FCC8/12/07 Genesis 1:26-31

Guest Preacher: Rev. Fred Gee

Why Should We Care What Happened To The Anasazi?

A funny thing happened on the way to this sermon. I had the beginnings of a sermon on a learning from archaeology brewing in my mind when Sharon, who’s a member of the Stewardship Ministry, informed me that my sermon needed to be on a stewardship theme. Needless to say that was not what I had in mind. So, I guess you and that other sermon will have to wait for another invitation from Tim to preach.

It wasn’t like I didn’t have other sermon ideas brewing--even stewardship ones. In fact I did have some thoughts related to stewardship struggling to come together. In the meantime, on a visit to our daughter in Illinois, the following quote in the pastor’s column of her church newsletter caught my eye: “Stewardship is everything we do with everything we have once we say we believe.”

That about says it all. I could not get much more basic and comprehensive--and biblical: “Stewardship is everything we do with everything we have once we say we believe.” Sermon in a nutshell. Stewardship is a way of life; a way of life which honors our relationship to everything we own; everything entrusted to us; and everything and every one in the world around us. Consequently, we must say there are multiple kinds of stewardship: good stewardship; bad stewardship; Christian stewardship; secular stewardship. It’s all in what we do with what we have and the attitude and perspective with which we do it. For us as Christians, stewardship should and must be the positive result of living out our relationship with and commitment to the God of all Creation and the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Admittedly and regrettably, it has not always been so. And that takes me back to those stewardship related ideas which were stewing in my consciousness. One of them was and is the new-found commitment to environmental stewardship among some evangelical Christian leaders and their followers--and the consternation and controversy that has sparked among evangelicals who feel betrayed by their newly “enlightened” leaders. The reality is that for a long time--even from the beginning--Christians of certain persuasions saw no relation between their faith and the environment. Or if they did, that relationship was in the faith that this world would soon pass away--either to be burned into ashes by God or replaced by a “new creation” unspoiled by human hands.

One memorable expression of the long-standing evangelical disdain for the world in which we live came from the lips of a former Secretary of the Interior who declared that we need not be concerned about protecting the environment since Jesus was coming soon and it would all be destroyed anyway! That strikes me sort of like vandals thinking they can do anything they want to an abandoned building since it’s going to be bulldozed anyway--except the consequences are more far-reaching!

A related stewardship thing floating around in my mind got there as a result of the study we have been doing in People Incorporated Class on Bart Ehrman’s book and lecture series Lost Christianities, in which he deals with the radically diverse versions of Christianity afoot in the first three or four centuries after Jesus. Alongside our Learning Hour study, I have been doing research in preparation for teaching a course for the Ray Society at Drake this fall on the so-called lost books of the Bible--or as I have entitled the course: “The Bible As We Never Knew It.”

One of the things Bart Ehrman deals with--and I will also--are books from the Nag Hammadi Library and the Christian sects which revered some of them as scripture. If it had not been for the discovery of the more popularly known Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the discovery of a cache of Christian and secular writings near the town of Nag Hammadi, Egypt two years earlier would have been the sensational archaeological and biblical find of the twentieth century.

Many of the books found at Nag Hammadi were Gnostic writings--many of which we had known about in prohibitions against them by early church Fathers. Church history students knew they had existed, but we did not have actual copies of them until 1945. Among the early Gnostic Christian writings in the Nag Hammadi library are some which reflect a totally negative attitude toward this world. They proclaim that this world was not created by the God we know in Jesus, but by a lesser, evil God who trapped divine souls in human bodies and in this unredeemably evil world; and that the goal of enlightened souls was liberation from the body and this world--so much so that they were to abstain from having children and thus trapping even more souls in this evil existence!

I cannot imagine how devotees of that kind of Christian faith--more widespread than we might like to believe in the early centuries of Christianity--would sully themselves caring for the environment or have a sense of stewardship beyond saving souls. The tragedy is that a lot of evangelical Christianity past and present is not very far from that same position--as expressed in the so-called gospel hymn which declares that “this world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through!” While evangelicals may not share the belief that this world is the evil creation of some lesser God, they certainly share the Gnostic disdain for this evil world as something for which they not are responsible--other than to save their souls and those of others from it. For them stewardship and caring for the environment are not co-joined faith issues.

And that makes me think of an advertisement I saw recently with a solemn word from God after we’ve destroyed the world--something to the effect of “Why didn’t you like the world I created for you?”

Both the beauty and challenge of the first chapter of Genesis is its connection between God’s intimate involvement in and our responsibility to care for the wonders of God’s good creation. That says to me that our stewardship of life and the creation must match God’s stewardship of all nature and all living things.

Throughout scripture there are challenging images of God’s involvement in, continuing relationship with, and future plans for our lives and planet earth. Genesis chapters 6-9 tell the familiar, but sad, story of the Flood and Noah’s Ark and how things in the human realm deteriorated to point God regretted ever creating humans and washed them and all other living creatures off the face of the earth--only to start over again with the promise to never destroy the earth and living things again, leaving us with the clear message that the fate of humans and the natural world was and is inseparably intertwined. From that point on--especially in Isaiah--the Biblical story is one of God’s unrelenting promise and goal to restore human life and creation to their Edenic state: crops instead of thistles; flowers instead of weeds; lions and lambs sleeping together; children and poisonous snakes playing together; people living endless lives in harmony and peace and health in God‘s good creation. And if that’s God’s plan who are we to ignore or deny or work against it?

That leaves me one more set of restless mental thoughts on stewardship and the environment. Those restless thoughts come from the continuing debate over global warming (as reported in this week’s issue of Newsweek magazine) and the debate over whether we are approaching--or may have passed--the point of being able to save ourselves from the consequences of our reckless consumer assault on the environment; and from reading a series of books by husband and wife archaeologist team Michael and Kathleen Gear which novelize life in early North America from the time the first person walked the land bridge from Asia.

Reading their books quickly erases the romanticized image of Native Americans as peaceful people who had the highest respect for life and the environment. To the contrary, these novels depict our Native American ancestors as always at war with each other over territory, natural resources, and food--survival issues which still dominate and threaten our lives.

The preface to the second book in their Anasazi Mystery series, The Summoning God, is cryptically entitled: The Rise and Fall of the Anasazi: Why Should We Care What Happened To Them? The Anasazi, for those not familiar with them, were the Native Americans who lived in the cliff and canyon pueblos of the four corners area of the Southwest roughly a thousand to eight hundred years ago only to suddenly disappear--leaving anthropologists and archaeologists to wonder and debate what happened to them and why. So the Gears ask their question: why should we care what happened to the Anasazi. They affirm that we need to pay attention to the Anasazi because what happened to them “bears directly upon the survival of our civilization.”

After a few brief parallels between the Anasazi and modern Americans, the Gears end the preface with this paragraph:

The vicious cycle that led to the rise and fall of their civilization has become clear as a result of the excavation of hundreds of their towns: the rise began with a wet warm climatic episode that resulted in a period of affluence and scientific achievement. With the affluence came swift population growth. In the process of feeding their people, they exhausted the soil, cut down the trees, over-hunted the animals. Then the climate changed. When their crops wouldn’t grow, they expanded their trade routes. When their trade routes were cut, they turned to warfare to keep them open. When they couldn’t keep them open, they took what they needed from their closest neighbors. They must have next fought to protect their homes from their victim’s wrath, then the fight became a struggle just to stay alive.

We leave it up to you to decide where in that cycle our modern civilization stands, but several things are clear: we’ve over-utilized our resources, the climate is changing, and we’ve already begun to “fight.” (p. x)

The question for us Christians is how we respond to what’s happening in our world and what our role is as the stewards to whom God has entrusted human life and the creation. Is it to get the most out of everything we can before it runs out or somebody else gets it; or is it to do the most we can to preserve and enhance life and creation so it does not run out and so all of God’s children in all generations to come can enjoy life on the earth?

Several years ago, while preparing a stewardship curriculum for the Region’s summer camp program, I ran across this quote from a ten year old girl: “The purpose of life is to leave the world a better place than it was before.”

I happen to believe that that is our solemn calling and trust as Christian stewards. Recently, California Governor Arnold Schwartzeneger said that the world does not belong to Republicans or Democrats; caring for the environment is the responsibility of us all. I would go one step further and say that caring for the environment as a sacred trust from God is not a liberal or conservative or evangelical matter. It is the sacred responsibility of all of us who believe in the God “who so loved the world“--and we can and must fulfill that charge through the stewardship of what we do with everything we have.

Let us pray:

Creator God, Lord of this good earth and of all living things, inspire and help us who honor you and your Son, to honor and care for all that you have made and enabled us to make and entrusted to us as your children and partners and stewards. In Christ’s name. Amen.