This is the second of a two-part series. Read part one.
[todaysdate]
By Corbin Croy
I – The Sabbath Rest
According to the Bible, who was the first gardener? Believe it or not, it was God. God planted the Garden of Eden. He did not speak it into existence. The Bible says that he actually planted it! I’m sure he put a little God-power into it to make it grow faster, but most do not recognize the significance of this act. The Genesis story shows us a God who plants trees and works like a human. The first image we have of God is that he is a planter of gardens.
Also, when you consider the depth that Sabbath law and the Mosaic Law, it goes into describing how food is to be managed. You would have to throughout most of the Torah if you were to discard all dietary and food related passages. For six days you worked. What did you work? The land. When the Israelites were in the desert they collected extra manna for the Sabbath day, and only on the Sabbath would the food not spoil because they had collected too much. When collecting manna they were forbidden to collect more than what they needed. Ever seven years the land itself would get a Sabbath. Every 50 years the land distribution would get reset back to God’s original plan. A farmer was forbidden to harvest the edges of his crop so travelers could glean the crop. There was a portion of every sacrifice that went to help feed the poor and the priests. Every sacrifice was inspected according to whether or not it was perfect according to food standards. Every festival celebrated an agricultural purpose. And the Jewish dietary laws are famous world wide.
Not only that, but consider what ushered sin into the world. It took the form of food. What miraculous sign did God give Israel while in the desert that he would provide for them? Food from heaven. How did Israelites avoid the angel of death in Egypt? They ate a special meal together. How did Jacob steal Esau’s inheritance? Food. The spiritual history of Israel centers around agriculture and the dynamic between the fruit from the land and the fruit from our hearts. The Sabbath was an idea to represent peace with God, but this fundamentally entailed peace with the land, as well. The pinnacle of this system was the temple.
The temple was the place where God dwelt upon the land. It was holy ground. Inside the Holy of Holies was the Arc of the Covenant which contained manna (food), a tree branch (plant life), and the stone tablets of the Law, which mainly prescribed how food and agriculture were to be maintained, but all items were originated from the ground. They show us, much like the garden of Eden, God’s involvement with the land. The very seat upon which God sat was a seat of his contact with earth, dirt and wood. Outside the Holy of Holies was the bowl of incense, the table for bread, and the ceremonial candle. The incense would come from the finest material that the land could produce. The bread was harvested from the land, as well. And the candle was the eternal light which makes all things grow. And outside the Holy Place was the Outer Court where the sacrifices were made. There was a water basin for cleansing, and the altar where the sacrifices were made. Water is nourishment for all life. It feeds plants and animals. The altar was the place where the animals were sacrificed, but the sacrificial system was not simply the act of killing animals. Only the best animal was chosen, so priests were the agricultural authority in their tribe. The one offering the sacrifice would place his hand upon the animals head, thus identifying with it. The animal was not just killed, it was also set on fire. The fire served two purposes. It sent a pleasing aroma to God, and it signified a warning to the people of what might happen should they break their commitment to God.
The temple system instilled in the people that our relationship with the land was synchronous with our relationship with God. Thus, being in right relationship with God required that we be in right relationship with the land. Submitting ourselves to God meant quite literally that we use the resources that the land provides to benefit all people. In Jewish Law the land of Israel was intended to bless the entire world. It was a promise not just intended for Abraham’s descendents. It was a promise intended for the land itself.
II – The New Temple
The Early Christian writers were not ignorant of these facts. They went through great pains to incorporate Jewish agrarian spirituality into their spiritual teachings. Jesus tells us to consider the lilies of the field. He speaks in parables, using agriculture as his prime example. Communion is intended to be directly related to the Passover meal. Jesus feeds 5,000 people, which becomes an example of manna from heaven. The Holy Spirit falls on Pentecost which is a harvest festival. The early Acts community may have been reinstating a form of Jubilee in their selling of their estates. Paul instructs us to have the “fruits of the Spirit.” And in what is the most daring move for the early Christians to make would be the teaching that our bodies are now the Temple of the Holy Ghost.
God planted a garden, and now angels protect it. God gave us food from heaven, made a dead tree bloom, and carved words into rock, and then sat upon it. The previous temple system gave us symbols of God’s great miraculous acts. This temple was removed from us. Only one man could actually enter the Holy of Holies, and he could do it only once a year. The old temple system may have created a spiritual bond between man and the land, but theologically he was still separated from his God. Christian theology flipped the paradigm. It made God theologically accessible to all people. Our bodies literally became the Temple of God, but unfortunately it also began to separate our intimate connection with the land. Admittedly this was an unintentional consequence. For the first Christians this reversal was an exciting and bold declaration of how God has united himself with humanity. There was never an idea that because of this humanity could not stop caring about the land.
For the first Christians our immediate contact that we had with God through the Holy Spirit only meant one thing, the completion of God’s creation and the ushering in of a New Earth. Today, the message of a New Earth sounds like a free pass to do whatever we want to this one, but upon its inception New Earth eschatology only could mean one thing. God and his creation were always meant to be united together. And for the first Christians our bodies as God’s Holy Temple was the manifestation of this New Creation. It was never about throwing away our broken world and getting a new one. It has always been about transforming our human eco-systems into God-sized environments.
The point of New Testament Eschatology was not to inform Christians that they could treat the world like garbage, because it would be thrown away, and God would give us a new one someday. The point of New Testament eschatology was that God’s Creation would finally be united to its Creator, and that this unification would usher in a New Creation! The shocking reality of this eschatology is that it is the community of Christ-followers who are the New Creation. There was never a possibility to think that it would be okay to forget the sanctity of the natural world, or the natural order. In the New Testament believer are given an unmediated connection to God through the Holy Spirit, but it was never thought, or realized at the time, that this would excuse or diminish our connection or responsibility to the world around us. In fact, this worship of nature, of sorts, seems to be the basis for many of the teachings of the New Testament. In this regard the spirituality of the Old Testament which centered around our holistic connections to land, food, heart, and soul were still in play during the writing of the New Testament with just a different paradigm in place.
III – The Holy Presence
Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Agri-business. Those are the big three industries that are most consuming our natural resources and laying waste to our planet. Behind these three industries there is the unholy alliance between the military-industrial complex and the news media. And don’t even get me started on the banking institution. There are rich and powerful people that want to make sure that three things are always happening. War, debt, and fear. Ultimately, fear is always the main agenda on the docket and with fear always comes war and debt.
We are living in a world where a New Dark Age could be upon us. Democracy is nearly gone and swallowed up by bureaucracy and corporations. And despite our fervor for patriotic nationalism our world has been at war for over a decade now. And homeland enforcement has gotten more brutal and invasive. Everywhere we look we have reasons to be alone, afraid, and silent. When I was a teenager and I first came to accept Jesus as my savior, I was told that my mission as a Christian was to make disciples and baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. My look into the spirituality of the New Testament and the state of the world that I live in compel me to reject the idea the “saving souls” is all I really need to do for Jesus.
I feel that a New Missiology is needed for every generation, and for me, proselytizing is the poorest example of evangelism when the world is crumbling around me. My old Church said that their mission statement was to save the world, one person at a time. I think that they had a good heart and good intentions in thinking this, but it always made me uncomfortable. The world needs saving, no doubt, but the idea that we can simply save people and then say mission accomplished is a far cry from what the New Testament means by “New Creation”.
To better explain what I mean by this new missiology I think it is best to consider what was meant by “spirit” in the Bible. The word “spirit” comes from the word “wind,” as most people know. In ancient cosmology it was the wind that moved the stars, clouds, and heavenly bodies, alike. Believe it or not, but this was somewhat scientific. People observed how the wind moved things on the ground and applied their understanding to larger scales. Wind was a mystery to the ancient world. So it seemed fitting to come from the gods, or God. And when man was created it was God who breathed (winded) into man. Even in the New Testament it says how Scripture is God-breathed (God-winded).
Thus, the thing which gave man life was the same thing that brought the weather. It was the same thing that moved the stars in the sky. It was the same thing that moved the sun around our planet. Wind was in us, and outside us. It was all encompassing. It was the spirit. So to baptize into this spirit would baptize into this all-present reality where God is in everything. To disciple others into Jesus, would be to discipline them into the Incarnation of God, into his Holy Presence. The Great Commission for today is not to save souls, it is to save the world. And to understand that those terms are not mutually exclusive.
There is a holy presence that comes with bringing God to the world, and for our modern world we are longing for this presence to be realized in nature and creation. Christian dualism has led many to think that the Church is a repository of spiritual teaching, and that this means that we have to get people saved and get them to stop looking at porn and doing drugs. No one thinks to consider the detrimental effects that consumerism and materialism can have on a persons spiritual life, nor do we want to consider how such behaviors might actually be violating God’s mission for us. We want to have our boats and large houses and eat out every day of the week while we drive our SUV’s and not feel burdened by a responsibility to live simply or minimally, while also feeling like God is entirely okay with it.
And maybe he is. I am not actually debating to morality of such behaviors, but whether or not we can be truly present living a consumeristic or materialistic lifestyle before our God. The idea of “spirit” in the ancient world, at least for the Jews during the post-exile Temple era and the early Christians, meant a one-ness with all reality. The wind which moved the trees and the weather was also moving inside of us. Being present in the world means taking part in the sustaining and development of our world, and not just a human development. Thus, being present in this sense, means recognizing that we are just as much a part of a system as we are masters of a system.
Industry and efficiency has diminished one’s individual presence in just about all aspects of human life today in order to streamline it for a mass audience. And for the most part this has been a very helpful and prosperous endeavor. I do not doubt this, nor do I question its beneficial merits. I am not a socialist, or even against capitalism. I am all for innovation, working hard, and receiving the due rewards from that work. But what I am suggesting is that we must always be aware of the alienating effects that such systems bring upon us. In all systems we must harken back to a simple life where multiple and complex process make our presence in the world less then what it could be.
When you eat a Big Mac, you are not less present in the world because you are contributing to a predatory economy, nor are you less present because you are feeding your body poison. The Big Mac makes you less present in the world because it is so highly processed. It is food that you had no hand in making, no recognition of the work which went into making it, no knowledge of how it was crafted, or what is actually in it. You have no presence in the Big Mac except the few pieces of paper given to receive it. It is a highly efficient system, but it is a completely impersonal system. Compare this to a farmer who names his cows, feed them grass from his own fields, drives them to the butcher who he knows by name, carries the meat in his own vehicles and stores it in his own fridges, and cooks it all with recipes that have been handed down in his family for generations. Such a person is connected to his food. Every bite he takes has meaning for him.
What I propose is that our physical ecology and our spiritual ecology are interconnected, and the more personal and intimate we are with nature will lead to our own personal intimacy with God. We do not have to be like the farmer, but if we made more conscientious choices to maximize our Presence in the world then God’s holy presence is manifested in the actualization of our own understanding of how the whole world is God’s creation. Thus, there is just as much to be gained from developing disciplines of recycling, simplicity, and minimalism as there are to developing disciplines of prayer, fasting, and devotions. In God’s mission to save the world we have to move beyond the dualistic patterns of separating world from spirit and consider what God can teach us if we take responsibility for the creation he has given us and let his presence be involved in all our worldly and mundane existence.
