“From the biblical point of view, the earth and our earthly livelihood are conditional gifts. We may possess the land given to us, that we are given to, only by remembering our intimate kinship with it. The condition of the people is indistinguishable ultimately from the condition of the land. Work that destroys the land, diminishing its ability to support life, is a great evil for which sooner or later the punishment is homelessness, hunger, and thirst.”
Wendell Berry
The weight of this summer lifted a bit last week, in those first hushed moments spent greeting a good, long, earth-drenching, rain. Each droplet yielding this sense of lightness that spread out over our landscape and into my bones.
Relief had come.
Help was here.
Manna had fallen right into the heart of our desert.
Water had sprung from the rock.
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord.
The experience of release is a powerful thing. Be that the release of rain, over a parched and sun-scorched landscape. The release of provision, to those plunged to the depths of hunger and thirst. Or the release of a formerly enslaved tribe of people who were then led through the wilderness so that they might learn how to live out their salvation in The Promised Land.
And isn’t that what we are all still doing today? Each of us somewhere on the journey between captivity and freedom? Saved, yes. Released, indeed. But still learning how to incarnate and enjoy the great gift of our salvation, here and now? This is what Christian spiritual formation is, the lifelong process of shaping us into an embodied response to our prayer, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Part of the struggle we face with this is that, like Israel, humans can have a hard time differentiating between freedom and captivity. Not to mention that we live in a time and place where the dominant version of freedom that has been imaged and inspired by both our culture and often times the Western church, isn’t aligned with Gods hope for our freedom at all. And is often even opposed to it. It’s a freedom synonymous with independence and autonomy, that doesn’t tie us down or hinder us with any sense of responsibility to our inheritance and the gifts we have been given as children of God, heirs to His Kingdom, and recipients of salvation.
This kind of freedom untethers us from any sense that God actually cares how we spend our time between here and heaven. Which includes how we expend the earth’s resources, how our consumption practices impact the land and the lives of creatures, how we use our God-given energy, talents, breath, bodies, and lives. Instead, these aspects of our existence are seen as cut loose from our lives with God and our discipleship with Jesus and set to the side for us to manage as we like.
Several years ago, The National Study of Youth and Religion, conducted a massive research project that at the time was the largest of its kind, and maybe still is. The findings of this study were examined in greater detail in a book by sociologist Christian Smith titled, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. What Smith gathered from the data was that of the 60% of American teenagers who responded that religious faith was important to them, the dominant religion of that group, including those who identified as Christians, was actually something he termed “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” And this is the “creed” of that religion:
1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants you to be good and nice and fair to one another, as taught in the bible and in most religions
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
This is telling evidence of the primary fruit of the American church, and of Western Christianity. And it is being transmitted to children and youth primarily though the lived witness of the adults and church communities who are discipling them.
As Dallas Willard (or maybe Jan Johnson) once said, our discipleship is more caught than taught. Our actions and lived witness will supersede our teaching.
And yet, this is not Christianity at all. Not to mention that it will crumble under the weight of life experience. In those times when we find ourselves suspended in the wilderness of death and disease or loss, longing for a form of sustenance that we don’t even know. Like mana – which translates to “what is this?”
Meanwhile authentic Christianity does not teach an expression of salvation that is untethered from responsibility. What our salvation does is cut us loose from other lesser attachments, those things that ultimately cannot provide what we need, so that we are free to take on the yoke of Christ and become responsible alongside him for all that we have been given to steward, on earth as it is in heaven.
Scripture teaches us that every God-given gift is inextricably bound to a burden of responsibility. Be that the gift of a child we have been entrusted to raise. The gift of a spouse we are called to love and honor. The gift of the tools and talents necessary for us to live into our vocations. The gift of our bodies, our breath, our people. The gift God has extended to all of us through access to the beauty and life-sustaining resources of this planet and her creatures. And most importantly, the gift of our salvation.
All of these things are unmerited, yes. All freely given, indeed. And yet, if we are to reach out and receive the fullness of this abundance with both hands, we will simultaneously assume the yoke of responsibility to them. Anything less fragments us from the gift and the Source through whom all is given, and we (and the world) end up receiving less life as a result.
There is no place in Scripture where I find this illustrated in more compelling terms than through Jesus’ own story about the Prodigal Son. This young son who attempts to extract his inheritance from the ties of responsibility to his father, and his place and purpose in his father’s home. He attempts to unhinge and untether himself with his inheritance in tow. And it leaves him starving and his inheritance diminished in a distant land that is marred by famine. The freedom he was after, turned out to yield captivity instead.
This parable has become so essential to my understanding of both my spiritual formation and my stewardship of the planet. And these two things along with my vocation as a writer and a servant of The Church are woven together into one intertwined thread that I now understand cannot be separated without fragmenting me in the process. In part because, as we discussed in the last post, I don’t see myself, or any of you for that matter, as just a sinner saved by grace. We have been saved for something. We have been saved so that we might be responsible for everything we have received, this beautiful inheritance, right now. Today.
We are here to tend and to keep, to be stewards and to exercise dominion, which means to bring order, to protect, to serve, to yield health, to maintain sustainability, to seek wholeness. In everything that we do. And the Bible makes it clear over and over again that inheritance and land go hand and hand. Which means that like the prodigal, we have received this place, this planet as an inheritance.
How then, will we live in response?
One thing that I think is important to note on all of this is that we aren’t called to seek progress or to save the earth through our actions. Progress is a word that is bound up in the economy of the world and our pursuit of it implies a presumption of power and control that isn’t ours to hold. Like our spiritual formation, our care of creation has and will always be about posture. A posture that resists exploitation because exploitation severs us from communion with God. Eve exploited creation. She took more from the garden than she was given. The young son exploited his inheritance and nearly starved to death. Our food system is horribly exploitive. It exploits impoverished people and nations. It exploits animals. It exploits the land. And it exploits us as consumers. And we can’t try to fix it. But we can choose to turn away from it, more and more every day.
To start asking of our eating, our spending, our wasting. Questions that widen our vision away from the narrow view of sustenance provided to us on colorful boxes in the grocery aisle. Or cuts of meat named anything but the animal from whom it came. Question like where and who did this come from? Where is this going? And does this align with my desire to see God’s will be done through me, on earth today? Is it responsible?
In the gospel of Mark, we meet Bartimaeus, a man blind from birth who is begging on the roadside. He calls out to Jesus and asks for mercy. Jesus responds by asking him what he wants.
It seems obvious, but the thing is, that if Bartimaeus is going to regain his sight his life is going to change. What was once acceptable for someone who couldn’t see, and who lacked the capacity to do more than beg, wouldn’t be acceptable anymore. If Jesus healed him, and he regained his sight, he would have to change how he provided for himself. The bar of responsibility in his life would shift, and he knew it.
And yet still, in light of this, he responded,
“Rabbi,” he said. “I want to see.”
He wanted to see. So do I. I used to live so blindly. I got myself through college on Mountain Dew, Bud Light and drive-thru chicken nuggets. I thought the aim of life was to fill my closet. When I grew up a bit I had a garden. But I didn’t aim to serve it, I wanted it to serve me. And I had zero sense that my status as Christian might have anything to say about any of it.
But now I really want to see. I want Jesus to come and stand next to me and point until my vision aligns with his and new things come into focus. More and more every day. Most of the time. And I say this knowing that the more I see, the more responsible I will have to be as a result.