Post 15: Being freed from overworking the land
Sabbath and the Earth (Part II)
Hi everyone,
First, a piece of good news. Thanks to you all, the Notes of Rest Fellowship now has 25 paid subscribers! I praise God for all that you’ve done to support my career as a writer. Man, thank y’all! ‘Tis the season to be thankful for all that God has done through The Notes of Rest Fellowship. This thing really takes a community. To celebrate, I would like to play some restful Christmas music just for you at 6p eastern this coming Monday on Zoom. The link is at the bottom of this post. And to all of y’all enjoying my new release Candid, a million thanks. More reflections on that next week when I resume Julian’s Note.
As the US moves towards the holiday season and the UN towards the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai next week (COP 28), I invite us to reflect on our relationship to the land. The holidays are a time of enshrined excess that requires exploiting the land - e.g., food and materialism - whereas the COP conferences are an important attempt to rein in our (meaning the industrial West and China) abuses on the land from which we have come and to which we shall return.
Western Christian theology has played an outsized role in the toll on the earth imposed by materialism and geopolitical strife. We have bastardized the passages in Scripture that speak to human dominion, such as Genesis 1 or Psalm 8. On myopic readings of these texts, the logic goes that we have been given full-reign over the earth as God’s custodians of it, and as such we get to exploit its resources as we like. (You don’t have to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior to be christianized in this way.)