Easter for Earth

Earth is being crucified. Is there an Easter for Earth, too, or just humans?

That question asks more than whether our pets “go to heaven” (thank you, Pope Francis, for reassuring us about that). By wondering about an Easter for Earth, I mean to wonder whether Earth can be our heavenly home. Biblical writers seemed to think so, and in ways that I never would have imagined in the Evangelical world of my youth. Realizing this shifts the frame of my faith so dramatically, it almost feels like a different religion.

I’m not sure I would have grappled with such a question if I hadn’t wrestled for so long with religious attitudes concerning lesbian and gay people, which shaped a great deal of my scholarly life for many years. By delving into critical social theory as an academic, I have since then appreciated how helpful such theorizing is for my life as a parish priest—in my life as a “woke” priest, I suppose one might say these days.

“Queer theory,” it turns out, seems rather at home in religious spaces, and it offers handy tools for doing constructive theological work in Christian traditions—even pastoral care. The Easter season reinforces that supposition at nearly every turn: however we wish to think of the “risen Jesus,” he’s not a ghost nor a resuscitated corpse but continually defies tidy categorization—just as a queer theorist might hope.

It helps to recall the suspicion queer theorists harbor for binary categories, which nearly everyone uses quite regularly: day and night; young and old; black and white. That’s an extremely short list of examples, and they are considered “binary” in character because they are usually defined by means of opposition, with each term neatly separated from the other. Daytime is the opposite of nighttime, in other words, and to be young is not yet old, and whatever black looks like, it’s not at all white.

But upon further reflection, the lines and edges between such categories quickly start to blur. We have words for that, too: dusk when day starts shading toward night, and middle-aged when we are no longer young but still some years away from “old,” and of course the color palette offers many different shades of gray between “black” and “white.” (That palette certainly calls our racial categories into question just as the new Pope apparently does with some “creole” ancestry, which is a Caribbean mix of both European and African lineage.)

Taking all of that into religious institutions can feel a bit harrowing or at least unsettling. The Bible itself, for example, is typically divided between the Old and New Testaments. Are the terms “old” and “new” binary opposites? The older testament is surely not obsolete given how often the Gospel writers quote from the Hebrew Bible to describe the good news of Jesus.

And that brings us to Easter. If we dare condense the richness of the Easter proclamation, it might be this: God, the giver of life, is also the giver of new life.

But what exactly does that word “new” mean in that sentence? Is there any continuity between the “old life” that has passed and the “new life” that is given? Or does the hope for the “new” rely entirely on discontinuity in an absolute sense? (I’m indebted to British theologian and scientist David Wilkinson for framing the question in that way.)

The Gospel writers had an opinion on that question, which they offered by giving us a risen Jesus who still bears the scars of crucifixion—a risen Jesus, moreover, who is not at first recognizable until those scars are seen. “Old” and “New” blend and mix together in Easter stories in ways that defy tidy classification schemes—to which queer theorists would likely smile and nod their heads.

But what about Earth?

Modern Western Christianity has instilled in so many of us, in both subtle and explicit ways, a religious vision of the Christian Gospel as an “escape hatch” from Earth; the Christ event is framed mostly as a divine rescue mission, saving those who believe by transporting us to a far-off, distant place called Heaven.

I’m caricaturing that vision to make sure we notice how it lurks around the edges of even the most “progressive” congregations in the liberal Protestant world—and it’s literally killing the planet. The late-nineteenth century social theorist Max Weber voiced a deep concern that the Protestant Reformation had in effect evacuated God from Earth, leaving this planet a “disenchanted place,” basically a giant storehouse of stuff for us to use however we wish. All sorts of writers, activists, ministers, and scientists since then have been sounding the same alarm on this—and its clarion call needs to wake us up, now.

The stubborn separation of human life from planetary life has been inscribed not only on our liturgical texts and in our ecclesial patterns, but also—and largely because of this—on our electoral politics, public policies, and corporate business plans. The Roman Empire killed Jesus; the human empire is crucifying Earth—will she, like Jesus, enjoy an Easter?

Perhaps practicing a (queer) suspicion of binary categories should belong more directly among Christian spiritual disciplines, which might make the question of Easter for Earth a bit less peculiar and more obviously woven into Gospel proclamation.

It just so happens that tomorrow, on the Fifth Sunday of Easter, the lectionary will invite us to hear a passage from the Revelation to John (21:1-6) that rather dramatically features a classic binary construction. The passage includes a vision of a “new heaven and a new earth.” How do we think about that word “new” in relationship to God’s creation? Does it mean that the “old” is entirely set aside or even destroyed? Is God starting over with a blank slate? Couldn’t we and shouldn’t we find a much more fruitful and constructive way to imagine the relationship between “old” and “new”?

Maybe it’s the American obsession with “frontiers,” or maybe it’s the tech world’s obsession with “innovation,” or maybe it’s global capitalism’s reliance on the “latest shiny thing” to bolster profits—whatever the source, the modern notion of new in relation to Earth has been nothing short of a disaster. When Earth herself is considered ultimately disposable, it grants (religious) permission for environmental destruction and unthinkable ecological ruin.

How then do we live as an “Easter people” observing a season of new life in which the old has not entirely disappeared? The scarred but risen Jesus poses precisely that question, reminding us that something new has indeed emerged from death, not to erase the world death marred but to heal it and raise it up into the light of a new dawn.

Perhaps the passage from John’s account of the Gospel (13:31-35), which we will also hear tomorrow, offers the only possible answer to the question of Easter’s newness: “Love one another.”

It’s not queer theory, after all, that will save any of us, but only love. Only love can heal the wounds from our past we cannot even bear to name and then carry us into a future we barely dare to imagine.

So, love one another, John’s Jesus says. Love whatever remains from our older selves, and whatever is emerging as something new—just love one another. And let’s be clear, this is not optional. It is so mission-critical that John’s Jesus calls it a commandment.

We must love one another, everyone, no exceptions—and we must love Earth herself into healing and renewal. Love alone will render Earth into our heavenly home—the hopeful Eastertide for this precious Earth.