The Web of Creation and Dollar Stores
September 30, 2007
September 30, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Philippians 2:5-13, Job 8:8-15
When our kids were in grammar school, the school they all attended for a time had mothers as lunchroom and playground monitors, so for a number of years, I volunteered as a “lunch mom” showing up (often with a younger brother or two along) to walk with a class to the lunchroom, watch over the kids as they ate, and supervise with another parent on the playground. And so I learned a lot about cultural anthropology and sociology as they can be observed on the playground – where, as in all cultures, rank and status are very important. The social system on the playground may not be quite as rigid as the caste system in India, but it seems to come close. And I still remember the remark by one very bright but unkind little girl who dismissed a classmate by describing him as “a waste of skin.”
The whole concept of value and rank is understood by children at a very young age. I remember Jason, early in first grade, coming home with a school paper that had a smiley face from the teacher on it.
“Wow, way to go, kiddo!” I exclaimed (ever the encouraging mom).
“Not really,” he responded, “It doesn’t have any rays.”
“What?” I asked.
“It doesn’t have any rays,” he explained. “You can get smiley faces with rays, regular smiley faces, straight-line mouth faces, frowny faces, and frowny faces with tears.” So much for kids not defining themselves by their grades.
Similarly, in our culture, people are often evaluated according to how much money they earn. So you can have a person who does some of the most important work in a society – caring for other people, nurturing children, providing a warm and safe environment for families – describing herself as “just a housewife”. What’s the matter with us?
It’s not only the way we value other people, we also value animals, and land, and other elements in God’s creation, according to what we can get from them – everyone and everything becomes a commodity to us then. How much benefit can we get from someone or something? Its value is all about what it can do for us – we don’t regard it as having value in and of itself.
One way of describing this way of looking at the world is that we objectify things and people – that is, we think of them only in relationship to us. In a sentence, where I am the subject, other things become either direct objects or indirect objects – for example: I hit the ball or I love pizza, in which case the ball and pizza are direct objects. Other examples are: I sing to you, or I write to her, in which case you and her are indirect objects. And sometimes we have both indirect and direct objects in a sentence: I sing a song to the baby, or I write a letter to them. Grammatically, in those sentences, I am the subject, and everything else: the ball, pizza, you, her, them, a letter, a song, the baby – all of these are objects, either direct or indirect. So a way of thinking that evaluates everything only in terms of what it can do for us is an objectifying mindset – this way of thinking looks at everything as an object and assesses it only as it affects ourselves.
Another way of describing this is that we commodify things and people – we regard them as commodities in our lives, and value them according to how they benefit us. For a long time, the culture of the industrialized countries has had this approach to the earth. We view different life forms in terms of their value to us – even as we describe the natural dimensions of a country, we talk about that as its natural resources. So for a long time, we devalued wetlands. We thought of them as a waste of land – didn’t have anything we could use, so they were of no value. Within this framework, humans haven’t been stewards of the earth; we’ve been consumers of the earth.
Yet, in recent years, we’ve learned to view wetlands differently – we’ve learned that they are very important to the whole eco-system. I learned from materials at the Environmental Protection Agency website that wetlands are some of the most biologically productive natural ecosystems – similar to tropical rainforests and coral reefs in terms of their importance to a large number of species. For example, in North America, up to one-half of the bird species nest or feed in wetlands. Seventy-five percent of commercially harvested fish are wetland-dependant. These figures are all the more amazing when you consider that only about 5% of the land in the contiguous United States is wetlands. And despite being only 1/20 of the land, they are home to almost 1/3 of our plant species. Two-thirds of the waterfowl in the continental United States reproduce in Midwestern wetlands. Unfortunately, our habit of regarding wetlands as unimportant has led to damage to wetlands, which in turn has harmed many species. And if we were completely self-centered, and thought that humans were the only species of value, we should still be careful with wetlands, because wetlands are some of our most effective natural flood protection – wetlands have the capacity to absorb significant amounts of floodwater. So even if we cared about no-one but ourselves, the wetlands are important.
We should not be surprised to learn that wetlands are important, if we take the Bible seriously. The Bible does not have a commodifying approach. In God’s economy, everything is a thing in itself and has value as itself, and as part of the whole of creation. The early history of the patriarchs tells of Israel’s God valuing people and a nation that the rest of the world would toss aside. Childless women, second-born sons, even an 11th-born son – all these played important roles in the early generations of the Hebrew people. And Israel itself was a little country, not a powerful nation, but of value to this God. As the generations wore on, a foreign woman would be an important link in the generations that would lead to the great king David, and David himself was the youngest of all his brothers – this God finds value in people that the world would not regard as important. And this God, our God, as Paul tells us in the reading from Philippians, this God did not even regard godly status as essential, but came among humans as a human, and as a human suffered not only pain and death, but death on the cross which was a death of humiliation and degradation. And then God reminded us that God does not value as we value – this man who had been put to death as a criminal, God raised to new life, revealing that although humans had rejected Jesus, God rejected our rejection.
So what we have learned about wetlands on our own reveals the same truth that we see in the Bible – God values even that which humans do not value. Each piece of creation is good, and it is all of value to the whole of it. We are only beginning to understand how life is interwoven, and how the web of creation cannot be disassembled without damage. Last weekend, when Prof. Wallace was here, we spoke on Saturday of how all creation is charged with divine presence – this is the understanding woven through Scripture, which is generally known as panentheism: God in all things. This is not pantheism, that God is the same as all things, but panentheism, God is in all things. This does not mean that everything is the same, as in the dollar store – everything a dollar, no matter what it is. No, in God’s economy, each thing has value in and of itself – they are not commodities for humans, everything is created, and has its own purpose. Light is good as light, water is good as water, earth is good, plants and animals and fish and birds are good, and humans too are good – there is intrinsic value to each thing in creation.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t eat plants, or animals, or use things in the earth – but it should mean that we understand that each element in creation has value, and should be appreciated as a thing-in-itself, not simply as what it can be to us. And when we appreciate the earth in this way, we can still eat, but we eat gratefully, appreciating the gift in the harvest. And when we take seriously God’s presence in the world, and God valuing the world, we can still use wood, and leather, and plants and animals, but again, we appreciate that these are part of God’s good creation – they have value in themselves, so we do not consume more than we need, we do not consume in a way that is unsustainable, we treat animals with respect and care, and we treat each other with respect and care.
And until we truly appreciate each thing, each plant, each animal, each person as having value in itself and not merely in relation to us, real intimacy is not possible – until we appreciate others as subjects and not objects, we are using them, instead of receiving them. And indeed, this understanding of life is a sacramental understanding of life – we receive each person, each being as a sacred gift from God, and we give of ourselves as well, so that life becomes a mutual giving and receiving: we receive life from the earth, and we give life back to the earth.
All of this is very consistent with Biblical Christianity whose central act of worship is the meal given to us by Jesus, when he said “Take this bread, it is my body; take this wine, it is the very life-blood that courses through me.” We don’t believe that bread and juice become the physical body and blood of Jesus, but we do understand in this sacrament that life is given, and received, and that when we leave worship, we are sent out to give our lives in the living of them. Paul writes, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Our lives become part of that life-giving pattern of giving and receiving that is at the very heart of God, and as we willingly participate in that divine mutuality, the living of the life of God, we become aware that our lives, too, are charged with the goodness of God. We are not really supposed to be afraid – but if we regard the living of our lives with awe and wonder, and appreciate that each moment provides opportunities to give and receive sacred gifts, we will truly be able to realize that “in God we live and move and have our being” and we will begin to appreciate that not only do we receive gifts every day, but we, too, are a gift – to ourselves and to the world. We are made in the image of God, a God who is within Godself- Father, Son and Holy Spirit-a perfect union of mutual giving and receiving. We, too, are made for deep intimacy, but when we live instead from a transactional perspective, always looking for what we can get out of any situation, we miss the gifts, and we fail to be gift ourselves.
A free-market economy assigns value to things based on their worth as objects for consumption. Those values can be kind of capricious. Is oil really intrinsically more or less valuable today than yesterday? Prices aren’t based on intrinsic value. My son Tyler told me yesterday that in Tanzania for what he just spent on a roundtrip 8 hour bus fare, 2 nights in a hotel room with TV and a private shower, meals for three days, a tailored suit, a pair of sandals made from tires, a notebook made from elephant dung, and a beautiful piece of fabric – for what he spent for all that, he could have bought a board game in the store in Dar es Salaam. And lest we think that pricing is only peculiar in Tanzania, someone pointed out to me yesterday about our culture [describing a plastic spoon], “It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.”
The free market approach is fine for economic transactions – it’s by far the best system we’ve come up with – but economic pricing is not the same as actual value. The fabric Tyler bought was imprinted with the saying, “All matter thanks God.” When we can believe that, then we, too, will be thanking God for our own lives and for all matter, and we will understand that we matter, because of God. And we will truly understand that stewardship is much more than the annual pledge campaign – it is an understanding of life that says “The earth is the Lord’s; the earth and all that is in it; the world, and those who live in it.” Everything and everyone has value – holiness is in the wetlands that we would pave over, and the persons we would ignore. And as we participate in life from a sacramental perspective, where we are constantly giving and receiving the gift of life, we find ourselves viewing the earth and all that is in it with reverence – not worshiping it as God, but recognizing that it, and we, are of God and for God and in God. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Philippians 2:5-13, Job 8:8-15
When our kids were in grammar school, the school they all attended for a time had mothers as lunchroom and playground monitors, so for a number of years, I volunteered as a “lunch mom” showing up (often with a younger brother or two along) to walk with a class to the lunchroom, watch over the kids as they ate, and supervise with another parent on the playground. And so I learned a lot about cultural anthropology and sociology as they can be observed on the playground – where, as in all cultures, rank and status are very important. The social system on the playground may not be quite as rigid as the caste system in India, but it seems to come close. And I still remember the remark by one very bright but unkind little girl who dismissed a classmate by describing him as “a waste of skin.”
The whole concept of value and rank is understood by children at a very young age. I remember Jason, early in first grade, coming home with a school paper that had a smiley face from the teacher on it.
“Wow, way to go, kiddo!” I exclaimed (ever the encouraging mom).
“Not really,” he responded, “It doesn’t have any rays.”
“What?” I asked.
“It doesn’t have any rays,” he explained. “You can get smiley faces with rays, regular smiley faces, straight-line mouth faces, frowny faces, and frowny faces with tears.” So much for kids not defining themselves by their grades.
Similarly, in our culture, people are often evaluated according to how much money they earn. So you can have a person who does some of the most important work in a society – caring for other people, nurturing children, providing a warm and safe environment for families – describing herself as “just a housewife”. What’s the matter with us?
It’s not only the way we value other people, we also value animals, and land, and other elements in God’s creation, according to what we can get from them – everyone and everything becomes a commodity to us then. How much benefit can we get from someone or something? Its value is all about what it can do for us – we don’t regard it as having value in and of itself.
One way of describing this way of looking at the world is that we objectify things and people – that is, we think of them only in relationship to us. In a sentence, where I am the subject, other things become either direct objects or indirect objects – for example: I hit the ball or I love pizza, in which case the ball and pizza are direct objects. Other examples are: I sing to you, or I write to her, in which case you and her are indirect objects. And sometimes we have both indirect and direct objects in a sentence: I sing a song to the baby, or I write a letter to them. Grammatically, in those sentences, I am the subject, and everything else: the ball, pizza, you, her, them, a letter, a song, the baby – all of these are objects, either direct or indirect. So a way of thinking that evaluates everything only in terms of what it can do for us is an objectifying mindset – this way of thinking looks at everything as an object and assesses it only as it affects ourselves.
Another way of describing this is that we commodify things and people – we regard them as commodities in our lives, and value them according to how they benefit us. For a long time, the culture of the industrialized countries has had this approach to the earth. We view different life forms in terms of their value to us – even as we describe the natural dimensions of a country, we talk about that as its natural resources. So for a long time, we devalued wetlands. We thought of them as a waste of land – didn’t have anything we could use, so they were of no value. Within this framework, humans haven’t been stewards of the earth; we’ve been consumers of the earth.
Yet, in recent years, we’ve learned to view wetlands differently – we’ve learned that they are very important to the whole eco-system. I learned from materials at the Environmental Protection Agency website that wetlands are some of the most biologically productive natural ecosystems – similar to tropical rainforests and coral reefs in terms of their importance to a large number of species. For example, in North America, up to one-half of the bird species nest or feed in wetlands. Seventy-five percent of commercially harvested fish are wetland-dependant. These figures are all the more amazing when you consider that only about 5% of the land in the contiguous United States is wetlands. And despite being only 1/20 of the land, they are home to almost 1/3 of our plant species. Two-thirds of the waterfowl in the continental United States reproduce in Midwestern wetlands. Unfortunately, our habit of regarding wetlands as unimportant has led to damage to wetlands, which in turn has harmed many species. And if we were completely self-centered, and thought that humans were the only species of value, we should still be careful with wetlands, because wetlands are some of our most effective natural flood protection – wetlands have the capacity to absorb significant amounts of floodwater. So even if we cared about no-one but ourselves, the wetlands are important.
We should not be surprised to learn that wetlands are important, if we take the Bible seriously. The Bible does not have a commodifying approach. In God’s economy, everything is a thing in itself and has value as itself, and as part of the whole of creation. The early history of the patriarchs tells of Israel’s God valuing people and a nation that the rest of the world would toss aside. Childless women, second-born sons, even an 11th-born son – all these played important roles in the early generations of the Hebrew people. And Israel itself was a little country, not a powerful nation, but of value to this God. As the generations wore on, a foreign woman would be an important link in the generations that would lead to the great king David, and David himself was the youngest of all his brothers – this God finds value in people that the world would not regard as important. And this God, our God, as Paul tells us in the reading from Philippians, this God did not even regard godly status as essential, but came among humans as a human, and as a human suffered not only pain and death, but death on the cross which was a death of humiliation and degradation. And then God reminded us that God does not value as we value – this man who had been put to death as a criminal, God raised to new life, revealing that although humans had rejected Jesus, God rejected our rejection.
So what we have learned about wetlands on our own reveals the same truth that we see in the Bible – God values even that which humans do not value. Each piece of creation is good, and it is all of value to the whole of it. We are only beginning to understand how life is interwoven, and how the web of creation cannot be disassembled without damage. Last weekend, when Prof. Wallace was here, we spoke on Saturday of how all creation is charged with divine presence – this is the understanding woven through Scripture, which is generally known as panentheism: God in all things. This is not pantheism, that God is the same as all things, but panentheism, God is in all things. This does not mean that everything is the same, as in the dollar store – everything a dollar, no matter what it is. No, in God’s economy, each thing has value in and of itself – they are not commodities for humans, everything is created, and has its own purpose. Light is good as light, water is good as water, earth is good, plants and animals and fish and birds are good, and humans too are good – there is intrinsic value to each thing in creation.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t eat plants, or animals, or use things in the earth – but it should mean that we understand that each element in creation has value, and should be appreciated as a thing-in-itself, not simply as what it can be to us. And when we appreciate the earth in this way, we can still eat, but we eat gratefully, appreciating the gift in the harvest. And when we take seriously God’s presence in the world, and God valuing the world, we can still use wood, and leather, and plants and animals, but again, we appreciate that these are part of God’s good creation – they have value in themselves, so we do not consume more than we need, we do not consume in a way that is unsustainable, we treat animals with respect and care, and we treat each other with respect and care.
And until we truly appreciate each thing, each plant, each animal, each person as having value in itself and not merely in relation to us, real intimacy is not possible – until we appreciate others as subjects and not objects, we are using them, instead of receiving them. And indeed, this understanding of life is a sacramental understanding of life – we receive each person, each being as a sacred gift from God, and we give of ourselves as well, so that life becomes a mutual giving and receiving: we receive life from the earth, and we give life back to the earth.
All of this is very consistent with Biblical Christianity whose central act of worship is the meal given to us by Jesus, when he said “Take this bread, it is my body; take this wine, it is the very life-blood that courses through me.” We don’t believe that bread and juice become the physical body and blood of Jesus, but we do understand in this sacrament that life is given, and received, and that when we leave worship, we are sent out to give our lives in the living of them. Paul writes, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Our lives become part of that life-giving pattern of giving and receiving that is at the very heart of God, and as we willingly participate in that divine mutuality, the living of the life of God, we become aware that our lives, too, are charged with the goodness of God. We are not really supposed to be afraid – but if we regard the living of our lives with awe and wonder, and appreciate that each moment provides opportunities to give and receive sacred gifts, we will truly be able to realize that “in God we live and move and have our being” and we will begin to appreciate that not only do we receive gifts every day, but we, too, are a gift – to ourselves and to the world. We are made in the image of God, a God who is within Godself- Father, Son and Holy Spirit-a perfect union of mutual giving and receiving. We, too, are made for deep intimacy, but when we live instead from a transactional perspective, always looking for what we can get out of any situation, we miss the gifts, and we fail to be gift ourselves.
A free-market economy assigns value to things based on their worth as objects for consumption. Those values can be kind of capricious. Is oil really intrinsically more or less valuable today than yesterday? Prices aren’t based on intrinsic value. My son Tyler told me yesterday that in Tanzania for what he just spent on a roundtrip 8 hour bus fare, 2 nights in a hotel room with TV and a private shower, meals for three days, a tailored suit, a pair of sandals made from tires, a notebook made from elephant dung, and a beautiful piece of fabric – for what he spent for all that, he could have bought a board game in the store in Dar es Salaam. And lest we think that pricing is only peculiar in Tanzania, someone pointed out to me yesterday about our culture [describing a plastic spoon], “It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, buy it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re done with it.”
The free market approach is fine for economic transactions – it’s by far the best system we’ve come up with – but economic pricing is not the same as actual value. The fabric Tyler bought was imprinted with the saying, “All matter thanks God.” When we can believe that, then we, too, will be thanking God for our own lives and for all matter, and we will understand that we matter, because of God. And we will truly understand that stewardship is much more than the annual pledge campaign – it is an understanding of life that says “The earth is the Lord’s; the earth and all that is in it; the world, and those who live in it.” Everything and everyone has value – holiness is in the wetlands that we would pave over, and the persons we would ignore. And as we participate in life from a sacramental perspective, where we are constantly giving and receiving the gift of life, we find ourselves viewing the earth and all that is in it with reverence – not worshiping it as God, but recognizing that it, and we, are of God and for God and in God. Amen.