A Heritage of Loving the Land
One of the keenest places that homesickness crept up on me once I left the mountains of East Tennessee to study at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary in Texas was driving through the countryside. I miss our mountains against a narrower sky, the vibrant green of summertime, and the trees! Oh the trees… such a variety we have that I never rightly treasured until I left.
As I’ve spent more time here, though, I’ve begun to see beauty around me in these shrubby plains and meager hills. I miss my mountains and trees but I’ve grown to love the tan grasses and even the angry grackle’s call. I think a part of the reason I’ve begun seeing the beauty here comes from my friendships with seasoned saints at my church, Bosqueville Baptist, who have had their love for the place rub off on me a bit.
When I think about it, that’s where my love for nature started in the first place, with saints who know goodness teaching me what is beautiful and good. I’m in a class on the Doctrine of Creation and we read some brilliant authors and I have a wise and challenging professor, but my earliest teachers about the goodness of “all things” remain as good as any: my grandparents. Poppa’s fishing lessons and time in the garden, Memaw’s long walks on our family land nestled at the foot of the Smokies, long chats about wildlife with my Pepaw in the living room, and the joy and awe of my Nana watching song birds out her kitchen window are just a handful of lessons learned and a glimpse of love planted into me. The affection that I have for our world has blossomed out of being taught what is good and beautiful and true by people who love me and love God.
The teachers of my teachers, my ancestors of blood and faith, were all intimately connected with the land. They knew it and loved it. They spent more time outdoors than inside, and certainly more time in the real world than on a screen (They didn’t have screens!). This knowing of the land was important, but their knowing turned into affection because of a fertile faith. For those of us who are in Christ we love the world and all of its creatures because we know the Creator of it. Paul makes it very clear in Colossians 1 that in Jesus “all things were made” and “in him all things hold together.” He also points out that all things are made “for him” (vs. 16). We might be stewards, but this world belongs to God and we simply live here.
What then does that mean for us? If Jesus is not only the One who hung the stars in the sky and planted the first seeds into the ground and called them good but is also the One who is holding creation together as we speak, and if creation belongs to Him, then how might that impact our behavior? Well for one, if we love God we will love His handiwork. Caring for our world certainly expresses love for God and love for our neighbor. This cannot mean poisoning rivers and tearing down mountains and destroying soil. We have an idea sometimes that this world has been utterly corrupted by the Fall, but if Jesus is in the midst of it then He’s about redeeming it in just the same way that He desires to redeem us. He wants for “all things'' to be reconciled to God, to be re-made as they were at the beginning. The challenge for us is that God, in His sovereignty and freedom, has decided to make us the coworkers in that ministry. That also then means He wants for us to be the agents of change and redemption as He powerfully inspires and sustains us. We need to move away from a mindset of holding out until Jesus returns to take us away to heaven and step into our faithful vocation as stewards who are called to redeem and reconcile this world back to God (this is the image of a New Jerusalem out of John’s Revelation certainly).
With that, I hope we can talk more about how to do that in the coming weeks, and I thank my good friend, Hunter, for giving me a space to start a conversation, but the key take away for us today is asking “do I love this world?” The affection we need to transform things back to the goodness God designed depends on having saints who can teach us of the beauty of the earth, a legacy of kinship that began with our Father gardening with Adam and Eve (before The Fall mind you). God himself was our first teacher, so I suppose my Memaw and Poppa do fall into second best. Wendell Berry writes well of this love legacy and kinship in a poem he calls “The Handing Down” which describes life between grandfather and grandchildren:
“After his long and wakeful life,
He has come to love the world
As though it’s not to be lost.
Though he faces darkness, his hands
Have no weight or harshness
On his small granddaughter’s heads.
His love doesn’t ask that they understand
It includes them. It includes, as freely,
The green plant leaves in the window,
Clusters of white ripe peaches weighting
The branch among the weightless leaves.
There was an agony in ripening
That becomes irrelevant at last
To ripeness. His love
Turned away from death, freely,
Is equal to it.”
May we all grow in a love for the Father, Son, and Spirit that expresses itself in care for our neighbors, fellow creatures, and our only world.