A couple of Sundays ago we celebrated a birthday- the birthday of the Church. And like many other family birthday parties, it provided an opportunity to share and re-remember a dramatic birthing story. The dramatic birthing story is found in Acts 2, and is often shared on Pentecost Sunday, the official day of celebration for the Church.
As always, there is a heavily pregnant woman at this birthday party: Creation. Her labour is starting, and she is looking forward to the birth of the New Creation and the end of earthly pain. She groans, hoping that the birth is close in time, imminent. It helps that there is divine presence close by her side, and everywhere, immanent. … But let’s retell the Church’s birthing story before we go there.
That day, the day that the Church was born, nature knew that something was afoot. The wind rushed, the flames arrived. Something new, holy and gale-force whipped up during a moment of high fire danger. The Church was born. It made its own birth announcement, in many languages. Those that heard the announcement were cut to the heart. It was intense, and it made the news. The Church was one person, and it was thousands.
We remember that the birth of the Church occurred at “Pentecost”, a Jewish festival also referred to as the Feast of Weeks. Pentecost celebrated the end of the grain harvest, and involved a time of rest, celebration and thankfulness after the frantic gathering-in.
Was there also some rest and recuperation after the dramatic birth in Acts 2?
There did end up being a period of rest after the Pentecost in Acts: there was a rest from the busy, selfish acquisition that Jesus condemned in the story of the rich, foolish farmer (Luke 12:13-21). The early believers formed a caring community in which food was shared and everyone’s needs were met (Acts 2:42-47)). As it grew up, the community worked together in this way to mitigate one of the consequences of the Fall: the curse put on the land and the human sweat involved in obtaining its produce (Genesis 3:17).
And today, some of creation is enjoying a rest from frantic human activity. As we retreated from our communities and into our homes, flora and fauna showed up in the sudden quiet of public places: grass growing between the stones of Italian piazzas, kangaroos hopping past city-store windows.
At the same time, some of creation is in painful spasm. Many of us imagine Nepal to be a pristine or even magical place in the mountains, but it is in fact one of the most polluted places in the world, and its air pollution has made the population extra vulnerable to COVID-19. All of us (humans) are complicit in this death and devastation. We haven’t worked out how to cultivate this earth without spoiling it for everyone, and everything, and our rich foolishness continues to reap a deathly harvest.
Some of us may have a buffer of wealth and privilege that allows us to enjoy this period of enforced rest without worrying about our financial status. Others may be desperate for money to change hands again for “non-essential” services so that a basic living can be sought. We may be looking forward to resuming “normal” again. However, normal has a trajectory, and we would do well to read nature for divine wisdom about this trajectory.
“Reading nature” is not an unbiblical or pantheistic thing to do. We are part of creation, connected to nature, as we should know, and the wildlife that has crept out of hiding rebukes us in our continued forgetfulness. We are also related to nature. In humility we need to recognise that even what we consider to be “inanimate” nature has always been animated by divine parental love. Nature has God as a parent, too.
God is intricately and lovingly involved in the life of his creation. He is immanent.
Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen? (Job 38:28-31).
We are in dangerous territory when we fail to recognise God’s deep commitment to his creation, and the care-filled responsibility that was delegated to humanity (Genesis 1:26).
We have to be careful that we do not become rich farmers who enjoy the sound of coins jingling in our pockets so much, that we do not notice that the landscape we have tilled ruthlessly has become a waterless wasteland. Who overhear the land cry out to God in the voice of the sibling we murdered as he stood beside us and was simply thankful to God for his food (Genesis 4:10). And, stumbling as the earth rips open before us in disgust, understand that we would much prefer to be Lazarus, whose poverty used to make our wealth look so purple (Luke 16:19-31). Realise that we would kill for a drop of clean water to ease sore throats and quench thirst. Realise that we have, in fact, killed clean, living water at its Source.
How do we read our environment and glean wisdom? Bruce Pascoe has shown us that Indigenous Australians cultivated food in a gentle way that respected the Australian landscape and its rhythms, way before the First Fleeters tried to grow English vegetables. Even if you look further back into European history, land was cultivated in ways that represented a “grateful exchange” between humanity and its environment: coppicing, for example, involved a continuous cutting and regrowth of woodland, and encouraged a biodiversity that would not otherwise exist. And if you look back into the history of ancient Israel, there is a model for this sort of give-and-take in the Bible. The book of Exodus provides that the Israelites are to give their land a rest from cultivation every seventh year, so that “the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what is left” (Exodus 23:11, and also Leviticus 25:7).
We need to keep working through the curse put on the land as a result of our rebellion against God, knowing that it will be a great day when the Church and Creation have their most “grateful exchange”. In the meantime, Creation groans as it labours, waiting and hoping for the imminent birth of New Creation (Romans 8:18-25).
As the theologian Walter Brueggemann notes in his new book, Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief and Uncertainty, while Creation is in this “struggle for newness”, “we must not pass over the labor pains, cries, and demands too readily”.
Has COVID-19 has given us a break from contractions, a chance to jot down the time in our notebook and record some observations about the pain? Can we pray through this notebook and ask for the Spirit to illuminate us? What should our dreams and hopes for the future be, as Creation groans for renewal? Should we turn in humility to our children and listen for their prophetic voices? (Joel 2:28)
Things to ponder, perhaps, as we pop birthday party balloons and sweep up cake crumbs after Pentecost.
the quiet yell 