From: Robert Schneider (rjschn39@bellsouth.net)
Date: Wed Nov 13 2002 - 00:08:58 EST
Below is the last of my meditations for the "creation season."
Bob Schneider
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CELEBRATING CREATION
Meditations for the Creation Season
Robert J. Schneider
St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Boone, NC
November 17, 2002
V. CARING FOR CREATION
Some of the same passages in the Bible that proclaim the relationship
between the Creator and his creation exhort us not merely to faith but also
to action. In the First Creation Narrative, God creates human beings in the
divine "image and likeness" and gives us dominion over other creatures (Gen.
1:26-28). We humans are to exercise authority over the earth as God's
representatives. In the Second Creation Narrative, human beings are set in
the Garden "to till and to keep it" (Gen. 2:15). In these two revelations,
we humans were given, out of all creatures, the major responsibility for
"this fragile earth, our island home."
This biblical declaration has not always been correctly understood.
The word "dominion" does not mean "domination" in the sense of
"exploitation." We are not to "use it before we lose it," as one prominent
fundamentalist minister put it. Rather, to exercise dominion means that as
God's vice-regents we are appointed to exercise stewardship on God's behalf.
And the verb " to keep" (Gen. 2:15) in Hebrew also means "to serve." Humans
are to care for the land, to serve it and preserve it, even as they work it.
These commandments are also to be understood in the light of God's evident
love for his creation. We are divinely commanded to treat the earth as a
lover would treat his beloved, to love it as God loves it. That mysterious
phrase "made in the image and likeness of God" may mean many things, but it
surely means that we are to act in the same loving way toward the creation
that God acts. We all have experienced how love can impel us to an
unconditional and self-sacrificing relationship with the one we love. In
that same spirit we are to care for the creation.
That's a tall order, and we human beings have often failed to carry it
out, especially in our own time. We only need to look around us to see the
enormous travail the earth suffers from overpopulation and overconsumption,
and their attendant ills of air and water pollution, deforestation, global
warming, ozone destruction, land degradation, and species extinction to
realize that we need to get back to our task of caring for the earth. Those
stubborn and unyielding sins of the lust for power and greed, twin offspring
of the original sin of disobedience, still characterize the human condition.
Surrounded by the beauty of the earth, we see increasingly with every
passing year the ugliness we have injected into it, whether the result of
unrestrained consumption, or of the basic need to feed, house and keep warm
a burgeoning humanity, so many of whom struggle simply to stay alive.
Fortunately, people of all cultures and faiths are awakening to the
groaning of the earth and are beginning to make commitments and pool ideas
and resources to help renew the environment. Science has shown us how in
every environment all living things are biologically and ecologically
interrelated; the Native Americans who referred to the bison and the beaver
as their cousins knew instinctively what we now know scientifically: all
life is inextricably bound together. We have also become painfully aware of
technology's ambiguous and unpredictable ability both to create and to
destroy, and our urgent need to make it our servant to preserve and restore
and not to become its servant and harm the earth and its creatures. Science
may instruct us, and technology may help us find ways to bring the created
elements of our island home and the life that it nourishes back into
harmony, if we but use them wisely. Steven Bouma-Prediger and other
ecotheologians have suggested some guiding principles: we should strive to
live within our means, exercise caution in decisions that affect the earth
and living creatures, practice and support ways to sustain rather than
deplete renewable resources, work for the preservation of diverse kinds of
life, and see that the particular creatures under our care are given their
needful rest. Such principles and practices may aid us in becoming more
effective earthkeepers.
As daunting a task it is to "repair the world," as the rabbis put it,
the Bible's images of the earth's beauty and God's ecstatic joy in creation,
and the creation's grateful hymns of praise, keep beckoning us back to our
divine mandate to be good stewards. And we have a Power to call to our aid.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins surveyed the world "bleared, smeared with
toil," and continued:
And for all this, nature is never spent,
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
We who have been made a new creation in Christ have the power of the
Holy Spirit: the same spirit who brooded over the waters at the beginning of
creation (Gen. 1:2) also renews the face of the earth (Ps. 104:30).
Listening to the Word, inspired by the Spirit, we can arouse ourselves
individually, as a congregation of believers, and as a human family to the
task.
During this week, may we all meditate upon God's call to us to be
stewards and keepers of this good earth, and consider how each of us may
live out this our primary vocation.
Readings:
Steven Bouma-Prediger, For the beauty of the earth: a christian vision
for creation care.
Audrey Chapman, Rodney Peterson, and Barbara Smith-Moran, Consumption,
Population, and Sustainability: Perspectives from Science and Religion.
Brennan R. Hill, Christian Faith and the Environment.
Max Oelschlaeger, Caring for creation: an ecumenical approach to the
environmental crisis.
H. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature.
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