Priests of Creation

Proper 22A: Gen 1, Rom 8, John 1

When to comes to addressing the pressing issues of the day, Christians are often accused of having nothing to offer, being “so heavenly-minded that we are no earthly good.” At the same time, we are routinely blamed for causing problems. If it wasn’t for us Christians meddling in politics, “pushing our agenda,” then we wouldn’t have all these problems we have, problems like war in Middle East, the marginalization of diverse groups, resistance to social change, and ecological destruction. It's hard to see how one could be both irrelevant and at fault for something, but that is often how it seems.

This is especially puzzling when it comes to the last issue I mentioned—ecological destruction. We have all read the headlines in recent years—oil spills, mountaintop removal, soil depletion, contamination of groundwater and waterways, species extinction, rainforests destroyed for commercial farming, islands of trash twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific—a parade of bad news. And people wonder, maybe we ourselves wonder—what do we Christians have to say about this?

On the one hand, it is alleged, we care nothing about these problems. All we care about are souls getting saved, going to heaven, and to heck with the rest of the world. On the other hand, you’ve got people who blame Christians for the ecological destruction. The quintessential charge was made back in the 1970s by the historian Lynn White. White wrote an influential essay in which he claimed that the historical roots of our ecological crisis can be traced to Judeo-Christian beliefs, specifically to the belief that humans are at the center of the world and the rest of the world exists to serve human needs. He also pointed to how Christianity gave birth to science and technology, which have enabled humanity to have such a destructive impact on the environment. For these reasons, White argued, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt, for theologically underwriting the destruction.

White’s accusation against Christianity is easily refuted as reductionist, facile and selective in its evidence. But White is right about one thing: the ecological problems we face are not primarily political or technological. They are, at root, theological. They’re due to our not being in right relationship with God and therefore not in right relationship with creation.

That is not an argument you typically hear. More often than not, environmentalists couch their argument in terms of a warning, that we are endangering ourselves by ignoring our dependence on the natural world. This is a helpful reminder, but, as a cause for action, it falls short. What we need is a more complete view, a more comprehensive vision of life, one which doesn’t just appeal to our enlightened self-interest—our survival—but which gives an account of the purpose and goal of existence, in relation to the rest of the world. It is not enough to know our lives depend on the natural world. We need to know how to live out our interdependence responsibly and in the context of what are living for.

The Christian doctrine of creation offers that. For, the doctrine of creation doesn’t just tell us about the making of the world at the beginning, but also God’s intention for it. It concerns not only the origin of the world, but also its ongoing ordering, and our participation in it.

The doctrine seeks to account for the ways in which God has been involved with his creation throughout the story of the Bible. This account begins, naturally, at the beginning, in Genesis chapter 1. There, as we just heard, God creates the heavens and the earth, calling them into being from nothing and setting everything to work together in a beautiful harmony—the sun and stars, land and seas, and every critter in the world, from the smallest amoeba to the greatest whale.

Among these creations, we see, one creature, humanity, is made special, made “in the image of God.” Now, this term—"image of God”—doesn’t refer to any particular ability humans have—our rationality, morality, or spirituality—but to our role, our place as God’s creation.

You see, in the Ancient Near East, the world in which Genesis was written, an “image” referred to a statue of a deity or an emperor which would be erected in a foreign land to remind them of who was king, who was in charge. These stone likenesses, it was believed, hosted the presence of the ruler they imaged. They’d symbolically make present the distant authority. Being made “in God’s image,” then, means humans were made to be “living statues,” signs of God’s sovereignty, his stand-ins, his representatives, enacting God’s will and carrying out his purposes on earth.

Now, why would this be necessary, if creation was perfect at the beginning? Because even though everything was perfect at the beginning, deemed “very good,” it was not in fact complete. In Genesis 1, God got things started, set things in motion, planted the seeds for what would come. But creation was not yet what it was intended to be, had not reached its goal. Like when you start a garden, even after you’ve planted everything, you’re not finished, it’s not done. It will still need weeding, staking, trimming, dividing, winterizing and countless other tasks if the garden is to realize its potential. A garden is always a work in progress, in a state of becoming. The same is true for creation. Creation isn’t a deistic, one-time act completed long ago—winding up the world and letting it go. Rather, God’s creative work is continuous and responsive, responding to what has been created, open to the independence, originality, and even the need for improvement.

This is where we come in. As God’s image-bearers, God’s agents on earth, humanity is charged “to subdue it and have dominion over all the other creatures.” By this, it means we are to subdue the wild and untamed world, not to dominate it, but to serve it, to direct it, so as to realize God’s intention for it—to bring out its fertility and fruitfulness, so that the whole earth would glorify God. Our psalm this morning speaks to this, to creation praising God: “Praise him, you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars; wild beasts and all cattle, creeping things and wingéd birds. Let them praise the Name of the LORD.”

This task, helping creation glorify its Creator, is something that the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann has written evocatively about. According to Schmemann:

The first and basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands at the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God [the actions of a priest]. And by filling the world with this eucharist [this thanksgiving], he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him.

What an amazing, awesome thought! The first and highest vocation of humanity, not just of clergy but every person, is to ‘eucharistize’ the world, to commend creation to its Creator in blessing, to bring all creation into the gift of union with God.

It’s hard for us to even imagine what that would look like, but it’s clear humanity has failed to live up to this calling, almost from the start. The story of Adam and Eve, in Genesis 2 and 3, tells us how, no sooner had the first humans settled into the garden of Eden, than they misused their freedom, eating the fruit from the one tree God had made off-limits. For that act, they were punished: exile from the garden and a curse on all involved.

That might seem a bit excessive for their “first offense.” But the eating of the forbidden fruit was not just a breaking of some arbitrary rule; it was a rejection of their role as stewards of God’s creation and a rejection of creation as a gift of God, something that pointed to God’s goodness and through which they had communion with God.

As a result of this rebellion, humanity’s relationship with the world was forever changed. Humanity wasn’t just alienated from God, but from the earth, from the land that sustains them. And I don’t just mean the curse of “thorns and thistles” with which God punishes Adam, as noisome as they are to gardeners like myself. No, the consequences were far graver. Because of humanity’s pivotal place in creation, when Adam and Eve fell, they brought the rest of creation with them. St. Paul says in our reading from Romans that “the creation was subjected to futility,” in “bondage to decay.”

Because of the Fall, creation is no longer able to do what it’s supposed to do, to be what it’s supposed to be. It has ceased to be transparent to God, and become opaque, dead, a thing to be used and abused and exploited as we see fit, imprisoned to the rule of corruption and decay. Death, disease, natural disasters, pollution, pests and parasites… these are all the result of the primordial Fall, of human disobedience which disrupted God’s good creation, making things not the way God intended.

In the generations that have come after, God watched as humanity made a mess of the earth. Overproduction, overconsumption and overstress laid waste to the land, causing famines, drought, and disease, leading to conquests for land and the enslavement of the conquered. God tried sought to show humanity a different way, calling Israel to be a light to the nations, a model society, to show the rest of the world how to live rightly with God and with God’s creation. In the Law, God gave his people explicit instructions of how to survive in the fragile ecosystem that is the Promised Land, telling them how to tend the earth and bring forth its increase, not becoming greedy and overworking it, destroying its fertility, but to care for it.

I bet you never thought of Israel that way, as an environmentally-sustainable experimental farm. But that is part of Israel’s calling. Just look at Leviticus and Deuteronomy—you find moral laws and commands for worship right beside instructions regarding sowing fields, laws about making sacrifices to God followed by laws requiring fallow years.

This approach didn’t ultimately work out, though. The Israelites stopped trusting in God and threw off the limits God established so that they could be “like other nations,” exploiting the land and the people, to the exhaustion of both.

Throughout this time, Paul says, creation waited, as a prisoner waits for release, as a mother awaits the birth of her child, longing, he says, for “the revealing of the children of God,” the appearance of a new people who would set creation free from its bondage to corruption.

This hope found its realization in the coming of Christ. With the holy experiment of Israel unraveling, God decided to take a new approach, to send his Son, to enter creation, to restore us to right relationship with God and with creation. As John writes in our gospel lesson, Jesus “came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

You catch that? Jesus came to shepherd into the world “children of God,” a people who live by a different Spirit, according to Jesus’ way, a people known as Christians. That’s right—we are the ones the world has been waiting for. Creation, imprisoned and frustrated, has been eagerly longing for our appearance, for us to reclaim humanity’s original calling, to take up the responsibility for cultivating, conserving, and consecrating God’s creation, to be priests of creation.

I’m sure this account of creation is new to you, as it is unfamiliar to most Christians. But it is important for us to rediscover. Because it shows the ecological crisis for what it is, a theological crisis. And as such, the answer to it is not to be found outside of us but within us, not in the ecosystem or in the laws but in the human heart. If the earth is to be redeemed, it will not be by instituting regulations or by technological advancements, but by our rediscovering God’s vision for creation and our humble, grateful, and responsible participation in that vision.

Many people wish we had clear directions, concrete steps we should take, but this account does not prescribe any particular polices or laws to adopt. People of good will can disagree on what most needs to be done. But what the Church’s teaching on creation offers is even more important. It gives us a new vision, a better vision, of the world and our place in it, offering a different way to be in the world, encouraging us to see creation not just as a thing to use or possess, but as the place where we can know God and have communion with him. For this reason, we believe this vision, the biblical vision of creation, offers us the best hope not just for humanity, but for the whole world. Thanks be to God!