“No one comes to cut us down”: God, Trees, and Human Beings[1]

 

Frederick J. Gaiser

Luther Seminary

St. Paul, Minnesota

 

            Perhaps some of you will remember Paul Ehrlich’s ominous warning regarding what he called our eco-catastrophe way back in 1969: “It is the top of the ninth inning. Man, always a threat at the plate has been hitting Nature hard. It is important to remember, however, that NATURE BATS LAST.”[2]                     

            Some consolation for nature, I guess. Not so good for human beings. And maybe not perfect for nature either, if human beings are one of nature’s inventions. Would Mother Nature not rather redeem one of her own than see it get blown away by a bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam? And what if there is a loving and caring God? Might that possibility suggest a better way out for our species than annihilation?

            Ehrlich’s perhaps appropriate pessimism reminds me of the old sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley about Ozymandias, that great ancient king, whose gigantic stone statue, says Shelley, is now reduced to nothing but a pair of vast trunkless legs sticking out of the desert, along with a half-buried head, still bearing an arrogant sneer.

            And on the pedestal these words appear:

            “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

            Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

            Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

            Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.[3]

            Is this the human fate? It is in countless doomsday scenarios, from On the Beach to T. S. Eliot’s lines many of us learned in high school or college:

            This is the way the world ends

            This is the way the world ends

            This is the way the world ends

            Not with a bang but a whimper.[4]

            I take it that the very existence of a conference like this one is a sign of hope amid such gloomy perspectives, but I cite these admonitions to introduce a similar one in the Bible, namely, the taunt song over Babylon in Isa 14. It may seem an odd choice for this occasion, but hold your judgment for a moment and listen to the rather long text:

3 When the LORD has given you rest from your pain and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve,  4 you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon: How the oppressor has ceased! How his insolence has ceased!  5 The LORD has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of rulers,  6 that struck down the peoples in wrath with unceasing blows, that ruled the nations in anger with unrelenting persecution.  7 The whole earth is at rest and quiet; they break forth into singing.  8 The cypresses exult over you, the cedars of Lebanon, saying, "Since you were laid low, no one comes to cut us down."  9 Sheol beneath is stirred up to meet you when you come; it rouses the shades to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth; it raises from their thrones all who were kings of the nations.  10 All of them will speak and say to you: "You too have become as weak as we! You have become like us!"  11 Your pomp is brought down to Sheol, and the sound of your harps; maggots are the bed beneath you, and worms are your covering.  12 How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!  13 You said in your heart, "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon;  14 I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High."  15 But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit.  16 Those who see you will stare at you, and ponder over you: "Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms,  17 who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, who would not let his prisoners go home?"  18 All the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb;  19 but you are cast out, away from your grave, like loathsome carrion, clothed with the dead, those pierced by the sword, who go down to the stones of the Pit, like a corpse trampled underfoot.  20 You will not be joined with them in burial, because you have destroyed your land, you have killed your people. May the descendants of evildoers nevermore be named!  21 Prepare slaughter for his sons because of the guilt of their father. Let them never rise to possess the earth or cover the face of the world with cities.  22 I will rise up against them, says the LORD of hosts, and will cut off from Babylon name and remnant, offspring and posterity, says the LORD.  23 And I will make it a possession of the hedgehog, and pools of water, and I will sweep it with the broom of destruction, says the LORD of hosts. (Isa 14:3-23)

God’s Environmental Impact Statements

            Why this obscure text for this occasion? Because it contains several of what I call the prophet’s surprisingly frequent environmental impact statements. On the surface, this is a song that rejoices over the downfall of the arrogant king of Babylon, a longer poetic version of “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants”)—the victorious cry attributed to Brutus at the assassination of Caesar, to John Wilkes Booth at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and, alas, proclaimed on the T-shirt of Timothy McVeigh after the Oklahoma City bombing. One person’s tyrant, of course, may be another person’s hero or husband or infant child—such is the indiscriminate quality of violence—but in Isaiah’s text, Israel rejoices over the downfall of the ultimate oppressor, the fiercely mythic yet terrifyingly real Babylon, whose jackbooted warriors had trampled out Israel’s vintage more times than they cared to recall.

            But my interest in the text this morning is not so much the historical particulars as those intermingled sentences that record the environmental impact of these events. They are to be found, in fact, everywhere in the prophets. What are they about, and how might they inform those of us who care about environmental issues?

            The most striking and most poignant of these in our text is the sigh of relief of the cedars of Lebanon, those Middle Eastern trees renowned for their size and glory, who, when the tyrant falls, sing out: “Since you were laid low, no one comes to cut us down.” Oppressive tyrants rape the earth because they can, in this case clear-cutting the old-growth forests of Lebanon to build yet another palace, yet another mansion, yet another temple, yet another monument to their own glory. The forested mountains of Lebanon—nobody living up there, said the king to himself (public lands!), why not use them for myself? But now the tyrant has been brought low, cut down to the ground, the victim at last of his own unsustainable expansion. And the prophet listens to the silence and to the trees: “The whole earth is at rest and quiet; they break forth into singing. The cypresses exult over you, the cedars of Lebanon, saying, ‘Since you were laid low, no one comes to cut us down.’”

            God listens, too, for this song is God-given, and God has had a love affair with trees from the beginning of the Bible to the end. In Gen 2, God makes trees grow in the garden of Eden because they are “pleasant to the sight” (Gen 2:9). And paradise is a garden, says Swiss scholar Othmar Keel, because

One of the most beautiful things and one of the greatest pleasures known to the ancient Near East was a garden....Both the descriptions of the blessed primeval time and those of the coming age of salvation are impossible without ‘gardens’ and garden metaphors: ‘The Lord will...satisfy your needs in parched places...and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail’ (Isa. 58:11; cf. Jer. 31:12).[5]

God’s idea of a promised land is “a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey” (Deut 8:8). Best of all, perhaps, God calls himself “an evergreen cypress” (Hos 14:8)—ever faithful, ever alive, ever fresh (by the way, the best proof text I know of for Christmas trees!). On a darker day, God so loved the world that he accepted the tree as the agent for the death of his only son (Gal 3:13).

            Then, in the Bible’s last chapter, Rev 22, the tree of life reappears in the heavenly Jerusalem, where its leaves, says the text, “are for the healing of the nations” (Rev 22:2). God needs the trees for beauty, we need the trees for refreshment, God used a tree for salvation, all peoples need trees for healing. So the chorus swells when the tyrant’s ax is stilled.

            Or another environmental impact statement in our text: When the dreaded king dies, he falls prey to the maggots and the worms (Isa 14:11). It’s only fair, since we are also reminded that this king is the one who has “made the world like a desert” (14:17), destroying the habitat of countless numbers of animals. We know now that this is not mere metaphor, that desertification is all too often a human-induced reality. You don’t have to be a king to contribute to this form of destruction of the planet—and, alas, each of us must admit our part in the ongoing abuse of God’s creation—but, no doubt, the more axes you own or control, the more effective a destructive agent you will be. But now the animals bat last—at least the maggots and the worms—feasting on the no doubt fattened flesh of the once mighty king.

            Then, on an even more jarring note, we learn that God, when pushed, will work God’s own natural destruction, if need be turning once fertile and inhabited lands into “a possession of the hedgehog” (14:23) in order to ensure that the tyrannic dynasty cannot be revived. It’s seems a harsh move, even an anti-environmental move (God’s scorched-earth policy?), and, in some sense, it is, just as was the destructive use of water in the flood of ancient times. But there is a positive side to this as well, namely, God’s own recognition that human misdeeds inevitably have negative effects on creation, and the fact that God has a vocation not only for humans, but for creation itself, in this case to lay down its life in the short term in order to restore justice and fertility in the long term.

            More, we learn throughout the Bible that such moments of divine judgment are never the end. After the flood, God pledges never again to do such a thing, but rather to commit God’s self to the ongoing order of summer and winter, day and night, seedtime and harvest (Gen 8:22). And later in Isaiah, in another environmental impact statement, we learn that God’s renewal is not only for people, but also for the land and its creatures. What in our taunt song was made desert will later be made to flourish: “The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people” (Isa 43:20). To be sure, Israel hears this text as a promise of human renewal, but it is no accident that the animals rejoice as well. There is no human renewal without the renewal of creation; there is no redemption of the human at the expense of the creation; there is no divine care of the human that does not embrace the creation as well. “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Ps 24:1). When humans drink, all creation drinks; when creation drinks, humans drink. We are in this together—and God is in it, too.

            We could go on at will to find similar environmental impact statements. Human irresponsibility adversely affects our own kind, but everything around us as well. “Your country lies desolate,” mourns God at the beginning of Isaiah (Isa 1:7), taking the form of Israel’s own lament psalms in God’s own mouth: “Why do you continue to rebel?” (Isa 1:5). On the other hand, in the world that God envisions for us, “The wolf shall live with the lamb....The cow and the bear shall graze....The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp....They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isa 11:6-9). In other words, the wages of sin is death—for creation, too; but the free gift of God is life—for creation, too (cf. Rom 6:23). The God of the Bible is never interested merely in saving souls; the God of the Bible is out for everything that God has made—from humans to chimpanzees, from ants to elephants, from frozen tundra to blazing desert, from our small speck in the cosmos to all the firmaments on high.

God and Creation

            But what, if anything, does this have to do with this conference and its interest in public lands? What does the Bible say specifically about our theme? The direct answer to that question, alas, is precious little, which I suppose is why I had to start somewhere else. The Bible on public lands would be a very short lecture, just as would be the Bible on almost any complex contemporary issue. The Bible arose in a very different world from this one, so its application to particular ethical and political matters will always be indirect and will always require careful and creative interpretation. We can hear God insist in Leviticus that “the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev 25:23)—and that will not be without meaning for us—but we know that in a postmodern pluralistic culture there can be no return to the tribal notion of a jubilee year that gave that text its original meaning. We can share Isaiah’s outrage over those who “join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but [them], and [they] are left alone in the midst of the land” (Isa 5:8), but without mortgages and profits and money at interest, none of us would own homes or fly to Denver for eco-justice conferences.

            I don’t mean at all to suggest that the Bible is irrelevant to contemporary social issues, but I do mean to suggest that we will almost always waste our time looking for the appropriate verse to tell us precisely what to do. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was quite right when he reminded us that “[t]he Holy Scriptures do not consist of individual sayings, but are a whole and can be used most effectively as such. The Scriptures are God’s revealed Word as a whole.”[6] Thus, to think biblically about our issue or about any issue, we will need to live in the Bible as a whole long enough to be caught up in its story, to learn the character of its God, to rub elbows with its other characters, human and nonhuman alike, to share its passion for justice, to appropriate for ourselves its words of judgment, to hear its hope for the future, and to put all of that together—along with everything we can learn about the world from the world (which is where many of you come in, with the interest and expertise you bring to this issue)—in order to try to find a true and helpful word about the affairs of this age.

            Which takes me back to those environmental impact statements. What kind of a God provides those for us, and why? What are those ostriches and hedgehogs doing in our salvation history? I have already implied much of the answer, I suppose, but let’s go back and think about this again. What do we learn from this—or what do we learn from the larger testimony of Scripture that will help us understand this?

            1. We learn first that creation is not a once-upon-a-time event but an ongoing activity. Now, to be sure, we can posit a moment when there was not and then a moment when there was—but even in the “was not” there was God, and everything after that brief nanosecond of absolute beginning has been process. Not until day three does God decide that things are “good”; and things are not “very good” until day six. The creation grows and develops, even for God, and God is delighted. But the reality of process means that things within creation can adversely affect creation—things like sulfur-dioxide-spewing volcanoes and ax-wielding entrepreneurs—so God will continue to have things to do within creation for the sake of creation, and God will graciously involve the creation in the process.

            2. Which brings us to the second point, that creation is a participatory activity. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, we are told; but then, interestingly, the earth “brought forth vegetation” (Gen 1:12) and the waters brought forth swarms of living creatures (1:20) and the earth brought forth cattle and creeping things and wild animals (1:24). God created humankind, and quickly put this new creature into the garden “to till it and keep it” (2:15), which makes sense only if the garden wasn’t finished yet. The earth itself, once created, joins in the creative process. So do the humans. And we all still do. The earth renews itself quite remarkably—though sometimes, when the damage is severe, it may take a very long time; and humans gather to pray and work to limit the damage so that people and penguins alike can live long and prosper. And God beams.

            Make no mistake: this is the very opposite of the occasionally heard notion that our commission to till and subdue the earth means to exploit it because it exists merely for our human benefit. Nothing in the Bible can support such a self-centered notion—indeed, it is the very essence of being curved in on self that Martin Luther named as the fundamental definition of sin.[7] In case you missed it, we have learned recently that James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, never said some of the most outlandish things about using up the environment that were later placed in his mouth,[8] but, for what it’s worth, Ann Coulter did in fact write:

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet—it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars—that’s the Biblical view.[9]

Now, to be sure, Ann Coulter probably said that primarily so that folks like us would sit around and talk about Ann Coulter rather than about things that matter, but her reading of Gen 1 to support exploitation finds support also among much more responsible writers. Ian McHarg, for example, in his important book, Design with Nature, writes: “Indeed, if one seeks license for those who would increase radioactivity, create canals and harbors with atomic bombs, employ poisons without constraint, or give consent to the bulldozer mentality, there could be no better injunction than this text [i.e., Gen 1].”[10] People who read the Bible faithfully and competently must make clear that such readings are simply diametrically wrong—whether put forth by those who embrace the supposedly proffered exploitation or those who despise it.[11] To till the garden is a creative activity, a vocation from God exercised from within creation not over against it. To subdue the earth, in the context of Gen 1, is to participate in God’s own ordering and nurturing of creation, again, with and alongside other aspects of creation that exercise similar co-creative functions. What the Bible calls “subduing” certainly had quite a different connotation in the early world of Genesis, when, for many, most of every day would have been spent scratching out a subsistence living in a harsh environment. African villagers will have their own positive and negative effects on their environment, but they will be happy to know that God blesses their attempts to survive until tomorrow. “Subduing” takes on a different tone when we have bulldozers and chemical poisons at our disposal, and all of us in industrialized societies will need to think carefully about how to do our work now in ways that please God and protect the earth.

            And if subduing isn’t bad enough the text gives us “dominion” as well. But dominion—love the word or hate it—receives its biblical definition in Ps 72, where it exists solely to bring about justice for the poor, prosperity for all, and the full blossoming of the nonhuman creation. Creation is a participatory activity. The sometimes traditional notion that God created a perfect world and then handed it over to humankind either to use it up or screw it up is not the biblical story. God created and continues to create through what my colleague Terry Fretheim calls “a mutuality of vocation” in which “both humans and nonhumans are called to a vocation on behalf of each other in the furtherance of God’s purposes for the creation.”[12]

            3. God does this because of who God is, a God who is always relational. A Christian doctrine of Trinity reminds us that God, as God, is already in relation with God’s self. In a very real sense, God is never alone—even prior to creation. Relationship seems to be in God’s bones, so God creates in order to broaden God’s relational possibilities; and, as soon as creation is there, God interacts with the creation, breathing life into it, talking to it—endlessly, it seems—nurturing and cajoling it, recreating and restoring it, bringing it along into God’s future. Deism won’t do for the biblical God; God is way too involved. Now we could misinterpret that fact and seek to use God to bail us out of the eco-catastrophes that we make for ourselves. But God is more committed to the processes of creation than that, and less susceptible to manipulation. Creation is real for God, even dear to God, so God won’t overturn its laws—God’s own laws—at our whim to save us from our folly. But God will continually be with us, and will continue to show us the possibilities that come from loving the creation as ourselves.

            Martin Luther, often thought to be a rather gloomy sort, wrote these remarkably optimistic words about the ongoing work of God in us and for us:

This life, therefore, is not godliness but the process of becoming godly, not health but getting well, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way. The process is not yet finished, but it is actively going on.  This is not the goal but it is the right road. At present, everything does not gleam and sparkle, but everything is being cleansed.[13]

While Luther spoke of the human, none of this growth and becoming would be possible for Luther or for the Bible apart from the human interaction with the creation. The human is an earth creature, whose life and well-being hangs together with the life and well-being of the planet.

            4. But, of course, we don’t get this right, and so, to a greater or lesser degree, we all become Isaiah’s Babylon, arrogantly abusing creation for our own supposed benefit. We are reminded that even Solomon took his turn at felling the cedars of Lebanon in order to build, of all things, the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem—and the slave labor and heavy taxation Solomon employed in that project is often thought to be a significant factor in the eventual division of God’s people into two kingdoms. The Bible and its environmental impact statements tell the sobering truth that ecology and justice are intertwined, that oppression destroys not only the social fabric but also the fabric of creation itself. To be sure, we can find the big Babylons that do big damage—the irresponsible corporations, the selfish interests, the corrupt politicians, the incompetent bumblers—but we cannot deny our own environmental impact, an impact all the larger because of our life style and our own failure or refusal to do what we know we should. Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo Possum was right about the environment: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” And all of this matters deeply. The king of Babylon is identified in our text as the “Day Star”—or Lucifer, in Latin—so this text plays with identifying the fall of the oppressive king with the fall of Lucifer from heaven. This is what satanic activity looks like, says Isaiah—oppression of the poor and destruction of the environment. Watch out, says the prophet, this stuff matters!

            But here, too, living in the biblical story will give us hope. For our relational God of ongoing creation always stands ready to start over again—with us and through us for the sake of the world. The Bible’s hope is never naive hope (“Don’t worry, everything will turn out okay”)—as though what we do doesn’t matter; but it is realistic hope (“Fear not, for I am with you”), precisely because what we do does matter, and God graciously channels our efforts toward the ongoing process over which God can pronounce once more, “Very good.”    

            5. All of this implies that, in biblical understanding, our future as humans is indissolubly tied to the future of the creation. The biblical God is forever active in creation, finally, of course, even entering it on our behalf—but not only on behalf of humans. As Paul notes, “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” when, at last, “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:19-21). Deep ecologists may not like the fact that Paul draws creation so fully into the human horizon, but it seems to me the cedars of Lebanon will be happy to hear that God’s redemption of the human is supposed to be good news for the creation as well. The trees can hope once again that no one will come to cut them down, that the children of God, knowing their redemption and knowing God’s care for the earth, might tame their chain saws, at least to some degree. It would be naive, of course, to posit a world with no chain saws, or at least no handsaws. Creation lives in such complete interdependence that there is no way for any part of it to get along without making use of something else. Whether vegetarian or carnivore, whether human or grizzly bear, we eat what we are. But, still, we can do this more or less responsibly, more or less sustainably, more or less respectfully, more or less cognizant of the fact that God loves both digester and digested—and such recognition or the lack thereof will have massive environmental impact, either positive or negative. Wendell Berry has made the point eloquently:

This is not to suggest that we can live harmlessly, or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.[14]

            Deep ecology, as I understand it, challenges an anthropocentric understanding of nature in which nature is valued in terms of its usefulness to human beings, preferring instead an ecocentric understanding that values and appreciates nature for its own sake.[15] We can certainly find biblical roots for that. In fact, according to the psalmist, God planted those cedars of Lebanon just so that birds could build their nests and storks would have a home—quite apart from any human use or any human presence (Ps 104:16-17). In Job, God confounds the human-centeredness of Job’s many questions with a lengthy dissertation on God’s work in and for creation quite beyond any human understanding or pragmatic use (Job 38-39). As but one example, God chooses, says the text, “to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?” (Job 38:26-27). Job and we are reminded that “God’s caring is broader than human caring.”[16]  Still, any human understanding of nature will have an inherently human character since we can only talk and think as humans. Perhaps, from a Christian perspective, we need a theocentric understanding that, at its best, will resist the antithesis inherent in an insistence on either human-centered or earth-centered ideologies and call both humans and nature together in a family that is responsible to the creator and lover of each. This is something like the vision of Michael Zimmerman, chair of the philosophy department at Tulane University, who lectures on deep ecology and calls himself a “Buddhist Roman Catholic”: “I’m also hopeful,” writes Zimmerman, “that as our crisis deepens there will be an alternative Judeo-Christian theology available to people, one which calls for the affirmation of life, for taking care of the Earth, and for fostering the sisterhood and brotherhood of all other living things.”[17]

            Our future is indissolubly tied to the future of the creation. That is undeniably true in this age. To use it all up too quickly because, after all, Jesus is coming soon will be doubly dangerous—first, because of the great possibility of miscalculation. Remember those foolish girls in Jesus’ parable who burned up all their oil because “the bridegroom was delayed” and thus had none to greet him when he finally arrived (Matt 25:1-13)? Like them, if we use up all the oil, we might find the door shut when the wedding banquet begins. And such mentality is dangerous secondarily because God cares about the creation just as God cares for us—so to use it up in anticipation of Jesus’ coming may find us confronted with a none-too-happy Jesus. Nowhere in the Bible does God save humanity from the world. The biblical new age is never merely a spiritual new age; it is a new heaven and a new earth, where—whatever those poetic images might mean—humans and all God’s creation find renewal together, because only together do they and God get to the “very good” harmony that God desires for us.

God and the Land

            But now, once more, we must think a minute about what this means for land and even public lands. True, there is no proof text, but what will it mean, in the light of all that we have said, that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Ps 24:1)? There are, in fact, many “land” texts to which one could turn, but let me take you to one that is, as far as I can tell, not so often used in conversations like this one, to the story of the healing of Naaman, commander of the army of Aram, who, we are told, “though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy” (2 Kings 5:1). Naaman’s eventual healing by the God of Israel at the hands of the prophet Elisha could be interesting to us this morning in a variety of ways—for, like few others in the biblical narratives, he represents “Babylon,” the arrogant and oppressive armies that overrun little states like Israel at will and cut down trees whenever and however they please. But, to be healed, Naaman must listen to his Israelite servant girl and his own servants, humble himself, and bathe in the Jordan, even when he knows full well there are bigger and better rivers at home. In other words, Naaman’s humility will be a necessary prelude to his healing, just as humbling the oppressor will be a necessary prelude to healing the forests of Lebanon.

            But when Naaman is healed and ready to depart, he makes a strange request of Elisha, that he be given two mule-loads of earth to take home with him to Aram. Why? Most commentators suggest that his request comes from the more-or-less primitive assumption that the God of Israel can be worshiped only in Israel. Thus, Naaman needs a piece of Israel to carry out his new religion—a little extra-territoriality, some of Israel's dirt to worship Israel's God. But, since the story tells us at the outset that God is already at work in Aram, the dirt must mean something else. And, of course, the biblical reader knows that Yahweh, though not bound to the land of Israel, has made promises about the land of Israel (cf. Gen 12:1; Ps 105:11). The distribution of the land to the Israelite tribes granted them their “inheritance” in Yahweh (Num 26:52-56; Joshua 13-19); it was a sign of their participation in the promises of God. A more likely explanation of the meaning of Naaman's dirt is that Naaman, too, now shares in the tribal inheritance of the land. By faith, though not by birth, he has become an Israelite, a recipient of the promise. The dirt here does not function magically, but sacramentally—the stuff of the earth with which God has associated his promise. Like the water in which Naaman bathes, the dirt reminds us that God’s healing is not just “spiritual.” It makes use of stuff and renews Naaman to live in harmony in a world of stuff. He is healed through the stuff of the world to live in the world. He is not healed from the world.[18]

            We have already heard Wendell Berry speak of our sacramental relationship to the creation. With Naaman, we learn now of a deep and particular tie to the earth itself and to God who nurtures through and in, with and under the very stuff of earth. If God’s promises are tied to earth—and later, for Christians—to bread and wine and water—we cannot do violence to earth and water, to bread and wine, to anything in God’s creation, without doing violence to God and to our own possibility of access to God. This does not imply some kind of pantheism. God is not confined to the earth. God is not an earth spirit. But God comes to us through promises related to the earth, just as God creates us from the earth, and chooses to walk in the earth. God and earth are as closely connected as are we and earth.

            The earth is the Lord’s, says the Bible. But does this mean that it cannot also be mine? To be sure, the Bible does not disavow some kind of private ownership of land, but that ownership comes in the Bible with many hedges. I cannot exclude the poor from their proper participation in the fruits of “my” land—remember the command to leave food around the edges for the gleaners (Lev 19:9-10). I cannot take more than my share of land at the expense of others—remember the admonition about joining field to field so that I, at last, can be blessedly (or not so blessedly) alone (Isa 5:8). The land will never be mine in the sense that it does not always remain God’s—remember the reminder that we always remain “aliens and tenants” on God’s land (Lev 25:23). There will always be “open land” that “may not be sold” because it exists for the common good—remember the land kept unsold to benefit the priests because they serve all and have no private land of their own (Lev 25:34). I cannot exploit the land without allowing rest, not only for the land but also for the least of those who are compelled to work it—remember the sabbath day and the sabbatical year (Deut 5:12-15; Lev 25:1-7). In other words, there are more divine easements on so-called private land than most of us would feel happy with in our own deeds—unless, of course, we agreed with the biblical premise that we are all in this together, landowners and workers, residents and sojourners, natives and foreigners, humans and animals, all sharing in the goodness of the land that God has provided for all. Biblical land ownership comes only with those easements, and when the owners forget, the prophets remind them in no uncertain terms. To be sure, we cannot apply the civil laws of ancient Israel directly to our own complex society; but we can learn some things about our relation to creation and creation’s relation to God that will shape how we think about land and how we attempt to formulate a public policy that benefits not only humanity but also the land itself.

            In the Lutheran Book of Worship, when the offering is brought forward the congregation prays:

Blessed are you, O Lord our God, maker of all things. Through your goodness you have blessed us with these gifts. With them we offer ourselves to your service and dedicate our lives to the care and redemption of all that you have made, for the sake of him who gave himself for us, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen[19]

It’s not a bad arrangement: We give as we are gifted, but our giving goes beyond the offering plate and beyond the doors of the church as we “dedicate our lives to the care and redemption of all that [God] has made.” Caring for the earth, caring for the land will be part of such care. So, you are doing a godly thing here. God has given us pictures of the coming kingdom in which people and creation live together in mutual fulfillment, and you, in this small way, are practicing the kingdom to come. The psalmist heard the sometimes soft and sometimes raucous praise of God from “Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!” (Ps 148:9). Perhaps we can hear it, too.  I applaud your efforts and commend you to the God who means to bless us all.


[1]This is a slightly revised form of a keynote address at the regional conference, “Tending the Garden, Cultivating the Commons: Faith-Based Approaches to Shared Environmental Challenges,” presented by the Eco-Justice Program of the National Council of Churches and Eco-Justice Ministries, November 4-5, 2005, Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, Denver, Colorado. Copyright©2005, Frederick J. Gaiser.

[2]Paul R. Ehrlich, “Eco-catastrophe!” in The Environmental Handbook, ed. Garrett De Bell (New York: Ballentine, 1970) 176.

[3]From Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818).

[4]From T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925).

[5]Othmar Keel, The Song of Songs, trans. Frederick J. Gaiser (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994) 169-172.

[6]From Life Together, published in the critical edition as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together; Prayerbook of the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) 60.

[7]See especially, Martin Luther, “Lectures on Romans,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 25 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1972) 291.

[8]See James Watt, “The Religious Left’s Lies,” 21 May 2005; online at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/20/AR2005052001333.html (accessed 2 November 2005).

[9]Ann Coulter, “Oil good; democrats bad,” 12 October 2000; online at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/anncoulter/2000/10/12/167364.html (accessed 2 November 2005).

[10]Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969) 26. The classic argument that Gen 1 represents the greatest threat to the environment is LynnWhite, Jr.’s essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in The Environmental Handbook, ed. Garrett De Bell (New York: Ballentine, 1970) 12-26.

[11]Though, to be sure, we must admit that such misreadings are part of the history of the use of Gen 1. Thomas Merton, for example, writes: “American capitalist culture is firmly rooted in a secularized Christian myth and mystique of struggle with nature. The basic article of faith in this mystique is that you prove your worth by overcoming and dominating the natural world. You justify your existence and you attain bliss (temporal, eternal, or both) by transforming nature into wealth….” (cited by Colman McCarthy, “Putting Jesus to work for exploiters,” Minneapolis Tribune, 26 May 1981).

 

[12]Terence E. Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005) 273. In this book, Fretheim offers a much fuller development of themes similar to those I consider in this address.

[13]Martin Luther, “Defense and Explanation of All the Articles” (1521), in Luther's Works, vol. 32 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1958) 24.

[14]Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land” (1979), in The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (San Francisco: North Point, 1981) 281.

[15]See, for example, Michael Zimmerman (interview with Alan AtKisson), “Introduction to Deep Ecology,” In Context 22 (1989) 24; online at: http://www.context.org/ ICLIB/IC22/Zimmrman.htm (accessed 2 November 2005).

[16]See Frederick J. Gaiser, “Why Does It Rain? A Biblical Case Study in Divine Causality,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 25/1 (2003) 12-13.

[17]Zimmerman, “Introduction to Deep Ecology.”

[18]Material in these paragraphs is taken from the chapter on Naaman in my book, “O Lord, heal me”: Healing in the Bible (forthcoming from Baker Academic).

[19]Lutheran Book of Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg; Philadelphia: Board of Publication, Lutheran Church in America, 1978) 68.