The Gospel According to the Earth: Why the Good Book Is a Green Book

By Matthew Sleeth

“Matthew Sleeth is a significant convert in the growing company of Christians who bring intelligence, passion, a biblically trained imagination, and mature Christian witness to the care of creation.”
— Eugene Peterson, Author of Living the Message

“Matthew Sleeth is a breath of fresh air. In The Gospel According to the Earth, he retells the Bible’s most familiar stories in ways that will stimulate your imagination, soften your heart, and challenge you to think more deeply about caring for creation.”
Jonathan Merritt, author of Green Like God

 From Dr. Matthew Sleeth, the leading Christian voice for the green movement, comes a dynamic and surprising primer on all the Bible teaches on caring for the earth— and an ideal companion volume to The Green Bible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9780061937880

Matthew Sleeth

J. Matthew Sleeth, MD, a former emergency room director, now writes, preaches, and teaches full time about faith and the environment. He is the author of Serve God, Save the Planet and the general editor of The Green Bible. With his wife, Nancy, and their two children, he helps lead the growing creation care movement. The Sleeths live in Wilmore, Kentucky.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Log in My Eye

A Journey Begins

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, Let me take the speck out of your eye, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

(Matt. 7:1–5)

One Sunday, shortly after I became a Christian, a pastor and I started talking about environmental stewardship. At the end of the conversation, the pastor told me I had a tree-hugger theology. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have rarely heard the terms "tree-hugger and theology" used in the same sentence kindly.

His comment made me wonder: was I on sound theological ground? Becoming a Christian had led me to rethink many areas of my life; the books I read, the movies I watched, and the friends I spent time with had all changed. Should I also reconsider my views on the environment?

Fortunately, Christianity is based on a book, the living Scriptures. Unlike politics and culture, this book never changes. It is the rock on which I base my life. When I have questions, the first place I look for answers is the Bible.

So I asked myself, What, if anything, does the Bible have to say about caring for the earth? Using an orange pencil (I wish it had been green), I read the Bible from cover to cover, underlining everything that had to do with nature, God’s revealing himself through creation, and stewardship of the earth. What I ended up with was an underlined Bible.

It turns out the Bible has a lot to say about what I think is the most important moral and spiritual crisis facing us today. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is filled with instructions on how we can demonstrate our love for the Creator by caring for his creation. He wants us to love every sparrow and every tree—just as he does. And he wants us to demonstrate love for our neighbors by sharing his sustaining blessings.

Reading the Bible through a green lens radically changed my life. Eventually, I left a successful career in emergency medicine to work on the greatest global health crisis humanity has ever faced: the health of our planet. My family and I reoriented our life away from material things and toward God.

In this book, I invite you to walk through the Bible alongside me and share my family’s spiritual and environmental journey. Although I was an environmentalist before I was a Christian, I did not act like one until faith inspired me to significantly scale back my lifestyle. The purpose of this book is to share with you what I learned and, I hope, encourage you to become a better steward of the sustaining gifts that are on loan to all of us. We will not be merely prooftexting specific passages, but rather exploring some of the deepest themes of Scripture—repeating patterns in the Bible that counsel us to lead lives closer to the example set by Jesus. Further, we will be expanding the popularly held notion of green. Instead of narrowly focusing on how much electricity we use and what cars we drive, we also will unpack how electronic entertainment interferes with our relationship with the Creator, and how living a biblical 24/6 life instead of a worldly 24/7 life can bring us closer to God. Throughout this scriptural odyssey you will discover, as I did, that the less we fill our homes with material things, the more contented and spirit-filled our lives will become.

How did this scriptural journey begin? For much of my adult life I did not believe in God. I thought that science and rationality were the keys to unlocking the way to happiness. I didn’t go to church, own a Bible, or hang out with people of faith. I had been brought up in a Protestant household—but it hadn’t taken. Nancy, my wife, was raised in a conservative Jewish home. We met when she was eighteen, and married when she was twenty. Reactions from family and friends convinced us that religion was simply a means for people to justify their own prejudices.

For the next two decades, we pursued the American dream. I had grown up in dairy-farming country and was working as a carpenter when we married. Nancy convinced me to enroll in college, and a few years later I was accepted to medical school. After residency, we moved to a postcard-perfect neighborhood on the New England coast. I was doing something I loved, and I relished the prestige, paycheck, and respect attached to being director of an emergency room and chief of staff of the hospital. I drove a fast car with a teak dashboard, and when I arrived home at the end of a shift, I entered my three-story Greek Revival house with four bathrooms, custom cherry cabinets, and a separate guest suite.

One February, my wife, Nancy, and I and our two children, Clark and Emma, went on vacation to an island off the coast of Florida. The island was warm, beautiful, and quiet. It had no cars and no streetlights. The narrow roads were paved with sand. The children ran round and round during the day, and I made up games to tire them out.

Once the children were tucked into bed, Nancy and I sat out on a balcony facing the water. The stars shone brightly, and a lovely breeze washed in off the Gulf of Mexico. The palm trees rustled. The children slept. In that beguiling, tranquil setting, Nancy asked me a question that was to change my life forever.

What, she wanted to know, is the biggest problem facing the world today?

There is no shortage of problems in the world: hunger, war, poverty, prejudice, greed, and weapons of every sort. Yet, after thinking for a minute, I answered, The world is dying.

I gave this answer not because I was a biologist or ecologist, but simply based on my observations. There are no more elm trees on Elm Street, no more chestnuts on Chestnut Lane, no caribou in Caribou, Maine, and no more blue pike in the Great Lakes. This fish is not a rare or exotic species that has fallen prey to extinction. A few decades ago, the blue pike was the most numerous and commercially harvested freshwater fish in the world—thought to be inexhaustible. It was fished to extinction by 1983.

The fields and fence rows in which I came of age have been bulldozed, plowed, and planted with houses. Many people like me have returned to the places of our youth only to find that they have vanished. When Nancy and I tried to find the ford where I had proposed to her, we could not even find the stream. It had been buried under a subdivision.

Similar changes have occurred in humans. We get more cancers, more autoimmune diseases, and more asthma than ever. Our response has been to build bigger hospitals and develop more medicines and radiation treatments. Healthcare becomes more expensive every year, yet we do not ask the question, Is it because our environment is making us sick?

Despite these warning signs, our houses, roads, and cities continue to grow. Plans for the future are based upon infinite growth. Yet we live in a finite world. No one should suppose that these trends can continue unaltered for another hundred years and that everything will turn out all right.

We sat there in the tropical quiet for a while. And then Nancy asked a much more difficult question, What are you going to do about it?

I did not know, but I told Nancy I would get back to her. When we returned home, I resumed my life as a doctor. On the surface it appeared the same—yet I was disquieted. How does one grapple with a dying world? I had seen and dealt with death both personally and in my role as a physician. But how does one get one’s mind around the death of an entire planet?

Around this same time, I came face-to-face with pain and evil. In one week’s time, three women were admitted through the emergency room: all three had breast cancer, all three were in their thirties, and all three died. One of the women died seizing right there in the ER, and I had to tell her young husband and two small children that Mom was gone. Not long before, Nancy’s brother had drowned in front of our children. And a mentally ill patient I had treated several times in the emergency room began to stalk me. I had all the accomplishments and wealth that were supposed to make me happy, but my life felt barren. I had no spiritual compass to direct me through murky waters.

We live in a world of measurements, and yet the evil and pain I was experiencing could not be measured. Our ability to quantify the things around us has allowed society to realize technological marvels. We find much power—even a kind of comfort and safety—in being able to measure something. Yet, there is a pitfall in our reliance on the quantifiable. If we can’t measure phenomena, we may choose to ignore or, even worse, deny that they exist. Evil—like love, hope, and even God—is something that cannot be measured using a double-blind study. Pain and evil defy the quantification tools of modern science.

I began to look in new places for answers. I read through some of the sacred texts of the world. I read the Ramayana, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Koran. They contain many truths. But I did not find the answer I sought: How do we save a world that’s dying?

One afternoon I walked into a hospital patient lounge. I sat on a couch next to a coffee table. The table was strewn with issues of People, National Geographic, and Time magazines. On one corner, I saw an orange Gideon’s Bible. I took it home and read it. In its pages, I discovered the truth I had been seeking. I became a believer—a follower of Jesus.

What I found in the Gospels is a theology vastly different from the secular humanist’s gospel that I had adopted. Before, I assumed that science or business or government would provide the answers. Once I read the Gospels, I realized my heart needed to change before I could make significant changes—changes that would require sacrifice.

I believe that the Bible provides answers to the problems of every age. If the world is dying, God has something to say about it. Even more, he has something he wants us to do. Our proper course of action is woven into the very fabric of the Bible. What we are supposed to do is not so simple that it can be spray-painted on a placard. Our moral responsibility to God, the earth, our neighbors, and the future cannot be discharged by simply voting for the right party or voicing the right opinions. Nor can we rely on others to do the work of change for us.

Instead, the Bible required me to look in the mirror. One passage in particular had a profound effect on me. Matthew 7 said that I was not to worry about the speck in my neighbor’s eye until I removed the plank from my own eye. Jesus, whom I now sought as my guide, told me that I was supposed to be meek, humble, compassionate, thankful, forgiving, and—most of all—cloaked in love (Col. 3:14). These were not adjectives that I would use to describe my life. I needed to change.

How could I become more like Jesus—more meek, humble, compassionate, thankful, forgiving, and loving? Clearly, I needed to scale back my lifestyle. I needed to focus less on getting, and more on giving. I needed to consume less, so I could serve more.

Eventually I got back to Nancy with the answer to her second question: what should we do about the earth dying? I told her that I would quit my job and start working full time in a job with no title: green doctor? creation-care minister? ecoevangelist? I didn’t even know how to describe my new calling, but I felt certain that the call was from God. My decision didn’t make any sense in the worldly economy, but it did in God’s economy. Although I was leaving the safety of a paycheck, I was not leaving healthcare. I was simply shifting to healthcare on a global scale, trying to help avert the biggest healthcare crisis our planet has ever witnessed.

The home, car, and job—they are now all gone. Our family moved to a house the exact same size of our old garage—don’t feel sorry for us, we had a doctor-sized garage. We reduced our electricity usage, fossil-fuel consumption, and trash production to a small fraction of the national average.

This book shares what motivated these changes—the living Word of the Bible—and what I learned: that the Bible holds eternal answers to today’s problems. In its pages, I found that God not only loves me but that he loves the tree outside my window and all the birds, squirrels, and insects that dwell in its branches.

What this book does not do is prooftext specific creation-care passages. Readers can easily find a number of articles and treatises that build a strong theological case for seeing green as consistent with being Christian. One wonderfully useful resource is The Green Bible, the companion book that inspired this volume.

While such books are extremely important, this book is different. In it, we will look at many chapters in the Bible that are not traditionally considered green, and we’ll explore how their overarching principles lead to a God-honoring life of stewardship. Instead of just pointing out the most obvious creation-care passages, we will explore pervasive patterns that point us toward a greener, less materialistic life. We will see how using less electricity not only helps us honor the Creator, but teaches us to love our neighbors. We will discuss how remembering the Sabbath is not simply one of Yahweh’s top ten commandments, but a counterculture way of life that calls us to do less so we can be more. We will learn how the principles of stewardship and sacrifice encourage us to choose restraint in a world that says just do it—if you can afford it, you deserve it—and while you are at it, have it your way.

I invite you to journey through Scripture with me, visiting some of the most important characters in the Bible and discovering what they can teach us about caring for God’s creation through daily spiritual practices. We will allow the Bible to speak for itself and tell us what God thinks of our all for one and none for all society, and we will share creation-care wisdom of church leaders through the ages. Once and for all, we will answer, How would Jesus save the earth?

I believe that humanity stands at a great crossroads. We hold the fate of God’s creation in our hands. This is not because there is no God, or that God is not all-powerful, loving, or in control. Rather, it is the result of our being made in the image of a Creator God. We are free to choose life or death, light or darkness, and the very fate of our own souls. With this awesome responsibility comes not only the stewardship of the natural world we inhabit but the fate of our children, and our children’s children.

Today, I understand that God used my tree-hugger discussion with the pastor and a couple of profound questions from my wife to lead me on an environmental and spiritual journey through the Bible. In addition to forcing me to look in the mirror and change my environmental footprint, Matthew 7 inspired me to continue seeking answers: Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened (Matt. 7:7–8).

It is my prayer that you will continue the journey with me. Together we will discover why the Good Book is, indeed, a green book.

We’ll begin where it all started, in Genesis, the creation of heaven and earth.

ONE

Work

The Garden

The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…. The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

(Gen. 2:8–9, 15)

For most of the previous two decades, our family lived in northern New England, either a stone’s throw from the Canadian border or within the sound of the granite shoreline of the Gulf of Maine. We began gardening there—a small strawberry patch to start, then peas, squash, and a tomato plant or two. But you can’t claim to be a gardener in those latitudes unless you’ve planted potato sets in long rows—and harvested them—which we eventually did. By the time we were getting the hang of feeding ourselves, we moved south. Or, rather, to the South.

As soon as we got settled in, we began turning over a patch of yard to start a new garden. Potatoes, at least the species we planted, did not do well in the blistering heat and the long dry spells of our new home. The second year we adjusted. Nancy noticed that we really have two New England summers, back to back, here in Kentucky. Maybe there was time to get two plantings in parts of the garden during one season? In August, we began clearing the spent cucumber and squash tendrils and got down to the bare earth. The ground was harder than I’d thought dirt could get, having just been turned a few months earlier. More like a ceramic than a clay. I began sinking the blade of my shovel, then lifting and turning the desiccated top soil. It was tough slogging.

Hank, my next-door neighbor, wandered by to see what we were doing. He admired the still productive tomato plants. The average one needs three gallons of water apiece in this kind of weather, he said in his soft voice. Whenever he makes an observation of this sort, I think what he is really trying to say is, You beginners better get more water to these tomatoes if you know what’s good for them. Hank is