Really now, God... you turned the world over to the likes of these ----->? To we humans who come in all shapes and colors and takes on life? And you expect that we'll use good sense while we're managing earth's affairs? Silly God! You could have done better, don't you think? Improved our moral fiber. Enhanced our reasoning functionality. Increased our wisdom. If you'd done all that maybe we'd be kinder to the land and more humane to one other...
As it is, it seems it was God's design and intention from the very beginning to create an amazing planet with a phenomenal capacity to support life and then surrender control of it (Genesis 1:28-30). Mindboggling! How can there be enough cows and mushrooms on earth for everyone who wants a mushroom-Swiss burger on a Tuesday afternoon to have one? Well, obviously part of the answer to that question is that there are scads of people who don't have what they need to survive, much less what they want. Which leads to the question of why don't we humans do a better job of sharing?
Perhaps because we're selfish or simply not mindful of the plight of others of our kind. Or we're fearful. Or callous. Or we defiantly disregard our reason for being in the world. Yes, God created the world and handed it over to us to work it so that it would work for all life. And that's not just about food and water and shelter. It's also about not doing harm to the earth and to those who walk upon it. It seems it is also part of God's design and intention that humans embody God's way of doing life as they go about doing life. And that means some hard stuff like forgiveness and reconciliation and not being hung up on a person's face (that's what it means to not be partial! see Acts 10:34-35) - whether it is brown or red or wrinkled or topped with purple hair or feminine or sightless or small. Oh, silly, silly God to believe that we will happily and boldly take all this hard stuff on as you have!
Yet 'tis so. Paul says straight up that we are "ambassadors for Christ" who have been handed the "message of reconciliation" (II Corinthians 5:19-20). And the salty scholar Robert Capon claims in his masterful Hunting the Divine Fox that the church is "not in the business of telling the world what's right and wrong so that it can do good and avoid evil. [The church] is in the business of offering, to a world that knows all about that tiresome subject, forgiveness for its chronic unwillingness to take its own advice... The church is nothing but the world under the sign of Baptism. It is the mixture as before, dampened. It contains as many scoundrels as any other sampling - and they practice their scoundrelism with as much vigor as the best of them." Yep, God intends that we be reconciled. That we forgive. That we not play favorites. Every first and last one of us scoundrels.
Oh, silly, silly, silly God! Good thing you are not undone by disappointment! And that your grace is surely as sturdy as your hope for us!