Greetings, Earthlings!

Psalm 104:24-34, Romans 8:18-25

Here we are on the last Sunday of August, and I am still preaching on your Summer Sermon Suggestions. Someone from the congregation asked me to preach on the environment and our commitment to the earth. In Christian circles this is sometimes called creation spirituality:  the God of Nature and Nature’s God. It is one of my favorite topics. Lots of people feel close to God when they are in nature, and the Scriptures confirm that God communicates through the created order. Theologians call it natural revelation or general revelation. I usually preach on this topic when I am preaching outdoors, which I don’t have too many opportunities to do. In my last church I we had an annual church picnic and outdoor worship service one Sunday in June, and this was always my theme. This year we had a worship service in Sandwich Notch at Pulpit Rock. Since I was standing on a big rock, I talked in part about the geology of the region and the vast expanses of time that geologists speak of – millions and billions of years compared to the decades we use when measuring the human life span. Today I am going to talk about our relationship to the earth from a Christian perspective.

1. My first point is that we as humans are the earth … literally. The Hebrew word in the OT for human being is adam. We get the proper name Adam from it. It is the feminine form of the word adamah, which means earth or ground. The English word human is from the Latin word humus, which means earth or ground. We are literally earthlings. We are earth. The creation story in Genesis says that our bodies were formed from the earth, and they will return to the earth at death. In Genesis 3 God said to Adam: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return.” Ecclesiastes 3 echoes that, “All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust.”

Sometimes we talk about ourselves as if we were separate from and different from the earth, as if we were aliens to this earth. We talk about coming into this world and we go out of this world. But the truth is we do not come into it or leave it. We emerged from earth and are made of earth. We are the earth. We are all earthlings. I am stressing this point, so that when we get to talking about our responsibility to the earth, we realize that we are actually talking about our responsibility to ourselves. It is not us over against the earth, as if these were two competing claims. They are the same. We are one. We are the earth.

Almost thirty years ago in 1985 Michael Jackson wrote the song, “We are the World.” Do you remember that? He and Lionel Richie wrote the song and got a bunch of celebrities to sing it together to raise money for Africa. It says “We are the world. We are the children.” And it goes on to talk about how we are all part of God’s one big family. They were talking about the human family, but the truth is that DNA has showed that all creatures on this earth are related genetically. We are all from the earth. We are the earth. You could say that we are the earth conscious of itself and conscious of its Maker. We are creation conscious of the Creator. It is mind-boggling even to think about this. We are conscious earth. We are earth.

2. Second, God became earth. I am referring here to the doctrine we call the incarnation – that God becoming human in Jesus Christ. Normally when Christians talk about God’s creation, we stress the difference between the Creator and the creation. This is true. But it also is true that the two became one in Jesus Christ. God became human in Jesus. Creator became creation. Christians believe that God did not just inhabit the body of the man Jesus as an immortal Spirit entering into and possessing a human vessel. We believe that God actually became man in Jesus. There is a big difference between those two ideas. Christianity has always affirmed that God became man. God did not just come into the world in Jesus. God became a part of the world in Jesus. God became enfleshed in Christ. We could use other language and say that God became inearthed in Jesus. This claim of Christianity is really amazing when we ponder it for a moment.

3. Third, God communicates through the earth. One of the basic ideas in Christianity is revelation – the idea that God communicates. God is not a silent distant impassive deity. God speaks. He speaks through the natural world. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” A couple of weeks ago, on a Monday might Jude and I went up to the top of Wentworth Hill about 10:30 at night and sat in the field and watched the annual Perseid meteor shower. It was great. Who would not be filled with awe when gazing into the starry heavens on a clear night? “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” The apostle Paul says: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” God communicates in the natural order.

God also communicates through his prophets and supremely in Jesus Christ. The Letter to the Hebrew begins with the words: “God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son.” That is why the apostle John calls Jesus “the Word” in his gospel. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Words are means of communication. God communicates to earth through earth.

We all have seen video footage or photos of the Allen Telescope Array, run by the SETI Institute near Mt. Shasta, huge radio telescopes pointing up into the heavens. It is a field of enormous ears directed to the heavens, which for years has been listening for any possible evidence of communication from intelligent life in the universe.  Apparently there have been some budget problems funding this project in the last couple of years, but that is not my point. My point is that we are listening for a message from the heavens. But the Intelligent Creator of the universe is communicating to us all the time, and much closer to home, and we don’t need radio telescopes to hear this communication. God communicates through nature around us, through the prophets whose writings are in scripture, and supremely through his Son Jesus Christ.

God communicates to us through the earth. You could say that the earth is sacramental. When we think of the earth as communicating the divine then every part of nature is like a sacrament. Christianity has traditional sacraments – like the Lord’s Supper and baptism. The water and bread and wine are said to communicate God in a special way. But in fact the whole creation is sacramental. It all communicates God if we will just open our ears and eyes. When we see the earth in this way as sacramental, then it is sacred. One does not destroy or abuse or misuse that which you consider to be sacred. This attitude changes the way we see the world.

4. Fourth, the Scripture says that the Earth waits for us. Our epistle Lesson says, “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

Listen to how Peterson’s translation put it: “The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.” Then Peterson goes on to develop a pregnancy theme even more. He translates the next four verses this way: “All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.”

It is an amazing idea, that the creation is pregnant and posed to give birth to something new. And that something new is us. Not just the old earthy creation, these bodies of made of dirt that will return to dirt. But there will be a new creation. The apostle John speaks about a new heaven and a new earth in the Book of Revelation. The apostle Peter says, “But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.”

The creation is waiting for something more than we now know. It is waiting for God to renew the creation, and it is waiting for us the children of God to be revealed. I don’t know exactly what this means. In part it means resurrection – which I will get to in a moment. And it also means that the earth and God are waiting for us to live up to our responsibility as children of God. The Genesis story makes it clear that humans were put on this earth as caretakers of creation – to tend and care for it. It says we are to have dominion over the earth. That is a good thing. Many people have taken this to mean something back - that humans can use it any way we want regardless of whether it is harmful to the earth. That is not what it means. It means we are to use it the way God wants. We are stewards, not owners of the earth. We are the resident managers. We are accountable to the owner of the property, who is God. Jesus tells a lot of parables about stewards who abuse their position, and are held accountable when the Owner returns.

You cannot get a more environmentally friendly worldview than that presented by the Old and New Testaments. You would not know that by listening to some people badtalk the Bible and Christianity. Some environmentalists blame environmental destruction on the Western spiritual tradition. They accuse Genesis of giving humans permission to abuse and destroy the earth for economic gain. That is twisting scripture for a political purpose. The Scripture never says anything like that. It says just the opposite! The consistent testimony of scripture from beginning to end, from the creation to the new creation, from Eden to the New Eden, is that the earth is the Lord’s. He loves the world and cares for it and has placed us here to be caretakers of it. To sin against the creation is to sin against the Creator. Even murder is placed in that context in Genesis when killing humans is forbidden because it is understood as an attack on God, because man is made in the image of God. Human life is sacred and all life is sacred.

Scripture admits that things have gone bad, both in the created order and the human order. It has gone so bad that God is going to have to step in and fix this mess that we have made of ourselves and the earth. That is the vision of the New Heavens and the New Earth. That is God cleaning up our environmental mess. The promise of the resurrection is part of this. In biblical thought we do not just escape the world through death, like immortal spirits fleeing a burning house to take refuge in e heavenly kingdom. Our scriptures talk about resurrection of the body and resurrection of the heavens and the earth. This earth and everything in it is redeemed in the biblical story. We are not saved from the earth. The earth itself is saved. We as part of the earth are saved with the earth. The Bible presents a very earthy description of salvation and the ultimate redemption of this universe.

In the end we are the earth. We are formed from the earth and return to the earth. Our job is to tend and care for the earth as stewards of God. We are held accountable by the Creator for how we fulfill our assignment. And our ultimate fate is connected intimately to the earth. And we are redeemed with the earth in the resurrection in the last day, when all creation will hear these words, “Behold, I make all things new!”