Sermon from October 31, 2004

In the winter of 1998 I buried Jimmy Long. He was seven years old. I met him at his house. His parents had come to BVBC and had invited me to their home to get to know Jimmy. He didn’t have long to live.

He was precocious. He could talk the hind leg off a donkey in his high-pitched, child’s voice. He could also operate the morphine pump that his oncologist had strapped around his waist. He knew when the pain became hard to take, and he accepted the narcotic relief. I prayed with him and his parents. I never saw him alive again.

The memorial service took place at Jimmy’s elementary school in Marcus Hook. All those children and their parents and teachers gathered in the gym. It was an awkward place to speak. It was a place meant for sports not grief. The sound echoed. The line of sight to people’s eyes was often blocked. I hardly knew anyone. I don’t even remember what I said. Soon after, the Longs moved away. I’ve never seen them again.

Jimmy had been born near Toms River, NJ. His family and many others lived near a hazardous waste site. No one ever proved a link between Jimmy’s cancer and the hazardous waste buried near his home. But a disproportionate number of children in that area got cancer. The parents made the connection.

An experience like that makes the dangers of hazardous waste more real than a thousand sound bites on the evening news. An experience like that also makes me sit up and pay attention when a university professor says publicly that Christianity is to blame for our environmental crisis.

In 1967 Lynn White, a professor of cultural history at UCLA, wrote an influential paper called, "Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." He said this: "Christianity ... insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.... Somewhat over a century ago science and technology ... joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.... Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone" (http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/lwhite.htm).

Those are serious charges. What I cherish and preach is being implicated in the death of Jimmy Long, and it didn’t cost Professor White any tears to sit in his privileged seat at UCLA and make those charges. Before he published his essay, I wonder if he entertained dissenting ideas from theologians and church historians who knew more than he did, to see if there might be a more nuanced way to understand the environmental issues that were surfacing in the ’60s. Was he competent to pass judgment on 2000 years of Christian theology in nine pages?

His paper offered no solution to our environmental crisis, and it became a stick with which to beat the Christian dog. The Christian doctrine of creation speaks to issues of the environment. It is worth hearing what it says in light of Professor White’s criticism of Christianity as the root of our environmental crisis.

Is Subduing Creation Sin?
The most striking omission in White’s essay is that he talked about the ecological evils of science and technology, but he never said a word about their benefits. He never admitted the benefits people have enjoyed from science and technology. He caricatured a complex reality. He made nature innocent and science evil. He also wrote in a learned fashion about Christian ideas, but at bottom he had a deficient understanding of the Christian doctrine of creation. For example, he implied strongly that man’s mastery of nature is evil. Let’s look more closely at that assumption. Is subduing God’s creation to human uses a sin?

Our Christian doctrine of creation teaches that the heavens and the earth serve as the setting in which God intends to be united in covenant love with man. Humans hold this exalted place, because God made them in His image. He implanted in man a measure of His mind, will, power and freedom. That is why we can discover and use the created powers of nature for human benefit.

Participation in the mind of God gives us the capacity to grasp the underlying order and structure of creation. Central to this understanding is our ability to represent the physical world mathematically. Thousands of equations measure the behavior of matter – everything from sub-atomic particles to planetary orbits to a skidding car on a dark road.

Science, as we know it, came into its own, when scientists began to use mathematics and experimentation to understand creation. In a special way, scientists, mathematicians, engineers and technicians are trustees of God’s creation.

Of course scientists were not content just to understand creation. The more they understood how it worked, the more they wanted to harness its powers for human use. We often refer to this as "man’s conquest of nature." Before you call this mastery is evil, ask yourself how thankful you felt for the amoxicillin that relieved your own or your child’s ear infection. Ask yourself how good it feels on a winter night to be all snug in your warm house. You get the idea.

God created this astounding harmony between human thought and the underlying order and structure of the physical world. As a result, science and technology bring healing and safety and pleasure and wealth to billions of people on earth. If such blessing comes from the Christian understanding of creation, then Christianity should get the credit. It is hard to dismiss a faith that can bless the world like this as "Christian arrogance toward nature."

The Meaning of Nature
Nevertheless, we do have serious environmental issues. Shall we lay the blame for them on Christian doctrine? On the contrary, I believe the Christian doctrine of creation offers a fruitful approach to the causes of ecological distress.

I need for you to be patient with me at this point. We Americans can be impatient with ideas. We prefer action. But ideas are powerful; they determine action. I find the Christian doctrine of creation helpful, because it exposes the idea that lies behind the environmental disasters we are now familiar with. Let me show you what I mean.

People make a variety of conflicting statements that invest the word nature with different meanings. For example, when the guy comes to your door to solicit money to save the whales, he is presenting nature as the innocent victim of human technology and human greed. But when Hurricane Charley floods basements and drowns neighbors, people demand more money and better technology to protect against the "ravages of nature." Certain theologians have said that a divine being made the universe, and then left it to run by itself, like some giant machine. Some scientists liked the idea of nature as a machine, dropped the idea of a divine being, and began to tear the machine apart to see how it works. In a familiar image, people call nature a mother that suckles her children.

So, what is nature: a victim of human folly, a threat to human life, a machine or a mother? It all depends on what a person believes about the world. We should never hear the word nature without asking what the person means by it. And which meaning should govern all the others?

We Christians see value in all these ideas of nature, but ultimately, we view nature as God’s creation. Where other people say, "nature," we say, "creation." When we say, "nature," we mean, "creation." And we say that this meaning governs all the others.

Some will say, "But that’s a faith statement." Yes, but so is the statement that nature is innocent, or nature is savage, or nature is a machine, or nature is a mother. They are all faith statements, all interpretations of nature. Why shouldn’t the Christian view be heard in public discourse along with every other point of view? Why shouldn’t Christians point out that viewing nature as a machine has a lot to do with our environmental crisis?

Let me justify that accusation from an officially atheistic point of view. The Soviet historian, M. N. Pokrovsky, wrote this: "It is easy to foresee that, in the future, when science and technology have achieved a perfection which we are as yet unable to visualize, nature will become nothing more than wax in our hands, which we are free to cast in whatever form we please" (McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature, 117-118).

That is arrogance toward nature, but it is not Christian arrogance. It came from an ideology that rejected the Christian faith. It no longer saw nature as a trust from God. It is nothing but wax in our hands to be shaped any way we wish. How different is that from the attitude toward "nature" that dominates secular, Western thinking?

Protecting the Creation
The Christian idea is that those who wield the powers of nature are trustees of God’s creation. Protecting what God created belongs to that trust just as much as discovery and uses of its powers. We can anchor the protection of creation in Scripture. The mandate of creation, pity for the creation, and the New Jerusalem teach us to do that.

Genesis 2:15 gives the divine mandate to protect the creation. The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. Taking care of the Garden of Eden before sin entered the world was man’s responsibility. The Hebrew word translated take care of it includes notions of watching, guarding and preserving. In fact, in 1 Samuel 28:2 the same word is translated as bodyguard.

The idea of exploiting the creation for human benefit has caught our fancy ever since Copernicus made the sun stood still. For 200 years we have pulled the creation apart to see how it works and how to make it work for us. In the last 40 years we have begun to take better care of the creation. We have to guard and preserve it. God’s mandate to do so has been there all along. It’s not God’s fault that we took so long to catch on.

Another incentive to guard and preserve the physical creation is pity. It finds expression, scripturally, in the memorable words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:22. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. I learned this lesson best from my family’s pity on the suffering of animals.

I remember my grandmother (with my mother’s full support) taking in day-old kittens whose mother had been killed. I watched her feed them with a dropper. She warmed bricks and wrapped them in cloth so that the kittens would have a warm place on winter days. I heard the way my family talked with tenderness about them.

It can be a short step from pity for suffering animals to pity for inanimate creation that is ravaged by human carelessness. And when pity turns into indignation, it gives birth to an activist and a movement and a change of social consciousness. Not many of us can be activists, but we can all learn pity for a creation that groans as in childbirth.

Here is a third incentive to take care of the creation God has entrusted to us. Did you ever live for a time in a rental property? If you did, when finally moved out of rented quarters and into your first home, what shape did you leave the rental property in? If you failed to take care of it, you may be less disposed to hear what I say next. If you treated that rental property like it was your own, you’ll get the point.

In Isaiah 65:17 God says, "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind." Hebrews 11:10 says that Abraham was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Both physics and theology give us reasons to believe this universe will come to an end. The Christian faith teaches that God will bring a new one into existence. In light of this how should we treat the earth, our present home in this universe? Shall we trash it? Or shall we treat it like it was our own?

I believe we should treat it like it was our own, and Revelation 22:24-26 shows why. In the New Jerusalem the nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

Like Robinson Crusoe, it seems that we will bring treasures out of the wreck of the old creation into the new creation God will make for us. There will be continuity between this world and the world to come. Why don’t we treat the present world like we will want to treat the next? Here are some simple ideas of how to do that.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
First, recycle. That seems like small change compared to the nuclear and genetic realities we face; but it is within reach, and a nation recycling would make a huge difference to the environment.

Second, if you have a say in corporate or political decision-making, remember to take care of the earth. EPA rules are very strict, but what happens when EPA is not looking? Many of you do business internationally. Don’t forget environmental concerns, as you help businesses in developing nations establish policy.

Third, can we learn to live more simply? I don’t know how that will always look, except that it will curb our acquisitiveness, and that will help the environment. I am pretty sure that Christian simplicity comes from listening "to that voice deep inside you, which amid the surfeit and vanity (is) stifled by the roar from outside" (Gulag, II, 605). That voice says: Seek first the kingdom of God. Love the Lord your God with all your heart. Take hold of that for which Christ took hold of you. Take up your cross.

Do you remember the summer of 2003, when a major power failure turned off the lights for millions of people in the Northeast? For a day coal-powered sources of energy did not operate. In those 24 hours, the skies over the Northeast turned remarkably clear. One lesson from that is to remember the power God put into creation to renew itself.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
By Gerard Manley Hopkins