"The Everlasting Covenant"
Dr. Larry Rasmussen
Sunday, February 2nd, 2003

“The time will soon come,” writes Wendell Berry, “when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.”

Is Berry right? Did that optimism end on that day? Six months later we vividly remember the horrors of 9/11. And there was a moment when, ankle-deep in the ashes of that heinous crime, we thought about reinventing ourselves “in the image of a….less materialistic, ecologically secure and spiritually enriched culture.” But did the unquestioning technological and economic optimism end that day?

A way of life that doesn’t know what to do without it certainly did not end. If anything we’ve become more defiant. “The American way of life is not up for negotiation,” two Presidents Bush have declared, the first at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the second to a national audience after 9/11.

I hope Berry is right, crustly old Christian farmer that he is. For we’ve lived, both before and after September 11, with the spectacle of unprecedented prosperity and economic growth carrying on while a beautiful world, still beautiful beyond the singing of it, is slowly being degraded and destroyed. Yes, by dint of good work and nature’s stunning resiliency, some communities of the living world are in good repair. But overall, Earth’s life-systems are in decline. Soil erosion exceeds soil formation now. Carbon emissions exceed carbon fixation and apparently make for more extreme storms and varied weather; species extinction wildly exceeds species evolution, this time at the hands of the one species that never really thinks of itself as a species among species--namely, us; ocean fish catches exceed sustainable fish reproduction, (many of the great ocean fisheries are near collapse; we turn more and more to fish farms); forest destruction exceeds forest regeneration, and in far too many locales, fresh water use exceeds aquifer replenishment.

We don’t call this gradual degradation “violence” because we don’t truly feel it. We have very little in the way of feelings of intimacy and kinship with the rest of nature. We don’t consider ourselves bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, though we indeed are.

But the prophets did call this violence, and we had better push aside the distractions of all the advertisements and war chants, and listen with cocked ears. I grant you that prophets are an odd, sometimes offensive lot. Isaiah ran around buck naked for three years, just to get people’s attention. What he said was unpopular, but poignant. Listen.

The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants;

For they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes,

broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore a curse devours the earth,

and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt....

The wine dries up, the vines languish, and the merry-hearted sigh...

The city of chaos is broken down,

every house is shut up so that no one can enter.

There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine;

all joy has reached its eventide;

the gladness of the earth is banished. (24:5-7, 10-11)

“Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you...” (Gen.9:10)

And a couple verses further: “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth. God said to Noah, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.’ (Gen. 9: 16-17)”

It goes on, 4 times in 10 verses! Oi veh, enough already! We get the message, Isaiah. Go home, put some clothes on, look decent for a change.

But evidently we didn’t get the message.

Ask the average pew-sitter who the everlasting covenant was with, or the first covenant, and the answer you will get is “Abraham and Sarah and their descendents.” We jump to that because we think covenants are between God and human beings or among human beings themselves. Our Christianity turns on an axis that runs between God and humankind only. And even when we are sober enough to honor the rest of creation as truly holy ground, we jockey into position as the good steward, the trustee who represents God to the rest of creation. As the good steward, we stand tall and rule from a place of dominion. In fact this is stewardship in the manner of the pre-abolition notion of steward. The slaveholder was the steward of his slaves. We got rid of that, mostly. But not nature as our slave--living property at our command over which we are stewards who make all the decisions.

Or ask the average-pewsitter what the very first commandment is. You will not likely get the right answer. It’s “be fruitful and multiply. (Gen. 1:21)”. But to whom is it first said? Fish and birds (or as they say in my neighborhood--da fish and da boids). “So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ And there was evening and morning, the fifth day.” (Gen. 1:21-23)

Nor do we much observe that the reason given by God for human earth creatures in Gen. 2 is “to till and keep” the garden. The Hebrew word-abad-here is the word meaning “to serve,” and it’s the same word that in Greek is used by and about Jesus as one who serves. The human is, by vocation, the servant of the land, and in this second creation account the primary identification of “Adam” [earth creature] is with Adamah [topsoil], from which Adam is made--and all other creatures--and to which Adam will return. You are topsoil, from topsoil you, just like the other creatures, came, to topsoil you, and they, will return; your task in life, as the human earth creature--Adam--is to serve and con-serve--to till and protect, or till and keep, the land. “To till and serve” is not quite the first commandment, as we’ve noted. But it’s the first one to humans and it’s long, long, long before Moses and Sinai. It comes at the dawn of our species; this is the primordial calling and command.

Ask the average pewsitter who is created next, after Adam, and the answer you get is “Eve.” In due course that is true, but in Gen. 2 all the animals are created first, right after Adam, as God witnesses “Adam” (Hebrew for “earthling”) alone and seeks a fit partner. Check it out. You don’t need to take my word. You need only read Gen. 2:18-20. But what is the logic embedded here, that “every animal of the field and every bird of the air” might be the appropriate partner for Adam? They might be Adam’s companion and partner because they, too, are all from adamah and return to it and they, each and every one, are all recipients of the very breath of God that gives them life. They, too, receive the Spirit; they, too, are kin.

Next ask the average pewsitter what tree is in the midst of the garden. The answer you get is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That tree gets all the press. Wrong answer. The right answer is: “Out of the ground the Lord made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Gen. 2:9). The tree of life as the very axis of the world--the most common of all religious symbols, except perhaps the sacred mountain. There the Bible begins. And the Bible ends with the tree of life in the New Jerusalem, along the banks of the rivers of crystal waters flowing from the throne of God. It bears its fruit for every season, and the leaves of the trees for the healing of the nations. But read on, to the very end: John of Patmos, an outrageously jealous author, closes the Book of Revelation saying that if you mess with his prophecy, God will get you. And what is the worst that can happen? Hades, Sheol, Hell, have your Suburban Utility Vehicle repossessed? No, God will remove your share “in the tree of life and in the holy city.” Check it out--Rev. 22.

Of course, there are other themes in these familiar creation accounts: we are made in the image of God, and the command to humans, too, is to be fruitful and multiply and have dominion. (A Jewish scholar friend of mine says: that commandment we’ve kept with a vengence--maybe it’s time to move to those we’ve not kept to such excess.)

But why do we raise these up these themes and not the others? Why do we systematically filter out some themes--our primordial calling to serve the land, the other creatures as our co-siblings of creation, the same breath of life--God’s own Spirit--shared with them, the same origin and destiny as well as the same atoms and cells, and all of us as partners in the same first and everlasting covenant between God and earth. Why do we filter all this out while we systematically raise up the themes that set us apart and over? This is what I call apartheid thinking at the species level--we think we’re a species apart that can develop separately from the rest of the community of life. We think the salient covenant is always between God and humankind. We cannot live apart, and the covenant is not with us as a species. When the vines languish, the merry-hearted sign; when the houses are shut up and the city is broken down, the gladness of earth is banished.

We filter reality the way we do, not because we are poor students of Scripture, though that may be true. There is another, far more compelling reason; namely, our whole way of life. We did not arrive at the decline of most every major life-system because we conveniently skipped half the verses of Genesis. We skipped the verses because they did not fit the distinctive mark of our way of living--namely, building a world that leaves Earth behind, building a world that never even bothers to ask what the whole Community of Life-other humans and the more-than-human-requires for its own renewal and regeneration.

Not that everyone--all human beings--do this in the same degree. About 70% of environmental degradation has nothing to do with people’s individual feelings about nature or their education and intelligence. It has to do with the patterns and systems--the way of life--of the richer nations and their imitators elsewhere. Bill McKibben paints a picture that should stick with us. “How big are we?” he asks, meaning the size of human claims on the Earth. “This is not so simple,” he goes on to explain. “Not only do we vary greatly in how much food and energy and water and minerals we consume, but each of us varies over time.”

William Catton...once tried to calculate the amount of energy human beings use each day. In hunter-gatherer times it was about 2,500 calories, all of it food. That is the daily intake of a common dolphin. A modern human being uses 31,000 calories a day, most of it in the form of fossil fuel. That is the intake of a pilot whale. And the average American uses six times that--as much as a sperm whale. We have become, in other words, different from the people we used to be. Not kinder or unkinder, not deeper or stupider--our natures seem to have changed little since Homer. We’ve just gotten bigger. We appear to be the same species, with stomachs of the same size, but we aren’t. It’s as if each of us were trailing a big Macy’s-parade balloon around, feeding it constantly....Now each of us needs not only a little plot of cropland and a little pasture for the meat we eat but also a little forest for timber and paper, a little mine, a little oil well.

Giants have big feet. Some scientists in Vancouver tried to calculate one such ‘footprint’ and found that although 1.7 million people lived on a million acres surrounding their city, those people required 21.5 million acres of land to support them--wheat fields in Alberta, oil fields in Saudi Arabia, tomato fields in Mexico. People in Manhattan are as dependent on faraway resources as people on the Mir space station were...Those balloons above our heads can shrink or grow, depending on how we choose to live. (Atlantic Monthly, May, 1998: 56-57.)

How we live--that is what is at issue in keeping or violating the everlasting covenant. Jesus, who talks about money more than about prayer, is speaking to us when he says, “Not everyone who says Lord, Lord, will be saved but those who do the will of the Father.”

How we live--that is the issue. Let the deep traditions of Christian faith speak to that. That would mean, for example, a sacramental apprehension of the whole creation, an orientation towards life that finds simply repulsive our turning all things, now even air and water, not to say topsoil--Adamah itself--into commodities, property to be bought and sold as though it had no life and value of its own. It would mean learning over again to say yes and to say no in a Christian asceticism that loves the Earth fiercely in a simple way of life, a life of material simplicity and spiritual richness. It would mean the prophet’s riveted attention to structures and habits and policies that make some rich and others poor, some adding lot to lot while others lack a livelihood, some enjoying fine wine in their gated communities while others dare not drink the water, yet must.

How we live is the issue. And let us at least begin by forswearing false gods. Let us worship, not the God of the economy or the non-negotiable American way of life, but the God of the sparrow, the God of field and tree and children in city streets, the God of all those now departed species, the God whose creating still gives birth to stars and spins out galaxies billions of light years beyond us. Let us confess that we have been worshipping a tribal God, a species God, even a God of class and race and clan. Let us begin to understand that any God-talk that does not take in all 15 billion years of the universe to date, and all 50 or 100 million galaxies, is simply quaint, the worship of a species idol.

Friends, even this pale blue dot, tiny little earth, seven land masses bent over a great round water, does not belong to us; we belong, with all else, to it. Until we get that right, the forests, and fish, the air and the water, and those species, will all languish. And we as a precious part of the web of life itself will suffer. Worshiping a species idol and worshipping the God of a superpower in an arrogant way of life is hazardous to your health and your children’s and your children’s children unto the third and fourth generation. That’s the warning label attached to the everlasting covenant, the covenant between God “and every living creature of all flesh,” between God and the Earth. Life--all life--is a precious gift. The horror of September 11 certainly taught us that all over again. Till this gift of life, and serve it, embrace it, cherish it. Keep the everlasting covenant.