“With so many things being said about who God is… God of love, God of faith, God of the poor, God of the second chance, etc., I wonder…
“Is God green? (That is, does he manifest ecological concern?)”
Those are part of my notes for a sermon I preached back in September 1991. [Apologies for the blurriness!] I decorated the page with my signature drawing: a long-haired duck wearing a headband and a necklace with a Celtic cross. (I was inspired by the comic book character Howard the Duck, who was trapped on Earth from another dimension.)
When you think about it, it’s a ridiculous question. Does God care about the environment? From start to finish, the scriptures testify to it. In Genesis 1, from a creation in which every part is called “good,” to Revelation 22, the final revelation of a holy city in which nothing accursed will be found, a city in perfect harmony with all that is.
We sing God’s glory throughout the Psalms. We praise God in creation in hymns, like “Let All Things Now Living.” Here’s something from verse 2:
“By law God enforces. The stars in their courses, / The sun in its orbit obediently shine; / The hills and the mountains, The rivers and fountains, / The depths of the ocean proclaim God divine.”
And of course, there is the incarnation, the coming into flesh. God enters into humanity enfleshed in the body of Jesus. We can also see a kind of incarnation at work roughly 13.8 billion years ago, when the universe came into existence, when God’s “good” creation got its start.
There are endless ways to imagine God’s care and love of creation.
Unfortunately, we often fail in our call to be stewards of creation. We seem to go out of our way to trash it. We pollute and pound and pummel the earth. We poison land and sea and air and everything within them. We do unimaginable violence to God’s creatures with whom we share this world.
I still remember, to my great shame, the poor little slug that had the misfortune of moving into my sight on a hot summer day. Magnifying glass in hand, I tortured my little friend with the heat of the sun focused on its slimy body, knowing it couldn’t escape that tiny yellow dot bringing it incredible agony. I could claim as mitigating circumstances that I was just a kid, but I still knew it was wrong.
(My confession of sin notwithstanding, I did promote a green message with my lunchbox which had on it the logo of the ecology flag!)
St. Paul portrays the Spirit as a silent power within creation, as a silent power within us. He says, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). Words no longer do the job. They lack intensity; they lack passion.
My title speaks of “a green Spirit.” Why green? Certainly, green is about creation, the environment, our interaction with it. The Spirit inhabits creation, going all the way back to when the Spirit was moving over the face of those primeval waters. And there’s the Green Party!
Green also speaks of growth.
Creation has been “subjected to futility,” it’s been held back, unable to achieve its true glory. That might be true, but it’s been done in the hope of being “set free from its bondage to decay” (vv. 20-21).
I love the Fiji Water commercial from a few years go featuring a little girl doing a voiceover proclaiming, “FIJI Water is a gift from nature to us, to repay our gift of leaving it completely alone.” Meanwhile, we’re hearing Pacific Islanders singing a song of praise and joy.
We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit does. And “the Spirit intercedes for [us] according to the will of God” (v. 27).
May we be filled with a green Spirit. May we be filled with a spirit that calls us to love and care for creation. May we be filled with a spirit that grows within us and urges us to grow. May we be filled with a spirit that inspires us with hope and enables us to spread that hope into the world, into our planet, into time and space itself. May we be filled with a spirit that knows our infirmities and leads us to pray and to be.
May we be filled with a spirit treasuring our planet on more than a single Earth Day.