God and the Environment

 Transcribed from the sermon preached 14 June 2009

 The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: I Samuel 15:34-16:13, Psalm 104, Mark 4:26-34

An atheist was about to be eaten by a bear and he prayed, “Oh God, help.”  So God replies, “You deny me your whole existence and now you want me to help you?”  “You have a point said the atheist.  I am being a bit hypocritical.  So, can you make the bear a Christian?” “ Ok ”, said God.  So the bear spoke up: “Dear God, thank you for this meal we are about to eat.”

I suspect more Christians have been eaten by bears than atheists; and Atheists and Christians alike have contributed to the decline of bears and other living things in our environment.  Atheist Russia is worse off than we are environmentally.  Still, the belief that an anthropomorphized God who is concerned only with humans, and not bears or lizards, trees or fish has to go. 

There is something fundamentally silly about biologists teaching Monday, Wednesday, Friday that everything including our sense of value and reason is a mechanical product of genetic chance and environmental necessity with no purpose whatsoever, and then on Tuesday and Thursday trying to convince the public that they should love some accidental piece of this meaningless puzzle enough to fight and sacrifice to save it.

Bob Traer sent me a copy of his handout for today’s Adult Forum class, the Environment and Faith.  Reading his recommendations, that Green faith should be Wonder-full, I was inspired to jump on board.

I believe our faith in God, Creator, Spirit, and self giving Son should and will provide hope for a sustainable and sacred relationship with Creation.  For if Creation is not just ours, but God’s, then we are just stewards and not owners, we are no longer free to exploit in any way we selfishly desire.  If the Spirit of God is the life giving Spirit of all beings, then our relationship with each and every thing matters.  If the Christ is sacrificial love for all Creation then we followers of the way of Jesus, must be for the wholeness of the world.  Jesus prays.  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

It is important to note that the author of Psalm 104 comes from a privileged situation.  The author views the order of Creation from a serene location.  The author is an observer of the orderliness of things.  He or she has time for awe and wonder.  He is not in the moment of writing the poem, struggling with the elements or other humans for mere survival.  He is not likely suffering from drought, or war, disease, oppression or hunger. (Brueggemann, Walter. The Psalms the Life of Faith.)

Even the lion seems to have an established place in the ecosystem.  “You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep forth.  The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God.  When the sun rises, they get them away and lie down in their dens.  Man goes forth to his work and to his labor until evening.”  We can guess that this poet is about as likely to be a sheepherder as I am a Guatemalan fisherman. 

A scribe for the king and a middle class preacher should always be careful about criticizing the desire of the poor to cut trees, kill a lion, or fish, in order to survive, make money and put food on their families table.  As we enter a conversation about ecology, conservation, limits, and cooperation, the first order of business is self-confession and humility. 

But given that admission, there are a few things we can draw from the psalmist’s observations.

Bless the Lord, O my soul!  The psalmist is looking at the world and feels that the experience of live itself is a blessing.  Some mysterious power draws forth gratitude.

Now observe the psalmist understands God to be not just an outside creator/ observer, but embodied incarnate in Creation, unfolding from Creation. The Spirit Creates but also unfolds from Creation…  You cover yourself with light as with a garment, who makes the clouds thy chariot, you who ride on the wings of the wind…God is a wind surfer, or God is in the creative forces of light and wind.  In other words, the mystery and wonder of Creation evokes faith in a divine, benevolent, creative and purposeful Spirit. For me, the fact that humans have evolved to experience awe and wonder, or to use reason for observation, purpose and morality, evokes faith in something greater than us, a purpose greater than space and time.

Sarah Oakley, in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin writes,” God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all; God is the a-temporal under girder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or "randomness," yet—we can say in the spirit of Augustine—simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself.”  (Coakley, Sarah. God and Evolution: A New Solution Harvard Divinity BulletinVol. 35, No. 2 & 3 (Spring/Summer 2007)) Divine Spirit doesn’t have to be anthropomorphized, reversing the scripture, “made in God’s image” to mean we are to make God in our image. 

The idea that God is physical man, it seems to me, makes man (and in this case the use of gender is appropriate) an idol, as if man were the center of the universe and God revolves around us.  So patriarchal apologists sit around defending an image of God the Father as the guy on the Sistine Chapel and what they are really doing is defending human structures and human arrogance.    

V. 5 “You set the earth on its foundations so that is should never be shaken.”

This was one of the places in scripture used by those threatened by Copernicus and Galileo’s evidence that the Earth revolves around the sun and not visa versa.  The genuinely pious and faithful Christian scientist Galileo was first encouraged by the Pope, then later, after making the pope look bad, found guilty of heresy. 

The Bible is not science; neither is the history of the bible, like any history, written without a human point of view.  The Bible is not God.  The truth of God is not limited to the Bible.  This is clear from point of view of the psalmist, who sees God Creator and God Spirit in the working of nature.  Nature is the psalmist’s text.

The point of the psalm is not scientific observation, though this is clearly someone who has spent some time in careful observation, the point is how observation of nature, including but not limited to humans, evokes joy, wonder and the mystery of faith in a Creator. 

It all works together, we are all interconnected, life and death together.  “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live.  I will sing praise to my God while I have being. “

Matthew Fox, in reflecting on a theology that will be helpful in our current eco-crisis says much of the Church has reduced  “a Trinitarian Godhead to a single Person of the Trinity. What I would call Jesusolatry has so overtaken much of mainline (and all of fundamentalist) Christianity that, in historical terms, we can ask: Isn’t this heresy, the loss of God the Creator and God the Spirit, to the extreme situation of God the Redeemer? 

Speaking of the Spirit, Fox says, “Western religion has so much to learn in this regard from indigenous peoples as well as pre-modern thinkers who understood Spirit to operate in the whole of creation and not just as an element of anthropology. “Spirit is about cosmology more than psychology—as Aquinas testified when he said: “Spirit means our capacity to relate to the totality of things”.”

Still orthodox whether others recognize it or not, Fox finds the Christian historical tradition of mysticism is born from the Cosmic Christ: “While the quest for the historical Jesus has preoccupied modern scholarship for two hundred years and has reached a fruitful climax in our time, where oh where is the research on the Cosmic Christ? Is the Cosmic Christ studied in our seminaries and theological literature? One cannot study it if one is working exclusively from a left-brain perspective, for the Cosmic Christ, like its Eastern counterpart, the Buddha Nature, is the Divine Image (Imago Dei) found in all beings. It is the image and likeness of the Divine in all things. It requires heart work to encounter it.”  “If you have done it to the least of these,” Jesus said, “you have done it to me.”

It is quite possible that we are too late, or what Garrett Hardin called the Tragedy of the Commons will be our tragedy.  Explained in an article first published in the Journal of Science in 1968, the economist Hardin describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen.  So people will cut trees, over fish or over graze for their own benefit even as the overall resource is depleted and destroyed. Nobody else will stop so why should I.  And of course, nations and corporations are more selfish than individuals, so communists, who worship the nation instead of God, fell into the same sin as Capitalist nations who worship the individual.  On a national level, communism is at least as selfish as a democracy for it has fewer checks or balances.

But humans also have an amazing capacity to catch onto new truth when they need it, by the grace of God – to be born again.  We have this amazing flexibility to evolve.  Look at the X Games and what kids do on bikes and skateboards - unthinkable even in our wildest dreams only decades ago. Think about it. Was it fun, work or fear that led the first humans to walk? Probably fear and work, but it was perfected by the next generation who changed it from necessity to fun. Why can’t the green revolution and the technological revolution be followed by the sustainable revolution?  Maybe the providence of God is showing up after all in the demise of the American auto industry and economy in general.  Perhaps now capitalists will have the opportunity to invest and research new green technology, not superficially, but in a big way. 

And we can toss out our disjointed theology that sucks all the sacred from Creation to give it to the pie in the sky Jesus.  For decades old line Protestants were talking environmental stewardship all by our lonesome selves.  But now there are hundreds, thousands of evangelical pastors jumping rank to call attention to the damage we are doing to ourselves and God’s planet.  A small seed of Spirit and knowledge has already sprouted into a tree that soon will provide shade for birds and all God’s creatures. 

Green faith embraces evolution

Green faith celebrates ecosystems

Green faith is wonder-full

We should “green” our sanctuaries. 

Our worship should be full of wonder

We should celebrate creativity

We should follow Jesus.  “Our Father who art in heaven,” we pray.  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  Whatever we mean by “heaven,” this prayer is about living on earth.