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Get Started: The Four Weeks of Season of Creation

September 11, 2011 is Land Sunday

Focus scripture
Psalm 139:7–12

Additional scriptures
Genesis 3:14–19; 4:8–16
Romans 5:12–17
Matthew 12:38–40

September 18 is Wilderness Sunday

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Creation as we know it begins with land. Land emerges from primordial waters (Genesis 1), living creatures emerge from land to serve its needs (Genesis 2), and return to the land in death. We are of the land, share its very being in an intimate relationship within the loving creativity of God.

Present realities Land Sunday in the Season of Creation reminds us of our kinship with land – because we so easily forget. Present land use is disastrous. Humans will starve without expanding cropland, but we already overuse most land suitable for agri­culture, and cropland degrades many times faster than re­plenishment. Deforestation accelerates erosion and renders soil barren or even toxic from chemical use. Topsoil losses are catastrophic and pollutants in the runoff poison oceans, rivers, aquifers. Climate change worsens these effects.

Natural topsoil is alive, an interactive community of organisms sustaining the minerals needed for growing plants. The rich shallow loams of tropics and the stark red sands of deserts support living relationships: but our abuse of soil replaces that life, which the winds blow away, with poisonous waste.

Scripture is blunt: humans do not own the land; its rights outweigh ours (Leviticus 25 – 26). We are “strangers and guests” (Hebrew gerim wa toshavim) with responsibilities to the land and all its creatures. The land is alive and loved by God. It cries out at misuse, and God listens. Our drive for possession violates God’s creation.

It also dispossesses those who understand kinship with the land. Indigenous people honour interrelationship with country and with creatures. George Rosendale, a Rainbow Spirit elder states:

Inside me is spirit and land, both given to me by the Creator Spirit. There is a piece of land in me, and it keeps driving me back like a magnet to the land from which I came. Because the land too is spiritual. The world’s most ancient laws, still taught in Aborig­inal Australia, protect the land and its inhabitants (not only humans). Indigenous relationships with land balance obli­gations and blessings. Displace the people, and identity and land are lost together. The United Nations calls that genocide.

Future possibilities Land Sunday can help Christians reconnect, re-member what has been dis-membered: our kinship with the living soil, with the creatures who share it, and with the wisdom of Elders in caring for it. Like other prophets, Jesus identified with am ha’aretz, the “people of the land.” Many who heard Jesus were dispossessed by Rome and Jewish collaborators. Their identity was stolen like the soil their ancestors tended. Jesus gave them a grounded hope: these meek “shall inherit the earth” – because the meek understand earth as their true lineage.

Do our actions demonstrate common cause with the people of the land, or are we complicit in its theft and degradation? Are we on the side of Jesus, or of Rome?

Whatever our past choices, we can reclaim our identity as Earth creatures, as people of the land. We can hear Earth’s cries again and respond in loving kinship. We can honour those who care for land, and nurture their wisdom. We can confess to abusing the land from which God shaped us. We can hear Earth’s voice in scripture and begin to ache in answer. We can stand alongside Indigenous people and oppose their dispossession. We can find ways to use soil that preserve its health and ours.

And we can praise: sing out like land opening to rain and greening in due season; sing out to God’s creativity, binding us with earth in everlasting kinship; sing out in hope that we are more than the wrong we have done. We can praise, with all living creatures, the God who still walks the land in the cool of evening and calls us all by name to come along.

Lee Levett-Olson is principal of Nungalinya College, Darwin. His most recent work in the area of ecotheology includes a presentation at the International Society for Biblical Literature in Auckland, July 2008 and a short piece in Colloquium on related themes.

LINKS TO EXPAND YOUR RESOURCES FOR SEPTEMBER 11
  • The role of worms, bacteria, and other soil organisms in composting and decomposition.
    Lucky Worm World

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