How Shall We Live? | Whole Faith Living EarthHow Shall We Live? Archives - Page 16 of 17

Archives For How Shall We Live?

The Church Lawn – Culture Over God?

Nathan Aaberg — September 21, 2015 — Leave a comment

You know you’re dealing with culture when you feel things should be done a certain way and you can’t really explain why.

Some cultural expressions, like the contrast between the American handshake and the Japanese bow or the cheese heads worn by Green Bay Packers fans, are innocuous and simply add flavor to life. Others enshrine fear and perpetuate human brokenness.

The parable of the Good Samaritan challenged the culture and norms of Jesus’ day. In the parable, love won out over a deep-seated and destructive cultural divide.

The good Samaritan: Love of God over culture.

It is up to Christians to be discerning about culture. And if a cultural element contradicts the loving heart that God desires us to have, that cultural element must go.

But because culture is so powerful and because we breathe it and swim in it everyday, we almost always have blind spots.

That’s true with cultural traditions that shape how we relate with other people. It’s particularly true with cultural traditions that dictate how we relate to God’s earth. The non-human living things of this world are, as a whole, the ultimate “other.” Our survival depends on us consuming nature. What’s more, the greater the scale to which we desire to expand our personal comfort and our civilization’s power, the greater the scale to which we feel compelled to use God’s world in ways that deplete and diminish it. This approach to God’s world becomes rationalized and embedded in our culture. And then we can’t see the reality of what is being done.

The church should be different.

The church should be a place where God and God’s love prevails over any cultural expression that is counter to God’s love and the way God desires us to live.

What would a Christian approach to church landscaping look like if you were starting from scratch? I’d suggest these principles:

Meet the needs of people who work, worship, and play there.

Seek to be efficient in the use of resources and time.

Be a good neighbor in every way.

Express the creativity that God has blessed people with.

Affirm the beauty of God’s earth in all its diversity and life.

Steward God’s earth faithfully in the unique context of that place.

Achieve all six of the previous principles to the best degree possible.

So how does the typical church’s big, green, weedless lawn match with those landscaping principles?

Devoting areas of the church’s ground to lawn to enable games and social activities does meet the needs of people. And there is a certain simplicity and efficiency to managing a property with just one type of landscape. The neat lawn can also be seen as being a good neighbor in terms of respecting landscaping norms of an area.

So you can make some case for the church lawn in terms of the first three principles.

But you begin to run into trouble as you think more broadly about what it means to be a good neighbor and as you look at the remaining principles.

When the lawn’s maintenance uses up large amounts of locally scarce resources (like water in dry areas like California) and applies herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers that contribute to broader environmental problems that impact people as well as wildlife, we are not being good neighbors. Nor are we being good neighbors when our lawnmowers emit pollution. We are losing, too, the opportunity to grow food that could feed our neighbors who lack good food to eat.

And is it just me or does a landscape with just a lawn lack any display of artfulness?

Sadly, and especially when there is grass even in places where people will never venture, the lawn-dominated church landscape does not affirm the goodness of God’s Creation. It communicates that the only plant God loves in Creation is Kentucky bluegrass. (Check out, by the way, this imaginary dialogue between St. Francis and God on the oddities of the lawn and how it makes no room for the many other flowers and plants of God’s Creation.)

It’s worse than that. Lawns provide almost no food, habitat, or shelter for wildlife at a time when the world is increasingly hostile to them.

So when our church landscape is a green empire of Kentucky bluegrass and non-native trees and shrubs, we think only of our own needs. We are depriving birds, butterflies, bees, and other members of God’s creation of the food, habitat, and shelter they need to survive, even in places we will not use. In no way can that be called stewardship of God’s earth.

When we come to the principle of optimizing, it’s become clear that we’ve maximized the first two principles and been a good neighbor in terms of cultural expectations. But in the process we’ve missed the broader meaning of being a good neighbor and completely whiffed on the other principles.

In other words, the typical church landscape tells the passing world that the Christian faith and that particular church care about human needs, efficiency, and meeting cultural expectation but don’t care about their neighbors in a broader sense and don’t care about the life of God’s earth. The typical church landscape ultimately communicates that we desire the assurance of life everlasting with God but we don’t want to be any more transformed and distinct from the culture around us than we must be.

But wait a minute, you say. What am I saying about my faith? I have a big, green, weedless lawn.

Well, actually, much of America does. According to this article, the lawn is now the single largest “crop” we grow. The United States has 63,000 square miles of lawn, which is approximately the size of Texas. That is a lot of water, a lot of chemicals and fertilizers, a lot of lawnmower pollution, a lot of unused potential for growing food, and a great deal of land made hostile to wildlife.

That does not square with the loving God of all of life we see in the Bible. The God who declared the whole ecological whole of creation, including humanity, very good. Who knows every bird on the mountains. Who feeds the ravens. Who shows great concern for the poor and weak. Who demonstrated dominion over the world by sending Jesus into the world. Who showers us, despite the fact that we don’t deserve it, with love and grace.

Does typical chuch landscaping communicate fidelity to God or to culture?

But the gravity of human culture is so strong.

We expect lawn. We don’t know why, but we expect it.

Yet, from the very beginning, Christianity in its purest form has been a counter-cultural, self-sacrificing force against dominant cultural norms that were counter to love and compassion. This was because Christians who stood up to those cultural norms had hearts that had been transformed by Jesus.

It’s time to filter our whole culture, including our landscaping culture, through God rather than filtering God through our culture.

It’s time that churches thoughtfully use their website, their church signs, and their landscaping to communicate their values and their ultimate loyalties.

(In a future post, I’ll share helpful ideas and resources on Creation-friendly landscaping. Please share with me examples you know of churches being good stewards of their landscapes by email at wholefaithlivingearth@gmail.com.)

Map of My Kingdom (An Excerpt)

Nathan Aaberg — May 28, 2015 — Leave a comment

Earlier this month, I saw a performance of the one-person play Map of My Kingdom at the meeting of a farmers group in downtown Chicago.The play was commissioned by Practical Farmers of Iowa and written by Iowa’s Poet Laureate, Mary Swander. In the play, the words and remembrances of Angela Martin, a woman who uses her legal and mediating skills to helping farm families transition their farmland from one generation to the next, immerse the viewer in the complexity and emotional intensity of those transitions. There are many references in the play to Shakespeare’s King Lear. In that story, of course, King Lear makes cavalier and egotistical decisions about how he will divide his kingdom among his daughters so he can enjoy a care-free retirement. This goes tragically wrong. Mary Swander’s play reveals to us how human frailties and legal complexities can cause generational transitions to likewise end tragically for farmland-owning families today.

Yet, the play ends on a cautiously positive, understatedly hopeful note. Because that note comes from a story that relates to the themes of this blog so directly, I asked Mary if I could run that final story segment here. She generously agreed.

In the segment you’ll find below, Angela tells the story of how a husband and wife (Marilyn and Gerry) were inspired to do the hard work of carefully transitioning their family’s land to the next generation because they came to realize that being committed stewards of the land was something their Christian faith called them to do.

…….

(ANGELA opens up the LAST BOX.)

But sometimes when it starts to fall apart, a family finds its way. Sometimes I help . . . I am learning to help more and more.

I had known Marilyn and Gerry for a long time. They had a large farm—really thriving. They survived the Farm Crisis, grew responsibly—real respected members of the community. I was surprised when they walked into my office—for a year Gerry worked closely with his lawyer, accountant, and a consultant to make a plan for his land—for after he and Marilyn stopped farming or…well if something happened. Gerry reached this place where he and Marilyn had digested everything that the consultant and lawyer and accountant suggested. Then they set up a meeting with me.

Gerry and Marilyn had everything in order—the books, the abstracts—they had asked tough questions and were working those out together. They worked on a mission statement, a plan for the farm and got their kids and family on board. It had seemed easy.

I didn’t know how hard it had been for them, how hard they had worked to make it seem easy, until Marilyn came into my office a few weeks after Gerry’s passing to put that plan we had made together into motion.

She sat down, exhausted from the funeral and those lonely, weeks after—all that work tying up loose ends, all that work that nobody ever sees, all that work that leaves little time for doing, let alone feeling anything else.

Marilyn came in. I put on the coffee and we just sat. And then she told me a story.

(ANGELA takes on MARILYN, grabbing mug from the box, and sits. She takes a big breath, and exhales quietly. A beat.)

I went to see the pope once.

(A beat.)

Never thought that would be something I’d want to do. Not Catholic, you know. But the Pope was traveling across the states, visiting churches, you know…blessing people…and I got the idea that I was going. This is what I was going to do—see the pope.

Gerry…he was busy, not interested, but said “go on”…you know, knock myself out. With the pope.

That’s funny.

(A beat.)

So I drove into the city—people everywhere—he drove up in that…that Pope-mobile…and you just start waving, you know—can’t help it. He’s there in his little . . .aquarium. . .and you raise your arm up in the air and he’s waving and I felt he was saying “Hi” right to me and I just start hollering, waving, whistling. I mean, I never got to see the Beatles or Elvis, so I guess I got it all out of my system with that pope.

And we settle in to listen to him—sitting on these hard bleachers to…you know…hear the pope.

And Gerry was at home on the farm choring, doing the milking in the barn. I guess he turned on the radio and they were broadcasting the pope…so I was sitting in the bleachers and Gerry was milking, but we are both listening to what this guy had to say. And what is some guy from Rome, you know, with the fancy robe gonna have for us—me on the bleachers, Gerry on the farm? I mean, really?

And the pope started to talk and I was looking around at all these people and Gerry must have been milking, not really listening much and then suddenly we heard the pope talking about the need to be stewards of the land and how we are called to leave the Earth, the soil in better condition than we found it. . . “The land is yours to preserve from generation to generation.”

That hit me. And it hit Gerry.

I started to cry. Right there, the pope talking and tears running down my face.

I got home that night and Gerry was sitting at the table. No, “How was it?” or anything just sitting there—hands folded, thinking.

“Gerry?” I said and he reached over and took my hands…

(MARILYN reaches out, thinking about the moment. A beat.)

Gerry told me he had listened on the radio and almost fell on the barn floor when the pope talked about the land. Gerry started to think about our kids and what we were leaving them. And how we were leaving the farm to them.

And I said, “Me, too.” The pope’s speech did the same thing to me. And we sat there a bit . . .thinking . . .and then we got up, cooked dinner and.. . Well, that was it . . . So we just decided we wanted to figure out what we would do next.

(ANGELA takes off MARILYN, puts mug away, stands.)

And they did.

They found a way to communicate to their kids what they valued and hoped for the land going forward. Everybody signed off on the plan—no surprises. One son was going to stay on, farm the land while renting from his siblings. Gerry had him build another house down the road, far enough away so that he couldn’t see Gerry and Marilyn’s farmstead. Gerry figured that would keep him from trying to meddle in how his son was starting to farm and keep his son from trying to fix what he thought Gerry was doing wrong.

And that wasn’t really the fix you know—it just got the issue out in the open, got them talking about it, Gerry and his son, and they figured it out as they went right up until Gerry passed. It wasn’t easy, but I learned that day how hard they had worked, how much honesty or courage it took to make it look like it was.

…….

I again offer my thanks to Mary Swander (in the photograph above) for allowing the excerpt to be reprinted here. If you know of a group who might find this one-act, one-person play meaningful, please contact her to discuss arrangements. It’s a play worth sharing, especially in rural areas.

Watching the play also reminded me of the power of story and art. It also reminded me that how we treat the land reflects, as do our choices in many other realms of our lives, the real values we live by.

Make This Easter Holy and Whole

Nathan Aaberg — April 4, 2015 — Leave a comment

I start this holy week blog post with an Easter buffet of quotations that express the joy of this holiday in ways that are meaningful to me and that I hope will be meaningful to you.

Then, because Easter was a day of questions for the disciples and others who loved Jesus, I will close with some questions for you and I to meditate on that relate to how we make our celebration of Easter holy and whole.

God proved His love on the Cross. When Christ hung, and bled, and died, it was God saying to the world, ‘I love you.’ (Billy Graham)

“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.” (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)

The great gift of Easter is hope – Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake. (Basil Hume)

“Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.” (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)

Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!

(first verse of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” a hymn by Charles Wesley from 1739)

“Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world … That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us. (N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense)

And here are the questions. Read them at your own risk! Living out God’s ways in this world can be disruptive.

Do you and I believe Christ’s resurrection is an epic moment that only has significance for people or does it also have meaning for all of Creation, the Creation that Paul writes is “groaning”?

What kind of people does God desire you and I to be? What does the holiness (what I could call “pure goodness”) that comes from being filled with God’s Spirit look like?

Can you and I as Christians be filled with holiness and the fruits of the spirit while simultaneously committing selfish violence against God’s earth and the living creatures of that earth?

Has the food you and I plan to consume on Easter Sunday been raised in ways that are in keeping with the fruits of the spirit and God’s abiding love? Do we honor God by what you and I eat on this day?

In particular, if you and I plan eat meat, what do you and I know of how the people raised the animals from which the meat came? Did the farmer who raised that animal raise it kindly and with consideration to the unique needs and innate characteristics of that animal? Or did it live in deprivation and was it pumped full of chemicals and antibiotics and then slaughtered in a place that is inhumane to the animals and to the workers?

And if our answer to that last question was yes, how do you and I reconcile our choice with the loving, merciful God of Easter that we say we follow and love?

Will you and I open our hearts to the full meaning of Easter and the renewed eternal life God offers us, our neighbors, and all of Creation out of His love?

Will you and I choose to live out God’s love for the whole world on this most holy of days in the food that we choose to eat and the food we will say grace over? Even if that means bucking tradition by not eating meat to make Easter a day of complete peace and grace? Or even if it means putting in the time to find a source of humanely raised meat and paying the true cost of it?

Will we, in other words, make what we eat harmonious with our worship of God and our love of Jesus?

And I end with this final quote from N.T. Wright (obviously a favorite Christian thinker of mine) from his book Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.

“That is what worship is all about. It is the glad shout of praise that arises to God the creator and God the rescuer from the creation that recognizes its maker, the creation that acknowledges the triumph of Jesus the Lamb. That is the worship that is going on in heaven, in God’s dimension, all the time. The question we ought to be asking is how best we might join in.”

To imagine all of Creation joining humanity and angels in praising God is an unreal image that I know may strain the credulity of some of my readers. But the beauty and wholeness and holiness of that image is one of the reasons for my faith.

Let us worship God with special joy and fervor this weekend. May you have a blessed Easter.

True Human Exceptionalism

Nathan Aaberg — March 14, 2015 — Leave a comment

We can learn a great deal from farmers as we read the Bible.

Each year, the non-profit organization MOSES (Midwest Organic & Special Education Service) holds an organic farming conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin in late February. It has become the largest gathering of organic and sustainable farmers in the country and features a wide array of workshops, roundtables, exhibits, and social events.

I just attended it for the first time and came away more aware than ever of the complexity and challenges of farming, especially if you are trying to do so in a way that sustains the life of the land and water.

What especially struck me was how thoughtful, observant, patient, open-minded, and nuanced many of the farmers revealed themselves to be, whether they were plaid-wearing young millennials or middle-aged men who looked, well, farmers or the reserved Amish men I talked to at breakfast one morning. From patterns of weed growth to the body language of a cow, the farmer must observe and interpret carefully what is in front of him while prudently considering the context. Fundamentally, I sensed deep humility.

We all could benefit from engaging the Bible and God that same way. But too often we don’t.

A good example is the nature of human exceptionalism.

This comes to mind because of something I heard recently on Janet Parshall’s program, “In the Marketplace,” on WMBI, the flagship station of the Moody Bible Institute. On this particular day, Parshall was interviewing Wesley Smith, the author of The War on Humans and a blogger about human exceptionalism on the National Review’s website. The way Parshall and Smith spoke of human exceptionalism in relationship to the natural world exemplified how easy it is for all of us to read the Bible in simplistic, self-centered ways.

In the program, Parshall played a portion of a Conservation International video in which Julie Roberts speaks as Mother Earth, and addressing humanity, she solemnly states, “I have fed species greater than you, and I have starved species greater than you.”

Parshall and Smith used this as the stepping off point for several broad assertions. First, environmentalists are anti-human. Second, extreme environmentalists exhibit a common mindset that humans are worth less than other species, that we are a destructive cancer upon the face of the earth. Above all, Parshall and Smith shared the conviction that the concern people have for earth is one more symptom of a distressing falling away from the Christian truth of human exceptionalism.

It is true. Humans are exceptional.

We do understand that people are made in the image of God, unlike any other creature. Clearly, a great deal of the Bible is about the interaction between God and people. From the beginning, God has a special relationship with humanity.

Jesus also clearly states that humans are of more value than sparrows and sheep (although there is no suggestion that sparrows and sheep have no value).

And the testimony of history reveals humanity to be endlessly inventive and creative. One advance builds on the foundation of the previous. We work technological wonders that would astound people of centuries and millennia past. We delve into the mysteries of the universe, of the workings of atomic particles, of the microbiotic worlds in our guts and in the soil.

Napoleon on his Imperial Throne (Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres); Does this exemplify the character of human exceptionalism in the world we see in the Bible?

Napoleon on his Imperial Throne (Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres); Is this the kind of human exceptionalism God wants us to exercise in the world?

But Parshall and Smith fail to provide a complete understanding of human exceptionalism in two ways.

First, they ignore sin. This should temper any discussion we have about our elite status. In fact, in the story of Noah we experience God’s utter revulsion at the violence and sin of humanity, which doesn’t sound that much different from the reaction of environmentalists to the violence we are inflicting on the life of the earth today.

Second, if you read the Bible like a good farmer, you will find a whole view of exceptionalism that is very different in nature.

When Abraham is called to be the founder of the nation Israel, one might expect Abraham to be told that the nation of which he will be the father will enjoy extreme prosperity and even build its own empire. But read Genesis 22:18 – “And through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed—all because you have obeyed me.”

In fact, if you read the Bible, it’s clear that the standards and expectations for Israel are higher than for other nations. Israel’s exceptional status comes from God’s grace and from God’s choice and it brings greater responsibility and greater expectations. They are called to be holy, to bear witness to God in how they live as a light to other nations and peoples. The people of Israel, to say the least, do not always welcome this kind of exceptionalism.

When Moses is called by God and has direct interactions with God, you would be hard pressed to say that Moses’ exceptional status was intended for Moses’ glory and for Moses to exploit for his own gain. He is called for God’s purposes and Moses actually finds that role challenging, fear-inducing, and extremely frustrating. Again, the expectations for those who are given exceptional roles are high.

The point of the God-given exceptional role is serving God’s purposes.

Prophets are similar in this way. Their unique role as bearers of God’s words and messages does not make for easy lives. They speak the truth. Their earthly lives are challenging and dangerous. They are tormented by the wrongs they see and the tragedies that will unfold.

The disciples are chosen by Jesus and have the exceptional blessing of daily interaction with Jesus and the opportunity to learn about God and the kingdom of God. There are times where it’s clear they hope their selection is for their glory, even arguing about who will sit at Jesus’ right hand in heaven. In fact, their selection is for a much more serious and humble mission. They are charged with serving God by spreading the gospel and making disciples after Jesus’ death and resurrection. All of them, according to Christian tradition, with the exception of John, died as martyrs in this service.

The Apostle Paul, whose life Jesus redirected in dramatic fashion, calls himself a servant of God.

The incarnation itself speaks volumes about God and the nature of how God exercises dominion over us.

We see in Jesus a God who cares about us, creatures who in comparison to God are limited and weak. We see in Jesus a God who cares about the poor and alienated and powerless. We see a God who reminds us of our common sinfulness, who calls us to repentance.

He is a shepherd willing to give his life for his sheep, a friend willing to lay down his life for his friends. He spoke of the first being last and the last being first. He washed the feet of his disciples. There was nothing in his life that communicated that life was about power, glory, and mammon.

I am struck, too, by the parable Jesus told of the ruler and the servant, which is recounted in Matthew 18: 21-35. In it, a ruler forgives the large debt a servant owes him but the servant puts in prison a fellow servant who owed him much, much less. This angers the ruler, and he punishes the servant. There is a strong sense that the ruler desires his servants to live out the same values that he, the ruler, demonstrates.

Ultimately, Jesus demonstrates love and mercy to humanity because God so loves the world. He restrains the power he has at his disposal for what is needed for the world and humanity.

Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (by Ford Madox Brown): The exceptionalism of Jesus.

Do we deserve this? Do we deserve a God who would become human because of his love for us and for the whole world? Is exercising our unique power in the world for power and mammon and at the expense of the life of God’s earth in tune with the exceptionalism we see in Jesus and in the Bible in general?

The first line of Rick Warren’s best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, captures the point of our exceptionalism perfectly: “It’s not about you.”

To be fair, Wesley Smith, who is highly articulate and compelling, does acknowledge in the interview that environmental efforts to protect clean water and clean air are important. He says we have a duty to leave a “clean environment” to “our progeny and our posterity.”

But there is something off in that eloquent phrasing. The word “clean” is a word of neatness, a self-directed and sanitized contentment with the order and comfort of things.

Our real duty is far larger than that and far less human-centered. Our duty as it relates to God’s world is to keep the world in a condition that honors God, provides a beautiful and sustaining environment for our children, and provides a beautiful and sustaining environment for all of the rest of life. Our duty as carriers of God’s image is to protect creation’s integrity and wholeness even as we must use it.

The ultimate measure of our success at carrying out that duty is whether all of creation is thriving. A shepherd who has lost many sheep but still has enough of them to eat in order to survive is not a good shepherd.

What Parshall and Smith failed to acknowledge, too, is that Christians have largely failed to be leaders in the effort to care for Creation and, in fact, too often have been leaders and apologists for the diminishment of Creation.

The fruit of this is an unraveling planet and a conviction by many that to be Christian is to support violence against God’s world and to be self-focused and self-centered. Why would that faith and value system be of any appeal to people, like Julie Roberts, who sense the mystery and beauty of this world?

Janet Parshall has it exactly right when she says, “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have deadly consequences.”

I encourage you to make up your own mind about what it means to be made in the image of God, what it means to have been shaped from the soil, what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and what that all means for how we should treat the world.

And I encourage you to do that the way a good farmer would – with nuance, patience, humility, an open mind, and an open heart.

Food, Farming, and the Whole Faith (Part 1)

Nathan Aaberg — December 13, 2014 — Leave a comment

How should we live out a whole faith?

How should Christians and Christian communities live out their lives in light of our calling to care for God’s earth?

There are many ways, but we should begin with food.

We should strive to raise food and make food choices in ways that will honor God, be consistent with God’s desire for the kind of people we will be, and enable God’s world to thrive.

This, I understand, is a challenging statement, a challenging ideal.

We are more comfortable talking about recycling, energy efficiency, and other conservation activities that are safer, more discrete parts of living. Food, by contrast, is far more woven into our cultural and social lives.

And we are tempted to believe that food choices are not related to a whole and holy Christian life. Don’t we have the freedom to eat whatever we want? And isn’t good food just a question of food that tastes good and is offered at a reasonable price?

But remember that through our food choices we interact with our neighbors and God’s land, water, and living beings every single day. Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer and writer-prophet, puts it best when he says, “… eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth.” What food you and I choose to buy makes us participants in the form of farming that gave us the food we bring home.

Remember that agriculture has a powerful impact on the condition of God’s earth. Nearly 40% of the earth’s surface not covered by ice is used for the raising of food. How we grow crops and raise animals shapes the health of the land and water of God’s earth to a remarkable extent. Does the food you and I eat helping the soil and water of our world flourish or is it depleting and damaging them?

Remember that in the case of meat and dairy agriculture, we are interacting with billions of living animals through the farmers and others in the food system who act on our behalf. Choosing to purchase the flesh or milk of an animal of God’s that has not been treated with compassion and care sends our economy this simple message: “I approve and reward you for what you’ve done to this animal and I heartily wish for you to raise more animals like this.”

The message of Proverbs 12:10 (“The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.”) applies to you and me even if we are not farmers. The animals that meat and milk come from are ours because our food purchase decisions make us part of the food system from which that meat and drink came. We need to ask: are we and everyone in that food system doing their very best to meet the animals’ needs?

Remember, too, that what we eat defines in large part our culture and what we stand for. What do you and I stand for? Who is our Master? Who is our God? Ourselves? Convenience, enjoyment, and low prices? Or our loving God who wants what is best for us and for the entire world?

And remember that what we eat shapes our health and the health of our loved ones. I have become convinced that eating with grace and mercy for God’s world will translate into better health.

So what is the food that Christians should buy and eat for every meal?

I’m not going to tell you.

At least I’m not going to give you detailed lists of what you should eat and what you shouldn’t eat. Food is complicated. Our modern food system is even more complicated. Our lives are complicated. Our social lives are complicated. I’ll be diving into those complications in future posts.

What I will offer at this beginning point, however, is a filter from the Bible that you might find surprising. Here it is:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23 NIV)

To the degree possible, the fruit of the Spirit listed here should guide not only how we interact with people but also how we interact with the world and with the particular conditions of land and water and non-human life we find in each particular place.

In short, we should, as part of a whole Christian faith, seek out food that has been raised with love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control toward living creatures as well as the land and water on which all life depends.

An even simpler way of stating this would be: would God consider the way this food was raised compatible with the ethics of a good shepherd?

Let’s test this filter on several examples of food production practices.

The first is the injection of rBGH (Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) into dairy cows by some farmers in order to increase milk production. First approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1993, rBGH has been found to cause the following health impacts on cows: increased rates of mastitis (inflammation of their udders), ulcers, arthritis, kidney and heart abnormalities, fertility issues, birth deformities in calves, and increased rates of lameness. Their productive lives are also significantly shortened (not a surprise when you’re forcing more milk production from other than what their bodies are meant to produce), which means they are slaughtered far sooner than untreated cows. There appears to be some evidence that there is an impact on the milk that comes from those cows as well.

Are love, patience, self-control, and the other fruits of the spirit part of this system at all? Are the needs of the cows being considered in this system at all? Should Christians drink milk from cows treated like this? Should Christian farmers use it?

The second example is turkey. Like broiler chickens, turkeys in the conventional food industry have been bred to grow far more rapidly than natural (sometimes more than double the natural rate) and more rapidly than the body systems of many of the birds can handle. The result is that some turkeys suffer from leg disorders, fatal cardiovascular problems (like ruptured aortas), and diseases, including sudden death syndrome. They are also likely to have weaker immune systems, which are stressed when they are subjected to continuous lighting and in close proximity to thousands of other birds. Finally, the breeding of turkeys for maximum breast meat production has made it impossible for them to breed naturally. Instead, they must be artificially inseminated. This is the polite way of saying male turkeys must be forced to produce semen and then that semen must be forcibly implanted into a female turkey. This is done to millions of turkeys.

The third example regards how many poultry, including turkeys, are slaughtered. You should read this article about how the speed of industrial-scale slaughterhouses results in hundreds of thousands of chickens and turkeys being scalded to death because workers on the line just didn’t have the ability to slaughter them properly. And the recent book – The Chain – makes clear that high-speed slaughtering and butchering facilities are awful for the workers, our neighbors, as well as for the animals.

Can we say this treatment of God’s creatures comes out of love, joy, patience, self-control, and the other fruits of the spirit detailed in the fifth chapter of Galatians?

Would a good shepherd allow those things to be done to his animals?

In Luke 15:3-6, Jesus tells the parable of a good shepherd seeking out the one sheep that was lost even as 99 were already safe and sound. That good shepherd does not live by the idea of acceptable levels of losses and collateral damage when raising animals. Should we?

Of course not.

So what stands between our Spirit-inspired values and acting on those values?

First, we don’t know how food is raised. Our complex food system generally is not transparent about whether the food item you buy at a grocery store has been raised in a way that is good for the earth, animals, and people. The food system also exerts tremendous pressure on farmers to farm in ways that are antithetical to being good shepherds. I have tremendous sympathy for the position many farmers find themselves in.

Second, we are tempted and even taught to think of our faith as strictly a spiritual pursuit and getting our doctrines right. We are tempted and even taught to think that our faith has no real implications for our practical life in this world or at least not in terms of our interaction with God’s earth. As a result, making whole faith food choices means we have to go against the grain of the dominant food system and the dominant theology around us at the same time.

Third, it can be more expensive and time-consuming to find food that is closer to the ideal. There are farmers who pour their heart and soil into building soil life, keeping local streams healthy and clean, and caring for their animals with loving concern. But are we willing to make the extra effort to find them and support them and to do right by God’s Creation?

Fourth, we are afraid of standing up for our faith. Eating is the most fundamental way we interact with God’s earth. It is also one of the most fundamental elements of our culture and social life. We fear standing up and standing out for our faith in social settings. And we fear that living out a whole Christian faith in terms of food choices and food ethics will cause fellow Christians to think we’ve become “political” or “liberal” or “New Age.”

Fifth, it is just far easier and comfortable to ignore the gaping contradiction between what we eat and our Christian values. Aren’t there already many challenges for us in our everyday lives?

Make no mistake. The core of our faith is ultimately our unity in love and life with God through our faith in Jesus.

But there is no question that once we believe and place all of the weight of our life upon God and God’s wisdom, that our lives will be transformed. Jesus spoke often of faith bearing fruit. If the condition of our world is a fruit of our choices and values that are generated by our faith, what does that conviction tell God and us about our faith? If the condition of our home place is a fruit of our faith being applied in every day decisions as people and a community, what does it tell God and us about our faith? Food is in the middle of all of this.

You and I should not be blind to the complexities of food and to the difficulties of producing food in a world of weeds, weather, and intense economic pressures. Eating in a way that completely and fully reflects Galatians 5:22 in every detail for every meal is very difficult today.

Yet, we do not give up on God’s other ideals for us just because we can’t do them perfectly. We throw ourselves on God’s mercy when we fall short. We ask for God’s Spirit to fill us and renew us. And we try again.

In that same way, we as Christians should be tenaciously and stubbornly pushing for the food system to be closer to that ideal and doing the best we can everyday within our sphere of influence to be part of that effort.

Stephen Webb has written an excellent book called Good Eating, which is part of the series called The Christian Practice of Everyday Life. In it he writes these words:

“Our diet should be holy if we want all aspects of our lives to reflect God’s grace. If we say grace over our meals, we should have grace in our meals…”

Yes.

When we make food and eat it, let us truly be truly be mindful and grateful for the food we eat and for the earth from which that food comes and for the people who work so hard to produce it.

When we choose food (and if we have the ability to choose what we eat, we should feel blessed), let us be mindful of God’s concern and care for the earth, animals, and the people who act on our behalf in producing food.

And let us commit ourselves as individuals, as families, and as communities of faith to bringing grace to God’s world through the meals we say grace over everyday.

Archives For How Shall We Live?

The Church Lawn – Culture Over God?

Map of My Kingdom (An Excerpt)

Make This Easter Holy and Whole

True Human Exceptionalism

Food, Farming, and the Whole Faith (Part 1)

Meet Nathan Aaberg

Subscribe

Topics

Looking Back