Genesis 1:1, 31-2:1
Psalm 24:1-2
The earth is in disaster mode. It isn’t because the earth itself is a disaster. It is because humans are making it so. Global warming, caused by our industrialization, driven by burning fossil fuels, is resulting in dramatic climate change, the destruction of the ozone, the near total melting of polar ice caps, and more, has pretty much put us past the tipping point.
My son, whose specialization is sustainability, who has a brain that sees the big picture of all the interrelatedness of what’s going on, who researches a huge number of reports from disparate sources, summed up our state of affairs in a conversation I had with him recently with the statement, “We’re screwed.”
From floating islands of garbage the size of Delaware out on the Atlantic Ocean, to deforestation in South America, to China and the United States gobbling up a huge majority of the worlds natural resources, to the internal combustion engine that propels all of our vehicles, to the coal fired plants that provide our electricity, and more, all adds up to a catastrophic mess.
Sustainability experts talk about the “tipping point”. It’s like when it snows, and the tiny, individual snowflakes begin to pile up on a branch. Thicker and thicker they accumulate. Until finally, one too many alights on the pile, and the branch breaks. That’s the tipping point. Too many negative effects pile up on the earth, until one too many begins the process of a broken world, and it’s too late to make it right. The world, like Humpty Dumpty is having a great fall, and all the kings men and all the kings horses can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
In the book, Limits To Growth, about the world over-population problem--that feeds into all the other problems I’ve listed so far--the authors use the illustration of a farm pond. The farm pond has lily pad plants growing on it. The lily pads double their coverage of the pond every day. So, on what day does the farmer need to clear the lily pads if she doesn’t want her pond totally covered? The answer is the day the pond is half covered. But if the farmer looks at her pond, without thinking about the doubling rate of growth, she will think, “Oh, half the pond is still clear; I have plenty of time.”
It’s called, the exponential growth of disaster. Or, as I have mentioned, the tipping point. We’ve gotten our selves and our world in an inescapable mess. The pond has already been half covered and we are in the next 24 hour period, so-to-speak, when the ecological disasters will fully take over our earth.
How did we get to this point? A large part of it, for me, has to do with the answer to a couple of questions. They are primary questions that arise out of the first verses of the Bible. They are questions that form the foundation of one of the most important themes in scripture. We can’t avoid these questions. These two questions are asked of us continually by scripture. The problem is, if we answer these questions wrong, everything else in our lives--including our relationship to the world--will end up in a mess. So the answers to these questions will determine the wellness or disaster of our personal and global life.
The first question is (drum roll, please): To whom does all this belong? “All this” includes you. To whom does the earth and all in it belong? It’s a question of ownership. Like I mentioned, if you answer this question wrong, everything else will go wrong. Not only ourselves, but the earth will suffer. And suffer it has, which lets you know humanity has been getting the answer to this question wrong for a long time.
The right answer is that humans do not own the world, or any part of it--especially ourselves. As the opening to Psalm 24 states (as in the rest of the Bible):
The earth and everything on it
belong to the Lord.
The world and its people
belong to God. (CEV)
There are a couple of words in both Hebrew and Greek for our word “everything” or “all.” There is a separate word if I was talking about all of you in this sanctuary. But there’s another word that is used as a universal all, meaning all people everywhere and at every time. That is the word used here--the universal “everything” that encompasses literally everything. Everything belongs to the Lord.
So, it comes down to what I call theological math. If everything in the world, including every person in the world, belongs to God, what else can belong to us? It’s pretty simple math. God has ownership over EVERYTHING. That leaves NOTHING for our ownership.
Ownership implies power and control. That’s why we like ownership. When you think about it, a great deal of our human laws hold up the concept and rights of ownership, especially land ownership. But in the law of the Bible, the 25th chapter of Leviticus, for example, underscores what God thinks about land ownership: “The land is mine; with me you are but sojourners and tenants” (vs. 23).
If there is nothing in this world that is ours, but everything is God’s, then that changes us from owners to tenants. We have been given everything we have, by God the owner, to take care of it for God and on God’s behalf. If we thought we were owners, then we also mistakenly thought we only have to answer to ourselves about what we think we own. But if we own nothing, and we are only caretakers for God, the real owner, we have to answer to God for what we do with what is Gods.
This correct, Biblical perspective changes everything in terms of how we interact with the world--that is not ours. Think of what that means. If God owns everything, and everything is God’s, how we treat everything is making a statement of what we think about God and God’s ownership. To abuse the world, to fill it with toxicity, to lay it waste, to trash it, to erase it’s protective abilities to sustain all life, is to say to God, “I don’t care a twit about your ownership of this planet, and therefore I don’t care a twit about you.”
The other danger is to claim ownership, which gives people the false sense of power and control over what they think they own, and therefore do as they please with it. That attitude sends the same message to God: “You, God, don’t factor in at all with what I’m doing and the decisions I’m making with what I think is mine.” You have no say, God, because I own it!”
So the destruction we have wrought upon nature and the world and each other and ourselves is not just bad stewardship. It isn’t just stupid economics. It is the most horrid of blasphemies. It is flinging God’s gifts, owned by God, into God’s face, as if they were of no worth beyond our own self-acclaimed power to destroy them. Dante and other Christian thinkers have been unanimous that “despising Nature and her goodness was a violence against God.”
The awful question then becomes, how can modern Christians have so solemnly folded their hands while so much of the work of God was and is being destroyed? And further, not only how have we just sat by with folded hands, but how have our hands been complicit in claiming ownership, and by that claim, do what we want with God’s world?
All this leads to our second big question. Remember I said there were two important questions--it’s in the title of this message anyway. It’s a very similar question to the first. It is: Whose story are we really living? If we can yank ourselves from the mistaken notion that we own anything in this world, and give in to the truth that total ownership belongs to God, then what does that say about how we live? What does that say about the decisions we make about our lives? What does that say about the story we are living? Is it our story, or does even our story belong to God?
It becomes just as huge a question as the first (To whom does the world belong?) If that first question shocks us awake, then the second tandem question should do the same: What sort of life story would be the most responsible in a world that is totally God’s? What is, then, the life of a tenant and not an owner in this world?
I hope you’re beginning to get a glimpse of how radically different life would be, in answer to these two questions, not only in your individual life story, but in how we treat God’s world. Can you get a glimpse of how messed up we are, and how far we have strayed from anything God intended and designed?
How are we going to stand before God and give any kind of plausible answer to his two questions, when we, and all those others in the world are living by destroying God’s world, and who see the murder of Creation as an OK way to live? How can we even lift our heads to God’s gaze, as God looks at a world that God, at creation, called entirely good, but we have taken that goodness, by our own sinful grasping at ownership, in order to pollute it entirely and destroy it piecemeal?
The creation destroying machinery of the industrial economy has been instrumental in making legitimate this form of blasphemy before God and God’s good world. In it’s stance before the world, this creation destroying machinery, fueled by our misguided sense of ownership, and the lostness of our personal story, has treated neither God nor God’s world with the respect the true Owner deserves. There is no awe, reverence or cherishing in such machinery leveled at God and God’s world. There is only a sinful show of contempt.
I confess, I’m more cynical than I used to be, in relation to a few things. One of those is hope about the world. That is, my hope in people to turn around and quit raping God’s creation. On a macro level, it’s never going to happen. That is, unless God turns his world loose on humanity, wiping most of us away and starting again.
My hope still remains, though, on a micro level. On a personal level. I think we can make major turn-arounds in terms of our individual life story, to live in a way that honors God’s ownership of all we have; to live into a story that is God’s story and not our own; to live responsibly as stewards and tenants in God’s world, in the location we find ourselves. That would give honor to God, and end the life of blasphemy. It would give us the confidence to stand before God both now and in the end, and be able to say: “Here is what you gave me, Lord; I give it all back to you cared for, cherished, and whole.”
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