Matthew 6:25-27; Genesis 1: 27-31

The last three weeks we have taken a theological journey along highway 80 and beyond, looking at faith and leadership in the past, faith and sense of space, faith and spiritual perspectives of immigrants.  As I made clear in our newsletter, our congregation in its size and membership is a lot like a Hawaiian congregation. Today, as we celebrate Hawaiian Sundays we begin a four week series on Hawaiian concepts and how they relate to the Biblical text and our Christian journey.  So we shift from the endless space along the full width of the North American continent to the fiftieth state consisting of a few small islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is interesting that Hawaii tourism likes to market the islands as the most remote archipelago in the world.   That may be kind of a technical distinction. I’m sure it isn’t by that much.  Of course it doesn’t feel that remote when you land in Honolulu. But it is true that the Hawaiian islands, or the Sandwich island as they were known under British rule, are remote, not just when you think of location, but isolated in terms of currents and prevailing winds. For more than a century the Spanish sailed from Acapulco to Manila and never stumbled on them.  What I am trying to do during these four Sundays is look at this remote chain, these specks in the ocean so awkwardly placed that they kind fall of a lot of world maps, and look at them as a microcosm of our world. In other words, what can we learn from the struggles of the people there for the wider world?  You see, as we may be isolated in space as a planet we spin around our sun, so in a way Hawaii is isolated from us. The way we will explore this is by going from large to small.  We start with the natural environment today, then look at society, next we consider the family and finally the individual in the whole.  Today our topic is malama ka ‘aina.   The Hawaiian language, one of most pleasant and vowel rich languages, has only about 12 letters to make all words.  Similarly words can be used to describe many concepts, expressing the wholeness and integrity of traditional Hawaiian thinking.  Malama means to take care of, care for, preserve; to keep or observe, as a taboo; to conduct, as a service; to serve, honor, as God; care, preservation, support; fidelity, loyalty; custodian, caretaker. That is a quite a mouthful isn’t it.  ‘aina means the land. Ka means “The” most of the time.

Friends, I have chosen two texts from the Bible that talk about our relationship to the natural world.  In the creation story in Genesis chapter 1, verse 28 gives as a clue:” And God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish in the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”  Well, friends, we humans are not very good at keeping commandments, but we sure followed this order. We sure have been fruitful and multiplied, shooting for seven billion, and boy have we ruled over the fish and the birds.  We have dramatically overfished, threatening species with extinction and have pushed many animals out of their natural habitat and introduced others where they did not belong.  The British supposedly introduced the mongoose to Hawaii from India to eat rats, only to find out that it is not nocturnal like rats.  Authorities are trying desperately to keep snakes out of Hawaii to avoid a snake take-over of the fragile habitat just like the brown snake did to Guam.  At least we are starting to try and fix the harm we have done to the world.

Then there is the passage in Matthew. We are told to be like the birds and not be overly concerned by what we eat or drink or what we wear.  You see, I think we lived more like Genesis and the Hawaiians lived more like Matthew.  Between the two is a tension: should we control the earth and its species, subdue them or should we just be with them, share the earth with them, learn from them and leave less of a footprint?  The problem is that we can follow neither passage in its traditional interpretation: we cannot continue subduing our tiny planet the way we have and we cannot be free of worry like the birds.  Perhaps we always misinterpreted them.  Maybe in reading Genesis we never understood that we were being blessed and that we were in fact being called to responsible stewardship.  Perhaps we never understood that in Matthew we were being called to throw off our materialism.  Perhaps we are too concerned about lording it over the earth to be with the earth.  I think the beauty of Hawaii’s islands has a way of pulling us back to nature, to belonging to it, helping us to rediscover the beauty around us when we come home.  In his book “Loving Hawai’I Yeow Choo Lak writes:”our earth is not just a place we once lived in and belong to for a few years, but it is lifelong belongingness.”   Friends, if we could learn to belong to this earth, this great gift of God our Creator, then we may stop disrespecting it.  Then we may understand that we are called to stewardship. Malama ka ‘aina. May God help us.