My youngest son and I recently canoed the Wisconsin River on a clear, sunny Sunday as a way to mark his 13th birthday. From streets, buildings, cars, trains, screens, and a man-made world in constant motion, we found ourselves experiencing a radical change in experience and surroundings.
We were on a broad, slow-moving river lined with tall trees and graced with the occasional sand bar and wooded island. Turtles sunning themselves. Kingfishers swooping low over the water. A bald eagle wheeling in the sky far off in the distance. Crows calling. Two sandhill cranes honking at us in indignation as they slowly gained altitude to fly further downstream.
One of our favorite moments of the trip was when we stopped at one of the islands and wandered about the sandy upstream section. The hot sand burned our feet so we moved quickly to the small, shallow channel that lay between the island and the nearby bank. This channel’s flow was far more clear than the main channel of the river, and in it we found a number of mussels. Several, thick and gnarly and trailing vegetative matter, appeared very old.
We could actually see a smaller mussel moving along the sandy bed, sometimes even positioned length-wise on end like a quarter on its edge. We could see its underwater trail in the sand, a faint and sinuous line across the sandy channel bed’s curvy lines of low dunes.
“Moving” is actually far too fast a word. Even “inching” is too fast.
You had to look carefully as its progress was so slow. But there it was.
Moving.
It was slowly moving by extending its fleshy “foot” forward and then pulling itself forward.
The moving mussel.
My son, out of interest or politeness, listened as I told him about the mussel’s natural history. The male mussel releases its sperm into the water, and when a female mussel of the same species pulls in a quantity of stream water for filtering out of its food, the sperm have their opportunity to find the eggs within the female and fertilize them.
But we haven’t even gotten to the interesting part. The fertilized egg grows into a tiny larvae called a glochidia, which must attach itself to a fish if it is to continue its life cycle. So adult mussels often shape bunches of their glochidia into shapes that resemble the normal prey of the fish they need to attract. These shapes can be things like small fish swimming in a current, worms, and even crayfish.
When a fish investigates and then bites into the bunch (cue the Mission Impossible theme music), the individual glochidia have their chance to attach to the fish, usually on the gills. Eventually, the glochydia transitions into a juvenile mussel which drops off of the fish, descends to the stream bottom, and begins its independent life with little or no harm having been done to the fish. The beauty of this system is that the adult mussel’s progeny are able to hitch a ride to a distant location.
Just to reassure you, I should mention that I didn’t lecture him. And I didn’t share nearly the level of detail that you are reading here. I just shared the fundamentals of what I know of mussels and their lives and their value to the life of a river. Above all, I shared my own sense of wonder.
In retrospect, I wish I would have have talked with him in the same way about the Christian faith during the trip. Not in a lecture. Just the fundamentals as I know them in the language that is true to me. And with the mystery and heartfelt conviction of the faith’s underlying truth and values.
One of the fundamentals I would share is the reality that life, even a life of faith, will have struggles just like the westerly wind that made some of our paddling hard work.
Another fundamental would be this – humanity has indeed been given special capacities, and yet, simultaneously, we are in a sacred fellowship with the rest of creation. All of Creation matters to God. All of Creation should matter to us.
I would tell him, too, that beginning to gain an understanding of God and the life that God desires us to live is as complex an undertaking as understanding this world and its workings. But the effort to seek that understanding and to act on what we do know at each moment of our lives is what life is about and is worth the effort.
Ultimately, we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We should renew Gods’ world even as we use it for our survival.
The mussel has something to teach us about that ethic. Mussels feed by sucking in water and filtering out food items like like algae, bacteria, and detritus. The mussels then expel clear, clean water. When mussels occur in large beds, as they often did decades and centuries ago, the net effect was a purifying of the waters of the stream. Clear water allowed more light to reach algae and aquatic plants which supported more creatures that feed on the algae and plants. The result was a underwater world that was more full of more life
As I write this I am convicted. I must tell him all that. I will.
I hope and pray that he will eventually and of his own free seek out God and live out a God-fearing life all of his days. And as part of that life of faith, I hope and pray that his faith and life will possess a love for God’s world, in both its eye-catching and humble forms.
In other words, I hope and pray that the Gospel he follows will have mussels.
We can learn a great deal from farmers as we read the Bible.
Each year, the non-profit organization MOSES (Midwest Organic & Special Education Service) holds an organic farming conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin in late February. It has become the largest gathering of organic and sustainable farmers in the country and features a wide array of workshops, roundtables, exhibits, and social events.
I just attended it for the first time and came away more aware than ever of the complexity and challenges of farming, especially if you are trying to do so in a way that sustains the life of the land and water.
What especially struck me was how thoughtful, observant, patient, open-minded, and nuanced many of the farmers revealed themselves to be, whether they were plaid-wearing young millennials or middle-aged men who looked, well, farmers or the reserved Amish men I talked to at breakfast one morning. From patterns of weed growth to the body language of a cow, the farmer must observe and interpret carefully what is in front of him while prudently considering the context. Fundamentally, I sensed deep humility.
We all could benefit from engaging the Bible and God that same way. But too often we don’t.
A good example is the nature of human exceptionalism.
This comes to mind because of something I heard recently on Janet Parshall’s program, “In the Marketplace,” on WMBI, the flagship station of the Moody Bible Institute. On this particular day, Parshall was interviewing Wesley Smith, the author of The War on Humans and a blogger about human exceptionalism on the National Review’s website. The way Parshall and Smith spoke of human exceptionalism in relationship to the natural world exemplified how easy it is for all of us to read the Bible in simplistic, self-centered ways.
In the program, Parshall played a portion of a Conservation International video in which Julie Roberts speaks as Mother Earth, and addressing humanity, she solemnly states, “I have fed species greater than you, and I have starved species greater than you.”
Parshall and Smith used this as the stepping off point for several broad assertions. First, environmentalists are anti-human. Second, extreme environmentalists exhibit a common mindset that humans are worth less than other species, that we are a destructive cancer upon the face of the earth. Above all, Parshall and Smith shared the conviction that the concern people have for earth is one more symptom of a distressing falling away from the Christian truth of human exceptionalism.
It is true. Humans are exceptional.
We do understand that people are made in the image of God, unlike any other creature. Clearly, a great deal of the Bible is about the interaction between God and people. From the beginning, God has a special relationship with humanity.
Jesus also clearly states that humans are of more value than sparrows and sheep (although there is no suggestion that sparrows and sheep have no value).
And the testimony of history reveals humanity to be endlessly inventive and creative. One advance builds on the foundation of the previous. We work technological wonders that would astound people of centuries and millennia past. We delve into the mysteries of the universe, of the workings of atomic particles, of the microbiotic worlds in our guts and in the soil.
Napoleon on his Imperial Throne (Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres); Is this the kind of human exceptionalism God wants us to exercise in the world?
But Parshall and Smith fail to provide a complete understanding of human exceptionalism in two ways.
First, they ignore sin. This should temper any discussion we have about our elite status. In fact, in the story of Noah we experience God’s utter revulsion at the violence and sin of humanity, which doesn’t sound that much different from the reaction of environmentalists to the violence we are inflicting on the life of the earth today.
Second, if you read the Bible like a good farmer, you will find a whole view of exceptionalism that is very different in nature.
When Abraham is called to be the founder of the nation Israel, one might expect Abraham to be told that the nation of which he will be the father will enjoy extreme prosperity and even build its own empire. But read Genesis 22:18 – “And through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed—all because you have obeyed me.”
In fact, if you read the Bible, it’s clear that the standards and expectations for Israel are higher than for other nations. Israel’s exceptional status comes from God’s grace and from God’s choice and it brings greater responsibility and greater expectations. They are called to be holy, to bear witness to God in how they live as a light to other nations and peoples. The people of Israel, to say the least, do not always welcome this kind of exceptionalism.
When Moses is called by God and has direct interactions with God, you would be hard pressed to say that Moses’ exceptional status was intended for Moses’ glory and for Moses to exploit for his own gain. He is called for God’s purposes and Moses actually finds that role challenging, fear-inducing, and extremely frustrating. Again, the expectations for those who are given exceptional roles are high.
The point of the God-given exceptional role is serving God’s purposes.
Prophets are similar in this way. Their unique role as bearers of God’s words and messages does not make for easy lives. They speak the truth. Their earthly lives are challenging and dangerous. They are tormented by the wrongs they see and the tragedies that will unfold.
The disciples are chosen by Jesus and have the exceptional blessing of daily interaction with Jesus and the opportunity to learn about God and the kingdom of God. There are times where it’s clear they hope their selection is for their glory, even arguing about who will sit at Jesus’ right hand in heaven. In fact, their selection is for a much more serious and humble mission. They are charged with serving God by spreading the gospel and making disciples after Jesus’ death and resurrection. All of them, according to Christian tradition, with the exception of John, died as martyrs in this service.
The Apostle Paul, whose life Jesus redirected in dramatic fashion, calls himself a servant of God.
The incarnation itself speaks volumes about God and the nature of how God exercises dominion over us.
We see in Jesus a God who cares about us, creatures who in comparison to God are limited and weak. We see in Jesus a God who cares about the poor and alienated and powerless. We see a God who reminds us of our common sinfulness, who calls us to repentance.
He is a shepherd willing to give his life for his sheep, a friend willing to lay down his life for his friends. He spoke of the first being last and the last being first. He washed the feet of his disciples. There was nothing in his life that communicated that life was about power, glory, and mammon.
I am struck, too, by the parable Jesus told of the ruler and the servant, which is recounted in Matthew 18: 21-35. In it, a ruler forgives the large debt a servant owes him but the servant puts in prison a fellow servant who owed him much, much less. This angers the ruler, and he punishes the servant. There is a strong sense that the ruler desires his servants to live out the same values that he, the ruler, demonstrates.
Ultimately, Jesus demonstrates love and mercy to humanity because God so loves the world. He restrains the power he has at his disposal for what is needed for the world and humanity.
Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (by Ford Madox Brown): The exceptionalism of Jesus.
Do we deserve this? Do we deserve a God who would become human because of his love for us and for the whole world? Is exercising our unique power in the world for power and mammon and at the expense of the life of God’s earth in tune with the exceptionalism we see in Jesus and in the Bible in general?
The first line of Rick Warren’s best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, captures the point of our exceptionalism perfectly: “It’s not about you.”
To be fair, Wesley Smith, who is highly articulate and compelling, does acknowledge in the interview that environmental efforts to protect clean water and clean air are important. He says we have a duty to leave a “clean environment” to “our progeny and our posterity.”
But there is something off in that eloquent phrasing. The word “clean” is a word of neatness, a self-directed and sanitized contentment with the order and comfort of things.
Our real duty is far larger than that and far less human-centered. Our duty as it relates to God’s world is to keep the world in a condition that honors God, provides a beautiful and sustaining environment for our children, and provides a beautiful and sustaining environment for all of the rest of life. Our duty as carriers of God’s image is to protect creation’s integrity and wholeness even as we must use it.
The ultimate measure of our success at carrying out that duty is whether all of creation is thriving. A shepherd who has lost many sheep but still has enough of them to eat in order to survive is not a good shepherd.
What Parshall and Smith failed to acknowledge, too, is that Christians have largely failed to be leaders in the effort to care for Creation and, in fact, too often have been leaders and apologists for the diminishment of Creation.
The fruit of this is an unraveling planet and a conviction by many that to be Christian is to support violence against God’s world and to be self-focused and self-centered. Why would that faith and value system be of any appeal to people, like Julie Roberts, who sense the mystery and beauty of this world?
Janet Parshall has it exactly right when she says, “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have deadly consequences.”
I encourage you to make up your own mind about what it means to be made in the image of God, what it means to have been shaped from the soil, what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and what that all means for how we should treat the world.
And I encourage you to do that the way a good farmer would – with nuance, patience, humility, an open mind, and an open heart.
I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a soccer nut. My family, for example, generally doesn’t watch television, but when the World Cup comes around once every four years, as it did last year, I break down and sign up for cable TV and DVR service and binge on as many games as I can manage, inviting friends over as well.
Spend enough time watching any sport, of course, and you’re likely to see deeper significance in it. While I’m tempted to, I’m not going to seriously suggest that God’s favorite sport is soccer. Nor will I suggest that the angels gather together to watch the World Cup, waving the flags of their favorite countries.
But I’ve long had some whimsical thoughts about some parallels between soccer and the kingdom of God. The beauty of a blog is that you have the chance, like I am doing here, to explore those thoughts. I hope there is at least a sentence or idea here that makes the reading of this rewarding for you.
Pele unleashing a bicycle kick. Brazil has long loved soccer and has long called it “jogo bonito” (the beautiful game).
I need to start by saying that I can’t recall ever hearing a sermon about the kingdom of God when I was growing up. So I’ve been shocked and surprised in my adult years to find that Jesus spoke so much about it
“Kingdom” refers to a place where the rules and intentions of a king are followed. In short, and to borrow the language of the Lord’s Prayer, it is a place where the king’s will is done.
For Americans who have grown up celebrating our revolution against a British king and have created a culture of freedom, it can hard to have any positive feelings about the idea of a kingdom. But the God that Jesus reveals to us is not comparable to a human king, and the kingdom that Jesus taught us about is not like any ruled territory in human history.
This is because the intentions and will of God are, from our human perspective, revolutionary. This is because God and God’s ways are the source of a truly abundant life. The kingdom of God is a state of being where love rules, where compassion reigns, where all are taken care of, where all have access to what they need, all are treasured, all are humble, and where God’s “electricity” (a wonderful metaphor used by Dallas Willard) runs through everything that is done and through everyone’s hearts. In short, the kingdom of God is the state in which we live individually and together with God, other people, and Creation as we were meant to.
God’s kingdom is truly a beautiful kingdom.
And when people, inspired by God and filled with God’s Spirit, actually live out God’s ways in this world, even for short periods of time and in imperfect ways, we get a small glimpse of what that beautiful kingdom truly will be in its fullness some day.
So what does this beautiful kingdom, which we are called to seek and to advance in this world, have to do with a beautiful game called soccer? And what does the beautiful kingdom have to do with God’s beautiful world?
Soccer and the kingdom of God upend the established order
The odd thing about soccer, of course, is that, with the exception of the goalie, players control and advance the ball without using their hands or a tool such as a bat or hockey stick. This is a complete upending of the normal order of our human world. Our hands are the honored members of our body that carry out almost every practical and playful task. Our feet are the lowest caste. They are, for most of us (with the exception of a few folks with weird fetishes), mere transportation units.
Soccer puts our hands into an almost useless role while the feet are given eminence. And the royal throne of our intellect – our head – is made equal with our feet, our legs, and our chest in the effort to control and advance the ball.
If you are after efficiency and productivity, it makes no sense whatsoever to put your hands off limits. In every other sport, using our hands gives us great precision and control, whether it is shooting a basketball or hitting a serve with a tennis racket. And this is the way the world works in general. We seek out efficiency and convenience in how things are done. We look for power and control. We are compelled to find the fastest and shortest route to get what we want.
The kingdom of God that Jesus taught about upends the normal order as well. He said the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Jesus gave attention and compassion to the poor and powerless. He criticized the rich and powerful. He criticized and confronted the political and religious elites as well. He eschewed violence, a curse of his time and ours. He forgave those who put him to death.
As people called to advance God’s kingdom in this world, Jesus calls for us to love others, to know that the poor and the orphaned and the widowed matter, to serve our neighbors even when they are not like us, to humble ourselves, and to even love our enemies.
Most fundamentally, in Jesus, the God of the universe was so loving as to become one of us and to accept suffering and violence from us. To serve in love. To show us how to be completely dedicated to God’s purposes. To die because of us and for us. And through all of that and through the resurrection, to offer new life to this world.
This message has been around for nearly two millennia, and with familiarity and constant exposure, it’s understandable if this concept seems normal and even ordinary. But if you really think about it, this continues to be a revolutionary, radical, order-upending, paradigm-busting message.
Just as importantly, all of this runs counter to our world’s normal metrics for a successful life.
We tend to measure success in America today in tangible ways that reflect our power, riches, and personal advancement. These measures include the numbers in our bank accounts and retirement accounts, the kind of cars we drive, the value of our homes, our nation’s GNP, our economy’s growth rate, our children’s class rankings and grades and batting average and ACT scores.
How do love and compassion and all the “currencies” of God’s kingdom get measured? These are much more intangible things and often defy measurement and rationality.
And, curiously, soccer also seems deficient in measurements and statistics in comparison to other sports. Football and baseball, for example, generate a never-ending tide of numbers that can capture in a science-like way how well a team and individual players performed. For most of the history of soccer, however, how a team played and whether a player did well on a particular play or situation were more literary questions and best defined by story and anecdote than numbers.
How do you measure success and meaning in your life?
Limits bring creativity and beauty
Soccer is often called the beautiful game. Its beauty comes in part from its simplicity. Its beauty also comes from how a well-knit group of players can move and create like a single organism that elegantly improvises within the general structure of a formation. But much of the beauty comes from how artistry and creativity have grown out of the boundaries and limits the game imposes on its players in terms of how they control the ball. It is a supremely enjoyable and always surprising thing to see powerful athletes using fine and careful movements with their feet, knees, thighs, and other parts of their body to move and control and even caress the ball. Here is a link to a video of great dribbling and ball skills that soccer can generate.
And here is a more playful one as three professional players in Europe show their skills against groups of kids in an exhibition.
God’s kingdom operates in a similar way. We are called to operate on love and selflessness, which run counter to the world’s drive for power and self-promotion. God’s kingdom is about freedom within limits. God’s kingdom is a state of being where we submit to God’s will and recognize that there are things we could do that we shouldn’t do because they would harm others and God’s world.
Living a Christian life is about God’s will being done even when we are sorely wanting our will to be done.
This translates into lives that are beautiful in ways counter to the mainstream. Christians at their best seek to serve others. They bear crosses and the burdens of others. They have integrity. They seek out challenges and work to mend brokenness in the world. They care for orphans and widows and the poor. They give generously and find ways to make ends meet while doing so. They try to create spiritual communities among diverse people. They submit to each other voluntarily. They take time for others and for God. They pursue peace.They love their enemies. They speak up for what is right even when that threatens their safety.
These qualities are what set the first Christians apart from the followers of other gods in the Roman world. Clement of Rome writes of Christians choosing to go to prison in order that others might be set free and of Christians becoming slaves so that the money generated could ransom other slaves. Early Christians also spoke against infanticide, which was common, and even rescued and adopted infants.
Another example is Paul Brand, a Christian who was born in India to missionaries. He dedicated 19 years of his life as a doctor to living in India and was the first doctor to understand that leprosy didn’t directly make tissue rot. Brand exemplified the combination of selfless compassion and service with a creative, intelligent mind that carefully examined the workings of the human body in the desire to reduce pain and suffering.
The kingdom of God in action – Paul Brand in India.
The story of Dirk Willem is another example of how a Christian committed to God’s ways and God’s kingdom will not follow the status quo. Born in the Netherlands, Dirk was an Anabaptist, which was considered a heretical belief by the Christian authorities of the time. He, like many other Anabaptists, was imprisoned for this action because it rebelled against the orthodoxy of infant baptism and against the marriage of nationalism and particular forms of Christianity. At least 1,500 Anabaptists were tortured and killed by the authorities of ostensibly Christian European states. Seeking to avoid that fate, he escaped over a prison wall during the middle of winter. A guard pursued him over the ice of the nearby lake. When the guard fell through the ice and called out for help, Dirk turned back to help because he believed the Bible taught that Christians should love their enemies. Dirk was recaptured as a result and died a horrible death.
And that is a story that also reminds us that in our world the evil and self-centered forces of this world (even those that sometimes operate under the banner of God) sometimes win out, at least temporarily, over God’s kingdom.
Here’s a particularly whimsical thought – in the confrontation between the goalie and an attacking player, I see soccer capturing the same drama of the conflict between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. And oftentimes the result is the same as in the story of Dirk Willem. The goalie, who has the ability to use his or her hands (our tools of efficiency and power), often turns back shots on goal, just as the world often seems to snuff out and reject what is selfless, good, pure, creative, and loving.
Those rare moments when the attacking team is able to use a combination of teamwork and skill with the ball to move the ball past the goalie’s outstretched hands is a small foretaste of the better world to come.
The same joy and fervor that we hear in Andre Cantor’s voice announcing a goal by the United States in a 2010 World Cup game against Algeria will be the passion and intense joy that the world will ring out with when it is fully enveloped by God’s kingdom.
The Beautiful Kingdom and God’s Beautiful World
God’s beautiful world is an essential part of God’s intentions for his kingdom. Living out a beautiful God-focused life necessarily means preserving and mending God’s beautiful world.
However, just as the urges of nationalism and power often won out over true Christian values in the course of European history, it has been all too common for the actions of Christians to be driven solely by the drive for efficiency, power, and convenience when they interact with God’s Creation. Too often we feel that when it comes time to make decisions about how we treat God’s earth it’s entirely permissible to turn off the “electric current” of God’s love that is to flow through us.
We compartmentalize where we are called to be holy and where we can just do what is convenient and normal in our fallen world.
We can see the result of that around us. We’ve relentlessly pushed back nature. Diminished it. Treated it with violence that our culture does not see as violence. Much of human history has been tragically defined by our drive to meet the needs of ourselves, our communities, our countries, and our species at the wholesale sacrifice of the other living things and the living systems with which we share this world. Too often Christians have too often gone along with this and even been apologists and cheerleaders.
This is the despite the fact that a domineering and self-focused use of our creative powers in the world is not in tune with the chords that we hear in the Bible of how we should be and how we should live.
The sobering challenge, however, with living in this world is that even if we desire to live out a loving, patient, compassionate, and self-controlled life we must still take from the world to survive. We must eat. We must have shelter. Something must die for us to live.
So how do we live out loving lives as followers of God while consuming God’s world?
I believe the beautiful game has something to teach us. Within the limits of love, patience, compassion, and self-control (as well as the other fruit of the Spirit we read of in Galatians 5:22), we can bring all of the creativity we have been blessed with to bear on how we use God’s world. We can minimize our negative impacts and actually contribute to the abundance and vitality of this world.
And people are already doing this, including many Christians. There are countless examples from the business world. Patagonia, for instance, is developing a wet suit made not of petroleum-based neoprene but from a rubber extracted from a desert shrub. Subaru’s plant in Indiana reuses or recycles 99.8% of materials left over from assembly of the vehicles.
You’ll find inspiring examples in agriculture as well. Gabe Brown has attracted considerable attention for the way he and his family are regenerating the health of the land in innovative ways on their diversified 5,000-acre farm and ranch near Bismarck, North Dakota. They have more than doubled soil organic matter by using no-till methods combined with cover cropping that uses diverse seed mixes and grazing with multiple species. The result is a place that is full of life and exceptional productivity without the need for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or fungicides. The home page of the Brown Ranch website begins this way:
“We believe that faith, family and working with the natural resources that God has provided allows us a meaningful life. We enjoy using these resources to regenerate landscapes for a sustainable future.”
God calls for us to live just this way – creatively, energetically, and passionately. Indeed, part of what it means to be human and to be created in God’s image is an ability and a drive to be creative. We are not merely to avoid doing bad but to proactively do good. We are to be “peacemakers” as we read of in Matthew 5:9.
Our tremendous creative capacities, both as individuals and groups of people, are to be used within the limits of what God desires from us, limits that are defined by love and justice and peace. One of the limits defined by love is the commitment to flourishing in a way that does not diminish the ability of life on God’s earth to flourish.
Living out a whole faith within God’s beautiful kingdom should and will produce a beautiful life and a beautiful world. And living that way offers the enjoyment to which the Brown Ranch mission statement refers.
Living that way should be our goal every day (pun intended!).
Living that way, even as we wrestle with the practicalities of survival and the flourishing of our communities and families, is one of the great challenges of the Christian life. It will require from us every bit of wisdom, artfulness,humility, creativity, and Spirit-inspired teamwork within the body of Christ that we can muster.
How should Christians and Christian communities live out their lives in light of our calling to care for God’s earth?
There are many ways, but we should begin with food.
We should strive to raise food and make food choices in ways that will honor God, be consistent with God’s desire for the kind of people we will be, and enable God’s world to thrive.
This, I understand, is a challenging statement, a challenging ideal.
We are more comfortable talking about recycling, energy efficiency, and other conservation activities that are safer, more discrete parts of living. Food, by contrast, is far more woven into our cultural and social lives.
And we are tempted to believe that food choices are not related to a whole and holy Christian life. Don’t we have the freedom to eat whatever we want? And isn’t good food just a question of food that tastes good and is offered at a reasonable price?
But remember that through our food choices we interact with our neighbors and God’s land, water, and living beings every single day. Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer and writer-prophet, puts it best when he says, “… eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth.” What food you and I choose to buy makes us participants in the form of farming that gave us the food we bring home.
Remember that agriculture has a powerful impact on the condition of God’s earth. Nearly 40% of the earth’s surface not covered by ice is used for the raising of food. How we grow crops and raise animals shapes the health of the land and water of God’s earth to a remarkable extent. Does the food you and I eat helping the soil and water of our world flourish or is it depleting and damaging them?
Remember that in the case of meat and dairy agriculture, we are interacting with billions of living animals through the farmers and others in the food system who act on our behalf. Choosing to purchase the flesh or milk of an animal of God’s that has not been treated with compassion and care sends our economy this simple message: “I approve and reward you for what you’ve done to this animal and I heartily wish for you to raise more animals like this.”
The message of Proverbs 12:10 (“The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.”) applies to you and me even if we are not farmers. The animals that meat and milk come from are ours because our food purchase decisions make us part of the food system from which that meat and drink came. We need to ask: are we and everyone in that food system doing their very best to meet the animals’ needs?
Remember, too, that what we eat defines in large part our culture and what we stand for. What do you and I stand for? Who is our Master? Who is our God? Ourselves? Convenience, enjoyment, and low prices? Or our loving God who wants what is best for us and for the entire world?
And remember that what we eat shapes our health and the health of our loved ones. I have become convinced that eating with grace and mercy for God’s world will translate into better health.
So what is the food that Christians should buy and eat for every meal?
I’m not going to tell you.
At least I’m not going to give you detailed lists of what you should eat and what you shouldn’t eat. Food is complicated. Our modern food system is even more complicated. Our lives are complicated. Our social lives are complicated. I’ll be diving into those complications in future posts.
What I will offer at this beginning point, however, is a filter from the Bible that you might find surprising. Here it is:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23 NIV)
To the degree possible, the fruit of the Spirit listed here should guide not only how we interact with people but also how we interact with the world and with the particular conditions of land and water and non-human life we find in each particular place.
In short, we should, as part of a whole Christian faith, seek out food that has been raised with love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control toward living creatures as well as the land and water on which all life depends.
An even simpler way of stating this would be: would God consider the way this food was raised compatible with the ethics of a good shepherd?
Let’s test this filter on several examples of food production practices.
The first is the injection of rBGH (Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) into dairy cows by some farmers in order to increase milk production. First approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1993, rBGH has been found to cause the following health impacts on cows: increased rates of mastitis (inflammation of their udders), ulcers, arthritis, kidney and heart abnormalities, fertility issues, birth deformities in calves, and increased rates of lameness. Their productive lives are also significantly shortened (not a surprise when you’re forcing more milk production from other than what their bodies are meant to produce), which means they are slaughtered far sooner than untreated cows. There appears to be some evidence that there is an impact on the milk that comes from those cows as well.
Are love, patience, self-control, and the other fruits of the spirit part of this system at all? Are the needs of the cows being considered in this system at all? Should Christians drink milk from cows treated like this? Should Christian farmers use it?
The second example is turkey. Like broiler chickens, turkeys in the conventional food industry have been bred to grow far more rapidly than natural (sometimes more than double the natural rate) and more rapidly than the body systems of many of the birds can handle. The result is that some turkeys suffer from leg disorders, fatal cardiovascular problems (like ruptured aortas), and diseases, including sudden death syndrome. They are also likely to have weaker immune systems, which are stressed when they are subjected to continuous lighting and in close proximity to thousands of other birds. Finally, the breeding of turkeys for maximum breast meat production has made it impossible for them to breed naturally. Instead, they must be artificially inseminated. This is the polite way of saying male turkeys must be forced to produce semen and then that semen must be forcibly implanted into a female turkey. This is done to millions of turkeys.
The third example regards how many poultry, including turkeys, are slaughtered. You should read this article about how the speed of industrial-scale slaughterhouses results in hundreds of thousands of chickens and turkeys being scalded to death because workers on the line just didn’t have the ability to slaughter them properly. And the recent book – The Chain – makes clear that high-speed slaughtering and butchering facilities are awful for the workers, our neighbors, as well as for the animals.
Can we say this treatment of God’s creatures comes out of love, joy, patience, self-control, and the other fruits of the spirit detailed in the fifth chapter of Galatians?
Would a good shepherd allow those things to be done to his animals?
In Luke 15:3-6, Jesus tells the parable of a good shepherd seeking out the one sheep that was lost even as 99 were already safe and sound. That good shepherd does not live by the idea of acceptable levels of losses and collateral damage when raising animals. Should we?
Of course not.
So what stands between our Spirit-inspired values and acting on those values?
First, we don’t know how food is raised. Our complex food system generally is not transparent about whether the food item you buy at a grocery store has been raised in a way that is good for the earth, animals, and people. The food system also exerts tremendous pressure on farmers to farm in ways that are antithetical to being good shepherds. I have tremendous sympathy for the position many farmers find themselves in.
Second, we are tempted and even taught to think of our faith as strictly a spiritual pursuit and getting our doctrines right. We are tempted and even taught to think that our faith has no real implications for our practical life in this world or at least not in terms of our interaction with God’s earth. As a result, making whole faith food choices means we have to go against the grain of the dominant food system and the dominant theology around us at the same time.
Third, it can be more expensive and time-consuming to find food that is closer to the ideal. There are farmers who pour their heart and soil into building soil life, keeping local streams healthy and clean, and caring for their animals with loving concern. But are we willing to make the extra effort to find them and support them and to do right by God’s Creation?
Fourth, we are afraid of standing up for our faith. Eating is the most fundamental way we interact with God’s earth. It is also one of the most fundamental elements of our culture and social life. We fear standing up and standing out for our faith in social settings. And we fear that living out a whole Christian faith in terms of food choices and food ethics will cause fellow Christians to think we’ve become “political” or “liberal” or “New Age.”
Fifth, it is just far easier and comfortable to ignore the gaping contradiction between what we eat and our Christian values. Aren’t there already many challenges for us in our everyday lives?
Make no mistake. The core of our faith is ultimately our unity in love and life with God through our faith in Jesus.
But there is no question that once we believe and place all of the weight of our life upon God and God’s wisdom, that our lives will be transformed. Jesus spoke often of faith bearing fruit. If the condition of our world is a fruit of our choices and values that are generated by our faith, what does that conviction tell God and us about our faith? If the condition of our home place is a fruit of our faith being applied in every day decisions as people and a community, what does it tell God and us about our faith? Food is in the middle of all of this.
You and I should not be blind to the complexities of food and to the difficulties of producing food in a world of weeds, weather, and intense economic pressures. Eating in a way that completely and fully reflects Galatians 5:22 in every detail for every meal is very difficult today.
Yet, we do not give up on God’s other ideals for us just because we can’t do them perfectly. We throw ourselves on God’s mercy when we fall short. We ask for God’s Spirit to fill us and renew us. And we try again.
In that same way, we as Christians should be tenaciously and stubbornly pushing for the food system to be closer to that ideal and doing the best we can everyday within our sphere of influence to be part of that effort.
Stephen Webb has written an excellent book called Good Eating, which is part of the series called The Christian Practice of Everyday Life. In it he writes these words:
“Our diet should be holy if we want all aspects of our lives to reflect God’s grace. If we say grace over our meals, we should have grace in our meals…”
Yes.
When we make food and eat it, let us truly be truly be mindful and grateful for the food we eat and for the earth from which that food comes and for the people who work so hard to produce it.
When we choose food (and if we have the ability to choose what we eat, we should feel blessed), let us be mindful of God’s concern and care for the earth, animals, and the people who act on our behalf in producing food.
And let us commit ourselves as individuals, as families, and as communities of faith to bringing grace to God’s world through the meals we say grace over everyday.
Whether we are looking at a representation of the crucifixion or of the cross alone, do we see what it actually is?
The cross, like a flag, is something that our eyes look at so often and that our minds register so symbolically that we don’t see what it truly is.
What do we see if we really look?
We see an object made of wood.
We see parts of what used to be a tree.
We see the remnant of a tree that was cut down by men with the express purpose of torturing an innocent man to death.
We see the perversion of humanity and Creation.
Humanity’s purpose is to love God, love each other, and care for Creation in the way a good shepherd cares for his sheep. Instead, in the image of Jesus on the cross we see humanity rejecting God, using its creative capacities in dark and awful ways against a neighbor, and ending the life of one of the living things of God’s earth for that dark and awful purpose.
It is easy to forget all of the brutal history that comes with the cross. It is easy to forget what an odd symbol it is for a faith.
Crucifixion of Jesus. Wood engraving drawn by Gustave Doré, engraved by J. Gauchard Brunier. From Sainte Bible (1866)
The Roman Empire used the cruelty of the cross to display its power relentlessly and with maximum psychological impact.
When Spartacus led his rebellion that ultimately failed, 6,000 of the rebels were crucified on crosses that stretched from Capua to Rome in 71 B.C. Imagine that. Picture it in your mind. Crosses with dead and dying and screaming and moaning men stretching for over 100 miles. One hundred miles.
Think, too, of the systematic effort it took for the Romans to cut down all of those trees, prepare them for their dark purpose, and transport them on their web of well-designed roads, the same roads that took their armies to ever-expanding frontiers.
In short, we see in the cross a potent and complete symbol of all that is wrong with this world, including the use of God’s earth for evil purposes.
I believe we also see in the cross a symbol of all that God will put right.
Just as the Creation scene in Genesis shows God, people, and God’s earth in harmony so we perceive a vision of a new heaven and a new earth in Revelation (as well as in Isaiah) with all of Creation at peace and praising God in love and communion.
And in the cross we see all that is at stake in whether we accept this message of a loving God willing to die for us at our hands and whether we live the lives we are meant to live by following God with the help of the Spirit.
What is at stake is our relationship with God, with people, and with Creation.
If we seek Jesus out and accept God’s transforming grace and commit to ever deepening our reliance on God, our relationship with God will become close and intimate forever. If we seek Jesus out and truly accept God’s transforming grace, God’s Spirit will cause us over time to love our neighbors in thought and deed, even if they are different from us in their culture or their beliefs.
And I believe that if we seek Jesus out and fully accept God’s transforming grace, the transformation of our hearts and minds will cause us to live out a new relationship with God’s earth. This relationship will be built on our abiding concern for the earth’s life and vitality. We will strive to use God’s earth in ways that honor God, benefit all people (especially the poor and marginalized), and enable the many amazing forms of life on this planet to flourish.
And what’s the very best news of this good news is that the whole life God offers through a whole faith is the very best life we could ever live.
A life interwoven with an awareness of the patterns and life of this world is a more complete one. A life that treats the world with love, patience, kindness, and self-control is a rich and beautiful one.
It is entirely fitting then that the actual, physical cross – that mutilated tree used to harm its very Creator – be part of our symbol of our faith and what that faith means and what that faith promises.
Nathan believes that a whole Christian faith includes an imperative for us, individually and collectively, to actively show God’s earth mercy and compassion every day. For more than 15 years, he has worked for non-profit conservation groups that restore and protect natural habitats, change the relationship people have with nature, and promote sustainable farming. To learn more, click here.
