God and Nature 1

Do you know your place, ecologically speaking?  This is the question Steve Bouma-Prediger posed during God and Nature I.  To test our ecological perception of place, we took a quiz.  Here’s a sampling of the questions. See how you do.

 

1.      How many days until the moon is full?

2.      Describe the soil around your home.

3.      Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.

4.      Name five edible wild plants and five agricultural plants in your bioregion.

5.      From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?

6.      Where does your garbage go?

7.      Name five trees in your area.

8.      Name five resident and migratory birds.

9.      What primary geological event or process influenced the land where you live?

10.    From where you are reading this, point north?

 

How did you do?  If we can’t answer these questions, we’re ecologically illiterate, despite of (or perhaps because of) our education.  Being good earthkeepers, however, requires that we not only know our place intimately, but that we also have ears to hear the “groaning of creation”.  The earth’s vital signs are not good.  Try this quiz.  No cheating…

 

1.      There were half as many people in the world today in the year

a)     1800

b)     1930

c)     1960

2.      If the number of hungry people in the world today were lined up shoulder to shoulder, the line would stretch

a)     from LA to New York

b)     around the world once at the equator

c)     around the earth 18 times at the equator

3.      Another species of plant or animal life become extinct

a)     every year

b)     every week

c)     every 8 hours

4.      Tropical forests are destroyed at the rate of 25 million acres each year, an area the size of

      a) metropolitan Chicago

      b) Rhode Island

      c) Indiana

       5.  The percent of people in so-called developing countries without adequate drinking water is

                  a) 10%

                  b) 25%

                  c) 50%

 

The answers are all C. Scary, eh?  Thoroughly depressing as these statistics are, as Christians we are called to hope not despair, and signs of hope abound. The Bible itself has a lot to say about caring for creation and more and more Christians are starting to cultivate an “earthy” faith.  Yes, there is bad theology out there but it is being countered by good theology, a theology that affirms that humans are called to serve and protect the earth; that God, not humans, is at the center of things; that the earth will be renewed, not destroyed; that the earth is our eternal home, not heaven.   There’s a lot of work to be done.  May God shape us to be people who have the patience, courage, and compassion to live as agents of His shalom in a world of wounds.  Amen.