Our human systems of self-reliance prevent us from using
the gift of creation well.
Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary—Year C
by Robert Saler
Reading
for Series C: 2013
The Fourth Sunday in Lent in Year C
Joshua 5:9-12
2
Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke
15:1-32
One of the most
insidious aspects of being caught up in systems of injustice is that we as
individuals find ourselves culpable for wrongdoing even if we have not made the
conscious decision to perpetuate sin. I might be going about my day engaged in
activities that seem perfectly benign, and indeed beneficial: going to work,
maintaining my household, engaging in recreation and travel with friends. But
each of those activities, in the North American context at least, is implicated
in larger webs of real and potential injustice. My salary at my workplace
allows me to live, like virtually all North Americans, at a level wherein my
basic needs are more than taken care of, even as much of the world’s population
goes without adequate food and shelter. My
recreational activities, praiseworthy as they might otherwise be, testify to my
complicity in the ongoing consumption of natural resources at an unsustainable
rate.
While Martin Luther’s
“low” theological anthropology and estimation of natural human capacities,
particularly as reflected in the severity of his late-Augustinian doctrine of
original sin, is often criticized for being too pessimistic or even irrelevant
to contemporary concerns, it is worth noting that the notion of original sin
does name a kind of pathos by which we realize that even best aspects of who we
are and what we do are inextricable from injustice and its effects. The bare fact
that there is virtually no action that we can take—including spending our time
working for environmental justice—that does not benefit from/participate in
disordered and unsustainable systems evokes the inevitability of sin in our lives—and perhaps also brings
forth the cry for deliverance.
The Joshua reading
for this week is ecologically interesting in that it marks the transition of
the Israelites from dependence upon the miraculous appearance of manna during
their peregrination in the desert to agriculture—once they have successfully
brought forth produce from the land, the manna is no longer necessary. This is,
in many respects, a praiseworthy achievement, and of a piece with the
Israelites taking possession of the land that God has promised them.
However, there is
something striking about the fact that the Israelites’ agricultural achievement
is marked by a transition away from being fed by the sheer gratuity (not to
mention improbability) of God’s manna. Part of what is at play here is a tension
that goes back to the stories of humanity transitioning away from the garden in
Genesis 2-3. On the one hand, Adam and Eve clearly trespass God’s commandment
not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they are expelled
from the garden as a result; in the aforementioned Augustinian/Lutheran
tradition of “original sin,” this transgression has generally been seen as the
root of subsequent human depravity.
On the other hand,
within both rabbinical and later Western Enlightenment contexts (as well as in
some early Christian church fathers, such as Irenaeus), this move away from the
garden was often read as a depiction of the “maturing” of humanity, with all of
the promise and peril such maturing holds [cf. Robert Saler, “The
Transformation of Reason in Genesis 2-3: Two Options for Theological
Interpretation,” Currents in Theology and
Mission Vol. 36, No. 4 (August 2009)]. Like a child that is weaned from
absolute dependence upon its parents for food, and a young adult who moves from
her parents’ home, the Israelites reaching a point of relative self-reliance
for providing their own food carries its own sort of potential for both sin and
blessedness.
I say “relative,”
because—as the rest of Israelite history as recorded in the Old Testament vividly
depicts—it is precisely when Israel “forgets” its dependence upon God’s
continued mercy and providence that the nation slides into its characteristic
evils—idolatry, injustice towards the orphan and the widow, rapacious practices
towards the vulnerable. To receive self-sustenance as a right arrogated rather
than a gift given is a cornerstone in the construction of sinful systems.
This theme—the perils
of self-sustenance—reverberates through the familiar account of the so-called
“prodigal son.” In this story, the son’s most significant learning is not his
own inability to provide wisely for himself by prematurely spending his
inheritance money. Rather, the most significant thing that he discovers is his
father’s ongoing willingness to practice sheer gratuity—forgiveness, seemingly
excessive celebration, and welcome beyond shame. To the extent that the
“father” in the story does indeed signify God, then the message becomes clear—recognizing
the ongoing “giftedness” of what we have received is the foundation of right
use. Joseph Sittler puts the matter well in his famous sermon “The Care of the
Earth:” “Abuse is use without grace . . . . If the creation, including our
fellow creatures, is impiously used apart from a gracious primeval joy in it
the very richness of the creation becomes a judgment” (Sittler, “The Care of
the Earth” in The Care of the Earth,
Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004).
We as humans will
build systems of self-reliance, and those systems will both bless and harm.
There is inevitability to this, and the preacher should not sugar-coat it.
However, preaching on these texts also presents an opportunity for the preacher
to invite the congregation into delight for the sheer gratuity of the gifts
that God gives us—in our lives, in church, and in creation itself. And
cultivation of such delight in the minds and hearts of the congregation may
become the occasion by which new possibilities for right use of these gifts
occur.