November 13, 2007
Genesis
Posted by ryan under environment, musings, spirituality | Tags: creation, environment, fall, jesus, old testament |Some thoughts on the first three chapters of Genesis.
In the beginning, God spoke and it happened, and it was good. As image-bearers, we too speak and when we do, things happen. Things become real.
God created the earth and he created us. When he created the earth, he called it good. And he gave it to us. The earth is a good gift. He meant for us to rule it; that is, to care for it. It is also meant as something to care for us; that is, God made us to need food, and he made the earth (specifically the plants of the earth) to provide that need.
Before the fall, ruling the earth was work. The earth has always required work in its care.
None of the creatures of the earth were suitable helpers, or as pastor E would say, rescuers, for Adam. It’s almost as if it says there was a search going on, or that as each creature came to Adam for its name, for its expression of identity, none of them filled that particular need for companionship that Adam needed. Just as nothing else God had made filled that particular need for companionship that God needed. Until Adam. And Eve. If Adam is to God as Eve is to Adam, does Adam somehow ‘rescue’ God as Eve rescues Adam?
Genesis 3:17-19 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
Adam screwed up. He is cast out and the earth is cursed. And so we have the messed up world we now live in. What was once pleasant work in the care of the earth is now painful toil that produces thorns and thistles as much as it does food. And we will surely return to the earth from which we were taken.
I think about this passage a lot when I think about gardening on our homestead. Our homestead is dry, rocky and cracked, and what isn’t thistle is surely thorn. Cactus, mesquite, jumping cholla, ocotillo, pricklies galore. I believe there is something of God in a desert garden. In it I cannot escape the notion that the world is fallen and not what it is meant to be. The modern conveniences we Americans enjoy sometimes feel like a blatant attempt to pretend that the world isn’t fallen after all, that we are in control of how we live and what we do. We can travel wherever we want whenever we want, eat whatever we like regardless of what season it is in. We can control our environment with air conditioners and furnaces, humidifiers and dehumidifiers, artificial lights and dual-paned windows. All of this technology coupled with a deep-seated cultural commitment to avoid discomfort makes it feel possible to live in an idyllic utopian world. It is when I poke my head out into places like a desert garden, a literal natural metaphor for a sin-sick, broken world, that I catch another glimpse of how disconnected I really am.
November 14, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Wendell Berry says that a big part of modern disconnection is our abandonment of the labor involved in farming. Since we have lost our sense of place and rootedness by moving into cities and artificializing our life, we have moved away from God, and away from good stewardship of creation.
At least that’s what I think he says.
Perhaps we waste so much, because we don’t understand the labor that has gone into producing what we use.
November 14, 2007 at 10:22 pm
To illustrate your point about not understanding what it takes to provide us with what we use: Every year we use untold millions or billions of gallons of purified drinking water to flush our bodily wastes into a sewer system, all the while we are faced with nationwide water shortages. Most of us probably have no idea what goes into ensuring our water is drinkable, and then dealing with the sewage waste we create when we add our poo to drinking water. A composting toilet, on the other hand, uses no water (or very little) and creates a valuable resource (compost) that trees love. The trouble with a composting toilet is that it isn’t convenient: you have to deal with your own poo. It isn’t magically whisked away with a satisfying watery whoosh! Instead you have to turn it and empty the drum and make sure that the temperature is nice and warm for the microscopic critters God made to take care of your poo for you.
November 17, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Wendell Berry: “If in the human economy, a squash in the field is worth more than a bushel of soil, that does not mean that food is more valuable than soil; it means simply that we do not know how to value the soil. In its complexity and its potential longevity, the soil exceeds our comprehension; we do not know how to place a just market value on it, and we will never learn how. Its value is inestimable; we must value it, beyond whatever price we put on it, by respecting it.”
No, it seems we don’t always understand the real cost of things.
Rod told me once that respecting something means looking deeply into something. By looking deeply into what we consume, squash or otherwise, perhaps we will realize just how much waste there really is.
“But when nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present has begun. Nothing (and nobody) can then exist that is not theoretically replaceable by something (or somebody) more valuable. The country that we (or some of us) had thought to make our home becomes instead ‘a nation rich in natural resources’; the good bounty of the land begins its mechanical metamorphosis into junk, garbage, silt, poison, and other forms of ‘waste.’
“The inevitable result of such an economy is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime’s devotion. ‘Waste,’ in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans–the unborn, the old, ‘disinvested’ farmers, the unemployed, the ‘unemployable.’ Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ashheap or the dump.”
December 3, 2007 at 4:29 pm
We live in such a me-now culture that most of us (myself included) are so set on getting what we want *now* that we fail to see long term consequences of our actions. (I’m imagining myself getting impatient at a fast food restaurant because it’s already been two minutes and I don’t have my food yet - I’m ashamed to admit that this actually happened this weekend.) Not all resources are renewable. We consume and consume and consume and then take for granted that what we’re consuming will never run out. I can’t remember the name of the article, but I read recently that certain species of fish are doomed to extinction if the fishing industry continues at the same rate. A number of different species face the same fate for similar reasons. What most of us don’t realize is that these fish and other creatures may have some vital role in maintaining the stability of the ecosystem. To consume or destroy them to the point of extinction may mean not just that they no longer exist, but that the world is broken because there is nothing to fill the vital role that they once played.
December 3, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Hey Chad, welcome! Check out this blog entry; yeah, some resources are not renewable and are gone forever. Some people suggest the earth has a way of repairing itself, maybe it does. It seems in keeping to how God redeems us though we are broken; perhaps he also redeems that which we break.