My last post touched on something important, what should my Christian response be to issues of the environment? I think as a Christian, as part of me exercising my faith, that it is right and proper to be interested in creation, in issues of the environment, aware of issues around global warming etc. After all God, in my view, is the king of all creation (rather than part of it), and I think his plan is not to scrap it but to bring it to fulfilment, to bring out its beauty even more so than it already is. We humans are part of God’s kingdom but so to are the birds, the animals, the mountains, the seas…
A couple of Hebrew words have helped me understand what this all means to me as a Christian, were highlighted by Brian McLaren in talk that inspired me:
The first is shamar, it means to tend, to keep, to protect, and to care for. We use this Hebrew word whenever we use this great blessing from the OT:
“May the Lord bless you and shamar you…we usually translate shamar here as ‘keep you’ but it means more than that, care for you, protect you, tend you.
The second word is abad, which means serve.It’s a word used in the famous statement by the Joshua:
“As for me and my house we will abad the LORD… i.e. we will serve the Lord.
Those words shamar and abad come up in another interesting place, in the beginning of the bible in Gen 2; most bibles translate it like this:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to keep it.”
But Brian suggests what this passage really says… ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to abad it and shamar it.’psalm 145…
"Everything God does is right—the trademark on all his works is love..."
One of the deepest subjects in philosophy is the tension between the one and the many, for example Plato emphasised the one whilst Aristotle emphasised the many. In very broad terms, eastern philosophy emphasises the one whilst western philosophy emphasises the many. Middle Eastern philosophy, which includes Judaism, integrates the one and the many. Psalm 145 is one of integration that paints a picuture which says if I want to understand the entire universe as one unit, as one entity, if I want to see the harmony and inherence and coherence in everything of all the universe then I need to see it as the Kingdom of God, because the one kingdom includes the king and everything the King has made. If I want to understand the universe I need to see it in these terms creatures and Creator unified into a relationship that Christians call the Kingdom of God. It’s a beautiful harmonising term and 3,000 years after the psalm was written I think we need a harmonising understanding of our world…
We live in a world where there is so much tension coming out of the division and disunity, different classes, genders, races and political views… I agree with the suggestion by Brian in his talk that there is there is a need for people who have a vision of integration, harmony, unity in this beautiful thing called the Kingdom of God. David takes a psalm which in Hebrew is an acrostic (each line starting with the next letter of the alphabet) and shows that you can take each different letter and integrate them to say one same thing...
"My mouth is filled with God's praise. Let everything living bless him, bless his holy name from now to eternity!"
God’s kingdom has wide open boarders and the open invitation to me to walk in, to not only to be cared for but to join with the creator in caring and serving all of his creation…
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