God's Earth and God's People: Relationships Restored. It s just another day. Another day of uncertainty. You fear for your life and that of your loved

Transcription

1 (note change in title to plural) God's Earth and God's People: Relationships Restored Another day in a broken world It s just another day. Another day of uncertainty. You fear for your life and that of your loved ones. You never know if bandits will attack you on the road or marauding gangs will take over your neighborhood. Daily news is about violence and death. Days are full of stressful striving for security. That s life these days. So you store provisions, build fences and tell your children to trust no one. Sound familiar? Well, this is the story recorded in Gen 6: The Lord saw how great wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time (5). Violence reigned inside and out of the human heart. The people, the land, even the animals and plants suffered. But the narrator affirms that God was not far nor on vacation. God saw this all. Neither was God indifferent. His loving and just nature would not allow him to remain impassively distant from this scene. The Lord regretted that he made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled (6). God grieved. God s heart was filled with pain. The harm being wrought by the people he had placed on his Earth to care for it was not at all part of God s creation plan. In the beginning, God had made the heavens and the earth, and celebrated their goodness. In the beginning, God had filled the earth with living things, and celebrated their diversity. In the beginning, out of the earth, God had created earthlings, men and women who would enjoy intimacy with God, with one another other, and with the rest of creation. And God had said: This is very good! 1

2 But they had trashed God s good gifts. They had determined to walk their own way, and no longer with God in the Garden. When we questioned our Creator s goodness, harmony with God was shattered. When we chose to decide on our own what was right and what was wrong, suspicion, shame, pain, death, and violence began forcing wedges between one and another. Human relations were broken. We were no longer able to act as mutual helpmates. When we chose to believe the lies of a creature instead of exercising responsible care over the rest of creation as stewards of God s property, our work became heavy, exhausting. The relationship between God s earth and God s people was damaged. All these broken bonds marred God s image in human kind. When we sought to grasp and hoard what God was freely giving us, we lost it all! This waste, this wasteland, was too painful to endure. The God of life, of fullness and abundance, could not bear the sight. The Triune God, that loving community of Father, Son and Spirit, could not tolerate the breaking of community. So the Lord said, I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground for I regret that I have made them (7). Perhaps the only way out was to start all over again, from scratch. Perhaps God simply had to write the whole matter off as a failed experiment. The story could have ended in Genesis 6. But thankfully, it does not. The story continues. And it does so by zooming in to one man and one family. The text says: But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord (8). Noah and restful responsibility Lamech chose the name of his son. He called him Noah, affirming: 2

3 Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and the painful toil of our hands (5.29). The name Noah sounds like the Hebrew word for rest. And the man s portrayal surely evokes rest when compared to that of his contemporaries! While they are busy killing each other, denying God and battering nature, Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God (9). Several times the narrator repeats: And Noah did as the Lord commanded him. He stood out for his faithfulness. The writer of Hebrews attributes his love of justice and his obedience to God to his faith (He 11.7). His was a life of connectedness with God and God s good purposes. And that is the turning point of the story. It s as if God even in his just rage and disappointment had been waiting for an excuse to yet again embrace his wayward children. To clothe them when they were naked. And Noah --imperfect as you and me--, but willing to obediently line up his life with God s life-giving purposes, was the good excuse. Still, as in the beginning, so in Noah s day: creating a new world was purely God s sovereign and loving initiative. In one same breath, God pronounces judgment and salvation, destruction and redemption: I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood And I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark you and your sons and your wife and your sons wives with you. You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you (13-21) God provides the means for the survival of the earth and its inhabitants, human and non-human. Because the God-who-is-community loves the work of his hands and yearns to celebrate because all things are good, as they were in the beginning. So in the midst of those turbulent times, God instructs Noah to build an ark, a home of sorts, in which not only people but also a rich diversity of animals will be safe and learn to live together! Norm Wirzba explains that in the Rabbinic 3

4 tradition, the ark is not conceived as an escape route but rather as training ground for Noah to learn responsibility for creation and faithfulness to God. Noah was not simply to find a way through the crisis for his family members. He was called to store food and make provision for the sustained livelihood of so many species! And to administer the home in such a way that they all got along. So his was both an ecological task --having to do with the household (oikos=eco/earth) and an economic one, having to do with the rules for life together in the household (oikos=eco/earth; nomos=rules). This home shared with other people and with all the creatures became, in Wirzba s words, a school for compassion and care (Wirzba: 141). The text actually says that after Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and their wives had entered the ark with all the animals, the Lord shut him in (16). God plunged Noah into the home-making school of intense, unavoidable, intimate relations. There was no way out: Noah had to learn to relate afresh to the inhabitants of that microcosm and to take responsibility for them. Responsible care, yes. But also rest. Noah was called to practice restful responsibility. The sustenance and survival of the ark s inhabitants did not depend exclusively on him. Their lives were not in his hands. No amount of stress, ingenuity or technology could guarantee success. God had made very detailed provisions, and it was God s good will and breath that kept them all alive. New life on earth was a gift to be received. And a gift Noah had to learn to wait for. The waters came; the waters washed all away; the waters subsided. But Noah could only wait. The earth was dry and yet Noah still had to wait for God s command to exit the ark. School finally let out when God called Noah out of the ark, with words that hearken back to the creation story, reiterating God s intent for humanity and for the entire created order: 4

5 Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you the birds, the animals and all the creatures that move on the ground so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it. In the beginning, out of the void, God had created a world teeming with life and bustling with diversity. Now, after human violence is washed from the land, God grants a new opportunity for healthy abundance on God s earth: I will never again curse the ground because of man Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease (8.22) Beyond survival to renewed relations Yet God s plans are not geared merely towards survival and multiplication. Life on the cleansed earth demands and depends on right relations. For them all God will surely demand accounting. I will demand accounting for every animal. And for each human being to. I will demand accounting for the life of another human being (9.4). God s people are responsible for all forms of life on God s earth. Responsible, yes. But restfully responsible. Because the bonds established between the new inhabitants of the earth both human and not are set in a matrix that includes another essential relationship: the one between God and the created order. If that bond is not restored, vain will be humankind s attempts at responsible care for the rest of creation. Though this bond too has been broken by human violence and irresponsibility, God graciously opens the door for its renewal. In what constitutes 5

6 the first explicit reference to covenant-making in the biblical text, 1 the Creator, of his own accord, promises to stoop down and establish a binding agreement with his creatures! God again offers communion with God s self as a gift to be received. I will establish my covenant with you (6.18). Once God finally gives the go-ahead for the inhabitants of the ark to step out on dry ground, God said to Noah and to his sons with him: I will now establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood: never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth. God then paints a gorgeous, multi-colored arc in the sky as a sign of the covenant between God and the earth. Although God speaks directly to Noah, who in his priestly role has built an altar and, in the name of his fellow human beings and of all the animals for which he has learned to care, has sacrificed burnt offerings in gratitude to God, God establishes his covenant with all living things. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth (9.16) Called to see and remember God promises to see and remember. Noah and his descendent were called to see and remember. God s people indeed God s very earth are called to see remember. We moved as a family to Costa Rica six months ago. It was the peak of rainbow season. Two, sometimes three, multi-colored arches spanned the sky in a daily display of beauty and promise. 1 Wright Mission of God insert reference. 6

7 We are fortunate enough to be renting a house surrounded by trees and with a dramatic view of surrounding mountains. Birds wake us and sunsets light the sky with purples and pinks: bold declarations of God s glory in the small and the majestic. When I consider these things my heart sings, with the psalmist, The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands Sadly, however, for most of the world, bird songs are drowned out by incessant noise, and sunsets are only seen in postcards. Yet worse, birds themselves drown in oil slicks and blankets of smog hide the sun. In plenaries and workshops these days we will be forced to see the dismal picture of God s earth marred and scarred by human negligence and greed. Even so, we must also remember that, as the good work of our good God, creation is, in itself good. Not divine -- deserving the worship due only to the Creator-- but sacred. Even in its repressed and abused state, creation still points to its Maker and reveals God s glory. Remembering against all odds what the song of a bird sounded like, recalling the awesome light and color of sunsets, these are in themselves creational acts for God s people today. Seeing and remembering together empower us to act responsibly in care of God s earth. When we protect, preserve, and conserve nature, we free it from the bondage of our own sin and allow it to live out its vocation: we enable it to sing the praises of its creator. When we stop consuming uncontrollably and instead care responsibly for earth, air, water and all their inhabitants, we contribute to God s enjoyment of God s creation. When we love that which our Maker loves, we too join in the singing and grow closer to our Father. Noah is remembered in Gen 9.20 as the first tiller of the soil because, as Wirzba posits, he engaged creation with care and compassion (Wirzba: 142). 7

8 Noah is the authentic person because he restores d connection between adam and adamah, the connection between humanity and life-giving soil (142). We too can live out our creational purpose, spelled out by God to Adam and Eve, and reiterated to Noah, regardless of how bleak the picture is. This is an intrinsic dimension of our mission while we live on God s earth. In Wright s words To care for creation is in fact the first purposive statement that is made about the human species; it is our primary mission on the planet (W, M 326). Ecological and economic concerns have always been and still are part and parcel of God s reconciling mission, and hence of God s people. Called to look forward in hopeful yearning Our original composite identity as earthlings-made-in-god s-image, and our original vocation as gardeners of the rest of creation are both reinforced by looking back and remembering as well as by looking forward to the completion of God s creational purposes. As in Noah s day, even now: God s image has been become so unrecognizable in humankind, in oceans and forests, glaciers and plains, yet God has not given up. Wright reminds us: Although we live on a cursed earth, we also live on a covenanted earth. (Wright Mission 326). We live on an earth God so loved that he sent his only Son to be born on it, to live, teach, heal and die in it, to be risen from it and to establish his reconciling rule over it. God s just rule has been established in Christ on the very earth we tread, the air we breathe, the water we drink. And God is renewing the entire creation, making it into a New Heaven and a New Earth (Isaiah 65). Contrary to many eschatological scenarios that would have this world blotted out and only the lost left behind, Biblical teaching affirms that this earth is not to end up in the garbage heap, discarded as unusable. Indeed, in Noah s day, the waters of judgment washed evil away so that 8

9 creation could be renewed. So again, on the day of final judgment, all things will be exposed as 2 Peter 3.10 affirms. However, as Wright explains: The purpose of the conflagration described in these verses is not the obliteration of the cosmos itself but rather the purging of the sinful world order we live in, through the consuming destruction of all that is evil within creation so as to establish the new creation. (W M 409). In God s grace we will all be recycled into the likeness of the one truly faithful image of God, Jesus Christ. Then freed from the deadening power of human sin, we, and the entire creation of which we are a part, will again celebrate because God, our maker, will dwell fully among us. 2 Our mission, as we face yet another day in a broken world, is to see and remember, to look forward in hopeful yearning, and to live day to day in restful responsibility. May this conference itself serve a bit as the ark in which Noah was forced to learn to relate afresh to the inhabitants of that microcosm and to take responsibility for them. May God s Spirit move among us this week, renewing relationships, restoring God s image, planting seeds of hopeful yearning in us so that we may all more faithfully live out God s mission as God s people in God s earth. Let s go forth and receive God s good gifts! 2 Rev