On Protestants, Right Relationships and Earthcare

This is the text of a talk I was gave on January 30, 2011 as part of the Anchorage Interfaith Council’s Earthcare Forum. There were seven religious groups with speakers on the panel. Each chose passages from their sacred texts and had 8 minutes to for comments based on those texts, followed by an hour of questions from the audience.

The panel included speakers from a Muslim group, two different sects of Buddhism, a Jewish Rabbi, a Roman Catholic professor of religion, an independent Christian Pentecostal, and a Presbyterian (me).

Basically, we all agreed that the world’s situation is dire and that the religious communities have much to say on the subject. Our beginning points certainly differed, as one might expect from such varied traditions. One person even quoted a 1960s vintage book that criticized Western Culture's version of Protestant teaching for contributing to the lack of Earthcare through the ages. This blog begins with my initial comments which, coincidentally, call on Protestants to repent for not taking their own stance seriously enough, and end with one point from the Q & A period that I thought was particularly important.]

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I am Curt Karns, executive presbyter for the Presbytery of Yukon. I am also a member of an organization called Yukon Presbyterians for Earthcare, so I was especially glad to be invited to participate in an interfaith conference with that very title: Earthcare! I was also very happy to see that some of the other speakers are basing their talks on those passages of the Bible which make it clear that Earthcare is an imperative for those of us from the Judeo-Christian tradition. This sets me free as one of the Christian Protestant voices here today to speak specifically from the Protestant point of view.

In my opinion, one of the Scripture that sums up much of the Protestant stance on faith is found in Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 2, verses 8-10:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— ⁹not the result of works, so that no one may boast. ¹⁰For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

This passage is about faith-life in general, but also has the potential to greatly add to any faith-based conversation on Earthcare, whether that be an interfaith conversation or an intra-Christian conversation. This passage asks us to wrestle with the question of what gives ultimate meaning to human existence. Ultimate meaning is one part of what salvation is about. This passage then goes further and challenges us regarding how we are to understand what we are to do—our works—in the world.

It is precisely our works that are at issue in the struggles for Earthcare. So much of what we human beings have collectively done in the world have not turned out to be good for our planet, or even for the long-range well-being of human beings. And part of the problem for Protestants has been that we have not taken the guidance that our own favorite Scripture passages, like this one from Ephesians, would give us.

According to this passage from Ephesians, we can stop fretting about whether we can achieve a good relationship with God—that part is given. We have no need to prove to the universe, or even to ourselves, that we are “good enough.” Instead we have been given an ongoing covenantal relationship with God.

For us, covenants signal relationships in which the parties involved agree to be in relationship with each other, and understand their own identities differently because of that relationship. Indeed, all covenantal relationships—marriage, parenthood, etc—call one to live differently in the world than if one were not a part of that relationship. According to Ephesians, once we know that we are persons-in-relationship with God, the way we live should reflect this new reality. We must now know ourselves as people whose way of life is the doing of good works.

Unfortunately too many people in America, including many Protestants, I’m sorry to say, live as if they had this Scripture backwards. They live as if they were still trying to earn proper praise for their existence, and do that through a strange definition of worthiness actions. Americans try to gain wealth to prove that we are successful; we seek prestige to prove our place in the human pecking order; we seek power to show the world our importance. And we seek subdue land and sea to prove that we are the masters and not the servants.

These are hardly the good works that the Scripture calls for. In the Christian tradition there are two parts to our ministry. Our ministry is to celebrate the gifts God has given each one to bring. And our ministry is to be a ministry of reconciliation.

Reconciliation is about being reconciled to God, but also to others. We are to work for reconciliation between one another in the faith community, between one another in our cultures and societies, and between ourselves and all creation. Our good works are about establishing right relationships such that everyone thrives. And because of who we are—members of this whole creation that God so loves—we absolutely must work for right reconciliation between human beings and the planet Earth.

These Scriptures, then, call people of faith to reframe our thinking of what a successful human being is from the secular cultural model to a biblical, faith-based model. Unfortunately, Scripture has often been interpreted through the lens of Western culture rather than the other way around. Genesis 1 through Genesis 2:4 tells about the seven days of creation. To hear Western culture interpret that passage, we are created in the image of God and God created everything in six days—which proves God’s lordship. Humans, too, need to be working to prove their worth. But a more consistent reading would note that the pinnacle of God’s creation was not the sixth day, in which humans (and animals, though we usually don’t mention the animals) were created. A more consistent reading shows that the seventh day, when God rested from work and just stopped to celebrate being in relationship with this whole of creation, was the pinnacle of creation and the proper model for us to emulate as the image of God.

Being made in God’s image, then, should be to celebrate the wonder of all creation, to enjoy being a part of creation and to love and tend it just as God does. This, of course, also includes celebrating families and friends and the fullness of human potential, as well.

Somehow we have turned this teaching on its head. Instead of knowing that we are already worthy of relationship with God, and turning our lives to standing for the restoration of damaged relationships, we seem bound to work hard to for our own prestige and make excuses for standing by and watching as the world suffers the consequences.

Reconciliation with creation means first recognizing how badly we have been in caring for our relationship with the ecosystem and repenting. Reconciliation means exploring how much damage has been done and knowing that we are responsible. Reconciliation means then reshaping our own lives in such a way as to participate in different ways of life that might lead to a better future for all.

My thesis, then is that we need to call people back to delve deeply into their faith traditions. There is old wisdom there, inspired by God. By letting culture define our faith and our very selves, rather than allowing the our faith-values to guide us as God’s ambassadors to our culture, we have been complicit in producing the consequences the world now faces. By going back to our roots in the face of this crisis, we can be essential in the needed movement for change.

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[An opportunity for another comment came up during the Q & A that seem particularly significant. Someone asked how we all understood our relationship to the environment as it relates to Earthcare. My response was that there is a changing view among some of us, which can be summarized by a minority view on how to understand Genesis 2:1. When translated literally, that verse uses the same terminology as the geneologies that show up later in Genesis--"These are the GENERATIONS of the creation of heaven and earth when they were made." Some of us are taking this as a true genealogy to say that we are related to the whole of creation, and the different members (species) have varied responsibilities to one another. Earthcare is something humans must take seriously as a part of the family of creation. It is about living in right relationships.]