Letting Heaven and Nature Sing

By Liza Field

12/22/2008

To reject the 'world' is not to reject people, society or the creatures of God, but to reject the perverted standards which make men misuse and spoil a good creation.

--Thomas Merton

It's Christmas week, here on the grubby, gritty, mistake-stubbled and holy Earth.

While some Christian broadcasters describe the "war on Christmas," and attacks on Christianity by "the world," I don't find such wars in my small town, nor up on the nearby mountain, among the wild turkeys, the chickadees in cheerful scrub-pines, the spring cracking cold, musical waters through rock.

In fact, I find the story of "incarnation"-God-in-molecules-particularly abundant on this mountain, even if no person is broadcasting a sermon. Like John Muir, I believe the ancient stones here contain scripture. The quiet, soul-stirring "shhhh" of the stiff oak leaves overhead, the merry wintergreen leaves and red berries below, all exude a sense of "Emmanuel"-or "God with us."

The entire Bible describes God's presence in nature-rivers, mountains, clouds, birds, the tree-of-life from Genesis to Revelations.

And so the disparagement of "tree-huggers," alongside his crusade-for-the-Christmas-tree, waged seasonally by my fellow Virginian Jerry Falwell, used to baffle me. Jesus said, "Ours is a God of the living, not the dead." So why was it Christian to defend a dead, sawed-off tree, but pagan to defend live trees with roots?

As a Christian conservationist, I don't see Christmas as a war between heaven and earth. In The Gospel According to John, "God so loved the world." Our choirs carol, "Joy to the world....Let Heaven and Nature sing!"

So why have various Christian leaders come down so hard on "Nature" in the past decade? Political-strategist-turned-Christian-broadcaster Chuck Colson says environmentalists are "a cult." They ask people to make sacrifices for the environment. Hence, they practice "human sacrifice."

Televangelist John Hagee encourages Christians to support oil-drilling in ANWR, dismiss endangered species and scorn the "eco-terrorists" who want to preserve wilderness.

Recently, my local "Victory FM" radio station has been replaying sermons by the late Jerry Falwell. He explains that water is a divine gift, but God doesn't care about human-induced droughts. We Christians (being saved, ourselves) are not to try to save the earth, but wait for an evacuation-by-rapture, leaving our mess for the Left-Behind folks to fix.

"For what will it profit us if we save the whole world and lose our souls?" asked a station ad last year, misquoting Jesus as part of Falwell's campaign against greenhouse-gas regulation.

Why? Speaking at a Baptist "Stewardship of the Earth" luncheon, in early 2008, Al Gore said that some Christian leaders are "locked into an ideological coalition....with the wealthiest and most powerful who don't want to see change that's aimed at protecting God's green earth."

Why would these Christians protect worldliness instead of the world?

Ralph Reed's work helps explain it. Reed left his chairmanship of the political Christian Coalition in 1997 to start a for-profit consulting firm, taking his impressive Christian database with him.

So when the interests of Reed's big-energy, auto, communications, timber and political clients have needed votes or grassroots support, Reed has been able to arrange client donations and to call up the Falwell Ministries, Pat Robertson, James Dobson and other Christian leaders who agree to promote industry or political interests.

But many Christian leaders are beginning to question whether such messages originate from prophets or profits. Catholic theologian Father Thomas Berry says that environmentalists, who cry out against business-as-usual, are in fact the true prophets of our day.

Al Gore is one, says Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics. "Prophets are unacceptable because their truth is inconvenient," he notes of Gore's dismissal by some Christian leaders.

Evangelical Richard Cizik provides another prophetic voice-one whose environmental slant recently contributed to calls for him to resign a post with the National Association of Evangelicals.

Once a global-warming "skeptic," Cizik is now convinced that Christians are called to protect not merely nine months of human life in a womb, but a climate and Earth which make all of life possible.

"I'm persuaded that evangelicals can become the activists behind climate change. Because if not us, who?"

A growing number of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders are joining in, realizing that if believers say "the earth is the Lord's," we should not wreck the place.

Perhaps this is the real Christmas war-the ancient struggle to honor the spiritual within creatures, instead of exploiting them. Christians, whose leading figure said man could not serve both God and money, are surely appropriate people for demonstrating how to choose life, eternally, over short-lived materialism.