Caring for Creation

This morning we will talk about caring for creation or environmental stewardship.  I will be honest with you that, to me, those churchy phrases feel dishonest:  they seem like euphemisms to try to make us feel better about the crisis is facing our planet, and the increasing unlikelihood that we can turn it around.  Who wants to talk about that on a nice Sunday morning?  Trying to get church people to take the planet more seriously, pastor and author Brian McLaren has titled his new book about it Life After Doom.  In it, he explores the complexity and challenge of living in a world human beings have failed to care for as we should.  It’s a challenging book and an important one—I will draw upon it throughout this morning’s sermon.

I was reading the book in Ault Park a few weeks ago—the title draws some interesting stares when you carry it around.  A woman walked by and saw the title, Life After Doom; she said, “that looks like happy reading!” and asked what it was about.  I told her, and she looked at me, struggling a bit for what to say.  She then expressed a version of what many of us feel, she said something like, “Yes, it is a terrible problem.  I try to do the right thing.  I wash and reuse my plastic bags.  What is one person to do?”  Many of us might say something similar; the problem seems so immense and our own ability to change things so small.  What does a faithful response look like?  How does one keep from losing hope?  This morning I will try to offer some suggestions.

Let’s start with what the Bible says about our relationship with the rest of creation, which begins in chapter 1 of the book of Genesis.  Here I’m going to call attention to some familiar elements of the creation story and maybe reframe for you some typical interpretations.  The phrase that gets the most attention is this one in verse 26:  “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.  The misuse of the word “dominion” has probably been most damaging to the environment.  Again and again, we interpret it to mean that human beings have been given the rest of the planet to use to its exhaustion to serve human purposes, as if God gives us a mandate to exploit the rest of the creation.

But the rest of that same verse and the story itself does not match with that interpretation.  Note that the first phrase of the passage says that humans are created in the image of God and according to God’s likeness, so apparently whatever dominion we have over the earth should reflect what God would do, that we should “exercise the same tender, loving responsible care the Creator has” for the world.  A couple of other observations about the story reinforce the point and should humble us.  Did you notice that on the 6th day of Creation God makes humankind, but on that very same day at the same time, God has created all of the other animals that populate the earth—humans don’t even get our own day.  Did you also notice that at the dawn of creation, the vision of humanity that gives glory to God is not what we usually think of as human achievement.  As McLaren states it, “the icon of humanity is not royalty in a palace, a conquistador on a horse or a white man in a pulpit,” no, what gives glory to God is “a couple of naked indigenous people living in a garden, in harmony with each other, with themselves, with all their fellow creatures, and with the earth itself.”  That what we were created to be.

Tragically, we’ve lost sight of this original intention for the created order, and have replaced it with a vision of the world mostly based on domination:  domination of one people over another, and the gutting of the earth’s resources for the convenience of humans.  These things are not only normal, but have even been blessed by Christians throughout time, who we have usually been taught to think of as the masters over the rest of creation.  And the great irony of our environmental crisis is that the constant drive to “advance” and “improve” the lives of affluent human beings is often the very thing leading to our destruction.  The destabilizing of our climate has its own innate risks as ocean levels rise and natural disasters worsen, but the changes in climate also have dire side effects, as destabilized human populations fight over natural resources, and refugee crises increase as peoples flee from lands that are no longer livable.

This situation makes many of us feel helpless and hopeless.  We read of the regular failures to change the course of environmental damage and we feel there’s nothing we can do.  If the leaders of the G7 and the titans of industry can’t make any real commitments to stop climate change, what does it matter if I use another plastic bag?  So we give up.

In the past few minutes I’ve been following McLaren’s work, which is extremely well researched, and I’ll admit I’ve been lecturing you bit about climate change, but my doing so is in service of something I think people of faith need to be discuss—this matter of giving up.  Giving up, or losing hope, whether it is on earth care, or anything else that threatens us with hopelessness—these are spiritual matters.  We have to figure out how not to give up.  McLaren’s book acknowledges this, so as we continue thinking about earth care, I want to turn for a moment to some words about hope.

The Bible has a lot to say about hope, and one of the most significant passages is the one we just read to you from Romans, chapter 5.  It says that when we are met with hard times, “…suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope—and hope does not disappoint us.”  Paul’s most important insight was that God’s grace and love, and not own effort, is the foundation of hope. The powerful insight that inspired Paul is that you don’t just have to find hope inside of yourself; hope begins with God.  We don’t have hope in life because we think we can earn salvation or be good enough to be earn God’s love.  God loved us first, and we persevere in doing the right thing because we are grateful.  Hopeful living is not about outcomes, but about gratitude.  Likewise, I suspect hope for the planet planet not when we stew about whether we can fix the damage, but when we take care of God’s created world because we love it.  Because we love the salmon and the heron, the ocean and the prairie, the magnificent sequoia, and maybe even the mosquito!

McLaren talks about a reimagining of hope in his book.  He follows the work of a theologian named Miguel de la Torre, who I actually heard speak at a conference here in Cincinnati.  De la Torre’s stance is that most of us misunderstand hope, and that hope has often been used in terribly destructive ways.  Hope is often confused with optimism, a naïve belief that things will turn out ok in the end, even if all of the evidence seems to the contrary.  This kind of hope may make us feel better for a short time, but it doesn’t change anything.  Even more harmful is the way this kind of hope appears throughout human history when one group of people conquers another.  Our own Christian tradition has been especially guilty of seeking to pacify people with hope.  When Christians have colonized or conquered people and they are living in unfair circumstances, we have asked them to imagine a better life in heaven.  We know life is horrible for you, says the conqueror, but hope in God and be happy.  This is precisely the way that white American Christianity was introduced to slaves.

Miguel de la Torre says that in order for things to change, people don’t need pie-in-the-sky hope, they need to be desperate, for desperation is what inspires people to change.  That message is hard to hear, but it tells us something important about hope.  Real hope is not telling people to accept things for what they are, but rather about inspiring people to imagine that things can be different.  That’s what changes the world.  Again, in the context of slavery, it was that kind of hope that created the underground railroad and the abolitionist movement, rather than simply waiting for a better life in heaven.  For anyone who was enslaved, freedom in a distant land hundreds of miles away on foot must have seemed impossible.  For an abolitionist, putting one’s life and family on the line to stand for the freedom of others was a tremendous sacrifice.  So it was not naïve optimism, but a desperate kind of hope that caused things to change.  Today, whether we look at the oppressions being visited upon Palestinians, Ukrainians, or Sudanese, or intractable social issues in our own country like gun violence and opioid abuse, or the struggle for the environment that began this sermon; the desperate kind of hope that leads to action is what we need.  (see de la Torre’s text, Embracing Hopelessness, 2002, or his keynote from the NEXTChurch Conference in Cincinnati, 2019; also as quoted in McLaren, 74-75).

Can we connect such a hope back to what I was saying about loving the earth?  I think we can.  I think we can because human history is full of not only terrible mistakes, but also wonderful goodness.  Consider this quotation from historian Howard Zinn, quoted in McLaren’s chapter on hope:

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.  It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.  What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.  If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.  If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.  And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future.  The future is an endless succession of presents, and to live now as we think humans should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory [italics mine]. (Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, in McLaren, 81)

Who knows if the earth can be saved, but perhaps Christians shouldn’t get stuck fretting about the results.  Maybe instead we should simply be committed to “living as human beings should live, whatever the outcomes might be.”  That sounds a lot like what Paul says about endurance, character, and hope.  Christians do the right thing not because of what we can earn or achieve, but because we are grateful for what God has already done for us.  If we are grateful for the earth, for the sunrise, the rainforest, the rushing river, magnificent eagle, and for one another, who knows if the world can be saved, but we live as if it can be, because we are grateful.