2023.06.04 | Report Card Day
“Report Card Day”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring, Senior Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
First Sunday after Pentecost
The primary text for today’s sermon is taken from the book of Psalms, chapter 8. The book of Psalms was Israel’s hymnal. It was a collection of our ancient ancestors' 150 favorite hymns that survived through the aural tradition, earthquake, wind, fire, flood, foreign invasion, and several general editors’ chopping blocks.
If you open your pew Bible to the exact center, you will find Psalm 100. If you thumb through the Psalms, you’ll notice that only the lyrics are provided for the songs. There are no notes for keyboard or woodwind instruments, and no cords for stringed instruments.
This lyrics-only version of the Psalms is similar to the slide versions of the hymns that Pastor Pepper prepares for Sunday worship and that Dawn Coburn makes magically appear at just the right time during the service.
When one of the pastors or the music director says, “It’s time to sing,” you can look at the words on the monitors, open your hymnal and sing along, or let your eyes wander back and forth between the screens and the book. Unless you know the tune well, it’s usually more helpful to refer to the hymnal which includes the tune, than the prose on the screen.
II
Psalm 8 is a song of praise sung to God in thanksgiving for God creating the heavens and the earth, and all of the creatures in, on, and around it--and for creating human beings and for granting them dominion over everything that exists on this side of heaven.
Hikes in Yosemite, a bird's eye view of Monterey Bay, and drives through the fields of Iowa are all occasions that bring the words of this and other creation Psalms to mind for me. I think how amazing God is and how amazing the works are of God’s hands, and I am humbled and awed by all that God has entrusted to us human beings.
Periodically, though, my sense of wonder and awe are interrupted by the sight of scarred timbers that are the remains of the several wildfires that we have experienced in recent years, or the memory of the yellow skies and the smoke that drifted into the Bay Area from fires burning, near and far.
From time to time, I pick up a regional paper, or I chat with my sister-in-law, who runs a whale watch out of Moss Landing, and I learn about another whale that has gotten confused by the warming of the Pacific Ocean and drifted into shallow waters, or gotten snarled in a commercial fisher net, or gotten broadsided and killed by a cruise ship.
Once a quarter or so, I go back to Iowa and while I am driving my mother all over the countryside in search of the world’s best pork tenderloin sandwich or homemade fruit pie, I invariably come across a farm whose owners have abandoned conservation tillage practices in exchange for short-term gain at the elevator and a faster trip across the field.
In times like these, I can’t help but wonder what God was thinking when God granted dominion over creation to human beings? Really, just really, what was God thinking when God put human beings in charge of creation?
Our track record is shameful.
The Environmental Program of the United Nations provides a fair glimpse of the mess that human beings have made of creation on their website and in recent reports that are posted there. Take a glance and you will see an overview of the damages done, just in the past two centuries:
1. Climate change has rapidly escalated since the Industrial Revolution and has resulted in the increased average temperature on the surface of the earth. This temperature increase has caused more severe storms, increased drought, the warming and rising of the oceans, loss of species, greater health risks for all of us, increasing food insecurity for most of the world’s inhabitants, and increased poverty and displacement of the most vulnerable populations.
2. The loss of biodiversity due to residential and commercial development, commercial farming practices, mining, oil drilling, and the production of fossil fuels have resulted in the destruction of habitat that has, in turn, led to the extinction of several species of wildlife around the globe.
3. Pollution resulting from the harvesting and use of fossil fuels, and various chemicals used in construction, production, and agriculture have poisoned our air, water, and soil. Right here in Ashland and Cherryland, for example, we have the highest rates of asthma in Alameda County. The water that ends up in the SF Bay is tainted with agricultural chemicals, and the soil in our communities has such a high level or lead that anyone planting a kitchen garden needs to haul in new soil and create raised beds to avoid giving their family food poising from growing their own fruits and vegetables.
These and many other examples leave me--and perhaps you, too, wondering: what was God thinking when God granted dominion over creation to human beings?
Since this is the end of the year on the traditional school calendar, and a time when student report cards are distributed, I can’t help but draw an analogy from this context. If God were handing out report cards today and we were getting graded on dominion, most of our cities, states, and nations would be getting an “F.”
III
I wonder, where did we go wrong? And is there any way to rectify this situaition?
As a pastor, I believe that confession is often a good place to start. The first thing we need to do is confess that we as a people are not doing well with dominion--with ownership or control of the cosmos. It’s not working out well for us or most other living things, because framing our relationship to creation in this way has led to the commodification and degradation of creation.
In order to get right with God and to reverse the path of destruction that we are on, we must abandon the kingly model of dominion and exchange it for an agricultural model of stewardship. Both models are found throughout the Bible. One is drawn from the political order, and the other from the economic order.
The dominion model assumes a royal figure who grants land rights to his subjects, who in turn manage the property into perpetuity as they see fit.
In the agricultural model, the steward is not granted the land rights, but instead is engaged to manage that which belongs to God, for the benefit of the whole oikus, the whole household.
Douglas John Hall, emeritus professor of Christian Theology at McGill University in Montreal, explains in his book The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age, Friendship Press: NY, 1982 that the health and wellbeing of North America, and I dare say, our entire global village, is dependent upon exchanging the imperial identity of a dominator for an agricultural identity as a steward.
A steward cares for creation rather than consumes it. A steward manages rather than controls. A steward passes on what has been passed on to them, and they tend and pass on to the next generation of caretakers, rather than sell to the highest bidder.
IV
When I was a child, one of my favorite things to do was ride along on the tractor with my dad. We did not have big fancy machinery like most other farmers. We didn’t even have a tractor with a cab on it until I was in the 6th grade. So there was plenty of room for me to sit on the fender and swing my feet between his seat and mine.
Dad was not always thrilled with my interest in riding along, because he was afraid that I’d slip off the fender when he was going around the hills or fall off when he needed to go faster in order to finish his work before the rain came or night fell.
Nevertheless, I sometimes could cajole him into letting me ride along. One time when I won that battle, I asked Dad why he bothered to farm on the contour, build terraces, and practice other forms of conservation tillage--given the high cost of the capital investment and the time and energy it took to employ this approach.
Dad simply replied, “I use conversation practices, because the land doesn’t belong to me. It doesn’t even really belong to Grandma. We are all just tenant farmers. We are only here on this earth for a little while. We have to take care of what’s entrusted to us. If I don’t take care of this land, it will not be productive for you and your sister when it’s time for you to take over.”
As you can see, I’m not farming in Iowa these days. Eden Church is my small family farm. But I’ve tried to bring these lessons learned in Iowa to California and to pass them on to others.
Today I offer it to you--and especially to our graduates--the encouragement to see yourself as a steward rather than an owner of all that has been entrusted to you, and to act out of that sense of identity. And if you do, the future will be brighter and healthier for all of us, and God will be glorified. Amen.