tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-263564892771726234.post5247499911136797715..comments2024-02-10T00:32:06.186-08:00Comments on Lutherans Restoring Creation Blog: Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-263564892771726234.post-35851162527881791522011-07-08T07:43:24.289-07:002011-07-08T07:43:24.289-07:00From Dr. David Rhoads:
I want to pick up on the co...From Dr. David Rhoads:<br />I want to pick up on the comment by Dr. Ormseth near the end of his reflections about how our alienation from nature keeps us from seeing Jesus as the Servant of Creation and prevents us from embracing our God-given vocation as Earthkeepers. Here is an experience I had some time ago that jarred me out of my backward thinking. <br /><br />One night in the mid-nineties, alone in my apartment in Chicago where I used to teach, I had an awakening that changed my whole way of thinking about myself and about us humans in general. It happened about 2:30 in the night. Now I never sit up in bed when I wake up. And I never speak when I first wake up. This night was different. I have no idea what I was dreaming before this happened or what may have led to it, but I awoke, immediately sat bolt up in bed, and blurted out, “I’m a mammal!” <br /><br />Now I knew that already! But somehow this word came as a revelation. It is as if I had known something all my life but didn’t know what it meant. It is as if I knew it on the level of disinterested fact, but did not know what it really meant. It is as if I knew it as a fact about life, but I had never quite related it to me personally. Now, however, I was confronted with the mind-blowing realization that I was indeed a simple animal, a mammal, a higher primate, one of a class of homo sapiens. And as a result of this insight, I have never been able to think of myself or humans the same way again. <br /><br />In the days and weeks that followed this experience, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what it meant. I realized that it is hard to see our mammalian nature unless we strip away all the “civilization” we have created around ourselves—the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, the language in which we live in our imaginations, the conveniences we have, the stores where we get food and goods, the farms and villages and cities and countries we have built up to serve us, the whole human created world in which we live and move and have our being. If we strip these away, it becomes absolutely clear how dependent in fact we are upon our earthly ecosystem as any other animals are. Stripping these away in my mind to see myself fully as the mammal I really am has been a long process, as if I were waking from a dream only to find this is still a dream, and then waking up from that one, and so on. As if I stripped away layers of clothes until I “came to myself!” <br /><br />It is hard for us to think of ourselves as just another animal. It took about two years to convince one of my granddaughters that we were animals. She just could not believe it. At some level, the rest of us don’t either. Not only are we mammals but also Jesus was a mammal. This may be the modern theological criteria for the acceptance of the full humanity of Jesus. This places our theology squarely in the orbit of Jesus as Servant of Creation—as one who was in solidarity not only with humans but with all creation and who inaugurated a kingdom that was designed to restore all creation, not just humans. We need to rethink our foundational theological perspectives in order to place ourselves in solidarity with the rest of nature and to see ourselves in the position to be servants and keepers of Earth, as Genesis calls us to be.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com