Thank you for joining us on this Earth Sunday! My maternal grandparents would have had a lot to share with us; they were farmers in rural Mississippi. They were born at home in the 1890s, before hospitals, electricity, or indoor plumbing had made it to that part of the world. You can’t get much closer to the earth than that! “Pap” was an excellent farmer. He was known in his part of the world for growing really big, sweet watermelons and for the pork sausage he made with lots of spices and flavors.
When you live off the land, you learn quickly to respect it. You know that you are partners with the land. Your part involves hard work and hard-won know-how. Treat the land well, and the odds are that the land will hold up its end of the bargain. You develop a keen awareness of the soil, its richness, its feel and smell. You are very present to the land.
Earth Sunday is about celebrating and understanding our material, physical world. The word “materialism” conjures up an obsession for the latest new thing, being slaves to our stuff. That’s the opposite of spirituality. But our Earth is undeniably a material, physical realm. And the Hebrew scriptures speak of a God who created a very material, very physical universe – and then called it GOOD. A couple of generations ago, C.S. Lewis wrote that the love of material things is not evil – God loves material things; he created them.
There was a group in the second century or so after Jesus – including some who called themselves Christians – who saw the natural world as a prison or a tomb, and they defined salvation as escaping what they saw as this physical realm of misery. So they figured that any God who created this horrible place must be an evil god. They threw out all of the ancient Hebrew scriptures and several parts of the New Testament, anything that spoke of the natural world as good. We call these folks Gnostics, from the Greek word gnosis, which is where we get our word “knowledge.” Gnostics claimed that the right knowledge could help you escape this ugly material world and become pure, beautiful spirit. Some even claimed that Jesus was pure spirit and only appeared to have a physical body with bodily functions like everyone else.
Fortunately, the Church took a different path. It said that salvation isn’t just a head game. It’s not about our knowledge or even our theological opinions. There is no true gospel tradition without a blend of both material and spiritual. We are both. Whenever we choose to focus only on one or the other, we depart from the biblical narrative. If we focus only on the material, ignoring the spiritual, we can become shallow and petty, obsessed with ourselves, disconnected from the image of God at our core. We are not actually present to ourselves or to the world around us. On the other hand, if we focus only on things that are allegedly spiritual and ignore the material realities of life, we run the risk of becoming, as my grandfather might have said, so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good.
Throughout church history, some theologians like Augustine focused so strongly on what they called mankind’s total depravity that they seemed to think that our sin bled over into the natural world, too. But others saw God as profoundly present in the natural world. Celtic Christians, for example, valued God’s creation like few others have. Their prayers focused on the mundane realities of everyday life, milking cows and cooking meals. Here is one Celtic prayer:
O Son of God, perform a miracle for me: change my heart…
It is you who makes the sun bright and the ice sparkle; you who makes the rivers flow and the salmon leap.
Your skilled hand makes the nut tree blossom, and the wheat turn golden; your spirit composes the songs of the birds and the buzz of the bees.
Your creation is a million wondrous miracles, beautiful to behold.
I ask of you just one more miracle: beautify my soul.
Another Celtic prayer claims that “The earth is both majestic and playful, both solemn and joyful; in all this it reflects the One who made it.” That’s not a bad summary for Earth Sunday: the earth reflects the One who made it. Too many Christians practice an almost Gnostic dualism, an “either-or” mentality that falsely distinguishes between our physical world and our spiritual lives, as though we could abuse the earth for our personal convenience and then go cluelessly about our spiritual business.
But we are not Gnostics. We worship the one God, Creator of a reality that is both material and spiritual. The point of our spiritual journeys is to make us more sensitive to God’s presence in this physical world.
The gospels tell us that Jesus took time to rest and focus, heading out to the desert to pray. There’s something about being in nature that can help ground our attention away from our first-world worries. We can return to what’s truly real, an awareness of God’s presence, which is what spirituality is all about. Nature in Jesus’ time and place happened to be a desert, but the same experience happens in a wooded wilderness as well. That’s why our Bee Tree preserve is both a material and a spiritual asset.
A healthy, growing spiritual life, like life on a farm, takes some effort and attention on our part. We can’t afford to sit back, taking no responsibility for ourselves or our world. Genesis 1:26 says that God made us in God’s own image and that we were given “dominion” over every living thing on the earth. Some have said that the word “dominion” makes us the boss. It gives us permission to do whatever we like to this Earth, with no regard for the consequences. But that’s the description of a really bad boss. This understanding of “dominion” has created a polluted and damaged world. Biologists and paleontologists tell us that because of human expansion and activity, we are experiencing our planet’s sixth major extinction event; the last one was the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
I suggest that dominion – like being a good boss – entails stewardship – stewardship of God’s creation. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus tells the Parable of the Talents. A talent was a sizeable sum of money, equal to fifteen years of a laborer’s wages. In this parable, before a wealthy master leaves on a long journey, he entrusts three of his servants to be stewards of a portion of his wealth. Two are good stewards; they boldly cultivate what has been entrusted to them, and they produce healthy growth. They both receive their master’s praise. But a third servant is afraid of the master; he simply buries his one talent in the ground, too afraid to try to improve or increase his trust. This fearful servant is declared to be “worthless” and is thrown into “outer darkness.”
We have the capacity to be good stewards of God’s creation, but we’ve often buried our talent. Over the last century or so, we’ve better understood that we are an integral part of nature. The question we have to ask ourselves as people of faith is, what kind of stewards do we want to be? Can we be stewards of the great natural wealth entrusted to us? Do we protect and nurture it? Or do we bury our responsibility in the ground and ignore it, allowing more of God’s creatures to disappear, poisoning our own air and water?
The Kentucky writer and farmer, Wendell Berry, wrote that our stewardship of the earth involves more than just having the right opinions. Stewardship, like salvation, is not a Gnostic head game. Stewardship takes focused effort and work. We need specific tools and know-how to apply to specific places and situations. Practical, everyday working goodness is far better than highly publicized heroics and good intentions. He wrote that:
“In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship, we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible…to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction…Once we have aligned ourselves with that principle, it is foolish to think that we can control the results.”
Of course, to live, we have to eat. We have to provide ourselves with the necessities of life by taking them from the world around us. By simply existing, we inevitably leave our footprints on this world, whether we like it or not. We daily consume bits of Creation, whether we’re carnivores or vegetarians. Berry reminds us:
“To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”
We are inescapably part of God’s creation. We can’t afford the illusion that we are somehow above it or separate from it. If we ignore creation, if we abuse it, we hurt others and disorient ourselves. We fail to be present to our world and to our own lives. But if we get out into nature, if we treat Creation reverently rather than abusively, we reconnect ourselves with the reality of which we’re a part. We can walk in the woods, camp in the desert, or just plant a tiny garden on a windowsill. We can become more present to our world, to ourselves, and to our Creator.
We can’t avoid leaving our physical and metaphorical footprints on this earth. All creatures do. But we can focus our minds and spirits, and do the work that it takes to be sure that our footprints are compatible with the rest of God’s creation, rather than destructive of both Creation and ourselves.
This Earth Sunday, let’s pledge ourselves to be more present to this marvelous world and to our Creator. In doing so, we will become more present to ourselves. May it ever be so.
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