A Resurrected Calling

On Sunday, April 11, Codi Norred, GIPL's Executive Director, offered the first sermon in a new series and collaboration between Park Avenue Baptist Church and GIPL. Listen, read, or view the message below.  This morning we are beginning a sermon series called Noinimod, literally reverse Dominion. The idea of reverse dominion is to imagine and live into a balanced and reciprocal relationship with the Earth. I would say that this sermon series intends to go even further than that, our job as believers is actually to undo and counter the multitude of narratives that we have inherited from perhaps other Baptist communities, other faith communities across the board, and the discourse that is so common in our socio-political spheres. The Earth is not ours. We do not possess it, nor do we keep it in check, and surely we are not called to dominate the Earth. This series is an attempt and an invitation to reclaim a vision of our original calling, to be caretakers of the Garden, and in doing so, caretakers of each other as well as ourselves.What do you think of when you think of Creation Care? Or how people of faith are supposed to interact with the environment? We are reminded of the opening words of the Hebrew Scriptures.Genesis. The beginning words of our tradition - God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, and The Spirit of God swept across the face of the waters. In the beginning God partners with a Creation in existence. Noticeably this is the place where God calls the waters, the sky, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the animals of every kind, all GOOD, well before human beings are ever mentioned in the story. And when human beings are created, we are crafted out of the ground, and breathed into by God. We are animated earthen creations. So too, in addition to the land and Creation’s inherent “goodness” that God bestows upon it, creation and the natural world lies at the heart of what it means to love God, and to love neighbor.The canon of Scripture is quite clear about the value of the land, and of Creation. Of course, you are likely familiar with these Genesis references, and the story of Eden. However, what doesn’t always register is that the original calling of human beings is to care for Creation. That is our purpose. These Genesis passages are the first ones I remember learning as a child, but they are simply the beginning of a history and a story that spans across the entirety of Christian Scripture, that God’s natural world is not only good, but that human beings have a moral and spiritual obligation to protect it.As we look around, according to the oldest Scriptures we have, it is Creation itself, apart from human beings, that bears God’s oldest fingerprints. The trees themselves felt the touch of God before human beings were birthed into being. Even Paul, despite his problems, would recognize in Romans that Creation itself is the original testimony of God’s greatness.Furthermore, the primacy of the land throughout Scripture is an indicator of worship, of God’s presence, of true justice, and the writer’s as well as God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus all rely on the natural world to communicate the holiness of God with human beings, and Creation serves as the primary content for the law in Deuteronomy, for songs and stories throughout the major and minor prophets, as well as the psalms and proverbs, almost every parable and teaching that Jesus offers relies on the natural world to make its point, and Revelation’s promises and warnings would be void and mute without its connection to Creation.We are all familiar with the stories of the burning bush, of the parting of the Red Sea. Deuteronomy holds codes about the limits of what is permissible to do to the land and to the trees during wartime. Even when we are at war with other human beings, you aren’t allowed to burn the land and cut the fruit trees.It is also Creation itself that gives glory and testimony to the Holy when human beings fail. In Isaiah, God speaks “The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland…” (Isaiah 43:20)When Job and his friends are separated from God, it is the land and Creation that continues to give praise. I could point to the Psalm we read this morning, or really any song, psalm, or proverb.In Luke, during the Triumphant entry, Palm Sunday, the Scriptures says that even if human beings stayed silent, that rocks and Creation itself would cry out recognizing the coming of Christ. I mentioned Paul and Romans, that God’s invisible qualities of his “eternal power and divine nature” exists so clearly within nature that people should be able to glean God’s likeness from it.I do not have time to dive into Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, or the parables of the sower, talents, fields of wheat, nor the paintings of Creation within the coming Kingdom. And Revelation, would this really be a Baptist service unless I brought up Revelation, but in it, the primary prophecy and promise is of a new world, and a new creation, a garden and a city intertwined, and the freshest and cleanest rivers of water flowing directly from the throne of God for everyone.The threads of our original call, of the importance of Creation and the natural world, are the foundation for everything in Scripture, and ground the majority of the holy revelations of God to human beings and even Jesus’ own life. The original call of human beings is to tend the Garden.Too often we separate the call to care for Creation as something that some Christians do, that some people of faith are exited about, they are the ones who plant trees a couple of weekends out of the year. Or when we think about the natural world, we think of dominion, we position ourselves to abuse the land for our own purposes because of misguided theological teachings that suggest we are in charge, somehow over and against the natural world. Neither could be further from the truth.

The reality is that care for the natural world is so intertwined with our calling and the Gospel that one cannot love God and love neighbor without loving Creation. It is not a pithy ask to plant a tree, and only to take reusable bags to the grocery store. It is the core of the Gospel.

We move into right relationship with Creation because it is our first call and commandment, but also because our relationship with the environment drastically impacts our neighbors.The people of God turned away to exchange the glory of God, for their own versions of it. We traded a call to tend and partner with the Garden to help it flourish, to help ourselves flourish, for a theology of dominion that excuses the ways we rape and pillage the land, the ways we hurt each other in doing so, and we allow ourselves to do this because we believe a lie. That dominion is somehow our calling. It is not.We traded the everglades and rainforests, for manicured lawns and the constant sound of leaf blowers in suburbia. We filled in swamps and marshes for privatized golf courses. We put blinders on our own eyes so that we might stop seeking the generation of power in a clean, equitable, accessible manner, but instead to continue lighting prehistoric sludge on fire. Burning coal and gas, destroying mountaintops and our neighbors’ lungs at the exact same time.We traded the fresh taste of a strawberry that comes only in the spring, for tasteless fruits and vegetables available year round, wrapped in plastic, and pushed across the globe on barges and trains, through communities who don’t even have access to those things. We made a system so cruel that the farmworkers who pick our food don’t make enough to buy that food at the grocery store. As the storms grow stronger and the seas rise, we forget our history of building arks, and instead shrug our shoulders and say “this is the way things are,” as we watch our neighbors struggle to survive on the coast. All of the world knows about Flint, Michigan, but what of the lead in those children’s bodies?By forgetting how to dream, we have succumbed to the way things are, rather than the way things are called to be.We have consumed so much, so fast, that the very ground whose purpose is to grow, to yield, to produce, now lays fallow and hollow. Dust where there were fields, somber silence where once buffalo and all manner of God’s creatures once roamed.Abandoning our call to help the forest flourish, we betray it, cutting, hacking, slashing, burning. All the while, we are complicit in complicated systems, designed to disenfranchise and devalue Black and Brown communities, Indigenous communities. The same systems of oppression and that prop up police brutality, unjust systems of immigration, detention centers, a lack of fair wages, the list goes on, are the exact same systems that perpetuate environmental injustices, push pipelines through those same devalued Communities of Color, build polluting power plants in a family’s back yard, poisons their water with coal ash waste, and make energy costs so expensive that those same people are forced to choose between medicine and heat in the dead of Winter.

No, it is no pithy call to care for Creation. It is radically Holy, revolutionary, prophetic, life altering, system shattering, table flipping, miracle working, make sure all who live and breath can flourish in their own right kind of calling.

We are set on Earth to flourish hand in hand with Creation itself, the Creation of which we are born of its dust. That is the call of the human. To return, not necessarily to the mystical garden of Eden, but to the original calling to safeguard the planet. To make every inch and mile of this wild world a blossoming foundation of possibility, freedom, teeming with life, one that truly reflects an abundant, loving, personal, interconnected, present, God.We live in a society that is built on how much you can produce, how much you can consume, how much you can have. Emerging from the Holy Season of Lent, we were reminded that Lent is an opportunity to hear the Spirit’s voice in the wilderness. To look at our lives, the choices we make, the systems we are bound up in. Lent is a reminder that we should take some time to step outside of our routines, our subconscious choices and patterns, of our automatics yes’ and no’s’, to remember our original calling.And yet, after Lent, a society grounded in oppression, white supremacy, violence, gluttony, and pervasive injustice kills Christ, the loving, because of the type of world he created and ask us to help usher in. And yet, hate cannot drive out love. Life abundant steps out of the grave in the resurrection.  Defiant to the chains of death and destruction, the stone is rolled away.The resurrection is a reminder that the goodness of God and the life that God fosters cannot be permanently locked away and killed by the systems that require it for their own profits and agendas. It is an invitation to continue to become co-laborers with Christ to lead others on the path of resurrection. That includes the planet.It is not a requirement that we return to Eden, but rather to live into the promise of Revelation. Oh how strange a thing to say. But to create a world where the city and the forest grows up together, where every living thing has access to clean water, clean air, good food, abundant land, the best wine, the symphony of the moaning and groaning of the forest as it spreads, space to run and be free, abundance for all. Water so clean that it would run from the throne of God itself. Remember who you are. Remember who you are called to be. Help the Earth flourish and in doing so, help your neighbor and yourself come alive.Resurrection is a reminder that the death we participate in and are complicit in doesn’t have to be the way that it is. There is a different way. There is life. There is the seed that sprout in defiance after the fire, after the bulldozer, after the pillaging. Anywhere can a garden grow. Repent, dream, plant, and return._____________________________________________________________________About the Author:Codi Norred is GIPL's Executive Director. Prior to this role, Codi worked as GIPL’s Director of Programs and Policy for three years. As Executive Director, Codi continues to lead all policy, program, and outreach efforts, spending much of his spring at the Capitol during the legislative session. He also directs one of GIPL’s flagship programs, Solar Wise, bringing sustainable and energy alternatives to communities of faith.Codi holds a Masters of Divinity (MDiv) from Candler School of Theology at Emory University with concentrations in Justice, Peacebuilding, and Conflict Transformation (JPCT), Theology and Ethics, and a Graduate Certificate in Human Rights. Also holding a BA in Religion from Samford University, Codi is interested in working at the intersection of religion, human rights, public policy, and the environment. When he’s not leading GIPL programs, Codi plays the drums on Sundays with the worship team at Park Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA.