Let me explain what I mean by land. Earth is old English word for soil, dirt, ground, dry land, and it later comes to mean district and finally referring to the whole planet. I am speaking about Christ’s relationship on all these levels of land, dirt, ground, and planet.

Today’s reading speaks symbolically of Jesus in the tomb of the Earth by speaking symbolically of Jonah in the stomach of a whale. God gives signs that those faithful who are open will recognize them even though even if this evil generation does not understand them or even distorts them. Jesus says the only sign that will be given this generation is the sign of Jonah, symbolically pointing to the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb of the Earth. Even though many Jews will not accept the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, there will be Christians who do not accept this as a sign and they wage war on the land and the Earth. They willfully ignore the sign of Jonah.

I want to give you some examples: There is a right wing Christian war on the land that supports corporate greed and reckless exploitation of the earth. Conservative Christians see enchantment of the world as a dangerous threat to their faith and their political and economic doctrines. They attack any reverence of Mother Earth as demonic.

Pat Robertson has stated, “What happens in the wilderness, may be important to nature and the natural processes of earth, but is certainly not holy.” He goes on to say, “God gave man sweeping and total mandate of dominion over the planet and everything in it.” For Robertson, environmental care and saving the earth is the work of the antichrist

Fortify your stomachs: Conservative Ann Coulter remarked, “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

The land is poisoned by pesticides and radiation. We poison, in turn, the water tables and streams and rivers and oceans. Pesticides poison the land, residues in plants, soil, and water tables—all creating greater production of crops in large corporate agribusiness farms. In Silent Spring years ago, Rachel Carson has shown how insecticides applied to crops not only poisoned and killed insects, but that there were other unintended victims, the birds who ate the insects and those animals that ate the birds. She saw this as symptom of sick society driven to dominate and conquer nature. Carson, prophetically wrote, “What is important is the relation of (humanity) to all life.”

We recklessly blow up mountain tops in Appalachia to get at the coal. And we upset environmental balance of the mountain and forest, with poisonous chemicals of arsenic and mercury into the water tables and streams, affecting animal life and human beings alike. People bathe in poisoned waters, and they have to import bottle water for drinking and cooking. We have not respected the environment, nor have we restored the mountain environments with trees and vegetation. The mountains remain as open wounds and scars of human greed for energy and reckless actions to mine coal. But to me, they are also scars on the body of Christ.

We use a type of hydraulic fracking, called horizontal fracking, to secure oil and natural gas in many states. Horizontal fracking is more destructive of the strata of the subterranean strata than vertical fracking, drives water and chemicals into the land to create splitting of the earth. It weakens the plates, making the land susceptible to greater numbers of earthquakes. States such as Ohio, Oklahoma, and eastern Pennsylvania have seen an upsurge these horizontal fracking methods expand across the country contaminate the water table with methane and other chemicals that are harmful to life. They have wanted to start horizontal hydraulic fracking in LA in earthquake zones and poison the water table when water has become precious to us in a time of drought. The war on the land is justified in the religious claims of human dominion over the earth and everything. Here religious claims justify economic exploitation and rape of the earth.

This harm to sacred land bring cries like the wounding of a mother. Reckless exploitation of resources, contaminating water and harming animal life make the land sick; and its sickness is contagious for those who are poor and close to the land. Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian, points how the cries of the Earth and the cries of the poor are so intertwined. Mountain harvesting, horizontal hydraulic fracking, pollution with chemicals and unhealthy toxins are not found Beverly Hills or any location where the rich live. It happens where the poor reside. The cries of the land are mingled with the cries of the poor before God.

We sang the Christian hymn this morning, “We are standing on holy ground.”

Let me make the case that we Christians need to re-enchant the land and the Earth with a sense of sacredness. I am reminded of the scene of the burning bush, in which God tells Moses: “put off your shoes from off your feet, for the place where on you stand is holy ground” (Exod. 3.5). In India and Asia countries, you enter a temple or even a church by taking of your shoes. It indicates the recognition that this holy ground. In taking our shoes off and standing on the ground, we experience a sense of holiness as Moses did. You might try this occasionally to ground yourself and connect with the Earth. All the land is holy in the Bible.

In 1944, Howard Thurman, a black pastor and civil rights activist, wrote:

The Earth beneath my feet is the great womb out of which life which upon my body depends comes in utter abundance. There Is at work in the soil a mystery by which the death of one seed is reborn a thousandfold in the newness of life…(I)t is order, and more than order—there is a brooding, tenderness out of which it all comes. In the contemplation of the earth, I know that I am surrounded by the love of God.

Thurman discovers God’s presence around him in the land, and in his meditation on the earth, he experiences the love of God.

In Genesis, it says poetically that we are made from the earth, the soil. This indicates that humanity is intimately connected to the soil and the land. The word from what we were made is the name Adam comes from the Hebrew “adamah”—meaning earth or dirt creature, if you choose “earthling.” Adamah is made from the clods of dirt and soil, God breathes God’s own spirit into the human being, God formed the earthling from the clods of clay and soil, breathed into its nostrils, and the earthling became a living being. Genesis is correct in showing humanity poetically connected to the soil and the land. By tilling the soil, the adamah sustained himself and makes the soil become productive. Our bodies are connected to the soil, we feed from the soil and plants grown from the soil.

Now the story in Genesis tells us that God plants a garden, and God forms plants and animals also from the earth. They share the essential earth nature as the adamah. This links humanity to plant and animal life. God places the human being in the garden. Humanity is assigned the vocation of taking care of the soil and land, tilling, pruning, and caring for the garden. God places the first human beings in a garden. Our vocation is to follow God in becoming gardeners of the Earth.

But let’s shift to the Christian scriptures: Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (Jn 12:24) He speaks metaphorically of his death as a seed placed in the tomb of the earth. Jesus’ body is laid in the heart of Earth in death. Jesus too is connected with the ground. He is three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. God’s Spirit fashions a new Earth body for Jesus and resurrects him to life, and Paul describes Jesus as the first born from the dead, the new Adam. He is the new earthling in God’s future world of promise and hope. He too stresses our vocation to gardening, for he is resurrected in a garden and mistaken as the gardener by Mary Magdalene.

I want to end with the voices calling to understand how we stand on holy ground:

The first is Hildegaard of Bingen, an abbess and green saint in the twelfth century, who wrote a lot about nature. In particular, listen to her poem to honor the Earth.

Glance at the sun/ See the moon and Stars. Gaze at the beauty of Earth Greenings,/ Now, think,/ What Delight/ God gives to humankind/ With all these things…/ The earth…is mother of all…./ The earth should not be injured,/ the earth should not be destroyed.

Hildegaard speaks of the greening activity of God in creating the world, incarnating in the world as a green fruitfulness, and through the continuous greening power of the Spirit. The greening activity of God within the world made the world, the land, and fertility of life sacred to her.

In 1991, thirty two Nobel laureates and eminent scientists wrote “An Open Letter to the Religious Communities.”

Many of us have had profound experiences of awe and reverence before the universe. We recognize that what is regarded as sacred is most likely to be treated with respect. Efforts to safeguard planetary environmental need to be infused with a vision of the sacred and as a universal priority.

They see environmental restoration as a spiritual practice and universal priority for continued interrelationship with the Earth. I find it ironic how scientists remind peoples of faith the need to see the sacred enchantment of the Earth. It is our scriptures pointing to our need for earth care.

The final voice is Sallie McFague, a feminist eco-theologian. She argues that Earth is sacred, it carries the sacramental presence of God. In fact, she invites us to understand the Earth as not only the matrix of life, the mother who creates the web of life, but as God’s body and household. She argues that Earth cannot be excluded from our spiritualities and theologies. “Everything is interrelated to everything else.” We Christians need to see ourselves as part of the web of life, an incredibly vast, complex, subtle, beautiful web that amazes us and can call forth our concern for ourselves, a reverence for life, and see the Earth as the sacramental presence of God.

McFague understands the Earth as house, God’s body that we live on and are entrusted by God to live responsibly upon. She gives us three principles or household rules to live on the Earth.
 * Take your share only. Do not exceed the use of the Earth’s resources.

*Clean up after yourself. If you make a mess, clean up your mess. It is the      responsible action to do.
 *Keep the house in repair for future occupants. Use responsibly so others after us can use the Earth. We are interconnected with the future occupants.

She argues for respect to recover a sense of the sacredness of the land.
We hear scriptural voices, the ancestral voice of Hildegaard, Noble laureates and scientists asking Christian leaders to recover a vision of the sacredness of the Earth, and Sallie McFague inviting us to understand the Earth as body and household of God.

I would add the sign of Jonah is a warning to those Christians who have distorted their relationships to the Earth out of greed and a drive towards domination. When they are harming the land through reckless scars and harming life, they are harming the body of the new Adam, the risen Christ constructed from the Earth and God’s Spirit. Are we endangered in the process of losing the earthly material that will lead to our own resurrection and the resurrection of life? Or do we as green Christians stand up and fight for the holiness of the land—our vocation to care for the land, all created life that is beloved of God. We stand up against the fundamentalist Christian war and their allies’ crucifixion of the land!