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One Foot in Eden

Mark 1: 12-15 : Lent 1, Year B : 26 February 2012

If there is one thing that we associate the poet Wordsworth with it is the idea that nature is a renewing force that makes us feel better by just being in regular contact with it. His argument was that long walks through the countryside - contemplation of the plant and animal kingdom, could make you feel a calmer and better person, perhaps even an inspired person.

But another great Victorian, Charles Darwin, pointed to a disturbing side of the natural world that people didn’t want to think about. "Nature red in tooth and claw," is Blake’s immortal description of the engine that drives the development of life on this planet. The drive to survive, the adaption necessary to keep your species a going concern, and the capacity to hunt things down, kill them, and get them on the table. Animals and humans didn’t get where they did today by being vegetarians.

This year marks the 153rd anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s "Origin of the Species." The book caused major shock waves and controversy for believers who took the Genesis account of creation literally. But by and large the sane Christian world now accepts Darwin’s thesis that we didn’t arrive straight from the hand of God. We are the outcome of a long process of development. We have only been the way we are for about a 100,000 years. Which helps me to understand why we are such a violent, avaricious lot, since the great world religions have only had a few thousand years to get to work on us.

Even if we are no longer bothered by our simian similarities, even if we accept with equanimity the chance outcome that has led to us being in the drivers seat rather than say Dolphins, the thoughtful and sensitive among us can’t help but be disturbed by the violence, predation, strife and cruelty that routinely goes on in forests, and jungles, and deserts. Kill, kill, kill, seems to be the script written into the heart of creation.

"He was with the wild beasts, and the angels looked after him." The artist Stanley Spencer did some pictures of Jesus happily sojourning with scorpions and the like during his wilderness stay. Forty days and nights in the Judean desert wouldnt just be a matter of finding sufficient shade, sustenance and water. You would be vulnerable to any predator who decided to take an interest in you. But Jesus it seems managed to co-exist with them happily.

There are those who argue that as Jesus came up out of the river Jordan after his baptism he began to change the relationship of the material world to God. The first act of his ministry as he sank beneath the water was to begin the healing of the wellsprings of creation. As those drops of water slid off him, already the material world was being drawn into the purposes of God.

Now in act two of his ministry he begins to reverse the curse laid on sentient life on this planet wherby animals and humans fear each other and feast off one another. The desert has become Eden. In this little pocket of the world for this brief period of time the creation is at peace with itself. In microcosm the world has gone back to the peace of the Sabbath on the seventh day of Creation - the shalom of God rests on this place of preparation for what will be a dynamic ministry of restoration of the world.

Step by step Jesus will roll back the forces that make life miserable in our world. For the past few weeks our readings in Mark have shown him engaged in act three of his ministry - the healing of human beings, the restoration of their bodies, minds and spirits back to their original image.

This second Eden experience goes hand in hand with the announcement that God’s rule is breaking in on the world of Jesus’ hearers. It is summed up in the punchy slogan, "The Kingdom of God." Today our attention is being drawn to the Eden restoring aspect of the Kingdom’s agenda. As we dwell on that image of the Garden of Eden we will be imagining a world free of predation and suffering, where human beings can live without violence in close kinship with the animal world. It is a world where we are not the be all and end all, since we only arrived on the sixth day of Creation. This world pivots around God enjoying the world in all its multifarious forms on the seventh day.

It means that we will be content to let other life forms be themselves. In the wondeful words of Henry Beston, "We need another and wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

It means having a bigger and more generous understanding of salvation. In the words of Metropolitan Gregorios, "Christ the incarnate one took flesh. He took matter into himself, so matter is not alien to him now. His body is a material body - transformed of course, but transformed matter. Thus he shares his being with the whole created order: animals and birds, snakes and worms, flowers and seeds. All parts of creation are now reconciled to Christ. And the created order is to be set free and to share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. Sun and moon, planets and stars, pulsars and black holes - as well as planet earth - are to participate in that final consumation of the redemption."

This more inclusive and all encompassing view of what salvation amounts to has been gaining ground in recent theology. There is a growing reluctance to view the creation as a kind of scenic backdrop to the drama of human salvation. Now serious attempts are being made to make sense of the notion that there can be a final fulfilment for the non-human creation. That Christ, as he returns to the Father by resurrection, brings not only us as a gift raised, restored and enhanced from our original value, but also the natural world, with its associated sentient beings.

There are, however some difficulties with this new perspective that remains to be thought through. Human beings tend to be somewhat selective and sentimental about what parts of the natural world they would like to see with them in the life of the world to come. It is all very well to want one’s favourite flowers, trees, pets, and associated lovely creatures, but what about the other bits of the natural world that we don ’ t care for, such as mosquitoes, wasps, snakes, and the like. There is in fact an essential point to them being part of the natural world, and therefore it would not be appropriate to screen them out in the world made new. Also, if all of the creation is to be drawn back to God then that applies also to all life that has ever been, so presumably we could expect to see some very large and rather terrifying sorts of dinosaurs thundering around the fields of paradise.

For that matter, there is the issue raised by the poem, "The heaven of animals," in this morning’s Pebble. What is to become of predators whose chief enjoyment in life is killing other species and dining off them? Who would they be, and how could they be happy in a perfect world where that kind of activity was not on the menu?

And what of evolution itself, which as I understand it is the engine that drives life on this planet. What looks like cruelty to us in the predation practised by creatures on one another is part of the weeding out of the unfit, and the balancing out of the right proportion of species. Evolution drives a process of continual adaptation whereby some species are eliminated, others are modified, and new ones come to be. This is something that is going on all the time irrespective of what humankind gets up to in the way of animal breeding, crop modification, and species extinction. So if evolution provides this forward momentum, which makes for a dynamic process underlying all the multitudinous life forms around us, what would happen if the engine that is evolution is turned off? That presumably is what needs to happen if "nature red in tooth and claw," is not the way things will be anymore. Would the very process of life itself then begin to slow down, and eventually come to a state of stasis, a kind of dead halt?

Sermons generally end on a note of crisp, clear, confident, clarity. I am sorry I am not able to do that for you this morning. But I will leave you with this encouraging thought. For the first 500 or so years of the Church’s life it struggled to get it ’ s thinking and believing straight about what it meant for Jesus Christ to be both human and Divine. As a result of these brain crunching and mind expanding conundrums being resolved we came to a much deeper understanding of what it means to be human, about and what human identity and personality actually amounts to. Now a similar process of endeavour and discernment is under way. In wanting to affirm that God is interested in all terrestrial life forms, and wants to have them with him and us in the life of the world to come, we are going to have to get to the bottom of what we mean by life itself, and about what God intends in the creation as it has come to be the way it is.