TRISTAN SHERWIN

Just in case anyone is interested, and further to part 1 last week, here’s my sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury and Whitefield, Zoom meeting (14th Feb 2021):

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Over the past few weeks we’ve been unpacking our mission statement, ‘Jesus at the centre’, and exploring what that means in the arena of our lives, our church, and our community. Last week, I began exploring the final arena of our statement Our World [click here]. As I said last Sunday, I define world as two connected halves—Humanity (Society) and Creation (ecology), and I teased the idea of being Priests in relation to humanity. This week I’m going to explore being Stewards in regards to our Earth.

READ: GENESIS 1 – 2: 15 (NRSV)

BACONIAN SANDBOX

A number of years ago, our youngest son was addicted to a computer game called Minecraft™.

For those of you who have miraculously escaped the news of this particular computer game, the premise is extremely simple. As the name suggests, you mine and you craft. It’s what’s called a ‘Sandbox’ game, and just like the sandboxes/pits some of us may have played in as kids, these games are creative environments, where you scoop up and excavate the material around you and use it to build whatever you want.

In the case of MineCraft, when you first enter the game, you find yourself being launched into an unblemished land stocked full of resources, a land ready and waiting for you to breathe your personality all over it. In the MineCraft worldview, every nanobyte of this pixelated world belongs to you, and you are free to do whatever you desire to do with it (within the programming limits of the game, of course).

As a dad who takes an interest in what my kids are into—and also as someone who enjoys computer games—I  was intrigued by this game and decided to tag along with Eaden, and the pair of us began to cast our artistic vision into this virtual world (My eldest son, Corban, after listening to this message, has urged me to mention that he was also involved in this renaissance, which he was).

But that’s when the problems started. It goes without saying, that you can’t build the world as you would want it when there’s two of you on the scene. Eaden and I just clashed.

Why? Well, call me a traditionalist, but when I build a wall, and the game offers me the raw materials of brick, stone, or wool, I’m going to avoid the wool. Even pixelated wool probably lacks the strength and integrity that I believe is required of a wall. Not to mention the devastation that a torrent of rain would cause! But not my son, Eaden. Oh no. It was wool everywhere; Wool walls, combined with wool roofs, and wool fireplaces. And when there was no wool left, Eaden would then build with slime.

Not only did we clash on materials, but colour schemes presented further tensions. I wanted sandstone walls, terracotta roof tiles, and nice oak flooring—all in their natural, realistic hues, please. Is that really too much to ask? But Eaden didn’t keep to those rules. His world was a collage of vibrant contrasts; an explosion of colour. Like it had been caught between a giant game of paintball and a Holi Festival.

We both had different ideas; our dreams clashed, our wills collided, and the world we were crafting became collateral damage caught up in the procession of our egos. Instead of paradise, a dystopia of disharmony emerged.

I say we clashed, I’m joking, of course. We had great fun together and, I must admit, Eaden’s giant, woollen statue of Sponge Bob Square Pants does look rather good next to my traditional granite-grey Norma castle. Unfortunately, though, in the real world, the consequences aren’t so humorous.

For many, how we see creation isn’t too unlike the MineCraft worldview: we see the Earth as a giant sandbox, stocked full of resources to be exploitively utilized without restraint. This hasn’t always been the predominant view, though—it’s actually a very modern way of viewing our environment. Up until about four hundred years ago, humanity naturally understood that it was interdependent of nature—that there was an ingrained mutuality between us and the planet.

We knew, for example, that we were dependent upon seasons and weather patterns for our farming. Fields had to be maintained and, most importantly, left to rest. If it went dark outside, because of winter, then human activity had to change with it. The only engine power we had to shape our environment with, was bodies—human bodies or animals bodies. Things took longer to build, change was slower and less of a shock to our ecosystems. I’m not saying it was perfect—it wasn’t. But because humanity had to partner with nature in order to do anything, there was a balance, of sorts. Humanity knew that there was something life-giving about our planet, and that in return, it (humanity) had to reciprocate this life-giving bond. There was, so to speak, a natural limit and responsibility imposed on our relationship with the ground that we came from, and that we relied upon.

But then that all changed—rapidly, too. After millennia of mutuality, we stopped partnering, and we began to dominate. Some suggest that the shift came in the 1600’s and was led by such voices as Sir Francis Bacon, in 1623. Bacon’s philosophies started to see this natural limit as a problem to humanity’s potential greatness—that people should strive to shake off the limits and chains of nature, and instead, we should ‘follow and hound nature in her wanderings’. In other words, it was time for people to snare and enslave the world, and not be “dictated” by it.

This was the start of an epoch of industrialisation. And within a century, how we related to the world, mainly within the West/Europe, changed massively. Steam engines appeared. We began heavily to mine for fossil fuels and raw materials in ways exponentially larger than any other era of history. Electricity was about to dawn, and huge factories multiplied and cropped up everywhere.

Humanity was suddenly “free” of the planet. Our relationship with the planet changed. Instead of being one of stewardship, which involved taking, but also of taking care that regeneration and future life continued, our relationship became one of purely taking; nonreciprocal, dominance-based extraction. One that saw the world as a sandbox to be mastered, and its resources exploited. As James Watt, one of father’s steam power allegedly said it, ‘Nature can be conquered, if we can but find her weak side.’[i]

We did find that weak side—and it’s turned out to be our weak side, too. It’s only within the past sixty years, or so, that we have begun to appreciate the damage that this has done, and is still doing. And only, in the past ten to twenty years, are we beginning to take it seriously—although, there are a great number of people who need to be convinced.[ii]

Everything changed with the age of industrialisation. It was also the dawning of the Scientific Revolution. But the problem wasn’t a scientific one—it was a larger cultural shift, that also involved the church. Theology, bible verses, where used to endorse this kind of perspective. Parts of Christianity blessed this regime, and one verse that was consistently appealed to is something we’ve just read in Genesis chapter 1: ‘Fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion.’

We used that scripture as our divine commission to treat the world like our sandbox, whilst forgetting that this creation is actually God’s Temple.

KNOTTED TO KNITTED

In Isaiah 66: 1-2, God boasts, ‘Heaven is my throne, and the Earth is my footstool. Could you ever build me a temple as good as that? … My hands have made both heaven and earth, and they are mine.’ (NLT)

Creation is God’s Temple—our environment isn’t a mere resource, it is sacred space. In many ways, Genesis 1 is the poetic account of God’s forming of this Temple (something I have spoken about a number of years ago, and I’m not going to repeat here). It’s a hotly-debated passage, though—one that gets argued over a lot when it comes to science. And the sad thing is, because of how we constantly read this passage in the context of an argument with science, we often miss the beautiful nuance of this passage and miss the good news of it: God is just the giver, but also the liberator of life.

In Genesis 1, God moves chaos to Shalom, disorder to order, and fruitlessness to flourishing. God liberates the cosmos from bondage and futility. God, throughout each of the poetic stanzas of Genesis 1, orders creation, by speaking into it and consecrating/blessing distinctions, prescribing vocations and bringing it to a functional goodness. And at the end of it all, God declares it to be very good, and Holy, and then God rests, God takes up residence—God reclines and reigns within this Temple. The clues to this ordering work are scattered throughout this poem.

In the opening of the account, the world is described as formless and void. The Hebrew there is tohû wabohû (it just rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it?); that is, disordered, wild, destructive, tangled—just a mass of non-functional stuff. Imagine, if you like, a large ball of knotted string—and God is going to unwind this string, and knit with it, so to speak, and turn it into a place that is viable for flourishing life. This is what happens, as the poem moves forward. Everyday day culminates with goodness emerging from chaos, knittedness emerging from what was knotted. Not only is this emphasised by God saying ‘it was good’, but also through the repetition of the phrase, ‘there was evening and there was morning.’

Sadly, some Bible translations have cut that peculiar rhythm out of the text. The NLT, for example, just has the very boring, ‘This was the second day… the third day.’ And they’ve done that because we just think this phrase is about a transition of time—but it goes deeper than that. The Hebrew word translated as evening is erev, and for morning the word is boker. ‘There was erev and there was boker.’ Erev literally means ‘an undifferentiated mixture of elements’ (a tangled mess), and boker comes from the root meaning of ‘to clarify’.[iii] You can see how they work for evening and morning; going from darkness and murkiness to the clear light of day. But they also express this deeper perspective: that there was chaos, and then there was order; there was mess, and then, through the liberating word of God, there was beauty.

CURATORS OF SHALOM

Why does this matter? Because before we come to the verse about subduing and dominion, it’s important to reflect on how God operates and how God rules creation. Humanity, after all, is made to be God’s image, God’s representatives, God’s ambassadors; we’re to take our cue from God, and what we see in this poem is that God doesn’t make a mess of the world—God cares for it, tends to it, and helps it flourish.

In Isaiah 45: 18, it says, ‘For the Lord is God, and he created the heavens and earth and put everything in place. He made the world to be lived in, not to be a place of empty chaos (tohû).’

Humanity is given the vocation to replicate this pattern, to uphold shalom within creation. We’re permitted to make use of the world, but we’re also not permitted to turn the world into a chaotic, out-of-balanced mess.

This is spelt out for us in Genesis 1: 28—‘were told to have dominion, and to subdue’. The problem, like I said earlier, is that we’ve distorted our understanding of this. In Hebrew, the words are Radah and Kabash.

Radah is often translated ‘to have dominion’—but it does not mean to be domineering. More accurately, it means to have authority, and it implies a depth of knowledge/understanding and, more importantly, a responsibility. In other words, it’s about a duty of care. God, is putting Humanity in charge of creation (see also Psalm 8:6-7), we are stewards of God’s Temple—and we will be held accountable to God for caring for it. If you want a scriptural parallel: Joseph is given authority over Egypt by Pharaoh—Pharaoh places Egypt under Joseph’s wisdom and care. Joseph is not granted permission to exploit it, and neither does Joseph own Egypt—he cannot do whatever he like, he represents the rule of another.

The other word, Kabash, is translated subdue. Again, we can often misunderstand this to mean domineering and abusive, as if it permits us to use any means necessary to bring things under our control. This is not the case, though. To subdue, to kabash, is not forceful dominance, it’s not about being controlling, but about pacifying—soothing. It connotes restoring something to its natural disposition. Think of it like calming a panicked animal, or even a hysterical person, or a fearful and tearful child. Subduing is what we witness God doing in this creation poem—God takes erev and moves it to boker. God sooths what is tohû wabohû, what is self-destructive and disordered, and leads it to functional goodness. If you want to think of it one way, noticing the autonomy God gives things in the creation poem, to subdue is not about bringing things under our control, but about restoring their self-control.

So, ‘to have dominion and subdue’ is not about domination and exploitation. It’s about protecting and caring.

In case we miss this—the same thing is repeated again within Genesis 2. God forms humanity (Adam) out of the dust of the earth (Adamah)—those two words already speak of an important bond and kinship between ourselves and the planet. And God gives Adam a job to do: Adam is to till and keep the garden (v 15). Again, the Hebrew words are ‘bd(as in Obed) and šmr (pronounced Shamar).  We translate them, till and keep, but there’s more to them. ‘bd (to till) means to serve, and it implies ‘to have a respect for’. And šmr (to keep) is not a possessive ‘keep’, it means to protect: to look after.[iv] If you’re an American police officer, the words ‘to serve and protect’ are taken as an oath, but they apply to us and our stewardship of the Earth.

Often, we’ve thought the world was just our play thing, something disposable—and, in certain Christian theologies—something God has given us to do whatever we like with. But these two terms echo Genesis 1; we’re given dominion, but we’re not called to be dominant. Our authority has parameters to it. We are to enhance creation, care for it, help it function and flourish—that’s our mandate as stewards under God. They do not permit us to exploit it, plunder it, or rape it.

Like the understanding of society of old, we can take from the Earth, but it’s not just taking—it’s also taking care of the Earth.

GARDENERS

What does this mean for us practically?

Well, we could make a huge list, I suppose. We could talk about taking global warming seriously; we could talk about the dangers of our consumer and throw-away culture; we could talk about litter and the plastic pandemic, and ethical sustainable produce, etc.,

All good things. All important and urgent conversations. Maybe you could talk about those things in your life groups, and about how we can practically take care of our world and the life it is home to.

Of course, I find myself at a dilemma, because I’m not really a fan of wasps—so I need to pray about that.

The problem I have, though, is that, if all this just becomes about imposing rules upon people, then we don’t really get to the heart of the problem. If our problem is dominance, then dominating people does not rectify that.

It has to start with our own thinking, our own hearts—it starts with our viewpoint, our theology.

If we think God doesn’t care about the planet and only cares about us (people), then we’ve got to allow God’s Spirit to move upon us. Paul writes, in Roman’s 8: 21, ‘that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to death and decay… that the whole of creation has been groaning… and that we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, [also] groan along with it…’

So maybe this has to start with us turning our ears away from the churning cogs of our industrial society, and with us listening instead to the groaning of God’s Spirit for our world.

What I do know is that God is already up to something that heals and restores our world—something that connects both our society and our ecology. That resurrection life is about reclaiming and restoring our world.

The Old Testament prophets spoke of a day when God will reign, and when Nations will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spear into pruning hooks (Isaiah 2: 4, Micah 4: 3). I love that imagery, and I find it pertinent to what I’ve been talking about these past two weeks. Last week I was speaking about the warring fractures and hostility in our world, and this week, our extractive view of the environment. Both these things relate to one another in numerous ways. However, what the prophet’s promise is a time when humanity will repent of its infighting and return to its vocation of tending and keeping the earth.

In the book of Acts (3: 19-21), Peter preaches, ‘Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah appointed for you, that is, Jesus, who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets.’ (NRSV)

‘The time of universal restoration…’, Peter announces. That time, as Revelation 21:5 powerfully says it, when God ‘makes all things new’, not ‘all new things’. Restoration. Renewal. Creation and humanity set free.

We’re waiting for that finale, but it’s not a passive waiting. God, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, has already launched that project; God is moving us once again from tohû wabohû into flourishing life, and we are to participate in with that. Jesus taught us to pray, ‘Let your Kingdom come, on Earth, as it is in Heaven.’ This prayer is not some platitude; it is to be formational in our natures, directional to our expression. The Kingdom of God is not about abandoning our planet, but about God’s reign of our world. As Paul expresses it, ‘God’s secret plan has now been revealed to us… that at the right time [God] will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth.’ (Ephesians 1:9-10, NLT. Italics mine)

As people who recognise the centrality of Jesus in our world, as those who are participating in what God is up to, for those of who acknowledge the authority of Christ, then maybe there should be developing within our lives a deep and tender concern for what belongs to God.

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[i] Asa Briggs, The Power of Steam: An Illustrated History of the Worlds Steam Age, p.72

[ii] If you want to read further on this, then I’d highly recommend Naomi Klein’s, This Changes Everything.

[iii] These insights come from Covenant and Conversation: Genesis: The Book of Beginnings, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, p. 52.

[iv] There are a number of books that share this insight, but to mention two: God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, by Phyliss Trible, p.85. Old Testament Theology: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, by Walter Brueggemann.