Creation and Conservation

Excerpts from TCF webinar by Susan Pursell - BA, Primary Dip Ed (Masters), Diploma of Bible and Missions.

(… indicates some text has been omitted. Editing by Pam Griffin)

When I was in primary school there was a show on TV called Captain Planet. If you are a child of the 90s or raised a child in the 90s, it might ring a bell. Captain Planet was a superhero, who with his team of planeteers, responded to various environmental emergencies. So, if there was a massive oil spill or illegal deforestation taking place, Captain Planet and his team would take it on using their special rings that gave them power over the elements. It was action-packed with strong environmental messaging and a mild dose of pantheism on the side.

At the end of each episode, a segment taught children how they could be planeteers to by learning which recycling bin to use and not leaving the lights on. And, as someone who generally put my chip packet in the bin at school, saving the planet seemed achievable. But there was another message being communicated by this series, though unintended. And the message was: That our earth is in great danger due to the neglectful and destructive activities of humans, and it would take someone with superpowers to save it. …

Fast forward thirty years and the environmental concerns of the planeteers are more mainstream than ever. Whether children’s television, the media, climate scientists, or David Attenborough we continue to hear this story about a planet in danger. There are plenty warning us that we are only a few years away from having done irreversible damage to the climate. Some think we passed that point ages ago. That we’re beyond saving.

There are of course more optimistic voices out there - those who think we can still turn things around. If we can just eliminate food waste and work out how to grow more food on less land, if we can switch to 100% renewable energy by yesterday and cease production of all plastics, if we can just develop biotech products to leach carbon from waste and regenerate the soil, reforest the Amazon, and persuade all politicians and corporations to stop acting selfishly, then everything will probably be fine. …

Our secular culture, the TV shows and the media we consume, are telling us a story about our planet. And it’s a grim story to my ears. It’s a story that produces in us and in our students a certain anxiety amongst other emotions. Australian clinical psychologist Leissa Aitken’s recent research paints a grim picture of hopelessness amongst our youth. When surveyed, the majority of young people responded that their best hope for the future was ‘that things won’t get too much worse.’ But we have before us in the Bible a different story. I think the Bible’s story does intersect with the story out there at certain points. But I’m hoping you’ll see it offers something more compelling, more challenging and more hopeful.

To begin with, the Bible’s story differs to the story out there when it comes to the how and why of Planet Earth. Christians believe this planet was no accident, but has a design, and that every atom is infused with purpose because it was set in place by a purposeful personal God. And as Christian teachers we try to lean in here, getting our students to grapple with the ‘spooky’ orderliness of our creation. Learning to categorise and rationalise and theorise is only possible because of the type of universe God created. …

The book of Genesis in the Bible gives us two stories about the creation of the world - or rather the same story but from different angles. And it’s worth having a closer look right now because this is the foundation for what Jesus teaches.

In chapter 1 of Genesis, God simply speaks creation into being. He speaks into the chaos and light, land, sea, sky, vegetation and living creatures appear in perfect order. Then right at the end of this creation story, the narrative seems to slow down as God says: “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So, humans are placed in creation with a special role, an authority over it. … We are rulers. We are masters. And that’s the way God designed it. The way some environmentalists speak, it’s as though humans are an unfortunate plague spreading across the earth. But no, first and foremost, we are the image of God, who is the true Ruler of this creation.

As God’s image-bearers, we bring order to chaos. We come to a wild hostile environment and instead of needing to adapt to survive in it, like the animals, we adapt the environment to support our survival and the needs of our communities. We put up shelters that protect us from the elements and house families for generations. We develop technology and machinery to build roads, tunnels, bridges etc. to connect us to other communities. We turn the wood of the bamboo plant into buttery soft fabric to wrap babies in. We grow mandarins with no seeds in them. We pluck copper out of the earth and somehow work that into a device that allows us to reach into our pockets and get live pictures and audio of a friend on the other side of the globe.

Our capacity to rule, to bring order to the chaos in our surroundings, is unmistakably God-like. But this kind of mastery is not the only sort of ruling God does.

In chapter 2 of Genesis, we get another account of God creating life. And if chapter 1 gave us the big aerial view, chapter 2 gives us the intimate on-the-ground angle. We are right there in the garden with God and he’s scooping up dust off the ground and shaping it into a man and breathing life into his nostrils. And he puts the man in the garden and tells him ‘to work it and take care of it.’ He’s meant to be the master gardener. His first job is to name all the other living creatures. Now this isn’t just a labelling activity. This was the man needing to get to know who he was going to take care of. Giving a name is an act of mastery, yes, but there’s also a noticing, an appreciating going on. Giving a name to something is the beginning of understanding what it is and how it works and how to care for it. …

We are not, as Christian teachers, going to simply name, define, categorise. We are going to find ways to get our students to appreciate and experience awe. …

God doesn’t just rule by mastering the chaos and setting things in place. He rules by sustaining life in moment-by-moment care for the things he has made. He rules by serving his creatures.

We are not just masters in this place. We are servants too. Charged with caring for this creation and these creatures who are made of the very same stuff as we are. Formed out of the ground - both us and the animals.

So, the Bible sets up this picture of our relationship to our environment in its very opening pages. We are both masters and servants of the creation.

But a lot has changed since those early days of God’s creation. In the world I live in today, humans have crossed the line from mastery of the creation to abuse and exploitation. We have crossed the line from service of the creation to cruel neglect and carelessness.

We are the kind of rulers who toss bread to the ducks by the lakeside, right next to the signs pleading for us not to do so. What happened? The next chapter of the Bible holds the answer.

Adam and Eve want the one thing they’ve been denied access to, the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It’s really the tree of ‘calling the shots’ - of deciding for yourself how you will rule, how you will master, without reference to God, the ‘capital M’ Master.

But when they take that fruit, something fundamentally breaks down in the created order.

The man and woman want to rule their own way, rather than ruling in the image-of-God, mastering-serving way. Their relationship with God is severed. They are forced to leave the garden where they were living alongside their Creator. And they are quite literally under a curse.

Imagine that curse as a series of fault lines running all over the place. Because their relationship with the true Master is broken, a fault line forms between the man and the woman. You see that immediately as Adam tries to pin the blame for everything on his wife. There is now hostility between the two people. And another fault line forms beneath our feet. There is now hostility between people and the earth. God says because of what you’ve done, the ground is now cursed. Why is the ground cursed? What did it do wrong?

Well, remember in this story we come from the ground and so do all the living creatures. The breath of God made us distinct from the dust and the animals, but we are still interconnected. That’s why God can say: For dust you are and to dust you will return.

It’s easy for us to look at our environmental problems and only see natural consequences. I think the secular understanding is something like: we’ve put in the wrong inputs (in the form of pollution etc) and now the earth machine is malfunctioning. But unfortunately, it’s worse than that. A deep rift has formed between us and our Creator and the rest of his creation. Why is our environment suffering? Why don’t humans have a perfect relationship with creation? Because we don’t have a perfect relationship with our Creator and because we don’t have a perfect relationship with other humans.

From Romans we read ‘For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it…’ God is ‘the one’ who put the creation under a curse. It was his decision that we would start to feel the effects of that fault line between us and God in an environment that is hostile and impossible to master at times. The writer continues… ‘We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.’ … The earth bears the scars of the violence and abuse between the people who were made to rule and serve it. I would like to see our students making more of a link between relational damage and environmental damage.

Consider this quote from environmental lawyer, Gus Speth: “I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

Selfishness, greed and apathy. Problems that live inside the human heart.

What can we do about this?

As an educator, I’ve watched as over the years, learning about environmental sustainability went from one part of one learning area in the syllabus, to being a ‘cross-curriculum priority’. Now in every learning area, students are made to consider the ramifications of human activity on the environment.

But a greener curriculum and all the Captain Planet episodes in the world will not be able to educate out the selfishness, greed and apathy. … Education and conservation efforts and activism demonstrably fail at times. Now they are great things and don’t for a minute hear me dismissing them. But they are not the saviours they are made out to be.

Thankfully God has provided for us a Saviour. The Bible calls Jesus the ‘new Adam’. He is the one who is the true master and servant of creation who will get it right, not because he’s a conservation expert, but because he has a perfect, unsevered relationship with God the Father and a perfect loving relationship with his fellow humans too. Because there is no selfishness, greed or apathy in his heart. …

How do we live out our role here as masters and servants of creation - in the big decisions and the small?

Well, it’ll give you comfort to know that the Bible isn’t silent on this, but as always, walking with Jesus is not about following rules, but it’s about a heart transformed. …

You’ve probably seen posters or ads for sustainable swaps you can make. Swap your plastic toothbrush for a bamboo one. Swap your plastic hand soap bottles for dissolvable tablets. So many of them are so simple and leave you wondering why we hadn’t done this sooner. Well God says you need to start your movement toward justice here: Swap your heart of stone for a heart that’s tender and willing and altogether more alive. A day was coming when God would swap his people’s hearts of stone for hearts of flesh - something pumping with compassion and justice, like God’s own heart.

The Bible records God saying to his people: ‘I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’~ Ezekiel 36:26 … What kind of a relationship did Jesus have to the environment? He’s the Lord of it. The undisputed master of creation: using his mastery to serve the most needy and the most vulnerable. So, standing in his presence, we won’t find five tips for sustainable living. We’ll find God. And confronted by this God, I suddenly see my ethical dilemmas in a new light. … When Jesus comes to town, teaching, healing, loving, restoring, ruling, he lifts the curtain on a world where those fault lines between us and God and between us and creation are repairing somehow. It’s a new garden, a new Promised Land if you like. A world where there is no scarcity, no frustration, no illness. …

The Bible says that to reconcile all things back to God again, it cost Jesus his life. The very blood of Jesus was the only substance in the universe that could heal the fault lines. And the blood of Jesus is sufficient to flow through every fracture line, picking up every loose fragment of brokenness and rejoining it to a new creation - more beautiful and more valuable than ever before. … Wholeness. That’s where creation is headed. And when it’s whole, when it’s unbroken, it’s free to be the thing it was always meant to be. Remember the verse we read earlier. 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.’ Romans 8:20-21

Creation will be repaired, rejoined, reconciled. It will still be recognisable in a lot of ways, but without the brokenness. And with a beauty and a glory that I think we can’t even imagine. Think of the body of the Risen Lord Jesus on that Sunday morning. That’s the first fruits. Proof of the future that awaits us.

So where does that leave us?

Well, we live here in this age between when Jesus came and spilt his precious blood for us on the cross and when Jesus will come back to do his ultimate reconciliation job. If the blood of Jesus has given you a new heart, then you start living a new life now - and it’s a reconciled life.

But firstly, we must challenge apathy with real living hope.

Because there are plenty of people - even Christians among them - who act as though there is no hope. What difference does it make trying to recycle in the classroom? You know I once taught at a Christian school where they had no recycling bin on campus. Not one. I’ve been to Christian conventions where all the food is served with single-use plastic. That wouldn’t pass for righteousness amongst unbelievers, would it? I’ve even heard of Christians saying that God’s going to scrap this creation and make a new one anyway, so surely there’s better things to spend our time and money on. Have you heard that one? But you know what gets me? The same Christians would never say: Well, there won’t be any poverty in the new creation, so I won’t waste time helping the poor now. I mean that would just be ludicrous and shocking for someone who purports to love Jesus to say. In a lot of ways our response to environmental justice issues should mirror our response to social justice issues. Indeed, the two are very interconnected anyway.

We don’t believe that we can make poverty history. Jesus said: The poor you will always have with you. [Mt 26:11] Until the day he returns, poverty will linger. He may just as easily have said: Pollution you will always have with you. So why bother? Why bother with creation care, with human care for that matter? Why bother? Because the love of Christ for all his creation courses through your veins, that’s why! Because your new heart compels you to love God and love your neighbour and live a reconciled life in the here and now. … When you do bother, you’re living like someone who knows that the future is not broken pottery shards! Someone who knows the future is actually a glorious reconciled whole that we’ll steward perfectly with hearts like Christ’s. So, your labour is not in vain. Every action, no matter how irrelevant statistically speaking, honours the King of that kingdom, even if he’s the only one who sees for the time being. And when the church is at her most beautiful, she is like a little glimpse of what life with Jesus is like, like a little postcard image from that future kingdom calling the world to come see and come know and come and be part of that new creation. …

Secondly, we can advocate with grace and without anger.

When my children were in nappies I joined a cloth nappy laundering group on Facebook. Washing cloth nappies is both a science and an art, if you didn’t know. So, the Facebook group was very helpful. But what I didn’t enjoy about being in that group was the vitriol that was sometimes dished out to those who were not using cloth nappies. And the badges of honour worn by those whose children’s bottoms had never touched a disposable nappy. Let’s passionately advocate in our spheres of influence for more sustainable choices, but let’s do it without any of the self-righteous tut-tutting that goes on these days. Likewise, in the political sphere, we can demonise big business and shift the blame to our politicians, but we are not walking with Christ when we do so. Let’s write our letters or whatever but be cheerful and gracious and aware of the many blessings of wealth and energy and time and relationships that allow for us to rule well when we can. Remember: ‘This is all my righteousness: Nothing but the blood of Jesus.’

Thirdly, we can quell anxiety and guilt with peace and freedom.

It’s easy for some of us to step into the territory of obsessing about waste reduction. We don’t want to see even a skerrick of plastic ending up in landfill. We start to hoard things because we cannot bear to think of throwing anything away. We try to offload our collection of yogurt containers on the kindergarten teacher. But watch that it’s not turning into a Messiah-complex. Your thoughtful waste disposal will not be the thing that reconciles all creation to God. Remember: ‘Not the good that I have done, nothing but the blood of Jesus.’ You are still living in a world experiencing God’s judgement on the ground. When you’re forced to make those tough choices, take a deep breath and repeat: ‘I am not the reconciler of all things. But I trust the love and grace of the One who is.’ You are free. Make your choice and give thanks that the burden of saving the planet has been lifted from your shoulders.

Followers of Jesus can be the non-anxious presence in this space. If the scientific consensus is right, then we’ll be facing some very challenging times ahead in terms of changing climate, but people who are living a reconciled life will face those times without fear: lifting up our heads because our King is returning. Free from anxiety we will keep seeking his kingdom first and his righteousness, come what may.

One last verse of this song – one that’s not often sung: Now by this I’ll overcome – Nothing but the blood of Jesus Now by this I’ll reach my home – Nothing but the blood of Jesus.