Psalm 96, Psalm
148 & Colossian 1: 15-20
Seventh Sunday of Easter/ 21st April
2013/
Care of Creation Sunday
Keep America
Beautiful. “Founded in 1953, it’s still
the largest non-profit, community improvement organization in the United
States, with approximately 589 affiliate organizations and more than 1,000
community organizations that participate in their programs. Keep America Beautiful focuses on three key issues: litter prevention, waste
reduction/recycling and community greening & beautification. These goals
are accomplished through a combination of community organizing, public
education and the fostering of public/private partnerships. Keep America
Beautiful was founded by a consortium of American businesses (including
founding member Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola)
nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and concerned individuals in
reaction to the growing problem of highway litter that followed the
construction of the Interstate Highway System. The original goal of the
organization was to reduce litter through public service advertising
campaigns.”[1]
On Earth Day in
1971, Keep America Beautiful launched a new and probably it’s most memorable
campaign around the theme "People Start Pollution. People can stop it." The campaign included the now iconic public
service announcement that included the "Crying Indian," played by
Iron Eyes Cody (1904-1999). Perhaps you've never seen it or don’t remember the commercial.
I remember it. I was six years old. This commercial, probably more than any
single event was instrumental in inspiring America’s fledgling environmental
movement. It left a lasting
impression. Here was a Native American
looking out on urban America with a tear falling from his right eye, weeping
for what had been done to his land. It raised an awareness in me at the time that
a terrible wrong had been committed, that I, that adults somehow caused the
destruction of this land, of his home.
Then in the
mid-1970s there was the Love Canal scandal, ironically named. It was revealed that a residential
neighborhood of Niagara, NY, known as Love Canal, covering 36 square blocks,
was the site of an industrial landfill. The Hooker Chemical Company buried
21,000 tons of toxic waste on the site, and then later sold it, in 1953, to the
Niagara Falls School Board for $1, and then it was later sold to a developer. The
US Army used the site to dispose of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project
after World War II. I remember hearing
about this on the radio and television.
Everyone was in a panic about Love Canal. What will be found next? What else is buried
in our neighborhoods that we don’t know about yet? Love
Canal? It wasn’t loving at all. All this helped to raise my consciousness
around my relationship to the environment.
I saw the destruction
of the environment all around where I grew up in Northern New Jersey, ten miles
from both the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels.
Bordering the east of my hometown of North Arlington are the Meadows,
which had become an enormous landfill; bordering the town on the west is the
Passaic River, one of the most polluted rivers in the country at the time,
situated downstream from the industrial mills and factories of Patterson, and upstream from the factories in
Newark, Harrison, Kearny. My high school
biology teachers took us on field trips down to the river to test the water, to
see what was in it. It was depressing to
say the least. My hometown was a nice
place to grow up, don’t get me wrong, but it was surrounded by the results of
industrialization from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, the Passaic River is much cleaner
(there are now fish swimming in it); parks have been built in Newark where
there were factories. Even in Jersey City, just east of the Meadows, where the
enormous Colgate-Palmolive factory stood along the Hudson River there are now
high-end condominiums, parks, and office buildings. The same story can be told of any major city
in the North and Northeast – Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and
here in Baltimore.
While we might
be in the process of cleaning up our urban environments, more conscious of our
relationship to the land around us, feeling good about our recycling efforts
here, reducing our carbon footprints, the ecological crisis continues. We’re playing catch-up as we watch the climate
change all around the world. The crisis
continues unabated overseas in Asia and Africa and South America. The devastation continues and as it does,
humanity becomes all the more detached from the earth, from the environment,
from our home, alienated from Mother Earth.
To some extent Christianity
bears some responsibility for the state we’re in. This might sound like an odd, even ridiculous
claim, but I think it’s true. The
Industrial Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries originated in Christian Europe, in Germany, France, and, in England,
with its “dark Satanic Mills,” as William Blake (1757-1827) put it – and they
were dark and Satanic.[2] The revolution spread to the American shores,
colonial expansion helped to feed our mills and the factories, some were just
as dark and Satanic. The United States
industrial expansion continued through the nineteenth century, yielding great
progress, a better future for immigrants from around the world, and enormous
wealth (especially for some), but it also yielded environmental
devastation. Civilization comes at a
terrible price.
These were
so-called Christian nations where industrialization occurred. Did the Church ever come to the aid of the
environment? Did it ever come to the aid
of Mother Earth? Did it ever try to save
the planet in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries? Today, yes, the Church is involved in
environmental concerns, but we’ve come late to this issue. Why weren’t we there centuries ago?
Because
essentially the Church, I think, operated with three misguided assumption. The first false assumption was due, in part,
to a false reading of the creation account in Genesis—it was assumed that the
earth belonged to us and not God, that God gave it to us to “use” at our
pleasure, to use the resources given to us by God and then use them for the
advancement of Christian civilization.
The second
assumption is this: the Church, for centuries, operated with a dangerous
dualism that privileged spirit over body.
The spirit was considered holy, eternal, of God. Matter, along with our bodies, was viewed
with suspicion, if not altogether bad. For
centuries the Church believed that it should concern itself with only spiritual
concerns and leave material concerns for those beyond the Church. And by spiritual, they/we meant concerns of
the heart or the soul or spirit, personal, invisible concerns, such as
salvation. It’s this deep division
between soul and body, preferring one over the other, which has helped to wreck
havoc upon the earth. This wedge between
spirit and matter is insidious.
Contemporary
theologian Jürgen Moltmann makes clear that both theology and the Church’s “domain
became the soul’s assurance of salvation in the inner citadel of the
heart. The earthly, bodily and cosmic
dimensions of the salvation of the whole world were overlooked.”[3] In other words—and this is the third
assumption—the Church viewed salvation as essentially the saving of the soul,
as a spiritual concern. That’s what God
really cared about, it was assumed, that’s what Jesus came to save, that’s the
Gospel. Everything else was, is, outside
the domain of the Church. Inside and
outside, sacred and secular—and so reality was divided. The individual was elevated and separated out
from its relationship to the rest of the world, to creation itself. The
individual/humanity was viewed as existing apart from nature, instead of seeing
humanity as part of the creation. Reality was divided. Some things are sacred, holy; everything else
is profane, secular. God is concerned
about holy things; doesn’t really care about the secular. Moltmann writes, “When personal salvation
came to be thought of as something that had nothing to do with the world, in
the same degree the knowledge and fashioning of the world ceased to have any
reference to salvation and disaster.
This meant that the calamitous dichotomy between the subjectivity of
human beings and the objective world of ‘mere things’ was deepened. The truth of faith and the truth of reason
split apart.”[4]
This dichotomy
contributed to so many other dichotomies that continue to plague our world: the
separation of faith and reason, faith and science, faith and economics, faith
and politics, faith and ecology. The
Reformation helped to forge this separation and then it erupted during the
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, followed by developments in science in
the nineteenth century, which effectively viewed God as separate from the
world, absent from the world, or even dead.
There’s a direct correlation between perceiving the absence of God, the
rise of secularism, and the ecological crisis caused by industrialization and
technological progress.
C. S. Lewis
(1898-1963) once observed, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown
in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”[5] Once heaven is divorced from having any
connection with the earth, everything unravels.
The earth, and all of us with is, loses its mooring and we are set
adrift. Once God is taken out of the
picture, taken out of creation, everything comes undone. We are left with the illusion that the earth
belongs to us and we can do whatever we want to it. We are left with the illusion that this world
doesn’t matter, that “we’re just a passin’ through,” so who cares if we blow
ourselves to smithereens, there’s another shore waiting for us. Once God is removed from the picture, the
world loses its glory, its otherness, its holiness. Some traditions in the Church were so keen on
eradicating pantheism, that is, the worship of nature, that we defaced creation
of its magic. God can’t be found in
nature, theologians said. We do not learn about God from creation, many
theologians in the Reformed tradition argued for centuries. It’s true, a crocus tells us nothing about
Christ, but that doesn’t mean that the world, the universe, isn’t infused with
the presence of God.
The early Celtic
Christians of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, before the eighth century, had a
much better sense of God’s goodness in the grandeur of creation. Every thing was every blessed thing because
everything was blessed, good, and holy. The incarnation of Jesus, God in the flesh,
means that matter matters. Many
centuries later, George Macleod (1895-1991), founder of the Iona Community in
Scotland, intent on renewing the Church with a new appropriation of Celtic
Christianity, was right when he said that the Christian gospel involves more
than soul salvation, it is whole
salvation. Because it is whole, the
soul is included along with the redemption of the world, and by world Macleod
included the created order.[6]
A good example
of this theological outlook is the meaning of the Celtic cross, such as the St.
John’s Cross on our Communion table (from Iona). The cross is placed over the circle. The circle represents the earth. The cross achieves the redemption of the earth,
of creation itself. Celtic Christians
had a far more cosmic understanding of salvation.
 |
| St. John's Cross, Iona, Scotland |
Macleod is right. From a biblical perspective, any talk of dividing the world up into sacred and profane, spiritual and material is an illusion, a fantasy that we’ve created for our own questionable purposes. Psalm 24:1 couldn’t be more explicit: “The earth and all it contains belongs to the LORD, the earth and all who dwell in it.” Heaven and earth are held together as one. We need to view the world, our reality in it, holistically. We need to stop dividing up reality, bifurcating reality. We need healing, wholeness. The psalms make this clear, such as Psalm 96 and Psalm 148. It’s in the New Testament as well, especially in the cosmic hymn to Christ offered in Colossians. Christ is viewed as “the firstborn of all creation.” Therefore, “In him all things are held together” (Col. 1:17). Reality, creation, the universe are all held together in him, are all one.
When we remember
this, live from this knowledge, our relationship with the world changes. If we try to imagine creation from God’s
perspective—holistically, heaven and earth linked together—would we dump toxic
waste in a landfill? Would we devastate the
rain forests of Brazil? When we abuse the earth, we abuse ourselves. To treat the environment this way is a form
of crucifixion, we’re crucifying Christ all over again.
What will it
take for you and me, for us to be re-enchanted by the glory and presence of
God? What will it take to again see the world enchanted? Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) wrote, “The
world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
Do you feel it? See it? Can we say, Praise be to God for every
blessed thing and to see everything blessed?
Will the creation again be the cause for praise, help us to praise?
As the psalmist
declared:
“Let the heavens
be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills
it;
let the field
exult, and everything in it.
Then shall all
the trees of the forest
sing for joy before the LORD” (Psalm
96:11-12). May it be so.
[2] William Blake’s “Jerusalem” (1804): “And did those feet in ancient time./ Walk
upon Englands mountains green:/ And was the holy Lamb of God,/ On Englands
pleasant pastures seen! And did the
Countenance Divine,/ Shine forth upon our clouded hills?/ And was Jerusalem
builded here,/ Among these dark Satanic Mills?”
[3] Jürgen
Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology
of Creaetion and the Spirit of God (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 35.
[4] Moltman, 35.
[6] See Ron
Ferguson’s biography George Macleod: Founder of the Iona Community (Wild Goose
Publications, 2004), and also Ian Bradley, The
Celtic Way (London: Darton, Longman,
and Todd, 1993).
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