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| Screen shot from "Mammoth", today's creative project film by Grant Slater |
Melting Permafrost: 2
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A Greeting
Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God.
(Psalm 104:1)
A Reading
God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’
And it was so.
(Genesis 1:29-30)
Music
Meditative Verse
I will make for you a covenant on that day with the wild animals,
the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground.
(Hosea 2:18a)
A Reflection
If we accept the popular vision that we are all headed to heaven someday, then it becomes easy to turn our back on the earth, because it doesn’t really matter. We will never foster an ecologically healing vision and practice in our lives as long we hold on to an unbiblical heaven-focused theology. Biblical hope, in Paul and throughout the canon, is decidedly this-worldly. Resurrection hope is always a bodily hope that encompasses all of creation. The Bible calls us to remember who we are: we are from the earth, we are for the earth, and we are destined for the new earth, where God will dwell with us. Or, in the language of Romans 8, we are the children of God who will one day be agents of creation’s liberation when our bodies are redeemed. This is language of resurrection, the language of hope. Throughout the book of Romans, the longing for resurrection found throughout the Scriptures is answered in Jesus.
- from Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice
by Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh
Verse for the Day
For the creation waits with eager longing
for the revealing of the children of God
(Romans 8:19)
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| Screen shot from "Mammoth", today's creative project film by Grant Slater |
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Today’s reflection by Sylvia Keesmaat-Walsh and Brian Walsh appeared in the Advent 2019 devotional project Praying for Creation. On that day we reflected on how Paul’s vision of hope in Romans is one in which we must believe that the world can be healed (see that page here), noting that prayer is where God’s deepest desire for the world and our own longings meet and transformation begins. That longing for the restoration of the earth will begin with the earth, as the earth is at the very center of all climate change conversation. It is from the earth that we extract fossil fuels to burn. It is on the earth that humans and other animals make their homes. It is the earth that hosts waters and forests that are degraded by pollution and it is the frozen permafrost earth under the tundra of the Arctic that is melting. How “on earth” can we connect back to that hope we had in Advent, when we prayed for transformation and aligned ourselves with the groaning Creation? Today’s reading returns us to Genesis, where we are reminded that the flora and fauna were created before humankind was created. The very next verse is the creation of humans. God created all of the creatures of the earth before humankind and then gave humans “dominion”, a word in its origin meaning “care”, of all Creation. In the story below we hear two Siberian ecoscientists describe their vision for how to protect and preseve the permafrost. Sergey and Nikita Zimov, father and son, believe that the answer lies in returning to the Pleistocene era, when herbivore creatures roamed in the thousands. Over twenty years, first father and then son has created “Pleistocene Park”, a nature reserve on the Kolyma River in Siberia, that replicates a grassland ecosystem in which the grazing “mammoth” animals prevented insulation from forming over the permafrost, exposing the ground to the cold air and keeping it frozen. Siberia’s permafrost holds the most lethal quantity of carbon deposit of anywhere in the world. To prevent it from being exposed, the Zimovs have imported bison and yaks from other regions and already begun to see a conversion to grasslands. This kind of ingenuity is Advent thinking in a very Lent-like crisis. It is caring for Creation instead of trying to "fix" it. It is adjusting a life on earth for the sake of the earth. How can it inspire us? How can God’s deepest desire for the world and creative scientific ingenuity on the part of humankind help us to move the earth closer to healing? What role can we play, in our prayers and with our supportive voices, in helping to support those making innovative change?
A CREATIVE SCIENCE PROJECT
The whole video is twenty-five minutes and recommended to watch.
A five minute excerpt has been selected here.
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LC† Reimagining Justice is a project of
Lutherans Connect / Lutheran Campus Ministry Toronto,
supported by the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.
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