This is the sermon I shared with the good people of Myers Park Baptist Church on April 27, 2014 for their observance of Earth Day.
Nikola
called me on the phone last week to talk with me about plans to celebrate Earth
Day here in Charlotte. Rarely do I speak with someone with so much passion for
a cause she believes in. In the course of our conversation she asked me a
question that continues to rattle in my brain. It’s deeply troubling and I
don’t know how to answer it. She asked, “Why is it that Christians have so
little interest in caring for the environment?”
Actually,
it’s a painful question. You’d think that Christians would be leading the
charge as stewards of God’s creation. And some are, as you well know here at
Myers Park. But generally speaking, most aren’t.
Perhaps you cringed along with
me last week when four candidates for the senate were asked about climate
change in a debate and they all agreed that climate change is a myth. One
candidate, who is the pastor of a prominent uptown church in a denomination
that will go unnamed, scoffed, “God controls the climate.” So, that's his excuse for doing nothing.
What’s
even more disturbing, though, is that so many of us who have no doubt that our
civilization is headed toward an irreversible collapse seem to proceed as if it
isn’t happening. It’s puzzling. After all, the first commandment in the
Scriptures is to care for creation. Wait, that’s not exactly true according to
Genesis 1. To be completely accurate, the first commandment was to be fruitful
and multiply. Through the centuries, that one hasn’t been much of a problem for
us. But it’s followed by, “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the
birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” And
this one has been more of a challenge.
Well,
unless we think that having dominion over means to overpower, oppress and
obliterate. Then we’ve done well. But, of course, that’s not at all what it means.
Yes, having dominion implies that there is a hierarchy in creation. But it’s
not a hierarchy of self-serving privilege; it’s a hierarchy of responsibility.
As that part of creation created in the image of God, humans have the unique
responsibility of caring for all that our Creator made to be good. No other
part of creation has the ability to preserve and restore creation that humans
do. And no other part of creation has the ability to destroy it that humans do.
Of all people, surely we Christians know that. And yet, our responsibility as
keepers of creation is such a low priority for us. Why?
It’s
not an easy question to answer, and no doubt there are many reasons. Today I want
to focus on an underlying theological problem so pervasive in our Christian
culture that we may not even notice it, much like the proverbial fish oblivious
to the water it’s swimming in.
Last
summer I went on a bus tour that started in Phoenix and went to the Grand
Canyon, winding its way up to Zion National Park. I did it with my then 34-year-old
daughter, Gretchen.
When
we had our orientation meeting with the group we would be traveling with for
the next eight days, it took me all of one minute to figure out which person
on the bus was going to drive me up a wall. Her name was Janis. She was a
retired high school principal, so she had at least a Master’s degree. I have to
mention that because it makes the things that came out of her mouth even more
unbelievable. She had no filter and blurted out whatever she was thinking. Like
when we were driving through a town settled by the Mormons and every time she
saw a satellite dish on the roof of a house, she shouted out “No Mormons living
there!” How did she know that? Well, because Mormons don’t have T.V.s, of
course. She was confusing Mormons with the Amish, which she continued to do
throughout the trip. I wanted to say, “Really? So, Mitt Romney and the Osmonds
don’t own T.V.s?” But I kept my mouth shut because I had decided the first day that
the only way I was going to cope with Janis was by thinking of her as a
character on a sit-com and just laughing at the things she said. So, I laughed
a lot. And turned to my daughter Gretchen and rolled my eyes.
My
coping mechanism worked pretty well until one afternoon when it became
impossible for me. There was a man on
our bus who was a surgeon from Chicago. He originally came from India and his
name was Ram. So, Janis goes up to
Ram and she says, “Ram. What kind of a name is that?” Ram explained to her that
it was a Hindu name.
Janis’s
eyes popped right out of their sockets. “You’re a Hindu?!” She was clearly
shocked. Ram told her he was. And then she came back with a question that
seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air: “Have you ever thought about becoming a
Christian?”
“Why
would I want to do that?” Ram asked.
Everyone
on the bus was listening at this point. And as someone who considers herself a
Christian, I was desperately searching for Janis’s on-off switch, hoping there
might be a way to shut her down. But she kept going. And here’s how she
answered Ram when he asked her “Why would I want to… [become a Christian]?”
She
said: “So when you die you can go to heaven with all of us.”
Yes,
she really said that. And no, I didn’t laugh. Nor did I look at my daughter and
roll my eyes. I had to speak. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I
couldn’t let that one go. Really? This man should consider abandoning his life-long
faith and becoming a Christian? And the reason why he should do that is so when
he dies he can go to heaven with all us Christians? Really?! For Ram, I suspect
the thought of spending eternity with people like Janis wasn’t sounding like
much of a draw.
Actually,
her words shouldn’t have come as such a suprize to me. I know that a lot of
Christians think that way. I guess I was just shocked to hear one of them
saying it out loud like that.
What
is the deal with this obsession we Christians have with heaven?
We
love to read about it, and sing about it, and speculate about it. The way we
imagine heaven usually says a lot about our own unmet desires. We’re hoping
that in the next life we’ll receive all the good stuff that seems to elude us in this life. We’ll be with all the people we love, and they’ll love us
perfectly. We’ll be able to eat and eat as much as we want and never gain
weight. We won’t have to work. We won’t have to listen to rap music or hip-hop.
I could go on, but you get my point. And, of course, that’s just a North
American’s view of heaven. If you asked people in other parts of the world,
they would describe heaven very differently from the way we think of it. But
the thing is, most people do think of it. Even though anything we can say about
it is purely speculative because there’s only one way to find out what happens
after we die, and that involves, first, dying.
Do
you ever wonder why the idea of heaven is so important to us? Is it because we
have such a fear of dying? Is it because we’re so self-centered that we can’t
imagine a universe without us?
Or
is it because we have to believe that someday we’re all going to pay for what
we’ve done in this life? Or what we’ve not done. Is the possibility of going to
heaven the Great Carrot in the Sky for us as people of faith?
The
Christian church has a long history of using the promise of heaven as a way to
control people. Often with a special emphasis on instilling within them a fear
of the alternative, hell. In the time of Martin Luther, fear tactics were used
by the Church to collect money in exchange for get-out-of-hell-free cards
called indulgences. The most beautiful
cathedral in Rome was built on the fears of people who didn’t want to go to
hell.
Perhaps
even more damaging has been the idea that we don’t need to change anything, but
simply accept things the way they are and trust that someday we’ll all be rewarded
for our trials here on earth. That was the gospel preached to slaves in the
American South. They could be satisfied with their lot in life and be the best
little slaves they could be because one day they’d get their pie-in-the-sky by-and-by.
When
faith is so focused on the afterlife, then the task of evangelism, sharing the
good news about Jesus, is all about helping people get to heaven. The evangelist
will do everything possible to win people for Christ: persuade, pressure, and
even beat them down until they submit to being saved. No tactic is too extreme
because, after all, it all comes from a place of love. Love for the poor
sinners who are bound for hell if the evangelist doesn’t save them. I often wonder
how Christians can be so zealous about saving individuals from hell in the next
life and yet exert so little energy toward saving humanity and the rest of
creation from the preventable devastation of our environment. Ironically, in the
process, we are damning our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren to a
certain hell here on earth.
Can
you see how the Christian faith has become all wrapped up in and around the
idea of heaven? The history of where this came from and how it evolved through
the years is long and complicated. Very little of that history has any
connection to the Scriptures. It’s surprising
how little the Bible actually says about heaven. Even the little it says is
open to a variety of interpretations. Our ideas about heaven aren’t derived as
much from what we read in the Bible as
they are from what we read into the
Bible.
In
the Old Testament, you will be hard pressed to find anything about it. And in
the New Testament, while there is mention of heaven, it is far from the central
focus of Jesus or life among his early followers. If you could conclude
anything from a study of the Bible, it might be that heaven is the icing on the
cake, but certainly not the cake itself. And it’s entirely possible to enjoy
the cake without any icing at all.
Recently,
I reviewed a book that is about to be released by Paul Meier called In Living Color: Heaven. One of the
things I really like about this book is the way the author taps into the
language Jesus actually spoke: Aramaic. This often changes the meaning of texts
that I thought I understood from my English translation of a Greek translation
of an Aramaic translation of the sayings of Jesus. It’s not surprising that the original meaning can get lost along the way.
So,
here’s one of those texts that is at the very core of understanding who Jesus
was and what his ministry was about. Matthew 4:17: “From that time Jesus began
to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” From the very
beginning of his ministry, Jesus came preaching the message that John had preached
before him, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is has come near.”
Jesus
talked a lot about the Kingdom of heaven in the gospel of Matthew. In Luke it's called the Kingdom of God. Matthew
substituted the name of God for heaven, because to use the name of God
like that would have been blasphemous to his Jewish audience. But assuming
Jesus himself used the word God
instead of heaven, he would have used
the Aramaic word for God, Alaha (which
sounds a lot like Allah). In Aramaic,
that word for God meant Oneness or Sacred Unity. And when you think about
it, that’s not a bad synonym for heaven, is it? A state of Oneness or Sacred
Unity.
The
word repent also takes on new meaning
if you go to the spoken language of Jesus. In Aramaic, the root for repent
“suggests something that returns in a circle or spiral to its origins or its
original rhythm.” It is flowing back to what existed in the beginning, to God,
to Alaha, to Unity. It is returning “to the image of God in which you were
created, the time when all things were working together in perfect harmony, the
way it started in the Garden of Eden.” When we do that, the Kingdom of heaven
is surely at hand, Jesus says. (Meier, p. 20)
Jesus
preached that God’s time for bringing unity and harmony to this earth is now.
Not someday after you die. Now. And then, Jesus proceeded, over the next three
years of his life, to show his followers what that looks like. He didn’t spend
his time with them preparing them to go to heaven someday after they died. He
taught them about bringing heaven to this earth while they were yet living.
Even when he showed them how to pray, he taught them to pray that God’s will be
done on earth as it is in heaven.
Fifteen
hundred years later, when Luther wrote his Small Catechism, he explained this
petition of the Lord’s Prayer by saying that surely, God’s will is done on
earth, whether we ask for it or not. But when we pray for God’s will to be done
on earth as it is in heaven, we’re asking that it might also be done in and among us. Prayer is more than wishful
thinking or turning everything over to God and letting ourselves off the hook.
It is committing ourselves to work with and not against God in bringing
creation back to the Unity God intended from the beginning.
Of
course, this has everything to do with the care of creation, doesn’t it? Because
until we get over this obsession we Christians have with heaven, we will never
be convinced that how we treat the earth really matters. We will continue to be
so “heavenly-minded that we’re no earthly good.”
There’s
a hymn that was in the old Lutheran hymnal that goes like this:
I’m
but a stranger here, Heaven is my home;
Earth
is a desert drear, Heaven is my home;
Danger
and sorrow stand, Round me on every hand;
Heaven
is my fatherland, Heaven is my home.
Within
the words of that hymn we find an answer to Nikola’s question, “Why is it that
Christians have so little interest in caring for the environment?” It’s not the
whole answer, by any means. But it’s a huge part of the answer. When we stop
looking to heaven as our home and start looking at our home here on earth as
heaven, perhaps then Christians will shift their focus toward caring for what
our Creator has entrusted to us from the beginning. I’m praying that happens.
And soon.
