Taking Care of Creation                                            Gen. 1 and Psalm 8

 

        We continue a series of sermons based on things that people in the congregation have requested to hear.

        Today we look at our role as care-takers of creation.  What better text to use than the story of creation itself?

The second verse gives us the crux of the truth of creation:

        “The earth was without form and void and darkness covered the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”

Eugene Peterson, in The Message, translates it this way: “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.

In other words, there was nothing before God began creating - darkness, emptiness, chaos, nothing.  God spoke and the world was created - in infinite beauty and wondrous complexity.

It is amazing to consider the variety of life on earth - the power of God’s imagination at work in creation.  And the wonder that we are part of that creation.

James Irwin, the lunar module pilot for Apollo 15, was amazed at the view of the earth from space.  He later wrote: “The earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament, hanging in the blackness of space.   As we got farther and farther away, it diminished in size.   Finally, it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God.”I don’t think we have to go out into space to appreciate the wonder of God’s creation.

                    Yet we often think we can do better - we use technology to help us improve on God’s work - and sometimes it backfires.  How many pesticides have we used that we thought would be the answer to losing crops to various pests, but then find they are very harmful to us as well?  Verse 26 of the first chapter of Genesis says that God created humanity to “have dominion over” the creation - we have tended to subvert what God meant by that phrase.

Gary Kowalski has written several books about creation and our lack of care for it.  He writes:   “Dominion” in its original intent did imply ‘ruling over,’ but only as a wise king rules over and protects his subjects, or as God reigns over creation, sustaining and safeguarding every living thing. In fact, Genesis plainly states that animals and humans were both created as nefesh chaya, or ‘living souls.’ Yet later scholars, when translating the Hebrew would render nefesh chaya as ‘living soul’ when applied to Adam, but render exactly the same phrase as ‘living creature’ when applied to animals a few verses later. Certainly Genesis was never intended as a license to clear-cut the forests, or pollute the oceans, or drive other species to extinction.
    Yet according to a year 2000 report by the Worldwatch Institute, 11 percent of all 8,615 species of birds living on earth are now endangered, 34 percent of all fish are at risk, and 25 percent of all mammals.  Will future generations ask why people permitted such a decimation of God’s creation?”—Gary Kowalski, “A new creation,” March 26, 2000, First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington Web Site, uusociety.org. ¹

        It is not just plants and animals, fish and birds that suffer at the hands of our “dominion” of creation.  People in North America do not realize what else we allow to happen to people in less developed countries of the world.

        The statistics I am sharing with you are from 1990, but they will give you an idea of what happens because we often fail to notice what is going on in creation.

The World Assembly on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation, held in Seoul, Korea, put together these statistics:

That’s enough bad news for one sermon.

        The question is what should we do as Christians to promote the care of creation?

We need to begin to recognize that creation is a system - that what happens to any part of creation, affects all of creation.

We can recycle paper and aluminum - and then go the next step and buy products that are made from recycled materials.

We can coordinate our trips and errands so that we use less gasoline.

The truth is that modern American society is structured around our vehicles, which still use fossil fuel - until some viable alternative source of fuel becomes available for most Americans, we are left to be frugal with the resources that we have.

We can make choices about the things that we buy, being aware of where they were made and what resources were used to produce them.  Much of what we can do comes from being aware, educating ourselves on how environmentally friendly companies are and choosing to do business with those that make better choices for God’s creation.  What we need to do is look at the idea of sustainability, which means looking at ways to use the resources that are available with the least waste to produce in needed for sustaining everyone.  Buckminster Fuller², an inventor and philosopher of the last century had a tremendous impact on this conversation.  Fuller believed that humanity needed to understand that we are all interconnected, that selfishness was not necessary.  He believed that by 1980 we had the ability to produce enough food and distribute it so that no one in the world would be hungry.