I.

Whenever I listen to the stories and myths of indigenous peoples, I often marvel at these folks’ apparently seamless integration into the natural order. Native Americans in particular traditionally manifest a deep respect and awe at the natural world, and believe in treading lightly on the Earth and living in harmony with it, rather than struggling against it.

But in recent years anthropologists are suggesting that these peoples might have learned their responsible attitudes toward the Earth through centuries of trial and error, and even disaster.

Prior to the tribes that occupied the Southwest in the 18th century, a mysterious people called the Anasazi inhabited the area. If you go out and visit some of their ruined cliff-dwellings, the tour guide will often remark that the culture died out suddenly and no one knows why. They just seem to have left their homes and disappeared.

Now we begin to understand, through environmental and mythological studies, that the Anasazi culture probably died out due to the mess they were making of their land. They clear-cut whole forests of juniper, and wantonly killed all kinds of wildlife, apparently behaving as if they had absolute dominion over the ecology of the whole region. They acted as if the natural surroundings belonged to them to exploit, and exploit them they did, until they exhausted much of the resources.

At that point the Anasazi ceased to function as a unified civilization. They left their homes and scattered far and wide. Eventually, other groups absorbed the remnants of the Anasazi. These would become the Hopi, the Navajo, the Pueblo, and other tribes. And they are the ones who have preserved some Anasazi stories and songs.

Stories like these should resonate with us, and strike us as remarkably pertinent to our own situation as a civilization. For, from the mowing of the tropical rainforests, to the depletion of the ozone layer, to the increase in Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, to the misuse of our land, water, and air, we follow in the perilous footsteps of these now extinct peoples.

What kind of evil force works within people to destroy the natural habitat upon which their life depends? What kind of destructive power works in our human consciousness to effectively separate us from God and from our own nature, and therefore from creation?

The Bible refers to this kind of thing as sin. We give the name sin to whatever force within us inspires us to work aggressively at cross-purposes with God and God’s creation. Sin takes a limited, peripheral good and blows it up into an ultimate, absolute, necessary Good. And, as with the Anasazi, sin appears among us as the ideology of waste, consumption, development, depletion, and exploitation that has dominated the thinking and acting of Modern people.

II.

Paul means this very attitude when he uses a word like "passions." In Greek, the word is epithumia. It means an inordinate desire or longing for something you don’t have, kind of like what the commandments call coveting. I interpret it as a compulsive lust for more: more possessions, more money, more love, more power, more development, more prestige, more books, more food, more baseball cards... just more of everything.

The passions focus exclusively on "I want," "I need," "I must have," "I’ll die without." They function according to the belief that everything around us is intended to satisfy and glorify us. It is here for us to consume. I once heard a member of one of my churches try to make the argument that the whole reason God put resources on the Earth is so we can use them as we see fit. (I suggested these resources are here to use as God sees fit.)

The attitude of waste and consumption leads to death because we make ourselves the enemies of God’s creation, the enemies of God’s people, and therefore the enemies of God.

The real crime of epithumia, of the passions, emerges when we put ourselves at the center of our universe, and remove God, and creation, to the periphery. When we make ourselves the center, we destroy the connectedness God intends for all of creation and all of life. Because in truth we simply do not actually occupy the center of everything. When we behave that way, we base our lives on a lie.

This big lie echoes throughout human history, beginning with Adam and Eve. The serpent told Eve the same lie: "You can be like God if you disobey God and make your own decisions. Forget about obedience," says the serpent. "Grow up already! Show some backbone! Make decisions for yourself!"

And they do, and so do we. But, you know, it is not the actual disobedience that separated us from God. Separation from God happens before we disobey and when we start to perceive God as someone "out there" whom we can choose to obey or not. Separation from God happens when we begin thinking that God dwells somewhere other than everywhere, somewhere other than right here with and within us, somewhere far away, distant, and unseen.

In Genesis 3, the serpent wins the argument not when they eat the fruit, but when Eve talks about God as if God were some inanimate, absent object out there to talk about. Somehow she just forgets that God dwells everywhere, and in that forgetfulness, she falls into a false understanding of the world. She starts believing the big lie that God exists somewhere else.

But faith in Jesus Christ and his resurrection means understanding that God energizes all of reality. This is what Paul realizes and is trying to get across in this book. Because of what God does in Jesus Christ the world is a different place. What is true and real and actual is determined by God’s act of love for the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. He is the truth. He is what is real.

III.

Bob Dylan once wrote a song called "Gotta Serve Somebody." And in that song he basically echoes what Paul says here. "It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody," Dylan sang.

Paul doesn’t talk about the devil here, but he says we once behaved as slaves of sin. In other words, we tend to live as slaves of the lies and falsehoods generated by our own consciousness, and mistake them for the real, whole truth. We tend to live in fear, isolation, selfishness, anger, and judgment. We tend to live only as far as our five senses and reason can take us, and our senses don’t give us access to very much. We tend to live as acorns with no clue that it is our destiny to be oak trees.

Paul recognizes that, in Jesus Christ, God offers us an opportunity. Christ shows that we don’t have to obey the lies and falsehoods of sin. We may instead act in freedom as slaves of the truth. We can live in the real world, the world God created, the world beneath, behind, and within the one we know, because of what God reveals and accomplishes in Jesus Christ.

We do not function in the world as autonomous agents who may do whatever we please. If freedom means that for us, we simply follow another convenient and self-serving, and in the end profounding limiting, lie projected by our minds.

We enter the world conditioned and programmed by 15 billion years of evolutionary development. We have effective choice about none of that. We find ourselves made of the same basic molecular building blocks as everything else on the Earth. We also discover that we share a connectedness and interdependence with everything else on the planet. We dwell within an incredibly complex dynamic which continually recycles, develops, and renews, elements in a vast churning soup.

We live as one with this beautiful, balanced, creative, blessed, and divine system, and we even die within this system. Why would we want to escape from it? The system of God’s creation and God’s life encompasses everything that has being. "All things work together for good," Paul writes elsewhere. The fact that we have no choice but to obey it does not mean the end of our freedom. Rather, it means our freedom now begins! It means that we express our freedom by consciously, intentionally living in synch with the destiny and development and orientation of the whole universe.

IV.

If we live as slaves to the truth, cultivating a harmony and resonance with the truth, reforming ourselves by the shape of the truth, then we become one with the truth. And in becoming one with the truth we become one with all things, one with all of life, one with every person, one with our true selves, and one with God. Our alienation and loneliness, indeed our sin, evaporate. Only in being slaves to the truth are we truly free.

If we function instead as slaves to our false, illusory, sinful nature, we too will rot and perish. But if we dwell as slaves to our saved, perfected, righteous, sanctified spiritual nature, we too emerge to blossom as something new and unimaginable. We reach upward in resurrection life! We too become a highway connecting heaven and Earth.

We are called to repeat this good news to our neighbors and our family members and everyone with whom we come in contact. We have to proclaim the truth of God’s love revealed in Christ Jesus for all people and all creation.

We have to serve somebody. We may serve "the devil," who stands in for the passions and desires of our mortal existence; we may serve our own fear and anger, our own lust and greed, our own self-centeredness... and inevitably we will wind up as extinct as the Anasazi. Or we may serve the truth, Jesus Christ; the One who comes into the world "not to condemn the world," but that through him the world might be saved.

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