PREACHING THE GOSPEL TO THE WHOLE CREATION
Texts: Genesis 1:24-28; Psalm 24:1-5;
Luke 12:6; Mark 16:15

Richard Louv has written a book entitled Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature - Deficit Disorder. His four-year-old son once asked, “Are God and Mother Nature married, or just good friends?”1

His question is headed in the right direction. What is the relationship of God and Creation? The less speculative and more urgent question is. What is the relationship of the human species to Creation? Our relationship? Of course, the word “Creation” already puts a theological/spiritual cast to the question. We are not living in an Accident, capital A, but in Creation, capital C, the act of a good God who created the world and called it good.

The problem is we humans treat the world as ours, a commodity to use and exploit for whatever we wish. So the big issue is our relationship to Mother Nature. Are we married, or just good friends? Our children begin a new unit today in Sunday School on Creation. I like how it frames the issue: Creation is our neighbor we are to love as ourselves.

I was arrested last week in my study for my Easter sermon by the words of the Risen Christ to his disciples: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” What is this gospel we preach to the whole creation?

I

First, we proclaim the goodness of Creation. The Genesis account says God created the world and called it good, tov. Dante wrote that “despising nature and her goodness” was violence against God.2

Another way of saying it that we proclaim the holiness of life. If life is the good gift of God, we handle with wonder and awe. William Blake, the mystic, poet, and artist said that “everything that lives is holy.”

Moreover, Creation is the ongoing holy activity of God. To use the words of Wendell Berry, Creation is not “the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God.”3

Creation is the ongoing act of God in an expanding universe and evolving planet. We are participants with God, in God, in this process.

II

Second, we proclaim that “the earth is the Lord’s.” It does not belong to us but to God. We are God’s stewards, the householders of the whole creation as the household of God. Ecology is home economics, the world as God’s home given to us. God has given us this earth as our home to live in, then bequeath to our children and their children, and all earth’s children. What shall we leave them? What messes do we leave for them to clean up?

III

Third, we let Creation minister to us: We receive the gifts nature has to give, not just materially but spiritually: The warm sun, the beauty of flowers, hills, sky. Mary Oliver wrote these words in her poem “The Summer Days”:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean - -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down - -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I’ve been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?4

IV

Fourth, we join nature in praise of God. One form of prayer is amazement. A person amazed is not likely to be a killer, to be cruel and indifferent. What sounds, what sights, what smells, what touch, what sounds amaze you? Will you let yourself be amazed? Will you praise your Maker while you still have breath?

Emily Dickinson once said that the only commandment she never broke was “Consider the lilies.” When Jesus said, “Consider lilies, look at the wild flowers of the field, look at the birds of the air”, he was not just using them to make a point. He was being amazed. At them and at God’s goodness.

V

Fifth. We must reread scripture in light of the present situation - - which is the careless destruction and exploitation of the environments. Our children, youth and young adults are much more sensitive to these concerns than most of us. The ‘green revolution” is the cause they bring to us, the Spirit’s new revolution through them.

We’ve had to learn to reread scripture in light of the racial crisis, sexual discrimination, in light of the terrible hold of violence on the human spirit. Today we must reread scripture on the care of creation.

Historian Lynn White in a famous essay blamed Christianity and the Bible for our ecological crisis. We are guilty, but the roots of the problem are a misreading of scripture based upon our prior “fallenness.” I like how Wendell Berry describes “fallenness” - - not as the Calvinists do as “total depravity” - - but as those who are “deficient in wholeness, harmony and understanding.”5

In the creation accounts in Genesis God creates us in God’s own image, gives the world to us and calls us to “have dominion” over it, that is to care for it and take responsibility for it the way God does. To care for it as we care for our own bodies - - which sometimes we’re not very good at doing either.

We mistake dominion for domination. But God shows us what Godly dominion is. We see it in Jesus; a shepherd king, a servant leader.

(I should say, parenthetically, that the church depends on Hebrew scripture for much of its ecological teaching, the larger story. The New Testament was written in two short a time - - about 60 years - - and was dominated by a belief that the end of the world was near - - still a problem!)
Jesus spoke of sparrows sold for pennies in the marketplace. God knows and cares for every sparrow, he said. “Not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.” This is part of the gospel we proclaim to the whole creation: God cares for the whole creation, even the smallest creature.

Another way we need to reread scripture has to do with holy land and holy places. Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson in an essay, “Is There Only One Holy Land?” challenges his fellow Jews not to think of Israel as the only Holy Land. The Holy Land includes the whole earth.6

Likewise, Wendell Berry challenges Christians who have “the idea that the only holy place is the built church.”7 We may rightly call our church house “God’s house,” but we should never forget that the first thing to say is that the world is God’s house. A fateful dualism has led the church to think of itself as a kind of spiritual “preserve”, a holiness conservancy from which it has left to exploit and assault a non-holy or secular earth.8

So let us take up our Bible and reread them in light of the present ecological crisis. Let us start by taking the Bible outside and reading it outdoors!

Sixth, our calling to kindness toward creation is not measured as the world measures success and efficiency. Only God can save the world: we are called to help save our little corner of it. Single acts of kindness to a single person, to a single animal, to one plant, to one plot of soil are holy acts. William Blake says we minister “in the minute particulars.” Do not minimize minute particulars. Some people are called to tackle the mega-issues: How corporate America will balance profit and the care of the environment? Will they pay attention to a triple bottom line: What profits the share holders, the community and the environment? How should government regulate business so to protect the environment from greedy exploitation? Christians will disagree over how much government regulation. But you can’t read the Bible without seeing the necessity for some government oversight. To paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr, man’s capacity for goodness makes government possible; man’s inclination to injustice makes government necessary. These are the big issues. God may be calling you to be an eco-politician or an eco-ethicist.

But all are called to enjoy, nourish, protect and love some part of God’s creation.

When the people of Israel entered the Holy Land, an important part of the Torah of God, the covenant between God and God’s people, had to do with the care of the land: “I have set before you life and death. Choose life that you and your descendants may live!”, said the Lord. So God sets before us this choice today.

Berry has written these true and unflinching words:

To live, we must daily break the body
and shed the blood of Creation.
When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it
is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily,
destructively, it is a desecration.
In such desecration we condemn
ourselves to spiritual and moral
loneliness, and others to want.9

Such is the law and the prophets, and the gospel we preach to the whole creation.


1(Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005), p. 285.
2 As cited in Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” The Art of the Commonplace (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), p. 308.
3 Ibid.
4 New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 94.
5 The Art of the Commonplace, op.cit, p. 307.
6 Ellen Bernstein, Ecology and the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature and the Sacred Meet (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2000), pp. 41 ff.
7 Berry, op.cit., p. 309.
8 Ibid., p. 312.
9 Ibid., p. 304.