Some of you may remember that a few years back, a Christian organization named the Evangelical Environmental Network produced a series of commercials. Parodying the popular “What would Jesus Do?” bracelets, these spots were entitled “What Would Jesus Drive?” Citing Jesus’ call to love our neighbor, they raised questions about the appropriateness of a Christian driving a gas-guzzling and polluting SUV. They asked those who considered themselves Christians to do some serious discernment in this area.
I doubt that many of you were offended by those commercials. Interestingly, however, many Christians were. Some Christian organizations accused the spots of portraying Jesus as “environmental wacko car salesman” and that this was irreverent and even blasphemous.
God, they claimed, is not concerned about the environment. Satan is the prince of this world. God is not nervously pacing the floors of heaven worried about the environment. His concerns are not that ”worldly.” God only cares about saving your soul so you can get into heaven. God isn’t fretting about pollution. The only pollution that God cares about is the pollution of sin and disobedience that occurred in the Garden of Eden 6000 years ago. Please. Don’t even get me started on that one. Even in the Bible, God repeatedly destroys the environment - the flood of Noah, the plagues of Moses, the planet-wide destruction of the Book of Revelation. (They conveniently ignore that Revelation ends with the restoration of the environment.)
Most people outside the church are probably more familiar with kind of Christian epitomized by that reaction than with the kind of Christian who considers herself an environmentalist. Indeed it is common to see the church as enemy of environment, friend of big business. Since after all, churches are primarily concerned with money, since they have so much of it. (Apparently we have a lot of money. I didn’t know that.)
The Bible and our Christian tradition tell us something distinctly different however. For someone following Jesus or seeking to follow Jesus, a conversation about the environment is an inherently theological, not a “worldly” conversation. Because the environment belongs not to us, but to God. The land belongs to God.
That’s what the ancient Hebrew people believed. Now when you tell people that Native Americans believe that, they get all misty-eyed and say, “That’s beautiful.” For some reason, when you mention that it is in the Bible, they want to wring their hands and debate it for a while.
I don’t know if there are any floors for God to pace in heaven, but I believe how we humans have abused God’s Creation has at the very least kept God awake at night. Caring for the Creation is a biblical idea. A church that has little to say about the environment is a church that has little to say to our world today.
What can we contribute to the conversation? I think something unique. Some of it will sound like Al Gore, and some of it will not. Some of it will sound like traditional church talk and some of it will not. So what does the church have to say?
God and nature are not the same thing, but God is present within his Creation
Many people in pagan traditions (and I use that word not as a derogatory judgment but as a description of a belief system) believe that nature is God and vice versa. That is not what we in Christian church believe. That is not part of our Judeo-Christian tradition.
However, we do not instead believe that God is separate from Creation or that the natural world is evil. Actually, there once was a group of early Christians who believed that. The Gnostic Christians, who some of you may know from the romanticized portrait painted of them in the “DaVinci Code”, believed that the natural world was evil and that the spiritual world was good. In fact, the even believed that since the natural world was so flawed and evil, it had to have been created by another lesser God.
Unfortunately, the idea of the natural world as a lesser reality still influences many Christians today. It leads them to view the natural world as inferior to the perceived as separate spiritual world. In turn, elements of that natural world are devalued. In this worldview, sex is bad so celibacy must be good. Being part of the day-to-day world is bad, so power in the church is best left to religious professionals.
In other Christian traditions, the grand transcendence of God is emphasized at the exclusion or even fear of God’s immanence or closeness. Intimate forms of God experience like meditation or contemplative prayer are distrusted. Any concern for the environment is labeled and dismissed as nature worship. Spending time with nature is seen as some gateway to paganism. As a teenager, I remember a Sunday School teacher telling me that “The Waltons” was a godless show because Mr. Walton didn’t go to church but found God on his hikes in the woods.
Even today, I know Christians who get very antsy about putting any natural objects on a church altar, as we have today, because they find it indistinguishable from nature worship. Somehow I have never been able to figure out the logic in that one. Evidently, flowers and Easter Lilies are okay, but rocks are satanic. It makes me wonder which person really believes there are spirits living in natural objects.
In this dualistic view of the universe, God is like some ancient sky God who would never set foot on earth. Friends, as Christians we believe that God did set foot on earth in the person of Jesus. We don’t believe that God is identical to nature. We believe God can be found in nature but is more than just nature. God is not either transcendent or immanent, but both transcendent and immanent.
We believe that God created the world and said it was good. We believe that God still delights in his Creation and calls us to take care of his garden. With that as our foundation, what does a Christian conversation on the environment sound like?
Stewardship vs Domination
We need to move from conversations about dominating Creation to conversations about stewardship of Creation. For centuries, the Western World has approached nature with instrumentalist point of view and used the Bible to justify it. “Look it says right in Genesis that humans are to have dominion over the natural world.” It turns out that we have mistranslated a Hebrew word that really means stewardship or caretaking to mean domination. These translators were writing the King James Bible. They had a king. Of course they saw the world, and hence Scripture, through the lens of domination.
Through this lens, Western culture has seen nature as a resource for the benefit of humans. Nature was usually described in feminine and therefore utilitarian terms. Even science was seen as “ravaging” her to extract useful information. People used the metaphor of rape to describe our relationship with the natural world as if that were a good thing.
A stewardship point of view, sees the natural world as belonging to God. Not as an object to be owned, controlled and exploited. We are accountable to the Creator for how we treat the Creation. In the industrial age, we humans reached a new level. We have the ability to have a massive effect on the earth’s environment. Consequently we have been given a great responsibility. God is calling us to an even higher level, a level that is beyond just having power, to that of demonstrating responsibility. But we are too busy choosing political sides in the environmental debate to rethink that responsibility.
Interconnectedness
“Humans are not separate from the environment we are part of it.” That was not some radical left-wing neo-pagan environmentalist who said that. It was Newt Gingrich. All of us, regardless of our political affiliations (anyone remember which President started the EPA?), can plainly see how interconnected and interrelated is all life on Earth. Jesus put that another way. He said, “What you do to the least of these. You do to me.”
The Bible consistently reaffirms our interconnectedness to one another and to God’s creation. In the world of science, through our God given intellect, constantly reveals to us how humans are not separate from the natural world, but part of it. This should not be a threat to our faith but a reaffirmation of it. Knowing that we have a genetic connection to other forms of life does not reduce us to being immoral animals. Instead, it raises our consciousness lead more moral and ethical lives. The lives Jesus called us to live.
Interconnectedness leads us to discuss the environment in terms of justice
Environmental disasters affect the poor most.
Jesus criticized the religious leaders of his time for being concerned with outward appearances and not transforming their hearts. We can all do the superficial things a good enlightened person is supposed to do recycle, sign petitions, bash big business, vote for who we perceive to be an “environmental” candidate. But holding ourselves to the level of authenticity that Jesus’ ethics call us into is a lot harder than that.
Many towns in our area are very concerned with preserving green space. Ever notice that those that are concerned about preserving green spaces tend to live in pretty white spaces. Our efforts to ensure our homes are placed on large lots, result in high home prices. This in turn, hopefully unintentionally, makes green space and inspiring views a luxury reserved for only the wealthiest among us.
So let’s not be so quick to pat ourselves on the back for preserving our local rural (i.e. rich) character while we consume products manufactured in other countries that are not so green or white. Let’s not be so content with our ability to stop a strip mall or corporation coming to our town, since after all we can just shop in some other town that has a strip mall or commute to our jobs in office park somewhere else.
Caring for God’s Creation means caring for it everywhere, not just preserving EPCOT-like simulations of supposedly “rural” life in our own backyard, at the expense of trashing someone else’s.
As you can see, an authentic theological conversation about the environment is challenging and difficult
But God is doing something new in the church today. Christians, even those from traditions hostile to environmental viewpoints, are in conversation about these issues. Go on the web and you will discover followers of Jesus engaging in civil productive discussions about the environment. Regardless of their disagreements about global warming or SUVs, they meet on the common grounds of recognizing our Christian responsibility for stewardship.
Whether or not global warming is happening or attributable to human activity is not the point. As comedian Dennis Miller says, “I’m really not that concerned about the earth’s temperature going up a few degrees. I was getting a little chilly anyway.”
Next decade we could be debating global cooling. Perhaps SUVs will turn out to not be that bad after all. What is essential, however, is for those of us who follow Jesus to be involved in the conversation. We need to bring our core values, the values of Jesus Christ to that discussion.
In 21st century, an important component of living a Christian life is how our lifestyle choices affect the environment. The local building projects we support or oppose, who we vote for, what we drive, or the energy efficiency of our homes, are now equally as valid a concern for a Christian as who we sleep with or how we worship.
The point is that this biosphere is not ours to do with what we will. As the only species that we know of capable of affecting it, we have been entrusted by God to care for it and we will be one day accountable for how we handled that trust.
This understanding opens up our lives to be transformed by God in a whole new way. If God is the God of all, including this biosphere, and if I am part of and deeply connected to this biosphere, then God is the God of me. There is no interaction that I have, no part of me, no part of this Creation, no facet of my life, in which I am not responsible to God.
In all that we do, we are not the masters, we are not the owners, we are humble stewards of what God has given to us.
A friend of mine once told me a story of a model plane he built when he was six years old. Everyday my friend would think about his plane when he was at school and then rush home from to work on it. After a couple of weeks, he finished it. So he brought it into the family den to show off to his older teenage brother. His brother had some friends over. My friend entered the room, beaming with pride, “Look, Look. I finished my plane.” His older took hold of it, looked it over and said, “Really? Does it fly?” He threw it across the room. It hit the linoleum floor and shattered to pieces. After all the work and care my friend put into his project, it was ruined.
I think that is how God feels about his Creation. All the care and work he put into it and we callously and arrogantly shatter it to pieces. That is not what God intended for us and someday we will be held accountable for our actions.