Spiritual Formation
Global Warming? How do we care for
our environment as stewards of God’s creation?
Saint Andrew’s
Episcopal Church
Sunday, September 13,
2015 9am
Theological
reflections on the spiritual context for environmental action
There was a landowner who
put his top employees in charge of his holdings. He said to them, “Take charge
of it – and take care of the place. Bring your families to live on the land,
and enjoy its produce. Serve it faithfully, and from its care you will live
abundantly.”
So the servants came on
board. They lived on the land, and raised families there. They were as fertile
as the land itself and they grew in numbers. And it was theirs for the taking –
to take charge of, to take care of, or to take advantage of – and with the land
they served as their home they would live in hope and abundance, or in fear and
scarcity – it was up to them.
What will they say when
the landlord comes? How will they be with him? As servants entering into joy,
or as sad stewards with empty fields, exhausted resources, and mistreated
fellow creatures, to show for their stewardship?
We are familiar now with the
data and analysis that have exposed to our concern the phenomenon of climate
change. It is a transnational challenge that faces us on a global front. Many
of the crises and problems facing humanity on occasional or local bases connect
to this root phenomenon: we live in the Age of the Anthropocene.
Human activity shapes
geography, climate, biosphere – and even geology. We are making, through our
collected and cumulative activities, a permanent impact on the landscape of our
world: its ice and free water, its air and clouds, its land and growing things
(including food for ourselves and all other animal creatures), and hence the
sustainability of life for ourselves and our fellow beings.
A Turkish seminarian from
Istanbul, an exchange student in the United States, told me he’d polled his
fellow students: If you saw a cricket in your room what would you do? Ninety
percent said, I’d kill it. And these were seminarians! He exclaimed. What
became of compassion for all creatures?
Let us not make the
Anthropocene the anthropocentric. Let us remember our special mandate as human
creatures to care for the earth: not just to multiply and fill it – but to tend
it. We are the stewards, the workers in the garden, of this green and gold, and
glorious, blue white planet. It is our home, but not as owners – not as
exploiters – but as chief tenants. We are the manager of the apartment house,
so to speak, not the landlord.
In our Christian hope we turn
to that landlord and yearn for his presence. We look forward to the return of
our Lord, with joyful expectation but also some anxiety. Our anticipation is
mixed with feelings of loss and grief – and even guilt.
As preparatory work for the
hope that is born in us through faith, we must acknowledge our failures –
perhaps irrecoverable, some of them – as stewards, even brothers and sisters,
to earth and our fellow created beings.
But our Christian
perspective, even in the kingdom of anxiety that is this world, is that we can
do something still worthwhile, small and large, in our collective identity and
our solitary pursuits, to move toward the day of his coming with rejoicing – a
welcome made possible only because we do not stand alone.
God is indeed already with us
– in our suffering and elation, our watchfulness and neglect.
What we face now with
environmental catastrophe is unprecedented in scale, possibly, but not in moral
quality or human impact. A famine up close is a hungry village, a starving
face, and a child with no solace. A forest fire or a drought is in aggregate a
great disaster.
But, again, up close it is
the tragedy of each creature swept up and away by destructive forces. Each of
us has stories to tell, and promises to keep, on the human level – efforts
token or tiny that help us forward as we confront the common foe. Together – as
we band together – there are large things we can do even yet to make the world
a better place.
Maybe the time of changing
light bulbs is over, as enough. But the time of the Anthropocene, the human-fashioned
epoch, has just begun. A couple of speakers at the American Academy of Religion
convention in San Diego this past Thanksgiving – including Bill – had some
things to say that are useful to us all, to guide our deliberations, and set a
spiritual context for our focus on climate change: sustainable living.
Bill McKibben talked about
the comforting whirlwind out of which God spoke to Job. We could distinguish
two calls in that voice: One is the call to humility – we are nowhere when it comes to the vast majesty of creation.
Where
were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
Who
has cut a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a way for the thunderbolt,
to bring rain on a land where no one lives,
on the desert, which is empty of human life,
to satisfy the waste and desolate land,
and to make the ground put forth grass?
(Job
38:4-7, 25-27. NRSV)
The other is the call to joy:
we are uniquely able to perceive God’s delight in this world. What we can see
and touch invites us into a joy just of being – not us exploiting or using –
just being.
We need that good-news
reminder at times of distress. There is too much goodness to give up now.
Our keynote speaker in San
Diego was Jimmy Carter, the former president. Jimmy Carter was there to talk
about the plight of women and children around the world. In getting there he
had some things to say about religious attitudes that shape our responses and
he had some things to say about the effect of climate change on women and
children.
That effect, I can tell you
first, is that the women and the children are in so many places and cultures
and traditions the last in line – when food is scarce, medicine is absent, and
there is no roof, or a lack of clothing, they are the ones who go with the
least, the last, and sometimes completely without.
That is only made worse by
climate change – as resources become scarce these the least able to cope, the
most vulnerable – are first to suffer and last to share in what’s left. Women
feel the pain first: climate change will exacerbate their plight in the future.
Cultural attitudes persist
that somehow some group of people are not as well beloved as all God’s children
are – and we are all God’s children – these attitude have played their part in
more than one story of human deprivation and prejudice.
The president’s example was
from his own childhood. He grew up in a small town in Georgia, playing with
other kids, working with them on the farm, and going to school together. That
his was the only white family did not seem to matter.
Except when experts came to
town, to the church, and sought to prove from the Bible that blacks were
inferior to whites and deserved a status of servitude. Folks, it’s just not
there. It’s not in the book.
That teaching was a willful
self-delusion on the part of people who benefited, holding positions of power
and privilege on the basis of that notorious falsehood.
Likewise, then, women and
children, treated as less than equal, as subservient, inferior or less deserving,
as if that was what God mandates in Scripture. Again, folks, it’s just not
there. It’s not in the book. It’s self-delusion, a prop for power – power over
one’s true equals in the sight of God. The truth is, we are equal before God
and equally beloved. To quote the president, “We are all created and loved by
God equally.”
Finally, a third
self-delusion – is this is my own addition to the mix: we are deluding
ourselves if we think our self-assumed pose of superiority to creation is
something mandated in the Bible. We are chosen, yes, and special, because we
are called to self-understanding, to knowledge (as partial as it may be) of our
place in the cosmos, and our role as stewards of the earth.
We have experienced, are
experiencing, and will experience, loss and grief as this world changes – but
that grief and loss have a purpose and a meaning. As Walter Brueggemann points
out, once acknowledged and voiced, it is “the hard, painful, preparatory work
of loss and grief that makes hope credible. Without the preparatory work, the
offer of hope is too easy and too much without context to have transformative
power.”
As to metanoia, that word for a change of heart, two things: “Repent means stop doing it.” Metanoia means so much more. Metanoia is not just a turning
away – it is a turning toward. It is a response to a call to humility and a
call to joy. It is a change of heart, replacing a heart of cold stone with a
living heart of flesh – vulnerable, real, and alive.
As the passages from Job
remind us, there is much to be humbled by when we turn our eyes to the stars –
or to the smallest element of creation. And in what those same eyes see there
is much to respond to with joy – the majesty of the infinite and the delight of
the minute. That humility and that joy are part of what make us human, make us
special, and give us a unique purpose in the plan of God.
Genesis 2:15 (CEB): The
Lord God took the human being and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it
and to take care of it.
In other words, we are both
to cultivate the land and to take custody of it as servants of the Lord. We are
stewards of the earth, caretakers and custodians.
In Genesis 1:26-28, God says,
“Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take
charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the
earth, and all the crawling things on earth.” God created humanity in God’s own
image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and
master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and
everything crawling on the ground.”
As the notes to the Common
English Bible inform us, to take charge – to rule as a master over servants, or a king over subjects – is a
way of characterizing human power and authority over the rest of the animal
world. But that in itself does not say anything one way or another about how
that power is exercised, whether in caring for creation or ruling harshly over
it.
We are God’s representatives,
or images, in creation, so exercising that authority of “taking charge” is a
servant role, subservient to the true Lord of the universe. We have power to
alter the world but we depend on the earth and its life for survival.
Our “rule” is subordinate –
submissive to God and God’s will for creation – God’s will, not our own.
Take care, take charge. Fill
the earth, be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. And delight in
it.
