God Is Green

Well, I’ve gone green.
My receipt from Whole Foods says so.
I got a 20 cents credit because I stuffed my kale and five-pound bag of carrots into my business portfolio case. My whole life has been quite transformed since listening to Rob Bell’s series God Is Green (you can get the podcasts at iTunes). He talks about how sustainability was key to the Israeli law of agriculture Sabbath. I’ve always thought, you know, let’s work on saving babies before we start working on seals and redwoods, but this sermon series really convicted me that the effects of what we’re doing to the earth is causing serious problems as our bodies break down from what we’re pumping into the environment.

More importantly, what does it say about Christians when we’re equals with the rest of the culture in our mass consumption. Saint Augustine writes of how “some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used.” Things we enjoy of course, are the things we “cling to with love for its own sake.” The other things in life are things we use in order to help us get the things we want to enjoy. As Americans, we have trained ourselves to value things that once obtained, do not increase our actual quality of life. Why do this, when there is so many more worthy pursuits to strive after?

Besides consumption, I’ve also become very aware of trash production. I weight my trash now. Did you know that I personally, produce like my body weight in trash a month? That’s obscene. My kitchen’s floor space is 3 foot by seven. (And I just cooked for 17 people last night. We also ran out of forks. This is completely not related.) The reason I mention my floor space is because I have started to recycle and the bags take up like one third of my floor space. I have to move them every time I do anything. But I am glad to do it because I really want to start to be more aware of my consumerism and how I am treating this planet that I am fundamentally connected to.

If you think about, identity and purpose are the two biggest questions a person will wrestle with in their lifetime. Our identity is rooted in the earth—we come from earth, we will return to dust, we walk upon its’ surface every day and gather our sustenance from it. But earth is also tied to our purpose. Genesis 1:26 is called the creation or cultural mandate. Genesis teaches that we bare God’s image as we shape the earth in all forms: in music, art, education, government, law, economics, agriculture, family, and academic pursuits. Any activity that takes raw nature, and orders it, or shapes it to create something new, is what dominion is about. “We are God’s royal stewards, put here to develop the hidden potentials in God’s creation so that the whole of it might celebrate his glory.” (Bartholomew, 37) So disregarding what our life-styles are doing to the earth is really violating the deep connection we have with earth in both our purpose and identity which I had never thought about before. And it doesn’t take that much effort to do something about it.
Get the sermon series.
Listen to it.

Go Green.