Creation Day

by Lisa Martinez

"In the beginning God created" has always appeared to me as an important premise to precede the expression "the earth was without form and void".

It implies origin and belonging in the midst of its chaos. "It is mine. It belongs to me before I marvel at you. It is mine in its glory and was mine in its chaos" Sealing that truth in the spirit of God that "moved over the surface of its waters."

It is the parental, creative, caring eye that looks beautifully at its child when it smiles and when its face is disfigured in tears. It is that eye that did not wait to give order to its creation to see "what was good". He already loved her in her chaos, in her "worst" moment.

This allows us to more easily see the transgression of genesis 3 as an assault on delicately ordained nature and not as mere moral disobedience that pays off in spades.

What if Genesis 3 were not a warning about never disobeying God and never disobeying the authorities? What if it were a warning against monopolization and exploitation of natural resources in the name of Progress and human comfort?

Genesis 3 shares with us the image of a pair of human eyes fixed on nature, coveting it in order to acquire power. Looking at it as an object and not as a worthy element with which we coexist. The corruption of Eden lies in looking with wrong eyes at what we have in front of us, at our environment and its elements (which are included in the expression "and God saw that it was good").

Somewhere along the way, we have mistakenly used the phrase "human beings are the crown of creation" as an excuse to exploit resources, given that they were created to serve us. That egomaniacal attitude deprives us of looking with respect and wonder at birds, fish, the enormous variety of plants, the water cycle, the behavior of insects, the subway communication of the fungi kingdom and other everyday wonders. We lose the blessing of wonder with our surroundings when we twist the gaze with which we notice God's creation around us. A greedy and twisted gaze on the fruit of this tree corrupts Eden.

Earth Day is a day to make a cause visible, to denounce after having made a reading of the environment and having identified a circumstance of injustice that is producing trauma or is on the way to produce it, with devastating consequences. Just the definition of the prophetic work to which the way of Jesus Christ asks us; and of this request, we can attest that it is involved in various expressions of God made flesh, such as:

-Speak out for the causes of your little ones.

-Avoid the scandal of causing trauma to vulnerable communities in which case it would be better to tie a huge rock around the aggressor's neck and throw him into the sea.

-The value of life over the value of structures (the Sabbath for the sake of the person and not the person for the sake of the Sabbath).

And this is not the exclusive word of Jesus or of the New Testament. In the Old Testament we find the divine voice demanding Moses to take off his shoes before stepping on this sacred land. Sacred because of the presence of God in it, but also Sacred because it crosses the wound of trauma, the wound of exploitation.

Nature crackles through the flames and has endured so much that it seems not to be consumed in spite of the fire and that gives us the optical illusion, the mental illusion that it will always be there; that it will never end, but the bush is on fire and its cause is so urgent that the voice of God manifests itself to demand that the human being bare his feet and with his sole feel the heat, the pain, the anguish, the pebbles and the thorns under his feet.

That not only out of basic empathy and human survival instinct be respectful, but for the sake of the image and likeness of God in his existence; because it is the cause of Christ and therefore the cause of his followers.

Earth Day has a solid foundation in the scriptures to become an active part of our prophetic work as salt and light of this earth. The ecological cause is part of the agenda of the believer's cause, of the church.

"New heaven and new earth" right here, right now.