Author: Jarrod Davis
I never wanted to be called an environmentalist.
Growing up in the countryside, I spent my childhood outdoors. I freely roamed the fields and forests near our house and around our family’s farm. I loved the trees and streams, the birds and beavers, the clouds and stars, all that nature had to offer. My parents and grandparents made sure that I was raised not only with an appreciation for God’s creation, but understanding our responsibility to care for it as well.
Just don’t call me an environmentalist.
Environmentalists were idealistically naïve, I thought. They were either scientists separated from the actual environment by the walls of their labs and their equations, or they were hippy protestors chanting in front of government buildings and corporate offices. Either way, environmentalists had no real understanding of what it means to live on the land, to walk and work on the land, to be a real part of the land’s history. So don’t call me an environmentalist.
I was, therefore, not thrilled to be giving the report on environmental ethics for my Christian ethics class in seminary.
I attended that day’s lecture prepared to take notes and report back to my precept group, with no expectation of enjoying it. Then our guest lecturer, Dr. Norman Wirzba, began to speak.
He didn’t talk about the environment. He didn’t talk about climate change and the carbon cycle. He didn’t talk about government regulations and restrictions.
He talked about growing tomatoes, sharing garden abundance with neighbors, and how delicious bruschetta made with fresh tomatoes tastes. He talked about his own childhood growing up in the countryside, and his encounters with birds and snakes. He talked about God’s acts of creating as making room for others to live, and how our own acts in creation ought to mirror God’s work.
“This isn’t environmentalism,” I thought. “This is what I’m already doing in my own backyard. This is what I’ve been doing my whole life.”
That day I was introduced to the theology of creation, and I was hooked. I found in the teachings of Dr. Wirzba and his ilk a practical theology, a hands-on way of interacting with God and participating with God’s mission to love the world. I found my own life’s calling wrapped up in God’s instructions to Adam and Eve when placing them in the garden of Eden, to serve and protect what God has made good.
Creation is the medium in which God redeems us. When Jesus came, he came into this creation as a part of it, interacting not with incorporeal human souls, but with whole human beings, and with fish and bread and sea waves and storms. Jesus’s grace redeems not just our souls but our lives. Christianity is not about being saved to leave this world behind and go to Heaven someday. Jesus’s salvation is holistic. Redeeming us and clothing us in righteousness now, Jesus works through us to bring about God’s Kingdom here on Earth, in the midst of God’s Creation.
If we as United Methodists are serious about our baptismal vows to resist evil, injustice and oppression, and to nurture those who are entrusted into our care, then we must do so through the medium of creation, just as Jesus does. If we really believe that through Jesus’s grace we are moving on towards Christian perfection, then we must work for righteousness, justice and perfection in and of this world we live in. Seeing the evil that we humans do through our environmental degradation—even the unintentional harm we cause in our attempts to better human life—we must repent; we must cease to do evil and learn to do good.
We must love our neighbor—human and non-human alike—by making this creation a safe place for life to thrive, so that creation may fulfill God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply.
So maybe you can call me an environmentalist after all.