and applying that Good News to our situation. A situation overcome with serious threats to the environment and Creation.

So, for a long time, I was vegetarian because of my concern with regard to factory farms and the horrendous treatment of animals in these places. But, one Friday, during Lent, I showed up to my grandmother’s house. She’d prepared a ham dinner. I was Roman Catholic at the time. Lent, Friday, pig. She was downcast when she remembered all of this. But I was reminded of a desert elder who did not eat meat, who showed up at the house of a friend who served him a meat dish, and he ate because to not do so would have been to refuse the love which his friend had put into preparing a meal to serve him. So I ate, remembering one of my favorite passages of Scripture, 1 Timothy 4:4-5,

For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.

Closing

So, I won’t tell you what to do step by step. Or give you a list of shoulds and should nots. Or tell you this is how it should be done in every case. But we do have tools and resources as Christians for thinking about life together in an expansive way that includes not only fellow Christians, or all human beings, but all creatures—animals, plants, rocks, waters, the atmosphere. That is capable of considering what a sustainable rule of life might be applying the Good News to our situation.

So something as seemingly simple as planting seeds and placing saplings in the ground in response to the needs of a local biosphere isn’t simply a bit of activism, it’s a service of our neighbors, first of the saplings themselves, and then of all of the creatures who depend upon the trees for their own survival and for renewal of the earth.

I invite you to remember above all else, it’s not about our righteousness, but God’s goodness. This God who creates this beautiful and complex world we live in each and every moment, even you and I. And it is from this starting place of awe, what the Psalmist calls fear, thanksgiving, praise, and finally silent wonder that we can begin to imagine, offer our own response in service for others, going out from ourselves for others.