We are Creatures.
In order to properly understand who we are we have to remember that we are deeply connected to the natural world and utterly dependent upon its provision through its Creator. No matter how buffered our bodies and imaginations are from the outdoors, our life still comes from sun and soil.
Christianity is not otherworldly, it is embodied and dependent. It is always responding, always feeling, always walking into the dirt and the darkness of the world, not so that people can enter the Kingdom when they die, but so they would allow the Kingdom reign of Jesus to heal their heart now.
The story of the progress of Modernism and the disillusionment of post-modernism, resulting in a hyper-technological age of innovation, is in large part a warping of the cultural mandate of subduing and ruling over the creation. It is a warping in a few different ways.
Firstly, the story of modern human progress is not the story of helping creation flourish as a result of human presence, but the story the secular priests are telling is more the story of human mastery and transcendence over the limitations and inconveniences of the created world for the glory of humanity.
Secondly, the technological age is driven by a distain for creatureliness, to use the material resources of creation and build a separate synthetic existence away from the cold, dirt, seasons, land travel, or entropy of life on earth, all to be lifted into a superior spiritual and physical existence, one day a completely virtual existence.
Thirdly, the Modern project, and the critique of Modernism within Post-Modernism, has led to a disdain for colonial aspirations in favor of trying to uplift those who are oppressed in terms of race, gender, or sexuality. The result of this misdirection is that we have believed the illusion that we are in a fight for justice (in terms of a power struggle for position, land, money, and natural resources), to find out we are being colonized and controlled in a dimension of our world we have not yet accepted as the new domain of power, the digital realm.
This project has not only spelled doom over the human heart, but has resulted in the impending destruction of the natural world. Within the modern age, humans are striving to become otherworldly on their own terms, not only rejecting creation, but destroying it so that they can become gods.
This is at odds with the true calling and context of the cultural mandate. The mandate to go and multiply the human family and fill the earth with human society was always within the scope and limits of the life of creation, with creation’s flourishing as its focus. But more importantly the expansion of human society was always with the focus of expanding the sacred space of the Creator God so that with the building of cities and society, it would also be building and expanding the realm of the rule of the Creator God in his goodness and love.
To be an image bearer is to reflect the Creator, who took the order of his life, descended into the chaos and revealed the original target and source of all order. We are called to find order, not strictness or regulations that make us righteous, but the proper set up for the flourishing of life, which is love centered on and sourced in the life and presence of God. Love brings cosmos from chaos and turns enemy into friend. Walking with the Spirit of love, we are to create, influence, and welcome our neighbors, communities, and cities around us into transformation. To simply escape the city, the sin, the addicted, the twisted, the lost, and to hide from chaos, and live in privilege is to deny the Creational attraction of the image of God to the natural place and materiality of the creative act, the wilderness, the desolation, the chaos.
The Bible is the story of the solution the Creator brings to the disruption of the unity of Heaven and Earth, bringing chaos back into the order. The Creator made man, Adam and Eve, in his image and likeness to rule over all things, yet Adam’s mistrust and desire for transcendence broke his heart and his land. Adam’s choice to mediate heaven and earth by other means meant the disruption of this delicate balance.
Jesus died to be the second Adam, not just to undo the first Adam’s relational failure, but to restore to us the meaning of our name.
If Adam is “of the ground,” a mixture of the dust and the moist breath of the creator in that primordial garden, our body being the true collision of heaven and earth, then wouldn’t it be necessary for Jesus to enter the earth again? Wouldn’t it have been proper for man to feel again the power of God’s damp breath amidst the cold stone walls? Wouldn’t it be fitting for the Creator God to emerge from the cave as the second one born from the ground of a garden, to unify all things?
For the first Adam dwelt on a mountain between heaven and earth and lusted after transcendence. Adam despised half of his origin, his Mother the dust, leading to his rejection of his Heavenly Father.
The second Adam came forth from Mary as a King without a father. Was he confused? “Who is my father?” Jesus searched and prayed for his origin, his seed, and found his Father in the Temple. He journeyed to uncover his identity in his Abba with the beasts in the desert, rejecting all ways of human wisdom for the power of heaven and the dust of earth to be reconciled.
For it was not Christ’s love of the cosmos that was his judgement, it was our judgment of his rejection of our wicked way of achieving divinity. It was we who thought we could maintain our path to divinity by killing our shame and thrusting its dead body into the dark of earth. Hiding our judgement. It was the Creator who embodied our shame and fear of ruling without control, showing us how to love his creation again in the image and likeness of our Maker.
Yet our failure, became our victory. Christ represented us to the powers and authorities who ruled between earth and of heaven, to break the temple on behalf of us by dying on that hill. Curtain torn. To rise from the garden womb among the leaves and the flowers, all for our redemption. He slept in a cave so that we can one day be broken of a way of rule that does not include a cross. He was buried in the earth though divine, all so our spirits can rise to one day accept our place in the ground.
We are risen, but we will still one day die, so that we can rise. At the sound of the trumpet, we the body of Christ, will be lifted to that place between heaven and earth, the overlap of realms to meet Jerusalem and descend to earth. We are a New Body, in this new heaven and new earth, this place of God’s dwelling. We fall with Heaven and collide with the profane and the wild to bring it to order, to build a city where all is one, and the Creator’s breath is found in our lungs again. A Kingdom of the slain lamb.
But today, we discover the gift of our image and likeness amongst the trees and roots, weeds and fruit, by finding the gardener. We cultivate our mother-dust who holds the flicker of a new creation while standing in the light of our Abba, to experience the gifts of grace while our toes are with the worms. This divinity is far from Zeus or Mars, it is power akin to the life of a seed, deep in the soil. It is common and overlooked. We are the temple, where the Spirit fills our weak flesh, the womb to bear the fruit of righteousness.
Can we then be called sons of God and say we love our Abba father, while cursing our brother, by neglecting and abusing the ground? We are abusing ourselves.
If you catch me gardening or pulling weeds and you ask me why, I will tell you I am a temple caring for the womb of my resurrection.