In August, 1999 I spent about ten days in Durres, Albania. Durres is an ancient city, located on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Albania was among the more oppressed countries of the infamous Eastern Block of nations, and has yet to recover from the decades of abuse brought about by the alternating allegiance of its rulers to either the USSR or China.
But the beaches in Durres – they were filled with potential for reflecting what God must have been thinking when, looking at His creation, declare that it was “very good.” But potential is the key word – for those potentially beautiful expressions of God’s creative power were littered with the fallen remnants of the former oppressors’ military might and garbage. Every kind of garbage you could imagine dotted the sea shore. And, perhaps even worse, every kind of waste was casually pumped into the sea as though doing that would make it disappear.
I can still remember walking down the sea shore with a believer in Albania. We were both drinking water from a plastic bottle – the only safe water to drink – and when he finished his bottle, he just dropped it on the ground. He was casually adding to the litter and the ugliness of what could have been a beautiful place on planet earth. The entire time I was thinking how much those beautiful beaches – if cleaned up and taken care of – could help the people of Albania tap in to the tourist industry and have adequate resources to live more comfortably, eat better meals, and provide an education for their children. I kept thinking “If I could become Secretary of State, in charge of a huge budget for foreign aid, I could . . .”
Earlier this week I started reading Genesis in my personal Bible reading. You can’t help but notice that God considered His creative acts to be “good,” in fact at the end of the first creation narrative He declares it to be “very good.” When the flood has accomplished its purpose, God gives a promise to Noah and his family that never again would He destroy the world with a cataclysmic event like the flood.
Apparently, despite our own abuse of creation, God appears to think it to be “very good.” In Romans 8, Paul reminds his first readers and ultimately us that creation itself groans for the day when God fully renews and restores the universe to its intended purpose.
It makes you wonder why it is that sometimes the loudest voices in our culture about care for planet earth are coming from those who have little or no sense of God as Creator. Where is the voice of those who insist that indeed He is the Creator of heaven and earth? How can we be silent when we are called to be God’s agents in the world to accomplish God’s ultimate plan?
In Colossians 1:15-20, one of the great Christological texts in all of Scripture, Paul declares that Christ is not only “the head of the body, the church,” but He is also “the firstborn of all creation” and “is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” If the phrase “body of Christ” is more than some clever metaphor Paul created and we truly are “Jesus to the world,” then surely a part of our mission from God includes care for what Christ, as firstborn of all creation, sustains – holds together.
It is more than unfortunate that we who hold the truth of the gospel to be absolute and utterly true are so prone to leave out part of the story. Through Jesus Christ God intends to renew and restore the good world He created to its intended purpose. While that obviously has great impact on the lives of individuals who, through faith, choose to become a part of the body of Christ, that isn’t all! We are called to be His agents in bearing witness not only to what we often mean when we say “salvation,” but into all that He came to do – and that includes the work of caring for the world our gracious and loving God created and called good!
When I think about the fact that this coming Sunday is the first day of a new year and most of us will think about how we want to live in the year that is before us, perhaps we could all spend a little effort thinking about how God can use us to renew and restore creation! Who knows, perhaps some believers in Albania will start picking up the litter on those beautiful beaches!
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