Living Creation-Community

in God's World Today

Ruth Padilla DeBorst
Putting Down Roots in a Broken Land
Scene I. The city is under siege. No reprieve in sight. With
access to theirfieldsblocked, their supplies are running out,
as is the hope of the people trapped inside the walls. The
empty promises of deliverance uttered by the false prophets
are wearing thin. The end is near. So Jeremiah, instructed
by God, proceeds to do what anyone in his right mind
would do before it all goes up in flames and is taken over
entirely by invading troops: he buys a plot of land! Yes. That
is what he does: he weighs out the money, signs the deed,
gets witnesses, and seals the deal. Was he being foolish?
Rash? Naively hopeful? Jeremiah matter-of-factly proceeds
to store the deed in an earthen pot and, while the enemy
armies batter down the walls, he publicly-and against all
obvious reason for hope-declares: "Houses and fields and
vineyards shall again be bought in this land" (Jer 32:15).
Scene IL They received a letter from home. They had
been torn away from their families, their houses, and their
land and dragged off by Nebuchadnezzar's army. They were
nobodies in the foreign land of Babylon, forced to work for
strange people whose language was unintelligible to them
and whose customs often affronted their Jewish sensibilities.
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Living Creation-Community
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They dreamed of the day they would return home to their

kin and their own place. Imagine their shock w h e n they
received the words of Jeremiah: 1
Thus says...the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I
have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:
God sent us here? This is God's doing! Incredible. We
are here because Nebuchadnezzar is powerful. God
had nothing to do with this: he forgot us long ago!
But the letter continues:
Build houses and live in them-,
Well, our tents are plenty fine, thank you very much.
We do not intend to stay that long, you know! We are
counting the months till we go home!
Plant gardens and eat their produce.
Plant gardens and wait for them to yield! You mean
put down roots in this foreign land? You mean we're
here to stay for quite some time? You mean we're
supposed to make this place our home?
The letter is not over:
Take wives and have sons and daughters.
Looks like we will be here for quite some time...
Take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in
marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters,
But this means generations! V\
We are to expect
grandchildren in this land?!
Multiply there and do not decrease.
1

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references in this article are from the
English Standard Version. The passages in this section are from Jeremiah
29:4-7.

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Ruth Padilla DeBorst

Well, okay; at least that means God wants us to be

strong, like our ancestors in Egypt. That way we will
gain power and leave these Babylonians in the dust,
where they deserve to be after such oppression!
But God's word gets yet more threatening to their preconceived ideas:
Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you
into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf.
The welfare of Babylon! The well-being of our enemies,
the people who are enslaving us? The health of this
land we never chose to live in? Pray! Why, yes! We're
surely to pray: to get out of here! It's good to know God
is near enough to hear our petitions. But God surely
cannot expect us to pray for these people!
The punch line left them dumbfounded:
For in its welfare you willfindyour welfare.
For all their illusion of separateness, of uniqueness and
privileged status as God's special nation, the Israelites had
to learn that they were inextricably bound not only to those
within their inner circle and to the God they had so blatantly
disobeyed but also to these "others" and to the land where
God had put them. And among those strangers and in that
land, they were to proactively seek life and establish homes.
They were to put down deep roots in that soil. Only then
would their lives be plenteous and would they honor their
Creator God. Their dreams and hopes were not to hinge on
a future escape. Their condition was intertwined with that
of the people and place where God had situated them. In its
welfare you will find your welfare.

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Living Creation-Community
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Growing into Hopeful Home-Builders

The biblical narrator who relates Jeremiah's symbolic

action and the challenge issued to the exiled Israelites was
not driven by postmodern ecological concerns. Nowhere
in the text do we read about environmentalism, cycling
or recycling, reducing consumption and C02 emissions,
growing organically or researching alternative energy
sources. Even so, God speaks to us today through the stories
of Jeremiah.
Both Jeremiah and the exiled Israelites, like Noah of old,
were being schooled in the ABCs of creation-community.
They needed to learn to value the life-granting connections
within which the God-community had designed them
to live: God, God's people, God's land. When any one of
these relationships was broken, all three shattered. In their
self-sufficiency and idolatry, they had wandered far from
God. That had made them incapable of caring properly
for one another. The powerful among them had used the
land as their private property to be exploited for their own
advantage, with no regard for its health or the plight of those
deprived of it. They had grown incapable of caring for God's
earth. God would only gather them again as a people in the
land he was entrusting to them once they had learned afresh
where they fit in the creation-community.
We too sorely need this school. We also
need to learn to live as restfully responsible
We too are called
members of the creation-community. We
to buy land, build
too are called to buy land, build houses, houses, plant gardens,
plant gardens, have children, and look
have children, and
forward to grandchildren in this, God's
look forward to
good earth. Far from envisioning salvation grandchildren in this,
God s good earth
as an escape from our broken world, we
'
are commanded to pray for its welfare and
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Ruth Padilla DeBorst

put down roots deep in its soil in full confidence that God is
with us and that God's good purposes for the entire creation
will be fulfilled.
So where do we begin? How we can become home-planters
in God's world? How are we to go about living creationcommunity here and now? The challenge issued by God to
the exiled Israelites provides us with some pointers.
On-going, Radical Conversion Engenders Hope
and Bold Advocacy
In evangelical circles, much stress is placed on accepting
Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. Many can
even mention the date of their conversion. Let's expand that
concept. Conversionimplies radical change,
a total shift of direction, of orientation.
As broken people,
And as broken people, we stand in need of
we stand in need of
not one but many conversions. Conversion
not one but many
from individualism to community, from
conversions.
autonomy to interdependence, from
idolatry to true worship, from grasping to
receiving, from oppressive dominion over
creation to loving care of it, from indifference to passionate,
prayerful action, from Western definitions of "development"
to loving participation, from competition to collaboration,
from protagonism to service.
One essential conversion demands a little elaboration.
Imagine his neighbors' reaction when Jeremiah buys land
in the crumbling city. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of
the exiled Israelites. They had all grown accustomed to
believing that what was was what should be. They were
bound by the tyranny of a hopeless "presentism" and had
become resigned conspirators in destruction. I dare say God's
people today are often living under the same oppression.
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Living Creation-Community
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Things are so big and so bad that we despair and fling our
arms up in helplessness. But a political and economic
realism that denies people the freedom to imagine other
scenarios denies the power of Christ's resurrection, simply
reinforces the status quo, and deprives women and men of
the necessary responsibility for change. As Christians, we
cannot allow our hope to be co-opted by such pessimism.
The stark reality we grapple with
must be named, but the story of God's
ongoing, loving involvement with his
Caring, faithful, truthful
creation is grounds enough for hope. relationships are at the core
With sober, tempered optimism,
of any hope for a better
we can, by God's grace, engage in
world. And these are gifts
restored relations with one another
of grace, granted by the
and fight against whatever hinders
God-who-is-community.
those relationships, be it unequal
opportunity, racial prejudice, unjust
business practices, ethnocentrism, or abuse of creation.
Caring, faithful, truthful relationships are at the core of any
hope for a better world. And these are gifts of grace, granted
by the God-who-is-community.
The first step toward living as the creation community
is conversion. We, like the Israelites of old, need to be
liberated from hopelessness, indifference, and impassive
contribution to the degradation of God's earth. We need to
see things as they are and remember God's covenant with
creation. We also need to look forward in hopeful yearning
to God's complete renewal of all things.
In addition, hope provides the grounds for bold advocacy. In
Globalization challenged - Conviction, Conflict, Community,
George Rupp calls people to bring their social visions and
commitments, their underlying convictions, to the table
of respectful conversation for a "comparative appraisal,"
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Ruth Padilla DeBorst

which is "unavoidably critical" and "self-critical." People

need to be "prepared to be public advocates for what their
2
convictions imply for society as a whole." Christians need
not shy away from contributing from the stores of their faith
and experience. Rather, we are called
to step out respectfully and offer the
We need an ongoing
resources and gifts we have received
conversion of hopefulness f r 0 m God for the common good of
before we can even begin humanity and the world as a whole.
to imagine and advocate

r
TA7
r
.. . .,
We
need an ongoing conversion 01
i_ r
u r
i~
Jfor alternatives to the
, . ,
hopefulness before we can even begin
mess we re im
to imagine and advocate for alternatives
to the mess we're in!
Let's go back now to the exiled Israelites and how the
recovery of God's image in us has economic and ecological
implications.

"Build Houses and Live in Them": A Living

Proclamation of God's Sovereignty Over All the
Earth
When as God's people we are tempted to allow our
expectations of the world-to-come make us indifferent
to the world today, when like the Israelites of old we see
our present place as so temporary that we need not be
concerned about its welfare, the God-community calls us
to build houses and live in them. We are called to a rooted
commitment. We are not just "a passing by," as the old song
rings. Instead, we are called to proclaim in bold word and
consistent lifestyle that the entire earth belongs to God.
2

George Rupp, Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community,

University Seminars/Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures (New
York: Columbia UP, 2006), 7.

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Living Creation-Community
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My heart: Christ's Home has been a best-selling title for

decades. Guided on a symbolic walk through each room
in their house, readers are encouraged to submit every last
corner of their individual lives to Christ's authority. Personal
discipleship is clearly a core dimension of the Christian
life. Jesus sent his followers to make disciples wherever
life took them. But he did not stop there. "All authority,"
he said, "in heaven and on earth has been given to me"
(Matt 28:18). Christ owns and holds authority over more
than just our personal lives. Christ owns the entire earth
and all that is in it. God's earth is Christ's home. No land
is my land; no land is your land. No land, for that matter,
belongs to any nation state. These
are modern constructs that society
expects us to defend patriotically at
A key question is:
all cost, to the detriment of the life of
"Does Christ's dwelling in
their inhabitants and of the very land our hearts affect the way we
they claim as a sovereign possession.
dwell on God's earth?"
All land belongs to God. And we, as
God's children, must proclaim it and
live in light of that proclamation. A key question is: "Does
Christ's dwelling in our hearts affect the way we dwell on
God's earth?"
In addition, the exiled Israelites needed to learn that God
was sovereign over them not only in the physical territory
of Judah but anywhere he led them. As the owner of every
last corner of the earth, God is not bound by humanly
constructed borders. God can take his people to other places
and enlist them to serve his good purposes in strange lands
and among "other" people because those lands and those
people also belong to him.
Recognizing the entire earth as Christ's home has radical
implications for our use of natural resources. We cannot
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Ruth Padilla DeBorst

continue as agents of or indifferent accomplices to the earth's

destruction. We must denounce all actions that make any
part of the world an inhospitable place for God's creatures,
human and non-human, and, hence, for the divine owner of
the home. But loving what God loves and caring for Christ's
property can be risky business. The long-lasting struggle of
the indigenous people, of our Nazarene brothers and sisters
in Amazonian Peru, and of priests in the tropical forests of
Honduras and Brazil attests to the fact that confronting the
powers of rampant exploitation may well cost us dearly. But
proclaim we must.
So what does it mean for God's people today to build
houses and live in them and so proclaim the earth as God's
property? Are we willing to address the tough questions
related to the millions of people who today are deprived
of land on which to build and live-refugees, immigrants,
the rural and urban poor? Who do we build houses for in
today's global economy? Where do we build them? What
do we build them with? Who actually lives in them? Who
do we make room for in our houses, in our inner sanctums?
Can we conceive of new ways of owning? All these are
economic questions we cannot avoid if we desire to live as
a creation-community that openly proclaims that the entire
world belongs to God.
Plant Gardens and Eat Their Produce: Recovering
Our Relationship to the Earth in the CreationCommunity
When the Israelites were dragged into exile by the
Babylonians, forced away from their people and their
place, they were at risk of losing an essential dimension of
their identity: their relationship with the land. So early on
they are exhorted to plant gardens and eat their produce,
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Living Creation-Community
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not only because they need sustenance but also because

they need to ensure restored relations with God's earth.
Created in the image of the God-community, we only live
out our full humanity when we relate in a healthy manner
to our Creator, to other human beings, and to the earth.
These three relationships are so intricately interwoven that
Christopher Wright affirms in The Mission of God that our
relationship to the earth is a gauge of the quality of the other
two fundamental relationships.3 And in Colossians Remixed,
Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat affirm:
Our renewal as image-bearing caretakers of the earth
must be rooted in a renewed relationship with the
Creator through receiving forgiveness for our covenantbreaking idolatry, and perhaps there is a sense in
which we must also seek forgiveness from creation
itself... Ecological renewal and restoration require
a spirituality of repentance for our blasphemous
destruction of this good earth.4
Care of the earth is a spiritual matter, and rampant
destruction of it is blasphemy, an offense to our Creator.
So what might it look like for God's people today to
plant gardens, eat their produce, and so restore our broken
relationship with God's earth? How do we engage in this
ecological dimension of life on our planet? How do we
stop "murdering creation," as Wendell Berry puts it? Land
reform, agriculture, food security, and water conservation
all are significant parts of the picture. So are all endeavors
to educate urbanits that eggs don't grow in cartons, nor
milk in plastic or vegetables on trays. Plant gardens! And
3

Christopher Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand

Narrative (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2006), 76-79.
Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the
Empire (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004), 195-96.

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ask: Who eats their produce? Who is most affected by agroindustry's monopoly of seed generation? What alternatives
are we fostering? These questions are at the core of restoring
the creation-community.
Take Wives, Bear Sons and Daughters: Family
and Church as Fertile Ground for Converted
Covenantal Relations
God's call to the exiled Israelites pointed to economic and
ecological concerns, things having to do with the broader
oikos/home. Yet the call also included the smaller scale
but enormously significant realm of family life, marriage,
children, and grandchildren. In the intimacy of this
community, values and attitudes, priorities and lifestyles
are molded. Here seeds are planted, of consumption
or simplicity, of greed or sufficiency and hospitality, of
competition or collaboration, of inclusion or exclusion.
Families-nuclear and extended, biological or not-are
central actors in the economic and ecological scene. Ron
Sider rightly challenges:
When Christian leaders go to government to call for
sweeping structural change, we have more integrity
and power when we can say: "We are part of Christian
communities that are already beginning to live out
what we are calling you to legislate." Our call for
costly changes in foreign policy toward the TwoThirds World designed to implement greater global
economic justice has integrity only if we are a part of
Christian congregations that are already beginning to
incarnate a more simple lifestyle that points toward
a more just, ecologically sustainable planet. Our call
for nuclear disarmament and international peace has

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integrity only if there is growing peace and wholeness

in our families and churches.5
We can add: When we advocate at Copenhagen, when we
pray for a change of heart in world leaders, when we demand
budget commitments from our governments for research
into alternative sources of energy, when we boycott a food
monopoly or recommend adaptation measures, our call for
justice will have integrity if, at the same time, those of us
who are counted among the rich and powerful of our world
think twice before using another piece of paper, taking long
hot showers, driving gas-guzzling cars, purchasing packaged
food, tossing recyclable items in the trash, and so on. None
of these measures is too small.
On the subject of small, in Small is Beautiful, E. E
Schumacher challenges the assumption that progress
consists of "ever-greater size, everhigher speeds, and ever-increased
violence, in defiance of the laws of
We must strive, he
natural harmony." We must strive, he
continues, to redirect
continues, to redirect technological
technological development
development "back to the real needs
"back to the real needs of
of man..., to the actual size of man.
man...to the actual size
Man is small, and therefore, small is
of man. Man is small... To
beautiful. To go for giantism is to go
go for giantism is to go for
6
for self-destruction."
self-destruction. "
He also states,
The chance of mitigating the rate of resource depletion
or of bringing harmony into the relationships between
those in possession of wealth and power and those
without is non-existent as long as there is no idea
Ronald Sider, in Sojourners' Voice of the Day, September 25,2006.
E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
(New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 169.
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anywhere of enough being good and more-thanenough being evil.7

Families and local faith communities are ideal spaces for
new generations to learn to distinguish between needs and
wants and between enough and too much, hopefully before
they acquire the disease of consumerism that is slowly
killing us all.
Seek the Welfare of the City: Sabbath and Jubilee

The last command to the Israelites had to do not just with

their families, their plots of land, or their homes but with
the welfare of the entire city and the land with which it
was intermeshed. God's law, the norms established for the
life of God's people, made provision for the welfare of all
those whom commerce and war, migration and marriage
would bring together and for the very land they inhabited
and which offered them sustenance. Conditions were
stipulated to ensure the livelihood and
restoration of the weakest among them:
These were
widows, orphans, strangers, and even
socioeconomic and
criminals. In the year of Jubilee, those
ecological measures
who had fallen into slavery were to be
designed by God to
freed and lost land was to be returned
guarantee right, just
to its original owner. Likewise, every
relations not only
seventh year was a Sabbath year, a year
between people but also
of rest, during which the Israelites were
between God's people and not supposed to sow or reap the land
his earth.
but allow it to be renewed. These were
socioeconomic and ecological measures
designed by God to guarantee right, just
relations not only between people but also between God's
people and his earth.
Ibid., 315, italics added.

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In our precipitous race to produce and consume, to prove

and improve, to sell and excel-even as Christian leaders,
development workers, and advocates for environmental
care-, Jubilee and Sabbath are both practices that more
than ever today can contribute to living out our calling
of creation-community. Jubilee: the year of reckoning, of
wrongs being set right, of redistribution, of release on the
part of those who have too much (imagine: there is such
a thing as having too much!) and of receiving on the part
of those who have too little (too many in our world know
what that is like!). And Sabbath: Times of quiet recollection
during which we allow our striving hearts to stop, to listen,
to receive, to tune in to the song of nature, to the stirrings of
God's Spirit. Sabbath: Our gift of rest for the earth so it, too,
can be renewed. They are times of waiting-like Noah and
all the inhabitants of the ark, like the exiled Israelites-for
God's work to be completed.
In the Beginning and in the End: God-With Us

We have heard powerfully the Genesis story revealed

to Moses, the story that explained who we are as part of
creation and who God is. And we were reminded that in the
beginning, even before the beginning, God. We have heard
the Noah story of a second beginning, where again God
was there. We joined Isaiah in the confident awareness of
another beginning, of the new heavens and the new earth
which have already come yet will only be fulfilled in good
time, again by God. And we will close our biblical reflection
with the final words of Jeremiah's letter, again centered on
God:8
For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are
completed for Babylon...
The passages in this section are from Jeremiah 29:10-14.
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Strikingly, God counts the years not from the

perspective of the exiles but in terms of the years in
which the land and people of Babylon will count on
the presence of God's people among them!
.../ will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise
and bring you back to this place.
And here is God's overflowing grace and love:
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord,
plans for welfare...
Plans for welfare, for wholeness where all had been
broken, of community where it had been torn apart!
.. .plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future
and a hope.
Alienation, estrangement-this entire mess-is not the
final story! And the best is yet to come:
Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me,
and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me...
Remember how God sought humanity in the garden:
"Where are you?"
...when you seek me with all your heart. I will be
found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your
fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the
places where I have driven you...and I will bring you
back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
Again we see the theme of exile, of banishment from
the garden, of that natural consequence of humanity's
rebellion. But God yearns to bring his people back
home!
And as it was in the first beginning, so, too, in all new
beginnings: God. God. God!

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Do we want to live creation-community in the midst of

the ravages of human greed and deprivation, environmental
degradation and climate change? Let us continue to be
profoundly perplexed but not paralyzed. Let us remain
restfully responsible. In summation, let us first seek God,
his kingdom, his justice, and allow the rest to be granted
tous.
I close with a prayer:
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long
view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime
only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is
God's work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is a way of saying that the kingdom always lies
beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
It may be incomplete; but it is a beginning,
a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the
rest.
We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder
and the worker.

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Ruth Padilla DeBorst

We are workers, not master builders;

ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our
capabilities.
We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.9

These reflections have been attributed to the martyred Archbishop of El

Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, although they were written by Bishop
Ken Untener of Saginaw and shared in a homily by Cardinal John Dearden
in November of 1979.
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