Love the neighborhood as
yourself!
Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary—Year C by Dennis Ormseth
Reading
for Series C: 2012-2013
Sixth
Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 19:15–16, 19–21
Psalm 16 (8)
Galatians 5:1, 13–25
Luke 9:51–62
The learnings for care of creation to be drawn from
this Sunday’s readings hinge on an interpretation of the concept of the “kingdom
of God” from the Gospel and second reading. Would-be followers of Jesus, we are
told, should “let the dead bury their own dead” and “go and proclaim the
kingdom of God. . . . No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit
for the kingdom of God” (9:60-61). Luke Timothy Johnson suggests that “the
meaning here depends on the understanding of conversion as a ‘new life,’ with
those not sharing the new life being in effect ‘dead.’" We are to
understand that the preaching of the kingdom of God requires “a sense of
direction and concentration” infused with prophetic urgency like that imaged by
our first reading (The Gospel of Luke. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical
Press, 1991; p. 163).
The apparent tension in the text between valid
concerns of everyday life—the obligation to bury one's father, the slaughter of
precious oxen to provide meat for a farewell feast, for example—and following
the prophet whose face is set toward Jerusalem, might suggest that preaching
the Kingdom has little if nothing to do with practical, economic
considerations, however much it might have to do with “new life.” We propose
here, on the contrary, to adopt Wendell Berry's insistence, in his essay on
"Two Economies" (Home Economics. San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1987), that “the first principle of the Kingdom of God is that it
includes everything; in it, the fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We
are in it whether we know it or not and whether we wish to be or not.”
Furthermore, although we “do not and can never know either all the creatures
that the Kingdom of God contains or the whole pattern or order by which it
contains them,” nonetheless in principle everything in the Kingdom of God is “joined
both to it and to everything else that is in it” (Berry, p. 55). Berry makes
this argument in order to assert the appropriateness of calling the Kingdom an
“economy”—indeed the “Great Economy”—which “includes principles and patterns by
which values or powers or necessities are parceled out and exchanged.” In this
view, the Kingdom of God and the preaching of it can hardly be disconnected
from the “concerns of everyday life.” There is urgency here, to be sure, but
the Kingdom has everything to do with such concerns, which we might in fact
properly characterize as at least implicitly “ecological.”
This follows from Berry's understanding of the
“Great Economy.” We find ourselves in the precarious condition of living “within
order and that this order is both greater and more intricate than we can know.”
And while we "cannot produce a complete or even an adequate description of
this order, severe penalties are in store for us if we presume upon it or violate
it." The special situation of humans is that while “fowls of the air and
the lilies of the field live within the Great Economy entirely by nature . . . humans,
though entirely dependent upon it, must live in it partly by artifice. The
birds can live in the Great Economy only as birds, the flowers only as flowers,
the humans only as humans. The humans, unlike the wild creatures, may choose
not to live in it—or, rather, since no creature can escape it, they may choose
to act as if they do not, or they may choose to try to live in it on
their own terms. If humans choose to live in the Great Economy on its
terms, then they must live in harmony with it.”
(While Berry develops his argument with reference
to Matthew 6, we see no reason not to apply his understanding to the concept in
these readings as well). A good human economy will define and value human goods
so as to conserve and protect them, as does the Great Economy. Nevertheless, certain differences pertain:
the dependence of a human economy on the Great economy means that humans can
only add value to things in nature, not originate value. A human economy must “also
manage in such a way as to make continuously available those values that are
primary or given, the secondary values having mainly to do with husbandry and
trusteeship” (Berry, p. 61). “The Great Economy,” Berry insists, is “both known
and unknown, visible and invisible, comprehensible and mysterious. It is, thus,
the ultimate condition of our experience and of the practical questions rising
from our experience, and it imposes on our consideration of those questions an
extremity of seriousness and an extremity of humility” (Berry, p. 57).
Given this understanding of the Kingdom of God as
Great Economy, what can we draw from this Sunday's readings concerning Jesus'
possible orientation to ecological concerns? The narrative, Luke Timothy
Johnson observes, begins the “great middle section” of Luke's Gospel. With his face set to go to Jerusalem, he
immediately encounters resistance from a Samaritan village and has to respond
to his disciples suggestion that they bring down fire to “consume” them. The
conflict relates to the 'ancestral antipathy between Judeans and Samaritans
based in the rivalry between the shrines of Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Zion, and on a
whole cluster of disputes concerning the right way to read the sacred books,
messianism and above all, who was a real Israelite” (Johnson, p. 163). That he
was headed toward Jerusalem would have been interpreted in the village as a
choice for the competing shrine, a competition in which the disciples were only
too happy to engage. Jesus' rebuke was meant to dissuade the disciples from
engaging in such competition; instead, as the following exchange reveals, they
should “go and proclaim the Kingdom of God,” which would entail transcendence
of that conflict in an embrace of and advocacy for the inclusive reality of the
Kingdom. As the disciples will soon understand, that his face is set to go to
Jerusalem with prophetic urgency shows that he is equally against the choice of
Jerusalem and its authorities over
Samaria.
The significance of this narrative is further illumined
by our second reading. The Apostle Paul is also concerned about the “kingdom of
God,” for which he proscribes an ethic of life in the Spirit. He insists that
the freedom to which Christians are called cannot be used as “an opportunity
for self-indulgence” (Galatians 5:13) because it leads to those “works of the
flesh” that preclude one from participation in the “kingdom of God.” His long
and dreadful list of such behaviors is notable for their inherently selfish
orientation within basically social or even economic relationships. “If you
bite and devour one another,” he warns with graphic metaphor, “take care that
you are not consumed by one another;” “let us not become conceited, competing
against one another, envying one another” (Galatians 5:15; 26). Paul in fact
generalizes here on the ethical principles of the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed. The
freedom to which we are called, he insists,
instead requires, paradoxically, that we “become slaves to one another”
in a life in the Spirit characterized by “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control,” all virtues that are
inherently and positively social, in accordance with the commandment to “love
one's neighbor as oneself” (5:14, 22).
While neither Luke nor Paul has in view anything
specifically related to the ecological crisis of our age, there emerges here an
ethos that brings the human economy into consonance with the Great
Economy. Again, Wendell Berry sees the
connection. When the existence of the Great Economy is acknowledged, he notes,
“we are astonished and frightened to see how much modern enterprise is the work
of hubris . . . based on invasion and pillage of the Great Economy (Berry, p. 65).
While Jesus forbids competition in favor of the transcendent Kingdom, and Paul
warns against its reciprocal “consumption,” it is Berry's observation that as
the “ruling principle in our explanation of reality and in our understanding of
economy,” competitiveness
“imposes a logic that is extremely difficult, perhaps
impossible, to control.” That logic explains why our cars and our clothes are
shoddily made, why our “wastes” are toxic, and why our “defensive” weapons are
suicidal; it explains why it is so difficult for us to draw a line between
“free enterprise” and crime. If our economic ideal is maximum profit with
minimum responsibility, why should we be surprised to find our corporations so
frequently in court and robbery on the increase? (Berry, p. 762).
In the Great Economy, on the contrary, “all transactions
count and the account is never ‘closed,’ so “the ideal changes:”
We see that we cannot afford maximum profit
or power with minimum responsibility because in the Great Economy, the loser's
losses finally afflict the winner. Now the ideal must be “the maximum of
well-being with the minimum of consumption,” which both defines and requires
neighborly love. Competitiveness cannot be the ruling principle, for the Great
Economy is not a “side” that we can join nor are there such “sides” within it. Thus,
it is not the "sum of its parts" but a membership of parts
inextricably joined to each other, indebted to each other, receiving
significance and worth from each other and from the whole. One is obliged to “consider
the lilies of the field,” not because they are lilies or because they are
exemplary, but because they are fellow members and because, as fellow members,
we and the lilies are in certain critical ways alike (Berry, p. 72-73).
Loving one's neighbor as oneself, we might say,
necessarily requires a community of neighbors, or a neighborhood. And within
the context of the “kingdom of God” as a Great Economy, that neighborhood would
be comprised of all relationships between existing creatures, however known or
unknown, visible or invisible, comprehensible or mysterious. For a human, Berry
concludes, “the good choice in the Great Economy is to see its membership as a
neighborhood and oneself as a neighbor within it,” as indeed, a neighbor who
loves the neighborhood as oneself.
.
For additional
care for creation reflections on the overall themes of the lectionary lessons
for the month by Trisha K Tull, Professor Emerita of Old Testament,
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and columnist for The Working Preacher, visit: http://www.workingpreacher.org/columnist_home.aspx?author_id=288
