Some Earth Day Ponderments

So tonight for our monthly post-prayer service Bible study, I invented a new thing. I called it Popcorn Bible Study. I don't think it's probably very original, but the idea was to read a number of short scriptures and briefly share our thoughts after we read each one.

The theme, for obvious reasons, was the relationships between God and us and creation. We are having church outside on Sunday to celebrate, with a guest speaker and everything, so this was really just warm up, but it was fun and interesting.

Some things we noticed...

For some reason, the first time God gives us creation, we are told to be vegetarians (Genesis 1:26-31). Then, after the flood, we are told we can eat animals (Genesis 9:3). What's up with that?

The Psalms are really good at expressing paradox. Psalm 8 manages to give a sense of the incredible wonder and majesty of God and creation, while at the same time pointing out that we have this crazy privileged position in all of that. Psalm 104 has an incredible trust in the orderliness of God's plan for the earth, a sort of "A place for everything and everything in its place" satisfaction. You could find a teaching in there telling us to stay in our places and leave the coney's place for them, and the mountain tops for the goats, etc.

And what does it mean that Jesus told us to love our enemies so that we can be "children of our Father in heaven, who makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous"? It would seem as though the sun represents the good of nature and the rain represents the bad, despite the good qualities of rain. I say this because of the way the order of the good and bad people is switched from the sun example to the rain example. Just seems likely that means something to me.

And further, what does it mean that we have completely distorted the truth of this point? The truth is that in our day and age, the rich are much more likely to benefit from the blessings of nature and the poor are much more likely to be harmed by the complications of nature. See flooding in Katrina, peasants displaced in the Philippines to make way for a golf course, environmental racism and classism, water being hogged by big cities, etc. It's enough to make you wish for a Day of Reckoning, though most of us would probably come out on the losing end of that.