Last week I wrote about my early view of life. Life, I thought, is what we do while we are waiting to go to Heaven. Heaven – there. Afterlife – then. This “there and then” view mixed with “cheap grace” (that is, grace as a cosmic “get out of jail free card”) misses the point of scripture and a meaningful life. What about the here and now?

Psalm 24: 1 – The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it

We don’t live in a “disposable” world, biding our time to get to the next one. All the earth, everything in and on the earth, and everyone are the Lord’s. Instead of reading “dominion” as giving us permission to do as we please with the earth; think of us as stewards and co-creators, tasked by God to continue this work of creation and to till the garden and keep it (Genesis 2:15).

In his book, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago Professor Philip Hefner writes,

Human beings are God’s created co-creators whose purpose is to be the agency, acting in freedom, to birth the future that is most wholesome for the nature that has birthed us – the nature is not only our own genetic heritage, but also the entire human community and the evolutionary and ecological reality in which and to which we belong. Exercising this agency is said to be God’s will for humans.

            Joan Chittister in her book, The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life, makes a similar point more simply, in a chapter called “Co-Creation”: 

… we know now in new ways that the earth and all its fruits are not for our exploitation, they are for our care. We are co-creators with God of what creation has left unfinished. What has been left in embryo is left for us to develop. What can be developed God trusts us to bring to full potential. But not for ourselves alone. Co-creation, the human commitment to continue the work of God on earth, requires us to tend the land and conserve the waters, to till the garden and protect the animals, to use the things of the earth in ways that enhance all life now—and preserve them for later generations as well.

We all called to live our lives “here and now” as co-creators, carrying on God’s work as stewards of God’s “very good” creation, the creation which reveals God to all people (Romans 1:20) – the creation where the Kingdom of God is at hand – here and now (Mark 1:15).

So, what is the point exactly? The point is that we are to live here and now as co-creators of all creation remembering that God gave us talents, not to bury them, but to multiply them while tending to the creation – loving God, each other and all things – all of creation, as if they are God’s– which they are– and ours to complete. Ours to complete through the triune God in which we live and have our being.

Read Romans 8:18-30, as you care for creation with and for the God who loves you unconditionally. 

Mike

Today’s Reading: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8%3A18-30&version=NRSV