The Rules of the House

The Rules of the House--April 23, 2021

"Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels.  But someone has testified somewhere, 'What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet'." [Hebrews 2:5-8a]

So, we have a recurring conversation at our house between one or both parents and one or both children.  And in some variation or another, the conversation comes back to this:  Mom and Dad are the ones "in charge," but that "in-charge-ness" isn't meant to dominate or bully.  If anything, it means the opposite--we have the responsibilities for making sure every part of the household is attended to, in a way that the children don't have to worry about yet.  

Children in a household have limited responsibilities about their own smaller realms within the house (making beds, putting dirty clothes in their hampers instead of on their floors), which they carry out with varying degrees of success, but the whole household is the responsibility of the parents.  We have to pay the utility bills, make sure there's food in the fridge and the cupboard, find a reasonable temperature to set the thermostat at, and make sure we don't run out of toilet paper, as well as mowing the grass and making sure laundry gets washed.  We mend what is broken, replace what requires replacing or replenishing, give medicines and band-aids for what is hurting, and keep a balance across the physical, financial, nutritional, educational, and entertainment needs of everybody in the household.  Even when grandparents come to visit, the mom and dad of the household still have the responsibilities to make sure kids are bathed and get to bed, dinner is served, and the electricity is on.  So sure, I guess you could say that the parents of a household are the ones "in charge," but it's a mostly un-glamorous servant-leadership, not a cushy life of being waited on by butlers and maids.  

To be a parent is to be entrusted with the privilege and responsibility of caring for a precious treasure and enabling that treasure to become most fully what it is meant to be, in a way that will outlast your own lifetime.  And in a very real sense, that is the kind of servant-leadership the Scriptures talk about for humanity and the created world.  We are caretakers, not exploiters.  We are responsible for the world entrusted into our hands--we are not free to ravage it.

That's the way I think we have to hear this passage from Hebrews, which again, is very interested in talking about the difference between angels and humanity, in order to make a bigger argument yet to come about Jesus--as a human like any of the rest of us, while also being the Son of God.  But everything in its order and in its time:  the first car in this train of thought is the idea that human beings are entrusted with a responsibility over the created world that fits with the way Jesus himself is a servant-leader.  Rooted in the earliest storytelling of ancient Israel's memory is the idea that human beings are made, not as slaves of the gods as, says the Babylonians or Greeks might have, but as co-caretakers meant to steward creation like parents steward a household.  Sure, you can call us "in charge," and you could say that "everything is subject to us," but in the same way that parents are in charge of the whole household--to preserve, protect, build up, and beautify, as well as to enjoy--but not to plunder or ruin.  Or, like you could in a sense say that all the plants in a garden are "subject to" the gardener, and yet the gardener's very purpose is to care for, and even to serve, the needs of the garden, so you could say human beings are entrusted as, well, gardeners, of all creation.   We are not here as God's butlers or slaves, but we are honored with a role of serving the rest of the world.  Like parents are entrusted with the role of raising their children to become mature, good, decent human beings at their fullest potential even after the parents are gone, human beings are entrusted with caring for the world so that it can be its most beautiful and full self beyond our own lifetimes.  We were made for each other, you could say.

For the writer of Hebrews, that notion comes not only from the Genesis storytelling about God creating the world and placing human beings in it as stewards, but also from the lyrics of Israel's ancient song-book, the Psalms.  The quotation used here is taken from Psalm 8 (to be a little more specific than "someone has testified somewhere,"), and it echoes the same idea--that human beings have a place of glory and honor in the world (much as Jesus has a place of glory and honor now in his resurrected Lordship, but that's coming in the next verse) that is best understood as a servant-leadership.  In God's Reign, nobody is a tyrant--not even God, and so certainly not humanity.  In God's Reign, the purpose of power or glory is the responsibility to care for everything entrusted into your hands.  So Jesus' kind of lordship--seen ultimately through the suffering love of a cross and empty tomb--is in the same key, so to speak, as our collective human kind of "rule" over creation: we are meant to care for it, not to despoil it for our own benefit.  We are made to be servant-leaders, providing for the needs of the world around us, helping the created order to flourish and stay in balance, and finding joy in letting other created beings become more fully themselves.  And in so doing, we get a glimpse of God's own joyous glory in having made the world and made us to share in its beauty.  Like parents who smile to see their children grown up into decent and loving adults, or grown-ups who feel a sense of satisfaction to see their household well taken care of, or a gardener beaming to see the prize dahlias blooming come June, we are made to share in God's own delight over the flourishing of beings other than ourselves.  

Let me say that again, just so we don't miss it: our greatest glory isn't in pointing to our own supposed "greatness" or looking out for our own interests first, but in serving other beings (humans, animals, plants, whatever) so that they can flourish as fully as possible.  Like one of our older brothers in the faith from the 2nd century, Irenaeus of Lyons, once said, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive," our greatest glory and honor is in helping other parts of creation to be most fully themselves.  The way to glory is in serving: that is the very fabric of the universe and of God's own being.  Jesus' lordship through suffering love and a cross isn't an exception to the usual order of things, then--it is, in fact, the clearest picture of what real glory and honor are!

Once we get that, then a whole lot of our Christian faith fits together in a way we may not have realized before: the cross and resurrection of Jesus are really of one piece with our human calling to care for creation rather than dominate or despoil it, and both are woven from the same cloth as God's own reign over the universe.  All of them have the same servant-leadership logic of the rules of the house: the ones who are ostensibly "in charge" are meant to give themselves away for the good of all.  Being "in charge" always means serving in love, from parents and families, humans and pets, farmers and their livestock and fields, Christ and humanity, or God and the world.

It does seem more than little appropriate then that as Providence or coincidence would have it, I am writing these words on the day we early 21st century humans mark out as Earth Day.  Because if we take these words from Hebrews and this whole train of thought through the Scriptures seriously, our stewardship of creation isn't merely a one-day-a-year kind of thing, or a side issue for Christians looking for some extra, but very optional, service project or merit badge.  Rather, our calling to be servant and caretakers of the world entrusted to us for the sake of its flourishing long after we are gone is one of the ways we most fully share in the very glory of God. It's more than a once-a-year sharing of ecological memes on social media, or a photo op moment recycling plastic bottles or picking up litter--it's about a whole way of living, a way of arranging our households (in Greek, "oikonomia" or "economy"), a way of ordering our societies, and our generational ways of caring for the world like it is a garden and we have just awakened in Eden.

How might we more fully share in the glory of God today--how might we more fully serve and care for the world in which we have been placed like servant-leaders... like gardeners blushing with joy at the dahlias?

Lord God, enable us to share in your self-giving glory that serves and cares for the world.