God’s Good Earth: A Pastoral/Prophetic Reflection
October 31, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church
Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/qsxK5-CP4xY
Growing up in Baptist churches, I came to understand a certain narrative about what we called the Old Testament. A quick summary of my understanding went like this:
God made a covenant with human beings, promising to bless them and sustain them as they promised to live by God’s rules which are summed up in the Ten Commandments. But the humans didn’t keep their promise. They broke the covenant over and over again in spite of all the leaders and prophets who God sent to guide them and warn them of the consequences of their actions. Eventually God realized that humans were never going to live up to their part of the covenant, so Jesus came to give us another way.
So, that narrative is basically true, but it leaves out a lot of detail and nuance. One of the effects of that narrative as it was often taught, is that it gives the impression that the humans who failed to keep covenant with God were inherently bad and that we are not. One positive message that I internalized was that Jesus gave us another way out of brokenness, a new covenant. Another more dangerous idea that came in at the same time, was that we would have kept the original covenant because somehow we are better. That idea that Christians are inherently less sinful because God’s grace was extended to us in Jesus is at the heart of anti-Semitism. The idea has caused so much suffering in the world and surely continues to break God’s own heart. Please understand that I am absolutely not putting forth that notion as truth. What I do want to suggest is that we modern people have fallen into a similar trap of breaking covenant. I’m thinking about a covenant that is referenced in scripture, but has not been routinely taught, and certainly not emphasized, among many Christians. I’m thinking of the covenant that God has with the entire creation, with the non-human creatures and with the earth itself. I’m thinking of the ways that human behavior interferes with and diminishes and violates that relationship.
The covenant that comes to mind first for many of us is the covenant God made with Abraham, where God promised a childless Abraham that he would be the father of a multitude and that through him the nations of the world would be blessed. This covenant was re-affirmed with Moses on Mt. Sinai with the giving of the Ten Commandments. One of those commandments was to honor the Sabbath. God’s people became peculiar because they set aside one day in seven for rest. They did so every week from one generation to the next.
Sabbath meant regular rest for everyone. Rich or poor, old or young, landowner or servant, even foreigners in the land got a day off. But Sabbath did not end there. The livestock also got the day to rest. And there’s more. As Ruth read for us, the Sabbath principle also applied to the land. Every seven years, the fields were to be left fallow and the vineyards untended so that they could also rest. In those years, the people could eat whatever the land produced on its own, but they could not sow and till it. And not only people, but also livestock were to eat whatever it produced. And not only livestock, but also wild animals. Israel was commanded to open their fields to creatures that threatened their very lives because God intended for all of creation to participate in covenantal peace and rest. [1] Sabbath-keeping was a tangible sign of God’s covenant with all of creation – people, domestic animals, wild animals and the land.
Another covenant we might remember is the one made with Noah. We see God’s concern for the animals when Noah and his family are charged to keep all of the animals aboard the ark alive. In advance, God told Noah to make sure to take food for his family and also for all the animals. And when it was all over, in Genesis 9, God said, “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth. . . I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” The rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant with the earth and also with humans and animals.
English theologian Robert Murray argues that, out of loving concern for humans and for non-humans, God forms partnerships with both. Murray pushes that idea further saying “if both are God’s covenant partners, how can they not be in some sense covenantally bound to each other?”[2]
If God is in partnership with both humans and non-humans, then it follows that there is a deep relationship between both, a relationship which is more than predator and prey, something intended to be different than an exploitative, extractive interaction. We might remember that even before Eden’s garden was created in Genesis 2, God made the human being out of the ground to tend and keep it. To tend and to keep – this is the fundamental covenant which we humans have largely forsaken.
The prophets are the ones who warned of covenant violations. We tend to remember that they spoke against greed, injustice and oppression of the poor, and going after other gods. But they also preached about the effect that those behaviors had on the rest of creation.
Jeremiah 9 says “Take up weeping and wailing for the mountains, and a lamentation for the pastures of the wilderness, because they are laid waste so that no one passes through, and the lowing of cattle is not heard; both the birds of the air and the animals have fled and are gone. . . .Why is the land ruined and laid waste like a wilderness, so that no one passes through? . . Because they have forsaken my law that I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, or walked in accordance with it, but have stubbornly followed their own hearts and have gone after the Baals . .”
Hosea, that very strange prophet, said it clearly “Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel; for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.” Hosea 4:1-3
A proverb from eastern Africa says “When the elephants fight, the grass suffers.” The way the people lived their lives directly affected the rest of creation. Walter Brueggemann notes the similarities between Hosea’s time and ours. He writes, “The drive for more money leads to displacing people. As the people are displaced, the land goes untended, unloved, un-respected. A little at a time, the land forfeits its will to produce and to multiply, the earth ceases to be fruitful and chaos comes . . .”[3]
I called this a pastoral/prophetic reflection. It is prophetic in the sense that it reminds us of sin and its consequences. But it is pastoral because I know that many of you are already deeply concerned the effects of climate change, the potentially irreversible ways in which humans are damaging God’s good creation. You are already keenly aware of the kinship we share with the planet, our interdependency with human and non-human creation, which some might even call a covenantal relationship. More and more people are reclaiming the role of tending and keeping the creation. Let us give thanks for persistent people everywhere. May we have the courage and faith to stand strong among them. Amen.
[1] Brandon Frick in his dissertation Covenantal Ecology: The Promise of Covenant for a Christian Environmental Ethic https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2104/9238/FRICK-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1
[2] Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (Sweden: Tigris, 2007), p. 102.
[3] Walter Brueggemann, “The Uninflected Therefore of Hosea 4:1-3.” In Reading from This Place, Vol. 1, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) p. 246