EarthFirst Words Jess Bee
“A challenge to consider our place in God’s created world and the responsibility we have to look after it”
Last year – via social media and shaped by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – VerseFirst’s EarthFirst campaign looked at what the Bible says about the climate emergency and our stewardship of the planet.
“Blessed are the debonair, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). In a French translation of verses known as the beatitudes, the phrase the English-speaking world know as, “blessed are the meek”, is translated as, “blessed are the debonair”. The dictionary defines “debonair” as confident, stylish, and charming, but when the Bible was translated into French in the mid-1500s, to be “debonair” meant something quite different:
1 “His God Story,” in The Eloquence of Grace: Joseph Sittler and the Preaching Life
A person who is not an idolater, one who hasn’t gotten hooked up in anything worldly, one who is so sophisticated as to know wealth for what it is, and that it isn’t everything
… This is a person who has a kind of centeredness that doesn’t let the idols of this world capture it. It’s a kind of debonair in which you sit lightly on the offerings and temptations of this world because you have a vision of something better.1 This reframing of “debonair” and its insight into the statement from the beatitudes was a starting point for EarthFirst – a challenge to consider our place in God’s created world and the responsibility we have to look after it; a challenge to throw off the temptations of consumption and greed, and instead, love outrageously.
10
Interact_1_2021_MK6PRESS.indd 10
09/12/2020 12:10
