"An Altar of Earth"

The Bible as Earth-Book

by Robert Corin Morris

Editor’s Note: This article is from the September/October 2008 issue of Weavings.

What kind of world will our children and grandchildren inherit? Will it be the bleak world envisioned by some, where we will live "not only in the ruins of nature, but in the ruins of the civilization that ruined it"?¹

Or will the world be well on its way to the renewal of the interwoven green mantle in which we live, so compromised by three centuries of human misuse -- a world of waters cleansed of poison, air cleared of illness-making pollution, and divinely-shaped animal species left to thrive in their own wild kingdom?

What will be the shape of this world to come? What kind of people will it take to shape it in this direction? And why should this matter to those who call Jesus Lord?

Earth as Home

The heavens are the Creator's,
the earth has been given to the children of earth.
-Psalm 115:16²

I don't understand why everybody's so bent on getting out of here," my wife commented as we left a Christmas Eve service many years ago.

"Out of where?" I asked, baffled.

"Out of here -- the earth," Suzanne responded. "Off the planet. Beyond death. What's so bad about being here? Isn't this where God has planted us?" Her green thumb and love for all things growing was showing up in her metaphors.

My brain whizzed through the Christmas carols we had just sung, looking for what she was talking about. Finally she clarified the line that had set her off-a line in the Episcopal hymnal's version of "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing," which says that Christ was "born to raise us from the earth."³

I pointed out that Charles Wesley originally wrote "born to raise the sons of earth." Some well-meaning inclusive language committee, attempting to get away from "sons," inadvertently changed the meaning. Instead of being "raised" out of alienation and sin, the phrase now might seem to imply the "lift off" she found so off-putting.

My analysis of the words did not dissuade her from pressing her concern. As we got to the car, she got to her real point: "Why does everybody expect that the real point of life is to go to heaven?" Back to the garden metaphors she went. "Seems to me the point is to blossom where we are."

For many Christians, the phrase "world to come" means only one thing -- our future heavenly home. The fate of the earth is but the fate of the temporary cocoon that gives birth to the butterfly of our true and immortal selves. Not for my wife, nor for the great twentieth-century theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He worried that the standard heaven-bent presentation of the faith made people choose between the things of God and urgent earthly concerns, rather than choosing with God to love Earth's rich and varied life. With prophetic clarity, he saw human civilization coming to a crisis-point as science penetrates more and more deeply into the secrets of the earth:

[T]he powers that we have released could not possibly be absorbed by ... the narrow system of individual or national units. ... The age of nations has passed. Now unless we wish to perish we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth.⁴

To "build the earth," for Teilhard, was God's mandate to our species. Among those "old prejudices," he felt, was any heaven-fixation that separates spirit and matter and makes us think Earth is not central to our destiny as creatures of God.

"But don't you think God's going to give us another home?" some devout Christian friends said to me two decades ago, when I agonized to them about the fate of the earth and the silence of most pulpits about the growing crisis. "Isn't heaven where we're headed?"

My answer then, as now, was a blunt and, I believe, Bible-based "No." If "heaven" is the deep realm of God's being, we must see it as embracing, penetrating, transfiguring Earth-life, not "after" or "apart," or totally "beyond" this world which is, as Isaiah saw, full of God's radiant presence (see Isa. 6:3).

Earth I am, and for Earth I was made, both now in this life and in whatever hereafter God has prepared. The Bible tells me so: earth from earth, adam from adamah. Yes, there is God's own breath, which is part of the mystery of how our carbon and magnesium, copper and calcium, selenium and lithium can sing and dance and pray and ponder. But you and I were made out of the stuff of this planet, which, from the moment of its birth, has captured the heart of a God who finds its green hills and blue oceans "delectable," and who "grieves in his heart" at everything that "wrecks" it (see Gen. 1:10; 6:6,11-12).⁵

The simple, biblical truth of my own embodied humanity was driven home to me when I was diagnosed with bi-polar depressive illness in 1977, a condition that had, for years, baffled me with its successive sharp changes in my whole inner psychological and spiritual life. At that point in medical science, the remedy was astonishingly modest: large doses of a mineral, lithium salt. For some reason, the bodies of people with this condition can't retain the small trace of lithium salt that comes to us in our food. For the lack of a mineral, the psyche's stability is lost; for want of salt, the spirit's balance undone. Earth am I, indeed.

Not only were we made of the earth, but for it -- created, as the Hebrew literally puts it, "to serve it and keep it" (Gen. 2:15)⁶ -- language even more radical than Teilhard's "build the Earth." In the Babylonian creation epic, mortals are created to serve the pleasure of the gods by sending them food offerings.⁷ The Genesis writer pointedly changes the emphasis of the well-known creation saga in his own version of origins: we are made to serve the earth as the representatives of God's purposes for it -- purposes that will lead to our full unfolding as Earth's guardian species. Human origins are humble, from humus, earth. The task our first parents arrogantly rejected is to realize God's presence and reign here and now "on earth" rather than to reign "like gods" in heaven (see Gen. 3:5, NAB).

An Altar of Earth

You need make for me only an altar of earth.
- Exodus 20:23

It should not surprise us, then, that Moses' first instruction on Sinai, right after God has uttered the preamble of "Ten Words" or commandments, is to make "only an altar of earth" for the worship of this world-creating and world-sustaining God.

You shall not make gods of silver alongside me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold. You need make for me only an altar of earth and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your offerings of well-being ... I will come to you and bless you. (Exod. 20:23-24)

Such an altar is a symbol of the whole biblical ethic, oriented, as it is, to fit us for our planetary life. From the psalmist's celebration of distinctive habitats for different creatures (Ps. 104) to the legislator's edict that we leave unharvested the edges and corners of the grain fields so that the poor may glean (Lev. 23:22), from God's provision of marshes and wetlands for salt (Ezek. 47:11) to Jonah's realization that Divine compassion enfolds even the cattle of Nineveh (Jon. 4:11, KJV), biblical law and story model a spirit of care for Earth and all its creatures.

There's more. Just as we show respect for the vulnerability of the deaf and blind (Lev. 19:14), we are not to take a mother bird away from her vulnerable fledglings (Deut. 22:6). Newly planted fruit trees must be given three years to bear fruit before we may enjoy the fruit (Lev. 19:23). Even in wartime, we are not to harm a town's orchards. A besieging army may help themselves to the fruit, but "you must not cut them down. Are trees in the field human beings that they should come under siege from you?" (Deut. 20:19). Finally, in response to the primal instruction to "replenish" the earth (Gen. 1:28, KJV), the land is to "rest" from cultivation every seven years, lest the soil become depleted (Lev. 25:4). The world and all the creatures are God's, and we are the stewards, the "husbandmen" -- a wonderful archaic term designating the love and care with which we are to care for soil and water, all creatures, and each other.

All these are not interesting tidbits of ancient agrarian religious law, but examples of what it means to "serve the earth," to make an altar of the whole of our life on Earth in a way that honors God, a way that allows God, as promised in the Exodus text, to "come and bless us." The implication is that if we live another way, such blessing is not possible.

The dangers of neglecting such commandments are all around us these days, as we begin to reap the whirlwind of environmental disregard in global climate change, the depletion of the water table in many places, and a looming crisis in topsoil vitality -- not for the first time in history. Part of the reason for the slow decline of the Roman Empire in the West was environmental decline around the Mediterranean basin. Deforestation and excessive grazing eroded meadows and cropland. Fertile land became non-productive due to the salinization caused by excessive irrigation, and in North Africa, the Sahara expanded into former Roman farmland. The annals of the Roman Senate are filled with repeated laws about environmental preservation that failed to stop a heedless pursuit of profit.⁸

Becoming the Children of Earth's God

For the creation waits with eager longing
for the revealing of the children of God; ...
- Romans 8:19

In Christ, heaven and earth are indissolubly joined in a human life. Jesus does not come to destroy what Torah and Prophets affirm, but to deepen, enrich, and "fulfill" (Matt. 5:17). There is little in the Gospels to suggest the sharp division between the "earthly" and the "spiritual" so prized by later Christian history. Quite the contrary, Jesus is preparing those who follow him to "inherit the earth," as he says in the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:5).⁹

These blessings must be taken all together as descriptors of the way Jesus himself lives on the earth, and calls us to live, not as separate blessings for different personality types. To hunger and thirst after justice, to mourn over all that goes wrong, to make peace and endure persecution for seeking justice, to purify the heart and show mercy-all these not only cleanse our eyes to see God and enter God's gracious rule, but grow us toward the "meekness" our first parents surrendered when they began to separate their use of Earth from God's purposes. They rejected the humble dignity of stewards and sought to "be as the gods." The "meek," as the Greek word praus suggests, are not weak, but have their power under control.¹⁰ They know their true place in God's purposes and do not organize things around themselves, but rather around what makes for the well-being of the whole.

Thus, human righteousness and the fate of Earth are linked again and again in Scripture. In our day, the ancient assertions that crop failure or success, drought or refreshing rain, a land wasted or a land bountiful depend on whether a people lives in righteousness and justice take on new meaning.

Most of us, for good reason, no longer think that God pulls the strings of nature in blessing or curse, or that lightning strikes directly punish individual sin. But the truth of the ancient human intuition that human behavior and the well-being of the land are inexorably linked is clear for those who have eyes to see. Heedless consumption fells the rainforests. Careless disposal poisons the waters. The worship of speed and convenience requires fossil fuels whose exhaust threatens global scorching. Powerful forces, both institutional and personal, resist the cost of change, the repentance that would avert the wrath of nature violated.¹¹

We are part of Earth's rescue plan -- God's plan to rescue Earth by rescuing it, first of all, from our destructiveness. Only by living into our destiny as Earth's stewards -- arranging our economic, social, and, yes, spiritual life around our God-given role -- will we become the children of God for which the whole creation, from oak trees to orangutans, "waits with eager longing" (Rom. 8:19). The creatures have been delivered into our hands (Gen. 9:2) and live in dread until we become Earth's true cultivators and custodians.

The Life of the World to Come

Without love for the earth
there is no place for us in heaven.
-South American Indian Proverb¹²

Not only for the time of our mortal life, but for whatever state of being God has for us after mortal death, the deep mystery of this planetary reality is, I believe, our home. Paradise and Earth are part of one reality. Dying will not relieve us of our task.

Years ago, one of my eighth grade confirmands wrote his confirmation essay about responsibility for the earth. Giving it to his dad to read, he was disappointed to hear a curt dismissal of his youthful ideals: "Don't waste your time with such worries. We'll both be long gone before the environment goes down the tubes." This indifferent Christian had learned only too well the conventional images of escape from Earth and imagined, as much as any fervent believer in the "rapture," that he could leave it all behind.

I believe, with Chardin, that one of the most important spiritual tasks of our age is to remove this "heavenly escape clause" from the way we read Scripture, which, in fact, causes us to glide over passages that suggest something quite different.

What if, when we die, we are still part of Earth's life, living in "paradise" (another dimension of its reality), awaiting the full dawning of the reign of God over the whole creation? The ancients believed the departed lived either inside the earth, the shadowy realm of sheol, or in one of the nearer heavens that surrounded the earth.¹³

The New Testament pictures the faithful departed continuing their prayer for the kingdom to come on earth (Rev. 6:10), and asserts that the fate of those who have come before us is mysteriously connected to how the living respond to God here and now. They will not come to their full completion "apart from us" (Heb. 11:40). When biblical writers contemplate the life of the world to come, they cannot leave the earth behind.

What form the "glorification" of human beings and Earth may take is something we know only in amazing events like the Transfiguration, where a mortal human body shines with the light of the Divine itself, or the Resurrection, where that which is "mortal puts on immortality" (1 Cor. 15:54). Whatever the ultimate meaning of the symbols, a glorified and renewed world, in which the kings of the earth bring all their treasures in tribute to a great City that has descended from heaven to Earth is presented as the end-game of God's plan for us.

And who will inherit this world where humanity and nature, nation and nation are reconciled? As we have seen, Jesus makes it very clear: the "meek" -- those who have submitted their human powers to the discipline of God's love. The growing crisis of Earth's life makes it abundantly clear that he was not a starry-eyed idealist, but a prophet of the utmost practicality. And more than a prophet: for he is the Way back to the humble humanity that is our true destiny, and Earth's best hope.

Notes
1. Fr. Thomas Berry, author of The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), speaking at my New Jersey educational center, Interweave, in the early 1980s.
2 Author's translation. All Scripture references are to the New Revised Standard Version Bible unless otherwise indicated.
3 "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing," The Hymnal 1982 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1985), no. 87.
4 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1972), 39.
5 Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, The Schocken Bible, vol. 1 (New York: Schocken, 1997).
6 My translation and emphasis. The Hebrew word can be translated "till," but literally means "serve," and is, in fact, the same word used as in "serve the Lord" or "serve other gods." To "serve" the earth, whether in tilling or in using natural resources, is a sacred task.
7 Read the Babylonian epic in Enuma Elish: Vol. 1 & 2: The Seven Tablets of Creation; The Babylonian and Assyrian Legends Concerning the Creation of the World and of Mankind, ed. Leonard W. King (San Diego: Book Tree, 1998).
8 For more information, see Jared M. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking Adult, 2004).
9 Jesus is building on an idea deeply imbedded in Israelite history. Psalm 37, for example, promises repeatedly that "those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land" (37:9) and that "The righteous shall inherit the land, and live in it forever" (37:29).
10 Praus, the Greek word for "meek" or "gentle," suggests wildness tamed and power brought under control. Understanding this, we can see why Moses was described as "very meek, above all men who were on the face of the earth" (Num. 12:3, kjv). See "Blessed Are the Meek", Grady Scott at The Christian Post, http://pastors.christianpost.com. See also Deidre J. Good, Jesus the Meek King (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1999).
11 We would be closer to the mark, I believe, if we read most references to the "wrath" of God as part of the automatic response of violated nature, or human nature, rather than as some personal Divine vindictiveness. We go against the grain of reality at our peril.
12 Oliver and Danielle Fšllmi, Revelations: Latin American Wisdom for Every Day (Offerings for Humanity) (New York: Abrams, 2006), January 28 entry.
13 Many Jews of Jesus' day believed in seven heavens, one of which functioned as both paradise and hell. Paul reports being caught up into this "third heaven" in mystic rapture (2 Cor. 12:2).

To order copies of this September/October 2008 issue, call 1-800-972-0433 or 615-340-7284. To subscribe to Weavings, click here.