Conversion

Last updated on: March 1, 2017 at 12:41 pm by John C Holbert

Conversion 2017-03-01T12:41:54-05:00 John C Holbert

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(Lectionary for March 5, 2017)

It is common in the first Sunday in Lent to turn to Genesis. I assume this has become the lectionary practice, since we are beginning once again our Lenten journeys on this day, and the book of Genesis is the curtain raiser of the biblical saga. And because Lent has often been characterized by solemn introspection (though in last week’s post I tried to offer another way of seeing Lent), Genesis is apparently viewed as a way to begin such introspection by examining the very beginning of the human story of sin and ultimate reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ.

Let me begin by saying that I find this a very poor and deeply flawed way of looking at this famous story from Genesis, the infamous tale of the garden. It is not in my judgment a simple story of human sin. It is certainly a story of human culpability for much of the world’s troubles, but that culpability does not arise from breaking the command of God only; it arises also, and perhaps more significantly, from the inevitable and finally necessary striving for great human knowledge, but accompanied by the complete exclusion of God from that search. The portrait of the two once naked human beings, rushing back to the trees from whence they came, adorned with fig leaves, attempting to escape their God, is all you need to know about human foolishness (Gen 3:7). The inevitable result of grabbing for the great knowledge of God, and in the process leaving God behind, is fig leaf aprons. If we know what fig leaves feel like—No.2 grade sandpaper—we can join the ensuing hilarity with the millions who have laughed over the centuries at the ridiculous couple until finally realizing that the grand joke is on us. We, you and I, are the butt of this joke, and a long look in the mirror in the morning will remind us that the source of the world’s ills are too often self produced. To deepen the joke, the author then has the couple in rapid succession blame each other for the dilemma of their irritating attire, further emphasizing that not only do we refuse to admit our own weaknesses when we are caught in the act, but even more we are always happy to pass the buck elsewhere in the absurd attempt to weasel out of our responsibilities (Gen. 3:8- 13). Such a grand picture of human inanity!

What I have just described in an admittedly Reader’s Digest version, can be the source of numerous potent and useful sermons and lessons for any 21st- century congregation. But I choose to move elsewhere today. I want to train an eagle eye on the first tiny section of today’s reading, Gen. 2:15-17. For I think in those three verses you and I can discover enormously significant resources for addressing what is surely the world’s most significant problem, namely, the crises surrounding our climate and its rapid changes.

I have in earlier posts focused much attention on this issue, attempting to point out numerous places in the Bible where the question of climate change can be usefully addressed. However, I feel the need to go back to this question under the pressure of the new presidential administration in the US, the approval of an avowed climate change denier as chief administrator of the Environmental Pro Scott_Pruitt_(16502619990) tection Agency, Scott Pruitt, and the overt threat to withdraw from the Paris climate change accord, the very best hope the world has for slowing and eventually reversing the changing climate. Such a disavowal of that accord would be nothing short of catastrophic for us all, for as the USA goes, so goes the remainder of the developed and developing world. Just yesterday, Feb. 28, several congressional members of several different committees of congress, charged with overseeing and addressing issues of climate, used the occasion of their meetings quite openly to raise questions concerning the basic issue: is climate change actually occurring, is that change, if it is happening, the result of human activity, and what, if anything, should we humans be doing to regulate our emissions of heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere?

It seems nearly impossible to imagine that such a discussion is still worthy of anyone’s breath, let alone the breath of a national elected official. For nearly 40 years 97% of all research scientists have been saying that green house gases are the main driver of climate change, and their cries have not changed or ceased. Yet, too many of our elected officials continue to stick their heads in the proverbial sand and hope that their constituents will follow them in woeful and preposterous ignorance. OK. Rant over.

I assume that most of you (both of you?) who are reading this are not scientists; I certainly am not. But I can read, and what I read convinces me beyond any doubt that we face a monstrous enemy, and that enemy is us and our refusal to change our life styles in order to confront the monster of climate change head on.

Gen. 2:15-17 offers hope, and bids us to conversion. We have read and heeded Gen. 1:26-28 too long. We are decidedly NOT kings and queens over the fish and birds and animals; we are decidedly NOT charged with “subduing” anyone or anything! Nor, I think, are we stewards, God’s slaves, in this matter either. Or if we make such a claim, such language has been a rank failure. We remain the same rapacious, despoiling, leaches of our land and waters and wildlife that we have long been in the unstoppable search for profit. The earth has been our warehouse, our supermarket, where we grab and take not only as much as we like but far more than we need. How desperately we need a new vision!

And so here one is.

YHWH God took the human being (the “soil creature”) and placed it in the Garden of Eden to serve it and to protect it. And YHWH God commanded the human, “ Pineapple_230 From every tree of the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of everything you may not eat from it; for on the very day of your eating from it, you will without doubt die.”

Translations continue up until our own time to obscure a very basic fact: YHWH does not put the soil creature (the Hebrew ‘adam is very close to the Hebrew “soil” ‘adamah) in the garden to “till” it. That translation bears the whiff of the KJV that translates “to dress it.” Because the KJV appeared in 1611, it seemed to them fully appropriate to employ this translation since the vast majority of 17th century English people were farmers, living on and by the “dressing” of the land. The more modern “till” is merely an agricultural update.

However, both translations are quite wrong. The Hebrew here is the very common word “serve”. This word in Hebrew means pretty much what it means in modern English. Synonyms are: “attend to,” wait upon,” “minister to,” “look after,” “assist,” be in the service of.” We are to be servants of the garden that God has given us, not its dressers or its tillers. In the same way that we ask that genuine Christians be servant leaders, so we are called by God to be servants of the earth that God has given, not queens, not masters, not even stewards, but servants.

To that view we must be converted Apollo_15_Earth1 if we are to have hope to survive on this planet. We are the planet’s servants, helpmates to help it thrive and flourish and we along with it. This conversion is the one we must now undergo. Will you join me in becoming a servant of the planet and thus fulfill the call of God to each one of us?

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)

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