Today we conclude our reflection on the baptismal promises here: Creation, Co-Creation and Christ
Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation, respecting, sustaining and renewing the life of the earth?
I will with God’s help.
Last week, we talked about justice and peace, and our striving for them. We saw how they have embraced in Christ, how they will embrace in God’s kingdom come, and how we have been called to pursue their embrace in the present as we live the cross-shaped life to which we are called in our baptism.
As the words are used in the Bible, justice and peace are not abstract concepts. They are not ideas. They are local, lived, realities. They name a way of living that pursues right relationships with God, right relationships with our fellow human beings, and right relationships and to the land. That emphasis is important. The stress on land reminds us that to strive for justice and peace is to strive within local situations. Justice and peace are embedded in local relationships and grow from local relationships. Justice and peace start in specific places, with specific people, name ways of living with specific challenges and opportunities. They name the life that is lived in covenant with God, a life lived in covenant with a community, a life lived in covenant with a place.
The politics of place have to come to the foreground in our last question that we will reflect on today. Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation, respecting, sustaining, and renewing the life of the earth? If we forget locality, it is very easy for this question to degenerate into an environmental feel-goodism which decries big oil, those polluters over there, but places no demands on us. Indeed, so misread, it can become a sinful strategy for self-justification. If I feel bad about environmental degradation in South America, I will still be able to live my unsustainable life here in North America. Maybe then we should call the sentiments this question can gin up “feel-badism” rather than “feel-goodism.”
But of course that is not how we should read the question. So how should we read it then?
Well, perhaps the place to begin is to locate this question within the tradition of reflection on Creation, which is to begin at (almost) the beginning. God, we read in Genesis #2, planted a garden in Eden, placed humanity there, and bade them tend it. Have we ever stopped to think about how much is packed into that very simple sentence?
(1) Creation is not divine. It is not a god to be either worshipped or feared, but it is itself a creature.
(2) Creation—even in its goodness—is incomplete. God plants a garden; God invites human beings to tend—to care for, to expand even—this garden.
(3) Human beings “co-create” with God in the transformation of the world. When we work in the world to bring it to greater beauty, to work for humans and others to flourish, we work as the image of God in the world.
(4) Human beings are not to treat creation as WE would wish, but as ourselves responding in obedience to the Command, under the reign, and exemplifying the goodness, of God.
Sin—which takes root in creation in the very next chapter—is rightly seen as undoing each of these points.
(1) The man and his wife seek to become divine, to become gods
(2) As a result, the man and his wife no longer tend for creation, but must toil for their food
(3) Our call to co-create with God is not avoided as much as it is now twisted. God becomes a rival
(4) And finally as our own gods, we instrumentalize creation, doing with it as we please.
Our baptismal question, in this context, calls us to our true vocation as men and women, together the image of God. It calls us to a place of subordination to God. It calls us to a place of stewardship on God’s behalf over what God has made. It calls us to an attitude of respect, sustenance, and renewal as we inevitably will and do transform creation.
And as we have seen every week thus far, we can’t fulfill this calling. It is almost written into our DNA to get it wrong. We invent anti-biotics and at the same time, invent anti-biotic resistant diseases. Our knowledge of nuclear power has revolutionized diagnostics in medicine and power generation, helping millions of people, and built the means to destroy all life on the planet. Our knowledge of genetics enables us to feed more people with less space than ever before, and we patent the genes instead of sharing the technology. The line dividing good from evil does not run between people, but through the human heart. And everything we make seems to come with unintended, and evil, consequences.
The good news is—as it has been since week 1—is that God’s love for us, for his good if fallen creatures is not conditional upon our performance. God acts to save us by giving us the One human life of his Son Jesus. And where we might be tempted to think of God’s saving act as God rescuing us from a creation doomed to destruction, our baptismal question rightly understood reminds us that God’s loving embrace in Christ extends to the whole of creation.
We look for, as we confess in the creed, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. We look for the world rescued from the domination of sin death and the devil, the world set back to rights, the world made even better because in Christ it will be brought to its true goal, which surpasses the beauty with which it was first created. And if we are in Christ, if we have been by the power of the holy Spirit united to this one faithful human life, then our hope is to share in this new creation, where, in the words of the commendation, “sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.”
Our hope is secured in the past—in the One faithful human life lived by God among us. Our hope is aimed at the future—the coming kingdom of a new heaven and new earth. And now? Now it is lived in the tension of the already and the not yet. Now it is lived in a call to tend for the earth that will become the new earth, that will become the very home of God.
Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation, respecting, sustaining and renewing the life of the earth?
I will with God’s help.