Hello folks out there in the blogosphere!
Today's post is brought to you
by Kendra, and I suppose I should start by introducing myself. I hail
from the greatest state this nation has to offer - Iowa - and graduated
from (the now-defunct) Dana College in Blair, Nebraska. I have spent the
past three years volunteering in Germany: one year in a
foster-care-type group home and two years, through Brethren Volunteer
Service, with a peace and human rights organization called Peace
Brigades International. Now, since January, I can be found here in
Elgin, aiding and abetting the hi-jinx of the BVS office and joining in
the fun of the BVS volunteer house. Clearly, God (with the help of
Google) had a plan when I stumbled upon the COB world on the internet.
Several weeks ago, I had started a blog post discussing the differences between my previous volunteer life and my one here in Elgin. And someday, I might just finish and post it. But today I'm taking the easy route and sharing how our house celebrated Earth Day.
To start with, we celebrated in Word, song, and skit by leading worship at Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren. In planning the service, some of us might have procrastinated more than we should have and it got a bit stressful at the end, but the service itself went pretty well and we all had a lot of fun. Our Scripture passages were taken from Psalm 24 and Psalm 8, and for hymns we picked 'Touch the Earth Lightly,' 'Morning has Broken,' and 'You Shall Go Out with Joy, the last of which contained a lot of energy thanks to our peppy pianist. For the children's message, Carol, Denise, and Rachel gave a stirring rendition of Shel Silverstein's
The Giving Tree.
For an added technological touch (which almost went off without a hitch), we put together a powerpoint featuring members of our church family providing their answers to the question: What change do you want to see in the world?"
Because I, with my limited technological prowess, can't figure out how
to post a powerpoint on here, I am adding a selection of some of the
photos. For a closer slideshow experience, I suggest listening to the
Wailin' Jennys' "One Voice" while viewing the pictures:
At the bottom of this post (because it's kind of long for here), I'll include the meditation I shared.
To finish out the day of Earth, some of us decided it was time to practice what we preached and get our hands dirty in the garden. After all, these little guys need a home:
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| My, how they've grown! |
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| Rachel, making the world a little better, one straightened garden edge at a time. |
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| Denise, getting up close and personal with the earth. |
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It's a lot harder to make a caption about yourself!
|
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| Jeremy, giving the soil some air and some love. |
Meditation
Psalm 8: “What are human beings
that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made
them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor. You have
given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under
their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the
sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. O Lord, our
Sovereign, how majestic is your name in
all the earth!”
I’d like you to keep that psalm in
your head for a moment as I read a sharp twist on those words from elsewhere in
Scripture:
“What are human beings, that you
make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning,
test them every moment? Will you not look away from me for a while, let me
alone until I swallow my spittle? If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of
humanity? Why have you made me your target? Why have I become a burden to you?”
These are the cries of Job, a man
who, according to Scripture, “was blameless and upright, one who feared God and
turned away from evil.” However, he is also a man who finds himself victim of
undeserved suffering and loss - loss of wealth, family, and health. To add
insult to injury, the only ‘comfort’ his friends can provide is to maintain
that Job must have sinned greatly and is now facing the just punishment.
Now, at first glance, Job’s story
may seem an odd choice for what we are celebrating today, but I think it has
much to teach us about the earth, about service, and about Easter.
The first lesson has to do with
humility. After losing everything, Job is filled with mourning. He feels that
his circumstances are so bad and his so suffering so great that life is not
worth living, that it would have been better to have never been born at all, in
the manner of George Bailey from “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Yet, Job even does a
one-up on old George: he wishes not to just erase his birth from history but to
stop that day from ever dawning. “Yes,
let that night be barren,” he cries, “ let no
joyful cry be heard in it!” He
pleads for an undoing of God’s creation, saying “Let that day be darkness!”
using the same Hebrew word that God speaks in “Let there be light.”
It must be remembered that Job is
speaking out of the depths of unwarranted sorrow, loss, and suffering, and he
will spend the next several chapters telling of his despair and anger and his
wish to somehow have it out with God, to prove his innocence and demand an
answer for his suffering. And this is understandable. But he starts his laments
in this arrogant and self-absorbed manner, as if to say “If I’m going down, the
whole earth is going down with me,” as if to say, “If this world hasn’t been
good to me, then what is it good for?”
Now, I sincerely hope that none of
us have been so desperate as to wish for an undoing of God’s creation, yet I
think behind it lies a very natural human tendency to treat the world as if it
were created for us. It is true, of course, that God blesses us with the gifts
of creation, gifts that not only bring us joy but allow the basis of our very
existence, but the earth’s value doesn’t like in what it can provide for us.
The earth is valuable because it is God’s good work - work that God continues
to maintain and value. Nature was not created to serve humanity; instead,
humanity was created to care for nature as a way of serving God. While the
creation narratives have often been misused to justify and encourage
exploitation of the earth, touting the idea of dominion started in Genesis and
continued in passages like the eighth Psalm, there is actually a very different
message to be found there. Genesis 2:15 states that “The Lord God took the man
and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” This isn’t a call to abuse but rather a call
to care. Steven Bouma-Prediger states that ‘to till the earth means to serve it
for its own sake. To keep the earth means to caringly guard it the way that God
blesses and keeps his people.” Put another way, Cal DeWitt tells that “such
keeping is not preservation as applied to pickles in a jar; it is the kind of
keeping we ask God to give us.” An alternative translation of the original
Hebrew makes this message even clearer: God placed adam (aka humanity)
in the garden to serve and protect it. As stated in Psalm 24, the earth
is the Lord’s - we are merely caretakers in it, hired hands, servants. Plain
and simple: we are born to serve.
If we return to the story of Job,
we see that when God finally provides a response to Job’s cries and
accusations, it is a response that
matches the universal proportions set by Job and one that is meant to
essentially put him in his place. God
doesn’t directly answer Job’s questions
and instead asks other questions, questions that show Job’s ignorance
and powerlessness. God illustrates to Job the scope and magnificence of the
earth in order to humble him, highlighting Job’s relative insignificance in
light of such unfathomable creation. God talks of the wild ass and ox who serve
no human and of the rain and life God brings to land that Job has never
imagined and that no human will ever see.
And yet God is not cold and
unfeeling to Job’s pain - God doesn’t give Job a reason for his suffering but
does take him beyond it. Creation is as good as it is vast. God’s admonition is
also an invitation. In creation is a source of comfort and joy deep and strong
enough to reach Job even amidst his suffering.
This is another very important
lesson for us. God’s creation is something beyond all comprehension, and we are
each but a microscopic speck in light of the earth and all its glory. But this
is not cause for discouragement but rather for joy. In creation, God offers us
a goodness that is bigger than anything we are facing, a goodness that calls us
to rejoice even in the darkest of times. Sometimes we may prefer to dwell in
our despair, echoing Job when he says “Why is light given to one in misery, and
life to the bitter in soul....Why is light given to one who cannot see the
way?” Or sometimes we may be like the people author T.M. Moore describes who
“trudge through their daily routines of trade and toil, unmindful of the glory
shimmering and beckoning around them.”
Perhaps that is the lesson of Earth Day, the lesson of Easter: God
continually fills the world with newness and life and light, even when we
ignore it, even when we can’t accept it, even when we would rather that it
wasn’t there. In every drop of rain or ray of sun, in every bird that sings or
tulip that blooms before our eyes, God’s love and grace are present, calling
and inviting us again and again to take notice and rejoice.
If we can take on this spirit of
rejoicing, we find that not just we ourselves but all of creation
benefits. One of the major factors
in the vast level of environmental destruction is our affliction of perpetual
discontentment, our constant state of production and consumption to feed our
belief that if we could just get more things, better things, life would be
better. Conversely, if we could join with the apostle Paul in learning to be
content with whatever we have, if we take up contentment and delight in God’s
good creation as a choice and a practice, regardless of circumstance, we can do
much in our individual battles against exploitation and destruction of that
same good creation.
And indeed, in the realm of all
creation, we as human beings have been richly blessed by God - we have been
paid special attention, singled out for a special role. We too might join in
the awe and wonder of the psalmist in asking “What are human beings that you
are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Or, conversely, we might
feel the burden and join with our buddy Job in asking “What are human beings,
that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every
morning, test them every moment? Will you not look away from me for a while?”
Job views God’s attention to humanity, and to himself personally, not as a
loving parent but rather as a watchful overseer with an unswerving gaze,
waiting for (perhaps even hoping for) the instant that Job messes up and sins
so that God can swoop down like a hawk and punish him.
This special attention from God
which both the psalmist and Job have hit upon is very important. And
unavoidable. We can’t deny that we have dominion - the writer of Psalm 8 is right:
we are created a little lower than the divine - crowned with glory and honor,
we are the royalty of the earth. If we look past his despondent, self-pitying,
tone, Job, too, has an important truth to teach us about what it really means
to the be the royalty of creation: it’s hard work and there are high standards.
With great privilege comes great responsibility - just a king has an immense
responsibility to his people, so we have an immense responsibility to the
creation with which we are entrusted. And of course there is accountability
there. Elected leaders know that the eyes of their people are upon them,
watching and judging their every move, checking to see if that leader holds up
to their expectations. Likewise, God’s eyes are upon us - just as Job says,
God’s mind is set upon us and God does visit us every morning.
Partly, because God loves us, yes of course, but also because God has
expectations for us and wants to ensure that we are living up to them (which,
clearly, we usually don’t). Yet it’s not
in the manner of the harsh overseer, as Job imagines, or even that of a jaded public, but rather
more like a loving parent who wants to make sure that the gift she has given
her child is taken care of because she knows it will hurt both her and her child
if it is not.
Authors Matthew Dickerson and David
O’Hara point out that: “We act with such sovereignty over nature that the
question is not whether or not we are royalty; the question is what sort of
royalty we will be.” So far, the answer
has been the sort of royalty that would have been overthrown, the sort of
elected leader who would have been impeached. Blessed with immense power and
opportunity, we have abused it - we have not borne God’s image well.
This can well lead to despair,
similar to that of Job’s. Everywhere we turn, we are slapped in the face with
ways in which we have made a mess of this world, harming the earth and those on
it. When reading the litany of human and environmental suffering, it’s hard not
to wonder if we have even started to drive God out of this world. We have long
asked where God is amidst hatred and violence, and now that our greed and sin
has started to devour creation itself, we ask where God is amidst environmental
destruction. Author Roger Gottlieb asks: ““How am I to feel joy in existence
when existence is such a mess? And if I cannot feel that, all in all, this
world - despite everything - is holy, then what kind of religious life will I
be left with?”
What we are left with is hope and
faith. The message of Earth Day, the message of Easter is that no place is
forsaken by God. The message is that the times and places of deepest pain and
sorrow are where God is most present. Barbara Rossing states that “Whatever
future events await the earth, the biblical message is that God comes down to
earth to live on it with us. Earthquakes, darkness, plagues? God comes. Are
hearts breaking? Is all hope lost? God comes. At one of the bleakest moments in
history, when people of Judea and Galilee groaned under Roman occupation some
two thousand years ago, ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ John’s
Gospel tells us.” In the end, what ties everything together is Christ. Through
Christ, God once and for all affirmed the goodness of creation by choosing to
live in it. In Christ we find light that darkness cannot overcome, light that
teaches us how to find joy when we are sunk in despair as deep as Job’s. Christ
teaches us to cherish and rejoice in, rather than oppress and exploit, the most
vulnerable among us; Christ teaches us to value the seemingly mundane in
creation, teaches us to bring sight and healing with just a bit of spit and
mud. In Christ we find a model of what true royalty looks like, royalty in the
form of humble servanthood, royalty in the form of self-sacrificial love.
And in Christ we find a call to
action. True, as the apostle Paul writes, the whole of creation has been
groaning in pain, but we are not called to simply wait for a new heaven and
earth to descend upon us once we’ve finished off this one. We are called to
transform this earth now.
To close, let us consider this
passage from German author Hermann Hesse: “Every man is more than just himself;
he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and
remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this
way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal,
sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of
nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit
has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer
is nailed to the cross.”
God has invested a great deal in
each one of us, invested God’s only Son, in fact. - we are all, so to speak,
princes of the universe, freed by Christ’s sacrifice for the purpose and
potential with which we were all created. The beauty of the earth lies in every
single child and creature of God that it contains; the joy of creation is that
every morning that breaks calls and
equips each of us to do our part in restoring the garden.
Sometimes we question with Job what this creation holds for us. But we need not
because, really, all of creation is within us, and every moment it calls us
forth to serve. And so, instead of mourning with Job, let us join with the
psalmist in proclaiming ‘O Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!’
And, led forth by the peace of Christ, let us go out with joy and do our part
in God’s vision of redemption and new life. Creation is waiting.
