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by Ashtyn Adams Romans 6:1-4 (NRSV) |
 Caravaggio's "Conversion of Saint Paul" (First Version) |  Caravaggio's "Conversion of Saint Paul" |
I cannot help but think about Paul’s own biographical life when reading this passage in Romans. One of my old professors used to joke that Paul would be dismayed if he knew his mail had been canonized as Holy Scripture, especially as we make all sorts of the twists and turns attempting, or not attempting, to fill in the conversation on the other side. While the Pauline epistles were certainly not written to us, I believe they can still be written for us, especially Romans. Romans is Paul’s longest and most theologically robust letter since he hasn’t actually visited Rome yet. He cannot shorthand anything like in his other letters where he has already established the Gospel. In the aftermath of exile and return of Jewish Christians from Rome during the reigns of Claudius and Nero in 55/56 AD, Paul writes this letter to a church he has not visited, for the purposes of peace amid strife and contention.
Paul’s own life of sin was marked by his time as a militant pharisee and violent persecutor of the Church. Then he was Saul, the man party to the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr killed for his faith, and who voted for the death of other Jesus followers. When he traveled along the road to Damascus he had a conversion experience: a light flashed around him as he fell to the ground, hearing a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” After being blind for three days, Saul the Pharisee becomes Paul the apostle to the gentiles, the very people Stephen gets his name from. For Paul, grace is an event that happened on the road to Damascus and he never gets over the fact that he has been saved by the same God he once so strenuously opposed. It compels him to go where no apostle has gone and ultimately be imprisoned and martyred himself. The church would look very different without his conversion, if Paul had simply continued as he had before.
In chapter six, we see Paul’s soteriology displayed, what it exactly means to be “saved.” We, as Christians, are not saved from something, but for something. In chapter two Paul has already asked, "Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" (Romans 2:4). The good news of Christ is not a get out of jail free card. Here, in chapter six, Paul further presses, “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase? By no means!” Me genoito is the Greek word used here, almost a “hell no!” It is not quite a curse word, but it is a very strong no. Anyone who claims that sin can abound so grace abounds has missed the Gospel. A true encounter with the risen Lord leads to newness of life which witnesses to the daily, incremental grace and mercy of God. Yet, this is still the same sort of pervasive thinking in the climate crisis today. When there is a call to action over the rising seas and warming earth, Christians hide under excuses of pragmatism or realism. There is often an attitude that God will fix it, and display his power all the more. It is an unfaithful, passive, and misguided posture which Paul would abhor. The spirit infused process of sanctification only makes us more and more into the likeness of Christ, and empowers us to live into the Kingdom here and now. If we have truly died to sin, we cannot go on living in it. Yet, our relation with the rest of creation is marked by sin, the sin of violence and indifference. We must be radically changed like Paul on the road to Damascus. As Todd Still says, “imitatio Pauli is in fact imitatio Christi, this is, in seeking to emulate Paul in general I am more able to follow Christ in particular.”
Paul’s own life of sin was marked by his time as a militant pharisee and violent persecutor of the Church. Then he was Saul, the man party to the stoning of Stephen, the first martyr killed for his faith, and who voted for the death of other Jesus followers. When he traveled along the road to Damascus he had a conversion experience: a light flashed around him as he fell to the ground, hearing a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” After being blind for three days, Saul the Pharisee becomes Paul the apostle to the gentiles, the very people Stephen gets his name from. For Paul, grace is an event that happened on the road to Damascus and he never gets over the fact that he has been saved by the same God he once so strenuously opposed. It compels him to go where no apostle has gone and ultimately be imprisoned and martyred himself. The church would look very different without his conversion, if Paul had simply continued as he had before.
In chapter six, we see Paul’s soteriology displayed, what it exactly means to be “saved.” We, as Christians, are not saved from something, but for something. In chapter two Paul has already asked, "Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" (Romans 2:4). The good news of Christ is not a get out of jail free card. Here, in chapter six, Paul further presses, “What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may increase? By no means!” Me genoito is the Greek word used here, almost a “hell no!” It is not quite a curse word, but it is a very strong no. Anyone who claims that sin can abound so grace abounds has missed the Gospel. A true encounter with the risen Lord leads to newness of life which witnesses to the daily, incremental grace and mercy of God. Yet, this is still the same sort of pervasive thinking in the climate crisis today. When there is a call to action over the rising seas and warming earth, Christians hide under excuses of pragmatism or realism. There is often an attitude that God will fix it, and display his power all the more. It is an unfaithful, passive, and misguided posture which Paul would abhor. The spirit infused process of sanctification only makes us more and more into the likeness of Christ, and empowers us to live into the Kingdom here and now. If we have truly died to sin, we cannot go on living in it. Yet, our relation with the rest of creation is marked by sin, the sin of violence and indifference. We must be radically changed like Paul on the road to Damascus. As Todd Still says, “imitatio Pauli is in fact imitatio Christi, this is, in seeking to emulate Paul in general I am more able to follow Christ in particular.”
If we have truly died to sin, we cannot go on living in it. Yet, our relation with the rest of creation is marked by sin, the sin of violence and indifference. We must be radically changed like Paul on the road to Damascus.
What is needed, as Pope Francis pronounced, is “an ‘ecological conversion’, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.” My ecological conversion was in the spring of 2020. I realized I was Saul, the stubborn persecutor of Christ resisting the light. After the first weeks of COVID shut down human activity, the airs and waters around the world cleared, and I felt as though I heard a deep groin of Christ from the Earth asking, “why do you persecute me?” Christ said he was found among the least of these, the prisoners and outcasts, being welcomed and fed without us knowing whenever they were cared for (Matthew 25). Creation itself now needs our intervention, it is among the least of these. It is where we will find Jesus and be transformed if we allow ourselves to be first knocked down, to die to sin. Although, like Rome, Paul has not visited our church in America, I hear him asking, are we to continue damaging the Earth in order that grace may increase? Me genoito! By no means.
Are we to continue damaging the Earth in order that grace may increase? Me genoito! By no means.
Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.
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by Ashtyn Adams
Matthew 9:35-38 (NRSV)
35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Here we are confronted with the “Lord of the harvest,” a particularly intriguing metaphor for God. I admit, part of the fascination may simply be attributed to a sheer isolation from a meaningful relationship with land. Our awareness concerning food production and use of agricultural language has drastically changed post Industrial Revolution. Yet, the pages of the Bible are painted with farming language. Kinship with the land is a common, if not central, theme throughout the Old and New Testament. The intimacy between the first human and the earth are immediately evident in the Hebrew in Genesis: the Adam from the Adamah; the earthling created from the earth. One of my Old Testament professors, Dr. Ellen Davis, notes that the first covenant of God’s is indeed one with the land. “The whole earth is mine,” declares the Lord, and we are to be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation among it (Exodus 19:5).
When I hear the phrase, “Lord of the harvest” though, one of the first images in my mind comes from my own grandpa preparing for his almond harvest in Madera, CA. I would watch him out in the fields for hours by himself, shaking and sweeping trees. To see the abundance afterwards was striking. I found myself in awe of how the harvest was there all along, how the green kernels hiding in the trees I stared at months prior were brought to completion as the brown hulls cracked open. Although my grandpa worked from dawn to dusk during harvest season, as an outsider looking in, I felt as though there was a sort of ease to it all, a rhythm and freeness I was drawn to. Was there a holiness to this process? Could I grasp something of the divine in the harvest? Was God like a humble farmer?
Jesus’ instruction to pray to the Lord of the harvest arises from compassion on the harassed and helpless among them and immediately precedes the commissioning of the twelve apostles to heal, cleanse, and proclaim that the Kingdom has come near. This metaphor of harvest and posture to be a worker in the field is essential to understanding how this kingdom is an alternative Kingdom to Caesars in Matthew’s Gospel. To pray to be a worker in the Lord's harvest field means life is not something to be possessed and safeguarded, raw materials are not something to be hoarded and exploited. There is plenty for all when we acknowledge whose the harvest is and do not take more than we need, which is why Jesus also reminds the apostles in the commissioning, “freely you have received, freely give.”
When I hear the phrase, “Lord of the harvest” though, one of the first images in my mind comes from my own grandpa preparing for his almond harvest in Madera, CA. I would watch him out in the fields for hours by himself, shaking and sweeping trees. To see the abundance afterwards was striking. I found myself in awe of how the harvest was there all along, how the green kernels hiding in the trees I stared at months prior were brought to completion as the brown hulls cracked open. Although my grandpa worked from dawn to dusk during harvest season, as an outsider looking in, I felt as though there was a sort of ease to it all, a rhythm and freeness I was drawn to. Was there a holiness to this process? Could I grasp something of the divine in the harvest? Was God like a humble farmer?
Jesus’ instruction to pray to the Lord of the harvest arises from compassion on the harassed and helpless among them and immediately precedes the commissioning of the twelve apostles to heal, cleanse, and proclaim that the Kingdom has come near. This metaphor of harvest and posture to be a worker in the field is essential to understanding how this kingdom is an alternative Kingdom to Caesars in Matthew’s Gospel. To pray to be a worker in the Lord's harvest field means life is not something to be possessed and safeguarded, raw materials are not something to be hoarded and exploited. There is plenty for all when we acknowledge whose the harvest is and do not take more than we need, which is why Jesus also reminds the apostles in the commissioning, “freely you have received, freely give.”
While this passage is often spiritualized, it is essential to think about God in our agricultural practices, to toil over whether they actually reflect the God we claim to be in relationship with. Currently, it is not difficult to see that they don’t. Industrial agriculture has maximized crop yields and meat production at a lofty environmental price, with soil eroding ten to forty times faster than it’s replaced. Monocultures have stripped the land of biodiversity and the natural ways of regeneration for sustained fruitfulness. Artificial fertilizers create “dead zones” in our bodies of water. Not only is our soil damaged, but our food is wasted. While enough food is produced to feed 1.5 times the global population, a third of it is thrown out and nearly a quarter of children under age five are malnourished. What does it mean to pray to the Lord of the harvest while we farm in a destructive way, without concern for our families, communities, and future generations? Would we even recognize the Lord of the harvest in our present day? Will we ask to be workers in his field? It would be a dangerous prayer, especially since our practices currently resemble Caesar more than Christ.
What does it mean to pray to the Lord of the harvest while we farm in a destructive way, without concern for our families, communities, and future generations?
It is not only the crowds, but the land itself that is now being harmed and harassed. We must look at it, like Jesus, with compassion, recognizing the gift that it is and our place within and among it. We must remember that God is the Lord of the harvest who brings abundance and bounty when creation is cared for properly, when we labor in justice. Sustainable agriculture will honor the limits of the land so that our populations, locally and globally, can thrive in the way God wills. We can embody and bring glory to God the gardener, the Lord of the harvest who makes all things new. Jesus’ ministry was one of touch along with word, one that fed the hungry, that cared about the physical needs of people as he walked the Earth. Perhaps Jesus’ instruction in Matthew’s gospel will help us remember an essential title of the God we serve, the Lord of the harvest, and cultivate a deeper love and respect for the land, the starting place of every other mission field we are sent into.
Resources
Books:
Painter, Betsy. A Christian's Guide to Planet Earth: Why It Matters and How to Care for It. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022.
Resources
Books:
Painter, Betsy. A Christian's Guide to Planet Earth: Why It Matters and How to Care for It. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022.
Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.
by Ashtyn Adams
Matthew 9:9-13 (NRSV)
9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. 10 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew (1600)
This is one of my favorite pieces of Baroque art in which Caravaggio powerfully evokes the grandeur, tension, and intensity of the calling of St. Matthew from this week’s lectionary text. Tax collectors held one of the worst occupations in first century Judea, collaborating with occupying Romans to fleece their own people with unjust taxes. Here, Matthew is hunched over, so absorbed in money that he fails to notice the intruder who thrusts his hand into the dark room. One of the figures points to Matthew with a bemused expression, gesturing, “Who? Him?” as the light beams out from Christ and penetrates the darkened room. Christ’s outstretched hand mimics Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, and we, the viewers, are present to Genesis 1 all over again, witnessing vocation and discipleship as a repetition of creation, light shining into the darkness.
Carivaggio required defense by his ecclesial patron because he dared to portray the calling of Matthew as a contemporary event happening in 17th century Rome. There were no halos around Christ or Matthew to indict their saintliness. They were dressed in fine attire, looking like ordinary, everyday Italians; how could this be a “Christian” painting?
Yet, I, and others, think Carivaggio had it right. We should shamelessly apply this biblical story to ourselves and our time. We are the sinners too preoccupied by the demands of our consumer capitalist culture to perceive Christ’s searing, demanding, and electing gaze. We are implicated in acts of injustice against God’s people and planet. We prioritize profit and convenience over and against the flourishing of creation. Just this week, the senate approved the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the debt ceiling deal. The fossil fuel pipeline will cut through the Jefferson National Forest and hundreds of streams, damaging wildlife and rendering the Appalachia community further dependent on dirty energy.
The injection of carbon into the atmosphere will contribute to the human greenhouse effect, causing rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, and other extreme weather patterns which burden and pain communities worldwide. We are already experiencing it, as the Canadian wildfires rage, forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes and putting millions across the East Coast at risk as they inhale harmful air. We have succumbed to Empire-thinking which sanctions violence and puts the immediate interest of the state above all else. Where are our eyes looking? We are in a dark room, the sick in need of a physician.
We should shamelessly apply this biblical story to ourselves and our time. We are the sinners too preoccupied by the demands of our consumer capitalist culture to perceive Christ’s searing, demanding, and electing gaze. We are implicated in acts of injustice against God’s people and planet. We prioritize profit and convenience over and against the flourishing of creation.
One of my professors, Dr. Will Willimon, told me Caravaggio’s painting depicts the human implications of the mystery of God’s incarnation, the oddness of it. This painting gets at the sense that incarnation keeps happening, God keeps intruding into human history to come alongside us. I believe God is here, now, with us in the Anthropocene and determined to heal the sickness among us, the sickness we have inflicted onto creation. Jesus says to Matthew, “Follow me.” He does not say love me, or believe in me or worship me, but follow me. Though a scandal, the incarnate God enlists and commissions the scoundrels for discipleship. Senators like Joe Manchin, who included the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the debt ceiling agreement to line their own pockets, are not excluded from it. There is hope that the Messiah is a friend of tax collectors and sinners, that our complicity with Empire in the age of climate change is not the end of our encounter with the living God. Yet, in order to begin anew with Jesus, Empire must be left behind. Matthew reminds us that no one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24).
If God is already incarnating, intruding, and turning his gaze toward someone like you and me, and like Joe Manchin, then he anticipates our response to the call beyond the idols of money, power, and pride that we cling to. Will we shift our focus and look up? Will we accept the call? In the 21st century, following Christ the physician, learning what it means that God desires mercy, must include a dramatically altered way of living with the environment around us. It must include a radical commitment to stop climate change. It will not be easy, but we might be transformed along the way, and we might have the privilege to say we accepted the call to restore creation, that we were caught within the Lord’s gaze.
Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.
By Ashtyn Adams
Genesis 1:26 (NRSV)
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
I often find myself lost in wonder thinking about what it means to be created in or “as” God’s image. I’m certainly not alone in that question as Christian theologians as early as Irenaeus have found it worth asking with each coming century. As I’ve gotten older though, it’s felt less and less like a noun, like a quality I continually possess. It may be more of a verb, as I ask myself, “Am I image-bearing today?”
One of my Old Testament professors, Dr. Ellen Davis, reminds me that the divine image is not a widespread biblical characterization of human status. In fact, it’s rarely mentioned in our Holy Scriptures, which may denote more of “a possibility, unique but unspecified, rather than the established and permanent condition of human existence.” I find this notion constructive in our desire to understand God’s creative intention, particularly because the Christian fascination with image bearing has misappropriately endorsed unlimited human power over and against nature. Too often we have used this biblical language for exploitation rather than loving service to the created order. The Genesis narrative does not depict an anthropocentric, but a cosmocentric view of creation, in which humans are blessed with the high responsibility to bring flourishing to every living thing. Dominion is better understood as an exercise of skilled mastery in order to bless and nurture. We fail to mirror God if our power does not bring life, if harmony is not its ultimate function.
One of my Old Testament professors, Dr. Ellen Davis, reminds me that the divine image is not a widespread biblical characterization of human status. In fact, it’s rarely mentioned in our Holy Scriptures, which may denote more of “a possibility, unique but unspecified, rather than the established and permanent condition of human existence.” I find this notion constructive in our desire to understand God’s creative intention, particularly because the Christian fascination with image bearing has misappropriately endorsed unlimited human power over and against nature. Too often we have used this biblical language for exploitation rather than loving service to the created order. The Genesis narrative does not depict an anthropocentric, but a cosmocentric view of creation, in which humans are blessed with the high responsibility to bring flourishing to every living thing. Dominion is better understood as an exercise of skilled mastery in order to bless and nurture. We fail to mirror God if our power does not bring life, if harmony is not its ultimate function.
Dominion is better understood as an exercise of skilled mastery in order to bless and nurture. We fail to mirror God if our power does not bring life, if harmony is not its ultimate function.
Andrei Rublev's Trinity Icon (c. 1400)
Creation is not a one time event, but an ongoing function of the Trinity. We participate in the nature of the divine by accepting the invitation to image-bear and care for the world around us. As June commences Ocean Month, I am reminded that 98% of waters around the continental U.S. lack any type of marine protected area. I am reminded that humans are not serving, but damaging and polluting the oceans we are dependent on and which bring God glory. Our ocean crisis is a moral problem which requires our creative intervention, the courage to step into that role which God has already called us to.
How will we respond and honor the dignity bestowed upon us, the risk God has taken in making us “little less than divinity” (Ps 8:6)? How will we renew our commitment to bear the image of God and restore the integrity due to God’s oceans and marine life?
How will we respond and honor the dignity bestowed upon us, the risk God has taken in making us “little less than divinity” (Ps 8:6)? How will we renew our commitment to bear the image of God and restore the integrity due to God’s oceans and marine life?
How will we respond and honor the dignity bestowed upon us, the risk God has taken in making us “little less than divinity” (Ps 8:6)? How will we renew our commitment to bear the image of God and restore the integrity due to God’s oceans and marine life?
Resources
Books:
Davis, Ellen F. Opening Israel's Scriptures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Books:
Davis, Ellen F. Opening Israel's Scriptures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.
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This blog shares the activities of Creation Justice Ministries. We educate and equip Christians to protect, restore, and rightly share God's creation.
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