Baptism in Dirt

Season of Creation 2A: Land Sunday

Genesis 3:14-19; 4:8-16

Matthew 12:38-40

Living in south central Nebraska, one comes to know the seasons by their distinctive signs. Every March, for example, the Sandhill Cranes utilize the barren corn and soybean fields along the Platte River as a staging ground on their migratory trek to the Alaskan tundra, so for about a month or so we have the delight of watching these magnificent birds socialize in their enormous flocks. Soon after that the songbirds arrive, the spring winds begin to blow, and then it's time to start sowing seeds in the ground. Summer comes too late and leaves too soon, but for at least four months out of the year we are blessed with blue skies, warm temperatures, and – if the rains come – green pastures

Recently we have moved into a new season of the year. Yes, the beloved Huskers have taken to the football field in Lincoln and there is much enthusiasm accompanying the first blood sacrifices offered up to the gridiron gods. But off in the more sparsely populated corners of the state the corn has begun to be harvested, and soon semi-loads of the grain will be hauled off to the nearest elevator, which – if all prognostications are accurate – will be unable to hold the entirety of the year's bounty. Consequently, huge mounds of corn will be piled up in every small town like massive cheddar-colored sand dunes. Over the next several months some of it will be sold to feedlot operators looking to fatten their cattle, but most will go to the new economic hope of this region: ethanol.

And so all around us in this state we see testimony to an absurd human cycle that nature would never claim as her own. We expend vast amounts of water, petroleum-based chemicals, and gasoline, not that the world may be fed, but so that we in the so-called First World – and especially in the US – can remain addicted to our need to consume the earth's fossil fuels. As in the past, we have insisted on placing more hope in our ability to meet the problem head on by finding a better technological fix instead of adjusting our moral compass and modifying our consumptive habits. Anyone who has worked with compulsive personalities can see the pattern here: "We don’t have a problem. Really, we don't! We can quit any time we want!"

And still the record grain harvests roll into the elevators every September, right on schedule.

As with any addiction, there are innocent victims – most often family members – who must suffer the consequences of a menacing obsession. In this case, the human toll is certainly tragic – people the world over are bypassed on the food line just so that we can fill the tanks of our SUVs – but the detrimental effects of our wanton behavior can also be felt on the land, our primordial home.

A few years ago I was on a service project with a group of students in Denver and ran across a disturbing story in the local paper, "The Face of Prostitution: ‘Book’ Rewrites Attitudes." The article related how over the last several years an undercover vice detective had been collecting arrest photographs of women picked up on prostitution charges and then recording these in chronological sequence. Three examples of his "before and after" snapshots were published, in horrifying color, just below the headline. What I saw in the paper that morning were human faces that had been transfigured over time into visages of desolation.

The first photo depicted a young woman who might likely be found walking the halls of any small town high school. Her hair was cut, even stylish, her clothes were clean, and her eyes seemed to reflect that glimmer of hope so often associated with spirited youth. In the next image – her second arrest – she was faring less well, sporting a black eye and looking like she could use a good night’s sleep. The third photo was worse, and by the fourth, I was left staring at only a shell of a person, someone who had endured untold beatings and abuse from controlling pimps and johns, to the point that only the faintest vestige of life was left in her sallow flesh and cadaverous eyes. At this stage she was completely addicted to drugs; the hopeful high school senior had spiraled into the depths of despair.

Driving home from Denver that day I had the opportunity to reflect on what I had seen, and this along perhaps one of the most agriculturally rich sections of I-80. It was early April and on the horizon I could see little plumes of dust rising up from tractors in distant fields, and everywhere there were mobile tanks of anhydrous ammonia being filled for an eventual application on the land. This prairie earth, once so rich in nitrogen but victimized by years of abuse, was now as barren of the element as any plot on the moon, so what was needed this spring, as with every spring, was a little help – a booster. "Just a little something to keep you going."

And suddenly it all seemed very clear to me: what I had seen in the Denver Post that day was being played out on an ecological scale right before me. If this landscape had had a face, I'm sure it would have been as cadaverous as the one that stared out at me from the morning's paper. Had it eyes, their emptiness would have haunted me. What I saw on that trip back to Hastings was the tragic effects of addiction. Not only have we as Americans become grossly dependent upon the highly processed products of agribusiness – whether these be ethanol or high-fructose corn syrup – but the very land itself has for the last thirty or so years suffered a kind of chemical addiction. I realized then, more poignantly than ever, that today's industrial agriculturist, whose technological toys and chemical know-how have become the pride of so many prairie states, is really nothing more than a kind of eco-pimp doling out "a little help" here and there in order to keep his property putting out, as it were.

Many, of course, would say that the Judeo-Christian tradition has more than its fair share of guilt to claim in all of this. After all, doesn't our most ancient mythology – the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden – provide the lens through which countless generations have understood the complexities of the human condition? We live a cursed existence, do we not, in which the enmity between the woman and the serpent, or the antagonism between men and the land, are regarded as essential truths? Small wonder, then, that those of us who were created to be caretakers – husbandmen, if you will – end up being little more than exploiters. Isn't it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Those who would make such claims, however, seem not to have thought too critically about the person and work of Jesus the Messiah. This is not surprising given all the attention that has been given over the years to the notion that Jesus is a "personal Lord and savior" and little else (for what else is there?). While this oft-heard mantra may be true, it does more harm than good in obfuscating the more important insight that Jesus' ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection have implications that are not only personal but also cosmic in proportion. Paul alludes to this when he speaks of Christ as the Second Adam, one whose incarnation heralds the beginning of a new creation. Just how closely this parallels the original work of God in the Garden – when Yahweh drew Adam out of the earth and breathed the breath of life into his lungs (Gen. 2:7) – has been under-emphasized throughout the history of the church.

It is here, I think, that we should consider the curious statement that Jesus offers to a group of scribes and Pharisees shortly after they press him for a sign, some clear indication that he is in fact the expected messiah. Jesus, disturbed at their insistence, suggests that the only portent they will receive is one that their lack of faith will prevent them from truly comprehending:

An evil and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth (Matt. 12: 39-40).

In the heart of the earth. In other words, in the womb from which the original Adam was drawn by the Creator – as if to say, God must also raise the Second Adam from the very earth itself so that creation may begin anew, redeemed and reconciled to God. We tend to place so much emphasis on the crucifixion and then on the resurrection of Jesus that this three-day sojourn in "the belly of the whale" is all but lost on us. But descent into the abyss is indeed significant, for it is here that the Second Adam, the prototypical caretaker of the new creation, is formed, and it is from here that the redemption of the cosmos – not just humanity – begins.

I learned yesterday that one of the early prophets of the "Christian green movement" (if we can call it that), H. Paul Santmire, has written a new book, entitled Ritualizing Nature. From what I can gather, Santmire argues in this work that the church, if it is to be truly aware of its responsibility for the care of creation, must introduce into its worship new rituals that will accentuate this unique calling in a meaningful way. Reflecting on this in light of the lectionary text for this week, I began to wonder about the possibility of a "green sign of Jonah" – that is, a means of enacting in a symbolic way our own rebirth from the earth into a life of commitment to the health of our biotic communities. How often do we have the opportunity to incorporate the soil -- which we have long taken for granted, if not abused -- into the communal life of the saints?

Though I would never go so far as to suggest that we set aside the ritual of baptism, a sacrament so central to the Christian tradition, I do wonder what possibilities might lie in a kind of "baptism in dirt," that is, in enacting in a deliberate way our own essential connection with the earth and the landscapes of which we are a part. In so doing we might begin to realize and affirm that the new creation, which we claim to profess in word and deed, began not in the early light of a Sunday morning resurrection appearance, not in the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, but in the rich, dark depths of the womb from which we were all formed, and to which we will all someday return.

From dust we came, and to dust we shall return – why are we only reminded of this important truth well after we have passed from this world? Perhaps we would do well to get our hands a little dirty now and then in the context of our Christian worship, and thus in the whole of our spiritual lives. Focusing only on the beginning and the end seems to devalue the real stuff of life: the troubles that arise between women and serpents, sweat and bread, seeds sown and brambles grown, as well as their sweet resolution through the mystery that is God's faithfulness.

But those who have sunk their hands into the dirt a time or two, who have planted seeds and nurtured their growth for a season, know that dust is an unlikely source for the life of one reconciled to God. Arid and lifeless, it is the final resting place of the fallen Adam, but this does not mean that we should claim it as our own. The earth, by contrast – moist and rich, teeming with life – is the primal home of the Second Adam, and thus the seedbed of a new creation. It is the ground of our very being as Christians. But how to make this evident and ritually significant in our individual and communal lives: this is the question. And this is our task. We need always to be reminded that between dust and dust, between ashes and ashes, and between crucifixion and resurrection, lies the good red earth, the material source of our spiritual lives and the place where we might still be forgiven of our many ecological transgressions.

Who Is My Neighbor?

The following is an excerpt from my book, Learning the Language of the Fields, which I found to be relevant to the Season of Creation lectionary texts for this week.

Genesis 2:4b-22

When we consider the manner in which Genesis 1-2:4a, the Priestly (P) narrative, God’s creation of the cosmos, and the doctrines that subsequently grew out of it, it is not difficult to see how we in the Judeo-Christian tradition have come to regard ourselves as essentially removed or distinct from the rest of the natural world. The image we are given of the Creator informs and determines the image we have of ourselves, and this account presents a God who creates from a distance, an observer who speaks the cosmos into being and sees that it is good. Nowhere in this description are we given the impression that God “gets God’s hands dirty” in the process, or that the quality and characteristics of creation are known through any tactile or first-hand experience. God does not taste or smell or feel the goodness of the earth in this story; rather, God contemplates it from afar, abstractly, as if surveying that blue-green jewel of a planet that Neil Armstrong first beheld from the moon in 1969. In the Priestly account of creation, God is transcendent, wholly removed, and not to be confused in any way with the natural world.

The Priestly narrative, however, is not the last word on God’s creating activity. Another equally important tradition, the Yahwist account, needs also to be considered. Because of the peculiarities of God’s early work in Eden, one can see why this story has become a favorite among gardeners. God, according to this tradition, is not a speaker of words as much as a planter of seeds. Written during Israel’s Golden Age, most likely under the auspices of King Solomon (c. 950 BCE), the Yahwist narrative (Gen. 2:4b—3:24) features a God who creates not from a distance but with God’s own two hands. This is an account replete with sensuality. Here Yahweh walks through Eden in the cool of the day (Gen. 3:8), a garden that God has planted (Gen. 2:8). God calls out to the creatures there, encountering them face-to-face. But what is most distinctive about this narrative is the manner in which God creates Adam; one cannot help but picture some meticulous gardener, knees in the muck, hands full of rich, wet earth, who is undaunted by the mud on his face as he breathes the breath of life into the form beneath him:

then the LORD God formed man of dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed (Gen. 2:7-8).

The obvious pun in this account is lost in the English translation: “Adam” is a play on the Hebrew word adamah — earth, soil. We might suspect that upon hearing this story the early Hebrews understood very clearly who the original human being was and, consequently, who they were: Adam was an “earth child,” brought into this world in the same manner as all the other creatures who roamed the earth (cf. Gen. 2:19). But what is perhaps most important in this narrative is the complete lack of any reference to humanity as “the image of God,” let alone any affirmation of Adam’s rational proclivities. On the contrary, a strong argument can be made that here we find humans created in “the image of the earth.” Indeed, the only mention of any similarity with the Creator is in the task that Adam is later directed to perform: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15; cf. Gen. 2:8).

Just as the Creator nurtures and tends the garden that he has planted, so must Adam do the same; in this way, Adam “images” God. Thus, we might say that the Yahwist narrative lends credence to the idea that human identity consists not in the ratiocentric imago dei bestowed upon us by tradition, but in a much more eco-centric alternative: humans as imago mundi et dei. Ontologically, we are grounded in the earth, with which we share our being. Ethically, our actions should reflect the work of the Creator — we are “imagers” of God.

It is at this point that we might pause to consider an interpretation of imago dei that has enjoyed particular favor among both Catholic and Protestant theologians since the middle of the twentieth century. As we have seen, the received notion of imago dei tended to place human beings outside or above the created order, and has to some extent perpetuated the image of the ideal human as an autonomous individual who uses his or her cognitive abilities to discern God’s will for creation. The assumption here is that there is some substantive similarity between the Creator and God’s image on earth: as God is self-reflective, so are humans.

The Neo-Orthodox theologian, Karl Barth, took strong exception to this understanding of imago dei. For Barth, the suggestion of any essential affinity between a God who is Wholly Other and creation was, in his estimation, an affront to the Creator. In contrast to Augustine, Aquinas, and others who followed in their footsteps, Barth suggested that the divine nature is, at its most fundamental level, relational; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in and enjoy an effusion of love among each other. In other words, God as Trinity is characterized by both an “I” who can issue a divine call, and a “Thou” who can offer a divine response. This relationality, however, is not simply limited to the Godhead; it can also carry over into relationships with human beings who thereby share in this image of the divine. Thus the encounter that lies at the very core of God’s being can take place on both an intra- and extra-divine level.

In God’s own being and sphere there is a counterpart: a genuine but harmonious self-encounter and self-discovery; a free co-existence and co-operation; an open confrontation and reciprocity. Man is the repetition of this divine form of life; its copy and reflection. He is this first in the fact that he is the counterpart of God, the encounter and discovery in God Himself being copied and imitated in God’s relation to man (Church Dogmatics III.2, 185).

For Barth, there is no “analogy of being” (analogia entis) between God and human beings; rather, our claim to be God’s image consists entirely in the fact that we have been graced with the distinction of being a Thou capable of encountering the divine I.

This singularity, however, is not simply a privilege — it has profound ethical implications. Though we share nothing ontologically with God, we are nevertheless obliged to act according to our received understanding of who God is. Like our Creator, we have been given the capacity to enter into relationships with others. We, too, are capable of being an I who may encounter a Thou openly and in a spirit of reciprocity. Conversely, we are also likely to be called by others into meaningful and open relationships. In this way we image God. Barth establishes this assertion on what he calls the "analogy of relation" (analogia relationis). Just as the Godhead is fundamentally relational — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — so must humans also see themselves. We reflect God’s essential nature only when we acknowledge and affirm our most basic need to be related to others, to reach out beyond ourselves in a spirit of love. We are who we are by virtue of these encounters. Indeed, this is at the heart of the two great commandments that Jesus impressed upon all those seeking eternal life: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27).

But herein lies the rub. Recall the lawyer’s engaging response upon receiving these deceptively simple instructions from the Nazarene: “And who is my neighbor?” (10:29). For Barth, the answer was readily apparent: my neighbor is any Thou with whom I can enter into relationship — that is, any human. For all his innovation in reformulating this doctrine, Barth was not willing to move beyond the divine and human sphere when it came to meaningful relationships. But given the various ecological challenges of our present context, it should be evident that this perspective is just too short-sighted. It certainly does not take into account the very radical nature of Jesus’ compelling reply to the lawyer’s question: the parable of the Good Samaritan. This is less a story about ethics than about theological anthropology.

In first-century Palestine, the lines of the Jewish moral community were very clearly delineated; those who observed the laws of ritual purity and worshiped God in his proper place were not only deemed “good” by virtue of their deeds, they were in many respects recognized as truly human, chosen by God. By contrast, outsiders were not simply bad or immoral on account of their actions; in the eyes of many devout Jews, they were, by their very nature, unclean, even less than human. Jesus’ parable, then, has implications that are easily lost on those of us who see in the Samaritan -- an outsider to Jesus’ culture -- a human who demonstrates his love for another through his acts of kindness. In telling this story, Jesus was making a very deliberate attempt to shatter the conventional wisdom of his day and extend the bounds of the traditional moral community to include aspects of the world “out there,” inhabited by creatures who were not widely regarded as fully human.

Given our current ecological concerns, we would do well not to overlook the centrality of the lawyer’s earnest question: Who is my neighbor? To what Thou may I call out and receive an open and meaningful response, thus affirming my essential humanity as a relational being? Should humans alone populate my moral community, or should I rise to Jesus’ challenge to break through old barriers and encounter this world anew?

As Americans, the land in which we live has long produced tales where humans were regarded merely as plain members of a Great Society, enjoying no special privilege or position of power. Ecologically, we know that we are indeed woven into an intricate web of life that, much to our dismay, regularly refuses to acknowledge our own self-styled importance. Theologically, however, we encounter obstacles to conceiving ourselves as having deep roots in this world, but only as long as we insist on our received understanding of what it means to be created in the image of God. Barth sends us part of the way down the road to recovery by insisting that the notion of imago dei be interpreted by an analogy of relation. I can agree with Barth that humans are called to be imagers of a relational God; my disagreement, however, is with his understanding of where and with whom we are to be doing our "tilling and keeping" (Gen. 2:15).

If we can acknowledge our most basic ontological connection with the earth from which we and all other living creatures were formed — as the Yahwist suggests — we can then effectively begin to address the implications of the lawyer’s question for our present context. My neighbor is any creature who was formed from the dust of the ground and with whom I therefore share my essential being. Ontologically, I am connected with the earth -- I am imago mundi. Ethically, I am called to image God by “serving and preserving” (Gen. 2:15) my neighbors, now broadly defined -- I am imago dei. In short, the “care of souls,” once so narrowly conceived, must now be expanded to include the “care of soils."

__________________________________________


Martin Buber on relationality and trees:

I contemplate a tree.

I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.

I can feel it as movement....

I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers and eternalize it.

Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.

... The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it -- only differently.

One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity (I and Thou, p. 57).