This morning Jesus instructs his disciples as they are sent on mission of God’s Reign I want to focus on the significant line: “Freely received, freely given.” Jesus expresses his whole notion of the economics of God’s kin-dom and symbolize his whole notion of God’s unconditional and inclusive grace. Just as he instructs his male and female disciples, so we today we received his instruction.

Jesus sets the criteria of gift exchange, for what it means to freely receive and freely gift. UK eco-theologian Anne Primavesi writes, “His (Jesus) injunction to his disciples lays bare the radical, anarchic nature of relationships within the kin-dom (kingdom) of God.” “Radical” and “anarchic” are used to describe both the economic and grace relationships in God’s kin-dom.

It raises a profound and dangerous question for myself: “To whom does the Earth belong?” Walter Brueggemann writes,

Once the claim of the Creator God has been sidelined, the sense of human entitlement may stretch in the contemporary world all the way from private consumer desires to aggressive pursuit of oil as “our oil.” The inevitable outcome is a loss of common good, and a refusal through taxes an infrastructure that will keep life livable (and sustainable my addition), because taxes take away from private self-aggrandizing.

The idea of “property” has developed in contrast to the biblical tradition that the land (and the Earth) belong to God. In the eighteenth century, the British jurist and legal scholar William Blackstone wrote, “The Earth, all things therein, are the general property of mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator.” British eco-feminist theologian Anne Primavesi has explored how starting from the Reformation, property was transformed into the colonial instinct to English colonization and domination. She writes, “God gave the land to be used by industrious and rational men. However, it was the potential to exchange the potential wealth of the land for hard currency that fueled the massive appropriation of the land by the English colonists in the seventeenth century.” Thus, the European notion of property ownership and land, and the Earth, was translated destructively into the Doctrine of Discovery, originated by European Protestant and Catholic Christianity. It propelled colonial conquest and appropriation of the Americas by giving religious justification to seize the lands of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the Doctrine became a principle of American authority and ownership of conquered and appropriated lands. Christian colonization and the legal justification of land conquest and seizure of indigenous lands became a property war. It was a conflict of property ownership against indigenous notions of the gift of land. There was a disdain for the spirituality of North American indigenous connected to the Earth. Even today, the Doctrine is still used in courts in legal cases against Native Americans fighting in defense of their sacred lands against the fossil fuel and mining corporations.

In the US and many other countries, humans not only own the land but the wildlife that inhabits their lands. Wildlife, even on private property, is owned by the state. The state of Oregon mandated through legislation, “Wildlife is the property of the state.” How many states exercise their ownership of fish and wildlife by issuing fishing licenses and hunting licenses? Human claims the rights to land, water, wildlife, and minerals or fossil fuels in the Earth.Environmental conservationist Aldo Leopold observes sadly, “We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

The culture, economics, and politics of property—especially, within a “winner take all” capitalism that is driven by short term greed and profit—recklessly exploit the fossil fuel resources of the Earth at all cost. They abuse the land by misusing the land and the Earth as God’s gift. The root of the our misuse is the failure to realize the Earth is a gift from God.

Our government justifies corporate greed at the expense of life. The EPA just placed Dr. Ruth Etzel, Director of the Office of Children’s Health Protection, on leave. Her office focused on protecting children’s health from environmental dangers to children—such as lead poisoning and cancerous toxins. Children’s health and along our natural environment does not need regulation or protection.

Another example is that Nestle corporation has been denied draining valuable water in California during drought conditions and bottle and sell the water. This commodification of a natural resource for life needed that should be a right and available for human life. The state of Michigan has allowed Nestle to expand it water extraction while not correcting the polluted drinking water for the town of Flint. Corporate greed treats the land for continual profit while disregarding the original divine gift of Earth to all life.

Indigenous peoples, however, do not understand the land and the Earth as property as the European and later American colonizers did. In fact, indigenous peoples understand the land as divine gift as the Hebrew Bible and Jesus understood. Let me give you few contrary examples to the notion of Earth and land as property.

For example, Quaker author Parker Palmer contravenes this notion of ownership and control of land:

The ownership of private property has long been a touchstone of the American dream — for better (when we’re able to meet our basic needs) and for worse (when need becomes greed and overwhelms generosity and economic justice). But when “ownership” is applied wholesale to nature, there’s no better, only worse. The arrogance that leads us to say “We own this patch of the planet” has also led us to foul our own nest and desacralize much of the earth.

Palmer reverses the notion of ownership, and he directly quotes Margaret Atwood’s poem, The Moment. Here nature responds to humanity:

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around.

Chief Seattle said in the 19th century. “The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to man.” He reflects the perspective of indigenous peoples of the Earth. Pope Francis in climate change encyclical, Laudato Si:

From them (indigenous peoples), land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God and from their ancestors who rest there, a sacred space, with which they need to interact if they are to maintain their identity and values. When they remain on their land, they themselves care for it best.

Indigenous peoples relate to Earth as sacred, full of animate life and divine presence (which Christians identify as sacramental presence), the interrelatedness of all life, and as a gift. Indigenous peoples understand their indebtedness and thus gratitude to the gifts of the Earth. They understand Jesus instruction to his disciples: “Freely received, freely given.”

Let me answer the graced economy of Jesus’ saying. “Freely received, freely given.” Jesus reflects a Jewish creation spirituality and its giftedness, and the fact of planetary evolution (and the evolution of the universe over15 billions years ago). The Earth is God’s primary gift to us. It is not property owned by any human or species. Anne Primavesi and scientist and author James Lovelock together write:

Within the community of life in earth such an irruption of abundant and available flower seeds brought about a flourishing of animal life and reciprocal, beneficial relationships between birds, insects, animals, and plants. These contributed to the evolution of the biosphere in ways that later gave emerging human communities the water, temperature range and nutrients necessary to support life.

The Earth, its antecedents for life, the evolutionary context of temperature and environments sustainable for all life and human life. These are the pre-original gift of the Earth to us. How aware are you of the gift of the air you breathe right now, the land that you walk, bio-diversity, our ancestors, and our descendants?
Today property-oriented society has diluted the original biblical principle of land as God’s gift. The arrogance of private ownership of the land and its misuse for personal greed and wealth undergirds Jesus’ aphorism, “No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and mammon (wealth)” (Mt. 6:24). For Jesus, God’s reign took precedence over unbridled pursuit of wealth through violence.

The divisions between the elite and the poor are the result of the exploitation and injustice. God’s ownership supersedes the drive for greed and power of the elite of the empire. For Jesus, the violation of God’s ownership is the violation of neighborliness, the coveting of your neighbor’s land and its acquisition through indebtedness.

Indigenous peoples live closely with the land, and they understand the land and, in turn, the Earth as sacred and gift. There is no direct ownership view of the land, for the land remains as divine gift, somewhat similar to the Hebrew biblical notion of land and the Earth as divine gift. Both the Hebrews and indigenous peoples practiced the gift of the Earth. Abuse of the land and the Earth is misusing them without a sense of God’s giftedness to all life. Here are some examples of indigenous peoples’ recognition of the giftedness of the Earth. They have pioneered a movement of promoting the rights of nature. Maori in New Zealand, and indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia also, have moved their countries to legalize the rights of the nature in their legal constitutions. Many First Nation tribes in Canada and the US have entered the rights of nature into their tribal constitutions. It is now time for the UCC to move in that direction.

All life depends upon the gifts of other life and the conditions that Earth that are produced to sustain life. The interrelatedness of all life on each other, both in the past and the present. Our earthiness is the true gift of God. Our home is the Earth.