Have you ever wondered how Adam got his name? Given all the possibilities, and the obvious importance of naming, we need to know why this particular name was given and not some other. As it turns out, all the clues we need are found in the story itself.
When God made heaven and earth, the land was initially dry and barren. There was no one to “till the ground” (Gen. 2:5), no one who could work the land to make it productive of life. So God “formed Adam from the dust of the ground (adamah)” and breathed life into him (Gen. 2:7). Then God planted a “garden of delight” – this is what the Garden of Eden literally means – and put Adam in it. His job was clearly defined: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it (Gen. 2:15).”
There is deep significance in what has just been communicated. The biblical writer is making it clear that who we are and what we are to do are inescapably tied to the life of soil. Our identity and vocation, that which is most fundamental about our life, are defined and understood in terms of the health and vitality of the soil from which we literally come and toward which we eventually return. If the soil suffers, we suffer. Moreover, the soil's suffering is a clear sign that we have not lived up to our divinely appointed vocation to be soil-tillers, soil-keepers, soil-servers, soil-preservers. The first human is called Adam because his life makes sense, and is potentially termed “good,” in terms of the ground (adamah) that is his body and the source of his life.
Not many of us any longer have a perspective from the soil. We live in concrete, steel and glass worlds, worlds that are as free from dirt and bugs as possible. Moreover, we are simply too busy to notice the ground beneath our feet (and roads and sidewalks), as we dream and plan for worlds of convenience and success. If we had an agrarian perspective, however, we would know “in our bones” and through our stomachs that our well-being is inextricably tied to the health of the land. What is obvious to every farmer and gardener – that our bodies live through countless other bodies – is now mostly lost to us. More than we care to admit, we suffer from a condition of “ecological amnesia,” a condition in which we naively think we can live well while the bio-geo-physical processes all around us go into decline.
One of the best ways for us to remember our connection to soil and our need to take care of it is to start paying more attention to food and the ways that we eat. Eating is fundamental. Every time we take a bite or gulp we bear witness to the fact that our life consists of a bewildering variety of memberships that we call creation. Eating joins us in multiple ways to the lives of microorganisms and worms in the soil, to the gifts of photosynthesis and soil regeneration, to the lives of plants and animals, and to the diverse cultural and culinary traditions that give us tasty recipes and times of feasting and fellowship. Food simply is the source of our health. When properly engaged, it can also be a source of justice, peace and joy.
Looking around, we now see that much of our current food production does not serve the health and vitality of garden and farm soils. Soil is eroding at rates far faster than it can be restored (if current erosion rates continue, differing regions will be exhausted within 100 years). What is not being eroded is being severely taxed and poisoned with our heavy regimens of fertilizers and pesticides. Most farm fields today have precious little organic, life-giving matter in them. As my friend and soil scientist Wes Jackson has put it, “We hammer the soil and then put it on chemical [fossil-fuel dependent] life-support.”
When we destroy soil, we also compromise the many forms of plant and animal life that depend upon it. Viewed theologically, what our destruction amounts to is the de-creation of the world, the slow, stupid, sinful unravelling of the memberships that keep life on the move.
One way to think about sin is to see it as the refusal to be creatures, as the rejection of our belonging to and responsibility for the land. Already in the first garden story, human beings were tempted by the thought of becoming gods themselves. As gods they could be free of the limits and demands of mortal life. This temptation has continued throughout the ages, and is now clearly expressed in industrial food systems that have it as their goal to free food of all biological traces. When food is reduced to a “commodity,” then we no longer need to accept responsibility for the natural memberships that brought it into being. We can see food as a human invention rather than the gift of God that it in fact is.
Many of our “foods” are highly processed and laced with artificial flavours and preservatives. Looking at the ingredients list, you will see that these commodities do not contain anything recognizable (or pronounceable!) as food. From an industrial point of view, this makes perfect economic sense. When food ceases to be tied to creation's rhythms and limits, then it can be controlled and made most profitable. The effects of our industrial food systems, however, can no longer be ignored: childhood obesity and early-onset diabetes, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, acid reflux and perpetual heartburn, e. coli and salmonella poisoning, highly stressed and mistreated chicken, pigs, and cattle, antibiotic-resistant pathogens, pesticide-resistant “weeds,” and destroyed rural landscapes and communities.
Scripture's writers were not naïve about the human condition. They understood how difficult it is for us to be the true “earthlings” we were created to be. Adam fails, and he and his family are banished from paradise. But God does not leave us without hope. In the person Noah we are given the opportunity to see what a true “Adam” looks like.
As we all know, Noah is famous for building an ark that saves a remnant of the creation that God is going to wipe out by flood. It is impossible for us to imagine the sorrow that would lead God to destroy what had already been proclaimed as good and as a delight. So sinful had humanity become that the whole creation no longer reflected God's life-giving presence. People were failing at imaging God's ways with the world.
This story, however, is about much more than Noah simply preserving “seed stock” for another go. Rabbinic traditions like to point out that the real significance of the story lies in the fact that Noah was the only one who demonstrated the faithfulness and patience it takes to care for creation. Think for a moment about the knowledge, affection, and curiosity required for Noah to keep all the animals alive for many months in the ark. Unlike his contemporaries (and today's industrial food executives), who saw creation as nothing more than a resource to fulfill their selfish ambition, Noah appreciated the integrity of God's creatures. He understood that each creature is deserving of its own forms of delight, beginning most basically with adequate and appropriate provision for their dietary needs. Can you imagine the attention and work it would take to prepare all those menus?
According to one rabbinic tradition, Noah did not sleep the entire time he was on the ark. The reason: he so much enjoyed feeding the animals under his care that he did not want to miss one opportunity to show generous and grateful hospitality. In this respect Noah showed himself to be like God, who also is sometimes understood as the host of all creation. In fact, John of Damascus, an early church father, once suggested that God's creating/creative work represents one great act of hospitality in which God “makes room” for what is not God to participate in the divine life.
Noah is the true Adam, a “sustainer of life,” because he knows what it means to take care of creation. The ark was no mere escape vessel. It was, rather, the training ground in which the skills of attention and care, and the dispositions of humility and affection, could be honed and refined. Noah emerges from the ark as a “man of the soil” (Gen. 9:20), as one who will lead humanity into a new life-preserving covenant with God.
For many of us, it is difficult to imagine how we might be imitators of Noah as the one who leads us into true creatureliness. After all, how many of us have the skills to build an ark or the knowledge it takes to feed and care for even a tiny sample of the animals we live with? Though we are living in a time when the waters are rising – this time due to climate change – it is hard to know where and how to begin.
One of the most practical and far-reaching ways we can bear witness to a healthy creation is by paying greater attention to our eating habits. Obviously, we need to burn less fossil fuel, waste less topsoil, degrade and use up less water. But one of the best ways for us to do that is to eat responsibly grown food produced closer to home, either by shopping at farmers' markets or by buying directly from farmers themselves via “community-supported agriculture” (CSAs). The average food item travels a distance of approximately 1,500 to 2,000 kilometres to get to our plate. That represents a lot of fuel for transport. What is not factored in, however, is all the fuel necessary just to get the plants growing and harvested (fertilizer production and application depend on a lot of fossil fuel use too). By many estimates, one calorie of food energy presupposes spending/wasting 10 calories of fossil fuel energy. This is simply unacceptable. It is also hugely inefficient and
destructive. According to an economist's logic, it would be better for us to drink the oil directly!
We can become better caretakers of the land if we support local food economies that grow food without all the fuel, fertilizers, pesticides, and stress that now circulate throughout our industrial food networks. Ideally, we could each commit to starting our own gardens, not with the aim of growing all our own food – a massive undertaking – but with the hope that we will learn to be more respectful and patient with the gifts of God. Churches should take the lead by starting community gardens all across the land, transforming lawns into beautiful oases that produce food and flowering plants alike. The potential for spiritual formation and community outreach is tremendous.
To be a gardener or farmer is to know that we don't control the processes of birth, life, death, and regeneration. The best that we can do is attend to God's life-giving processes going on all around us, exercise caution and care, and then gratefully receive what God so abundantly provides.
Creation today is in serious distress. Everywhere we turn there is yet more bad news of this species going extinct, that habitat being destroyed, some new disease working its way through a population. It is easy for us to lose hope in a time when we need it most.
Ecclesiastes tells us that “whoever is joined with all the living has hope …” (Ecc. 9:4). Eating is the daily reminder and opportunity for us to join with creation in ways that will further God's life-giving ways. When we commit to eating and living in ways that draw us more deeply into the health of the world, we will find there the gracious presence of God at work. Sensing and tasting God's life-giving presence is the true inspiration for our hope. As we devote our attention and energy to the well-being of each other and all God's creation, we will fulfill our divinely appointed vocation, which is nothing more and nothing less than to become worthy of our first and enduring name – Adam.
