March 8, 2009
Genesis 1:26-31

Lent II
“Being a Creature Means You Eat”

Dr.Ellen F. Davis

I thank you for inviting me to preach and worship and study with you; you have a reputation as a congregation that takes both worship and study seriously. And I know your clergy do. It is an honor to be among you for two days. I do not often have the opportunity to preach in a church in the Reformed tradition, and that opportunity is very welcome to me on two counts: first, because I am expected to give some detailed attention to the Bible, and second, because they tell me Presbyterians don’t mind if the preacher talks about sin. But let’s start with the Bible.

May the words of my mouth…. Amen.

Being a creature means you eat for a living; it is that simple. From a biblical perspective, one of the major differences between God and ourselves is that we need to eat, and God doesn’t. “If I were hungry, I wouldn’t tell you,” God acidly comments in one Psalm. And the essential corollary is that the God who does not eat provides the food for all the creatures, who do. In the creation account we have just read, God is stocking the pantry, you might say. If we had read the whole chapter, you might have heard the marked shift in style that happens when God makes the Dry Land ready for life on the Fifth Day. Up until that point, the description of each divine act is spare – “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” But the narrator becomes positively verbose in describing terrestrial food sources, with grains “setting seed heads” and fruit trees setting “fruit with the seed inside them.” It is a precise, botanically correct description of the remarkable variety of edible plants native to the Middle East, the region that is the cradle not only of the Bible but also of dry-land agriculture.

Funny, I spend most of my time reading the Bible, yet for years I hardly noticed all this detailed attention to the food supply in its first chapter. And once I did notice, I still had no idea what to make of it – and the scholarly literature was of no real help. I now realize that this general cluelessness about food among modern “expert” readers of the Bible points to a deep and worrisome difference between our cultural mindset and the culture that all the biblical writers represent. The difference comes down to this: for them, eating and agriculture have to do with God, and for us they do not. We might think carefully about what food we buy, from the standpoint of health or personal taste, but it is unlikely that many of us think this is a genuinely religious matter. We might offer a blessing, perfunctory or even beautiful, but rarely does that provoke any serious thought about the mystery that lies behind the food on our plate. Yet for the biblical writers, God’s provision of food is a key mystery and a core theological concern; it lies at the heart of our relationship with God and with all that God has made. That is why the creation account gives more attention to food provision than to any other aspect of creation.

So the Bible stands against us, in our ignorance about the theological significance of eating. And the weight of history is also against us: the vast majority of cultures and individuals who have preceded us on the planet, up until the last three generations perhaps, have been intensely aware that getting food from field to table is the most important religious act we perform. Every day, taking our sustenance from the earth and from the bodies of other animals, we enter deeply into the mystery of creation. Mindful eating is practical theology; daily it gives us the opportunity to honor God with our bodies. Our never-failing hunger is a consistent reminder to acknowledge God as the Giver of every good gift. When we ask our heavenly Father for an egg, we do not get a stone (Luke 11:12, cf. v. 2).

So Genesis 1 is a theological statement about food, and at the same time it is an ecological statement. Eating is also practical ecology, the most important ecological act we perform. Eating is the way we humans most regularly enter into the delicate complex of interactions among living creatures, exchanging the energy that keeps us alive for a time, consuming until in the end we are consumed. That, too, is what it means to be a creature: we are “dust to dust,” eating until we ourselves become part of the fertile soil that yields more food for God’s creatures.

But if we humans are eaters among other eaters, we also have a special status among the creatures, charged to “exercise dominion” – a charge that is rightly suspect to many ecologically sensitive people, both in the church and outside it, as it has been invoked as a license for the exercise of human power in wantonly destructive ways. However, the key Hebrew verb in that divine charge suggests not only power but also skill; a better translation might be that we are charged to exercise “skilled mastery among the creatures.” And then, immediately after the charge is given, God says, “Look, I have provided food for every creature: for humans, fruit trees and grains, and green plants for all animals and birds and creeping critters.”

God does not waste words in Genesis 1, so if God charges the humans to exercise skilled mastery, and then immediately points out the sufficiency of food, I would infer that those two are essentially connected. As creatures made in the image of God, we are meant to note the abundance of food that God has provided for all living beings and to acts in ways that ensure that abundance will continue in perpetuity. In other words, the integrity of what we now call the food chains may well be the litmus test of whether or not we humans are fulfilling God’s intention for us, whether we are fit to exercise special power among the creatures.

If my reading of Genesis 1 is correct, then it is a sobering word for us who live now in the Sixth Great Age of Species Extinction, when food chains and the natural systems they sustain have been disrupted worldwide. Knowing as we do that this latest tidal wave of extinctions is driven largely by human activity, we might well conclude that we have badly failed to exercise the skilled dominion to which we are called. That is in fact the one part of God’s intention for the created order that Genesis 1 does not report as already fulfilled. The biblical jury is still out on us, it would seem – or putting it another way, the first chapter invites us to pass judgment on ourselves, to see our failure to exercise our proper dominion as the one gap in the completion of God’s design for the world, the gap that threatens to undo all the rest.

It may surprise us to recognize – though probably it would not surprise the biblical writers – that very much of our failure has to do with the seemingly innocent and certainly necessary practice of food production. The “waving fields of grain,” in our land and others around the world, are the source of catastrophic erosion rates; in the last 60 years or so, half the topsoil of Iowa has gone south. The chemicals we put on our fields have made it unsafe to drink the water in many rural communities and produced hundreds of dead zones in our oceans. Modern industrial agriculture may poison the water, but it also consumes water in vast quantities: great rivers such as the Colorado have been drained to the point that they no longer reach their mouths. Forests on this continent and around the world have been razed for cropland, much of it for animal feed. Our dominant agricultural practices are thus a major driver of global warming and species loss. Maybe half our plant and animal species will disappear within the next century.(1)

I warned you I was going to talk about sin in this sermon. God’s creatures are dying, in numbers incalculable, because for the better part of a century, our industrial culture has been eating ignorantly and dangerously. We have been eating against the laws of the biosphere – to put that in theological language, we have been eating against the design of creation, and the earth will no longer sustain it. The situation is completely unprecedented, and yet we can see our sin more clearly by the light of this ancient text. Think about it, the first human sin, as Genesis tells it, is an eating violation; God sets a limit – the humans may take food from any tree except one – and they override it. The Eden story underscores the point made already in the creation account: the way we get our food lies at the heart of our relationship with God; eating against the design of creation is the first disastrous step in turning away from God.

In eating against God’s express command, Eve and Adam are refusing to be creatures – a refusal, as far as we know, of which humans are uniquely capable. Can a muskrat refuse to be the muskrat-creature she is? But we can in a real sense refuse to be human, and in the past century, largely through the catastrophic agricultural practices of industrial culture, we have done so to an extent that the earth can no longer bear.

The reason to bring bad news like this into the pulpit is that our situation is not yet hopeless. We bring it into church in order to read the news by the light of Scripture, and thus find our realistic hope. As we have seen, Genesis begins with the hopeful charge that we humans might by God’s grace take note of the biological integrity of the world and guard it by our actions. And then, at nearly the opposite end of the Bible, we get another radically ecological view of creation, when the Letter to the Colossians calls us to stand firm in “the gospel that was preached to every creature under heaven” (Col. 1:23). Can we take in the scope of that? The gospel is preached this very day in the hearing, not of homo sapiens only, but of monkeys and hardwood forests, of mighty rivers and earthworms and microbic creatures. The gospel of Jesus Christ, the One in whom and through whom and for whom all things were created, is preached to and for every one of us.

And what that means for us is that we can hear the whole truth of the gospel only in the full company of creatures. We can hear the gospel truly only if we listen to it as creatures among other creatures. But as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says, the art of being creatures is now nearly lost among us. And so, if we have forgotten how to be creatures, then how can we begin to learn again, so that our ears may be opened to the truth and the realistic hope of the gospel?

Being a creature means eating within the limits that God has set in the design of creation. And so the most hopeful task for us is to learn all over again how to eat, within the limits of our fertile, yet fragile and compromised, planet. The genuinely hopeful news is that better choices about eating are becoming more widely available to us, better than many of us have had in a lifetime. On a local scale, there are community gardens and increasingly, church gardens. There are urban gardens in formerly derelict lots, often providing skills training for youth. There are farmers’ markets and membership farms – both ways of supporting farmers who treat their land not as an industrial site but as a home for people and other living things. On a national scale, there is work on a 50-year farm bill that directly addresses erosion, toxic pollution, and the destruction of rural communities.

These are partial solutions; there are other larger possibilities we might discuss today and tomorrow. Creating a global food economy that is adequate for the long term will be difficult. Awakening from our long slumber about our destructive ways of eating, awakening to the damage and the current danger, is frightening. But the good news is that we now have the opportunity to eat in response to the gospel that was preached to every creature under heaven. A fuller response may be as close to us as our next meal; it should be as routine as filling our dinner plates. Indeed, it must become so, in order that our grandchildren and their children may live in a lovely fertile world, and just as urgently, that God may be glorified in our eating. Amen.

(1) James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 36.  

 

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