Читать книгу Resurrection Matters - Nurya Love Parish - Страница 8

PRELUDE

RELIGION MATTERS

I often say I grew up without any religion. I went to worship at a church precisely once during the first nineteen years of my life. I never went to other houses of worship at all. Neither of my parents found organized religion meaningful. If I wanted to practice faith, they decided, I could figure that out for myself later on.

I was an only child, and a reflective one. In the absence of religious teachings, I found meaning in abstract concepts: compassion, integrity, justice. These were untethered from ancient stories and traditions, which made me feel untethered too. As a college student I found myself looking for someone, somewhere, who had thought through my questions already: how am I to live? what is right? what is good? Slowly it dawned on me that religion was the container for these questions—and their answers.

Because I was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, at an early age I began to realize that humanity was headed for some type of ecological crisis. As a child I recognized that green lawns could not last forever in the desert, and wondered how my species had gone so wrong. More important, how could we be put right again? Eventually, I discovered that religion was the discipline through which these questions had been asked and answered throughout the ages. I converted from “nothing” to “something” because I needed the wisdom of those who had gone before me. I became a Christian and was baptized at the age of twenty-five because in Jesus I found someone worth trusting with my whole life.

Organized religions are meant to be deeply trustworthy. At its core, religion exists to provide a shared language for that which renders us speechless. Organized religion enables the practice of faith—trusting our lives to the One who is far greater than we are—across every generation. As Phyllis Tickle wrote in The Great Emergence, religion is like the rope that connects the boat to the shoreline: a “cable of meaning”¹ which tethers us to the source of life. Dr. Cornel West says, “Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.”² Religion is what teaches us that the first step into “nothing” leads to life and not—as we would logically expect—to death.

The church’s crisis and the climate crisis share the same root—a failure to practice the faith that is in us. God’s people have always been distracted from relationship with God; this story begins in Genesis, chapter two. Trespassing against God’s boundaries because we want to be like God is apparently what we do. Many generations have preserved this story. But preserving the story does not mean we understand what it means for our time.

When it became clear that extracting fossil fuels from the depths of the earth was leading to the destruction of Creation, Christians could have recalled the story of the apple in Eden. We could have remembered that we tend to reach for that which makes us more like God but is actually out of bounds. We could have called for research into the consequences of fossil fuel use. We could have demanded public policy that would steward Creation as witness to God’s glory and a home for future generations. We could have made the health of God’s world our first priority. If we had done so, we would have witnessed to the importance of remembering scripture as a source of wisdom, while also turning to science as a source of fact. We would have rewoven the cable of meaning that is fraying in our lifetimes. And perhaps, we could have changed the course of history.

The failure to understand and act on the wisdom of scripture did not jeopardize the health of an entire planet in previous generations. But the last hundred years have brought unprecedented technological advances with the maturing of the industrial age into the digital era. The last hundred years have also brought the rise of a market economy focused on short-term financial gain with no effective means to account for long-term ecological cost. Our loss of wisdom means we see Creation as a natural resource to be plundered. The rise of technology provides us the means to plunder it. Our generally accepted accounting counts Creation’s loss as humanity’s gain. We tend to think of ourselves as gods and God as absent. This aspect of humanity goes back to the beginning. It may very well be our end.

It is unfashionable in an era of pluralism to claim that the church holds unique power to save. But it is certain that the church exists to connect humanity to our Creator. The church holds language, story, tradition, and ritual that can be effective against idolatry. The church is far from perfect. Many, many times in our past we have fallen prey to idolatry ourselves. We have failed to be an obedient church;³ we have not loved God with our whole heart.⁴ But inherent to our core purpose is the language of sin, confession, redemption, absolution, and grace. This language is a gift both the church and the world desperately need to make sense of our current predicament.

We have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. As a result, our planet is in peril. The good news is that God, in God’s mercy, knows our sinfulness and has provided us a means of salvation in Jesus Christ. We left Eden a long time ago. God came to join us outside its gates. Now, as we turn to Christ and offer our lives for his service, God enables us to become stewards of Creation.

The stewardship of Creation begins with a renewal of religion. Science exists to teach us facts. Religion provides a language of reverence. A language of reverence leads to a practice of reverence. And the practice of reverence—the recognition that each day we walk on holy ground—is what our planet needs.