“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds,” wrote Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949.
Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.[1]
You don’t need to be an expert in ecology to know that we live in a world of wounds, and to know that many of them are human-caused. There’s a growing consensus among scientists that Earth has entered the Anthropocene — the first epoch to be defined by the overwhelming impact of humans on Earth’s vital systems. Most of the geological epochs of the past 4.6 billion years have lasted millions of years each, but human beings are now affecting the conditions of life everywhere, and we have done so in what is, in the Earth’s history, the blink of an eye. The Anthropocene is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when fossil-fueled industrialisation accelerated dramatically. “For a long time, environmentalists were hampered by having to urge action against threats that were largely invisible or so dispersed that the underlying pattern could be denied,” Camilla Cavendish wrote a week ago in the Financial Times.
The community believed itself well and did not want to be told otherwise.
But climate change is no longer theoretical: it’s here. And it’s no longer something that happens elsewhere, to other people. We can all see it in the weather patterns, in wildfires, in the hottest summer on record.[2]
In a way, we’re merely waking up to what we have known for ages, and what some humans have pointed out with prophetic urgency, while others dismissed it as wildly exaggerated, too restrictive, or out of step with the times. The community that wants to believe itself well does not want to be told otherwise.
According to the biblical witnesses, human beings have a unique calling in God’s creation. We were created in the image of God to subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing on the land, in the sea, and in the air.[3] We were indeed created for global impact, but dominion, although it may sound so very similar to domination, has nothing to do with it. Domination seeks to force its own vision upon the world, turning everything and everyone into means to self-serving ends. Dominion seeks to know and serve God’s vision for creation; dominion is about letting be, about seeing with kind attention, about naming the wonders, about caring for God’s creation as agents of God’s dominion. When human beings don’t know our place in creation, our dominion becomes abusive and destructive tyranny.
We are meant to serve as God’s agents, but we prefer operating without covenant obligations. In our sacred texts, this distortion of our relationship with God is called sin: the desire to be human without God, and its effects, which include further distortions in how we relate to each other, to the whole creation, and to ourselves. We choose self-assertion over love, and instead of serving God, we serve what Paul calls “the flesh.”
“Living ‘according to the flesh’ is to live for that which is transient, pursuing self-interests at the expense of others, and ignoring the presence of God,” is how one scholar describes the term. It is “a metaphor for the human tendency to seek and to possess all that brings immediate and imminent satisfaction to one’s own self. [And] the consequence of this way of living [, according to Paul,] is death.”[4] It’s like rushing into a dead-end-street, pretending it’s the freeway to a better, fuller life.
The impact, though, goes far beyond the ones doing the pretending, and not just since the beginning of the Anthropocene. Listen to this lament by the prophet Hosea,
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.[5]
The land mourns, and all who live in it languish, because human beings live “according to the flesh.” “How long will the land mourn, and the grass of every field wither?” Jeremiah cries out.[6] And Isaiah laments, “The heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have … broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth.”[7] A curse devours the earth; don’t we know it.
In Romans 8, Paul writes that
the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.[8]
It’s not just human beings who cannot fully be, under the reign of sin and death, who we were made to be: the whole creation is waiting, because its freedom is tied to ours.
We know, says Paul, “we know that the whole creation has been groaning until now.” Groaning—but God is a God of life and blessing, and God will do redemptive work, should those gifts be endangered. And freeing people to be what they were created to be is characteristic of God’s redemptive work. It is a deliverance, not from the world, to some otherworldly plane, but to true life in the world.[9] Israel knows this because groaning under the yoke of slavery they cried out, and God heard their groaning, and made a way for them out of bondage in Egypt.[10] And the church knows this because God raised Jesus from the dead, making a way for humanity out of bondage to sin and death. And what God did for Israel, what God did for Jesus, God will do not only for those who are in Christ but for the whole created order.[11] Humanity’s freedom from bondage to sin and death and creation’s freedom from bondage to decay go hand in hand.
Christ has made us his own, and led by his Spirit, we enter ever more deeply into our transformation into the image of Christ, finally becoming true and faithful image bearers of God. The gift of the Spirit disturbs and disrupts what was previously a settled pattern of pride and denial. Those whom Christ has made his own, who pray with him, “Abba, Father” are weaned from the drugs that kept reality at arm’s length from them, as James Dunn put it so well.
Believers are being saved not from creation but with creation … Having the Spirit does not distance believers from creation but increases the solidarity of believers with creation.[12]
We rediscover who we were meant to be all along: caring agents of God’s dominion. Joyful participants in the communion of Creator and creation.
Paul calls the gift of the Spirit “the first fruits,” which announces the beginning of harvest season. The term echoes the joy of tasting the first homegrown tomato after long months of waiting. It sounds like hearing the opening bars of life’s redemption song, the great song of freedom for all of creation. Paul speaks of the great harvest of redemption for which the life of Jesus was the seed. The gift of the Spirit is the first fruits, the first taste, the first glance of the redeemed creation. And the gift of God’s Spirit kindles in us a burning restlessness that cannot put up with the world as it is. First fruits – we know there’s more where that came from, and we lean forward into that promise. That’s what our hope is, a leaning forward into the promise of resurrection for all of creation. And that is no facile hope. Audrey West writes,
This is hope as a woman in labor hopes: breathing through the pain, holding tight to a companion, looking ahead to what cannot yet be seen, trusting that a time will come when this pain is but a memory.[13]
Many of us struggle to hope like that amid the daily avalanche of life-draining news. But we are not alone – never alone in this world of wounds. God abides with the creation that waits with eager longing for the revealing of a humanity that will honor its calling as agent of God’s dominion. And God abides with the church in our desire to live, not according to the flesh, but led by the Spirit of Christ. God is not watching the drama of redemption from a distance, but doing the work, groaning with us, and inspiring us to trust the way of Christ and the pattern of his life, because it is the way to fullness of life for all.
We do live in a world of wounds. Three years ago, Bill McKibben wrote,
The battle is not just to swap out coal for sun; it’s to swap out a poisoned and unfair world for one that works for everyone, now and in the future. Of course, no matter what we do now, we’ve waited too long to prevent truly massive trauma. Already we see firestorms without precedent, storms stronger than any on record, Arctic melt that’s occurring decades ahead of schedule. We’re losing whole ecosystems like coral reefs; we have heat waves so horrible that in places they take us to the limits of human survival. Given the momentum of climate change, even if we do everything right from this point on those effects will get much worse in the years ahead, and of course their impacts will be concentrated on those who have done the least to cause them, and are most vulnerable. That means there is another area we need to be working hard: building the kind of world that not only limits the rise in temperature, but also cushions the blow from that which is no longer avoidable. … We’re going to need human solidarity on an unparalleled level, and right now that seems a long ways away.
The biggest challenge we face in moving toward resilience, sustainability and healing in this world of wounds is not technical; it’s not even economic or political; it is the oldest challenge human beings have known: to live, not “according to the flesh,” but as fellow members of the household of God.
In grace, God has freed us from the tyranny of sin and death. In grace, we are finally free to welcome one another as agents of God’s dominion of love. And in this welcome, all living things will find fullness of life.
[1] Quoted by Curt Meine https://blog.oup.com/2017/01/130-years-aldo-leopold/
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/c283bb9c-1a67-4659-830d-98580fef2900
[3] Genesis 1:26-28
[4] Arland Hultgren http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2365
[5] Hosea 4:1-3
[6] Jeremiah 12:4
[7] Isaiah 24:4-6
[8] Romans 8:18-21
[9] Terence Fretheim, “The Reclamation of Creation: Redemption and Law in Exodus,” Interpretation 45, 359; my italics.
[10] Exodus 2:23f.
[11] See N.T, Wright, Romans, NIB, 590.
[12] James Dunn in Romans and the People of God, Sven K. Soderlund and N. T. Wright, eds. (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 1999), 87-88.
[13] Audrey West http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1306