Climate Change – Peculiar Faith

Red Sky at Morning

The wider world of God’s creation isn’t always a cozy place. The biblical texts assigned for the third week in the Season of Creation offer a stark reminder that we’re dealing with a bit more in this season than just a soothing tableau of endearing animals or even a beautiful painting of a static landscape we can admire from a distance.

We are embedded in this world, a world alive with the presence of God—a world to which we can, and must pay very close attention.

Crewing a tall ship on my days off I’ve learned from the ship’s captain what it means to attend carefully to one’s surroundings, not only what’s happening on deck, among the passengers, or with the sails, but also out on the distant horizon where storm clouds might suddenly sprout. On the Great Lakes, storms can form quickly and move rapidly and take careless sailors by surprise.

The third Sunday of the Season of Creation features the sky, and everything in it—sun, moon, and stars, as well as the clouds, which can sometimes paint the sky with multi-colored cotton balls and sometimes darken the sky with portents of disaster.

The old maritime adage would serve us well this week: red sky at night, sailors’ delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Matthew’s Jesus actually quotes that old adage (Mt 16:2), and he does so to berate his own religious leaders for failing to read the signs of the times properly. James Gustave Speth urged modern readers to do that very thing back in 1980, and even more directly concerning the signs of the environmental times. His book—Red Sky at Morning: American and the Crisis of the Global Environment—was Speth’s attempt to ring the collective alarm bell about climate change. He also was a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and his warnings have gone mostly unheeded.

In this world alive with the presence of Creator God, the skies, the land and sea, humans, and all the other animals are all interconnected, all of them offering signs that we must learn how to read.

To modern Western ears, paying that kind of careful attention to the world of nature can sound rather unsophisticated, certainly not very “scientific.” And yet, many environmental scientists today—stretching back to Speth’s work and earlier—sound very much like biblical writers from many centuries ago as they urge us to wake up and pay attention to the living world around us, a world in which we are inextricably ensconced. It’s from Earth that we learn the most about divine blessings as well as judgment.

The ancient Hebrew prophets repeatedly exhorted their readers to notice what Earth and sky might be telling them about how they were living, and especially about the judgment they were bringing on themselves by their own misguided actions.

The seasonal lectionary this past Sunday gave us a startling passage along those very lines from Jeremiah, a passage not only bleak but brutal (4:23-28). After the people of Judea, in stubborn arrogance, refused to heed his warnings about impending war and an invading army, Jeremiah writes as if he is the sole survivor of a catastrophe, the devastating effects of which are inscribed on the land itself.

He describes the shocking extent of this devastation as mountains quake, and hills are torn apart, and farmland turns into desert.

“I saw the earth,” he writes, “and, look, welter and waste…”

That’s the very same Hebrew phrase (from Robert Alter’s translation) that lectionary gave us two weeks ago in the first verse of Genesis, when God created the heavens and the earth. Jeremiah quotes that story verbatim twice more in this week’s short passage, suggesting a terrifying reversal of God’s creative work—the creation itself is unraveling, reverting back to its original chaos.

In Genesis, God looks on each day of creation and calls it good.
Jeremiah looks on each stage of earth’s destruction with horror.

Jeremiah is not enumerating only metaphorical devastations. The intensity of human violence and warfare always and quite literally disfigures the heavens—just as the intensity of human violence against the planet renders the air unbreathable. Thick smoke obscures the skies, the stench of spilled blood and death chokes all those still living, and even all the birds of the air flee.

Silence accompanies the darkness in a bird-less sky, as Jeremiah portrays the desolation of earth, as if the sky is speechless with grief over the wreckage wrought by human violence—just as Mark also portrays a bleak and somber sky as Jesus dies in that portion of the Gospel for this past Sunday (15:33-39).

The descent of darkness in Mark’s account of the crucifixion frames dramatically the heartbreaking journey Jesus is taking into every greater isolation—his own religious leaders condemn him; his closest friends abandon him; imperial forces torture him; even God seems tragically absent—and the skies refuse to give any light as the heavens enter a time of celestial grief.

Like Matthew and Luke, Mark includes another curious detail in this story: the curtain in the temple, the temple veil is torn in two at the moment when Jesus dies.

We might recall that the tearing or rending of garments was a sign of deep grief and mourning in that society, and still today for many. Pair this with what we can learn from first-century historian Josephus: the temple veil, or the temple’s own garment, as it were, was woven with four distinct colors to represent the four foundational elements of the Universe. God’s creation tore its own holy garment in grief over the death of Jesus.

Yes, these are grim readings. But if we pay attention to the Earth, and especially to the sky, as these same readings note, we can still find a thread of hope. In Psalm 19, also read for this week, the psalmist depicts the skies as having their very own voice. The movement from night to day, the changing of darkness to light is a form of speech. Their voice is not heard in words and yet they speak, and they praise God their maker.

Just as many others in the ancient Mediterranean world imagined the movement of planets and stars creating their own music, the psalmist sings about the skies declaring the very glory of God.

More than this, the psalmist then makes a connection between the divine glory of the skies and the divine glory of the law, the ordinances of God for righteous living, for reviving the faint of heart and giving wisdom with vision—more desirable are these ordinances than fine gold and sweeter by far than honey, the very color of the shining sun.

God’s law for life, for the very sake of life itself, is written into the fabric of God’s creation, and this alone is reason enough for our gladness and joy—even in times of deep distress and debilitating darkness.

This is what Paul is writing about in the portion assigned from his letter to the Philippians (2:14-18). Paul is in prison as he writes this letter, and the Philippians themselves have been suffering and undergoing persecution. Even so, he says, hold out the words of life to a world that has lost its way. Live like shining stars, he says, in the darkest of nights.

Do this remembering that God is faithful. Even Jeremiah holds out hope that God’s faithfulness will not permit the utter destruction of Earth. Only by holding fast to this hope can we act for the sake of life, holding out believable words of life for a world that has lost its way.

God is faithful. That’s the only reason Jeremiah would even bother to prophesy at all. Bleak and brutal as his text can be, he rants precisely because the people have forgotten what will not change: divine faithfulness. And this is likewise the only reason Paul would ever bother to embrace a life of gladness and joy.

God is faithful. The Church must declare this like we believe it; and then live it as if it matters—because it does, now more than ever.

In our believing and from our living we must offer the words of life for the healing of the world, for a world that has lost its way. Then we will shine like the stars at night.

A Re-enchanted Earth

And it was good.
And it was good.
And it was good.

This is of course the repeated refrain from the ancient story of creation in the very first chapter of the Bible—the Bible begins with goodness.

It’s worth noticing in this story that Creator God declares the light and the waters and the land and the beasts and fish and birds—all of it—as good long before humans ever appear.

Earth herself is good, quite apart from whether or not it is good for us.

Believing that Earth has its own intrinsic value would surely shift how most of us humans think about our place and our role in the wider world of God’s creation.

Devoting time and energy to such questions is one of the reasons I have grown to love The Season of Creation, a mini-liturgical season that has developed over the last thirty years or so and is now celebrated among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and many others in the month of September.

This little season has its own three-year lectionary replete with weekly themes and images. The first Sunday of this year’s cycle, which we celebrated just yesterday here in Saugatuck, was devoted to Earth. to the goodness of Earth, which is paired closely with the goodness of God in the ancient story from Genesis; creation and creator together are good—full stop, no conditions, no caveats.

This emphasis on goodness matters, culturally and politically and not only religiously. Or perhaps a better way to say that: the religious significance of this story from Genesis appears most vividly in its cultural and political consequences.

Early Christian theologians, for example, used this story to destabilize the oppressive power of the Roman Empire, which is certainly a counter-intuitive use of a biblical text. The line of reasoning ran something like this: compared to the God who creates all there is out of nothing, Rome is certainly not eternal.

Equally intriguing is to notice where, when, and why this ancient story was first written. Most scholars date this story to the period of the Babylonian exile of ancient Israel, when Babylon invaded Judah, occupied Jerusalem, and took her people into captivity.

This was an unmitigated disaster for God’s people, and in that time of crisis, exiled from the land God had promised to give to them, it’s at least curious if not terribly odd to devote one’s energy to telling a creation story. The reasoning here ran like this: the Creator God who brings order out of turbulence will surely restore order to God’s people living in the chaos of exile.

Empires come and go, in other words, kingdoms rise and fall, and yet through all of that chaos—all of that “welter and waste” as Robert Alter’s translation would have it—Creator God brings forth order, harmony, and beauty.

Naming and living the significance of this story today presents a different kind of challenge, and in some ways for a much more severe crisis. We modern humans have, in effect, exiled ourselves from the goodness of Earth in the midst of an ecological crisis our ancestors never could have imagined.

Today’s crisis, the challenge of living in the spiral of a collapsing network of ecosystems, pushed me to pay closer attention to the lectionary choices yesterday—and I stumbled into an insight from those texts I hadn’t seen before.

For some years now, I have relished reading the first chapter of Genesis together with the first chapter of John’s account of the Gospel. As some scholars have suggested, John is basically early Christian commentary on Genesis—the first verse in both books is the same: “In the beginning…”

But here’s what I haven’t considered before: John seems to invite us into the inner life of Earth, where the creative Word of God shimmers with divine energy, that Word who was with God from all eternity, and who dwells with us in the flesh (John 1:1-14).

It occurred to me, in other words, that John might be inviting us to notice an “inside” and an “outside” to God’s creation. As strange as that sounds, we do sometimes speak that way about ourselves. Each of us has an inner life, most of which is usually known only to ourselves or perhaps an intimate partner, and also an outer, visible life seen by others.

The failure to think that way about the wider world of God’s creation, about this “inner life” for Earth, is likely at the root of today’s ecological crisis. Modern human societies have treated Earth mostly like a giant rock floating in an empty space—the “third rock from the sun”!—rather than a living organism, brimming with life itself, and with the very Word of God as her heart and soul.

Meanwhile, modern industry and the burning of fossil fuels have exacerbated what is actually an ancient problem. Yesterday’s lectionary described that problem in a passage from the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:18-25): God’s invisible Spirit has been clearly shown through the visible things God has made, Paul says; but human beings have not honored that Spirit.

We’re using the First Nations Version of the Christian Testament of the Bible in this season, and in that version of Paul’s letter, the “failure” to give God proper thanks is referred to as an “empty way of thinking,” which has taken hold of our “foolish hearts”—a powerful reminder, it seems to me, of mind and heart intertwined, connecting what we think and how we feel for the way we act.

Reading from this version of the Christian Testament can remind us that our indigenous neighbors think and feel differently about Earth—about the land, other animals, about sea and sky. Much like St. Francis of Assisi, actually, indigenous communities treat everything around us as living beings. Francis famously sang the praises of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon,” of “Brother Wind and Sister Water,” and of course Mother Earth, who “sustains and governs us.”

This respectful posture of loving relationship—rooted in both indigenous and Christian traditions—certainly seems at odds with our frequent dredging, stripping, drilling, fracking, and burning of Earth, our mother.

In the late nineteenth century, the German ethicist Max Weber sounded a note of severe caution about Western society. He worried that certain strands of the Protestant Reformation had basically “evacuated God from Earth” to reside only in Heaven. This leaves Earth, as Weber put it, a “disenchanted place,” simply a giant warehouse of stuff for us to use however we wish.

Against that grim backdrop is John’s luminous vision of God’s very own Word creating and animating the whole world, enchanting it with divine presence—and this, we might dare to suppose, this re-enchantment of Earth, might very well be a lifeline of hope.

Despair is easier, especially since it is now perfectly clear that we as a species and a global community lack the political will to address climate change effectively, Indeed, many environmental scientists are publishing plans for how we now need to re-orient our lives and adapt to what is now inevitable: seriously harsher living conditions on this planet because of a swiftly changing climate.

“Adaptation” sounds modest and doable; but the kind of adaptation we need to consider is actually quite dramatic and, as many scientists worry, our species may not be up to the task. I truly believe this is precisely what religious communities of vibrant spiritual practice are for. Adapting in the ways we now must, it seems to me, will be possible only if we embrace Earth herself as alive with the presence of God.

A re-enchanted Earth would re-shape what all of us think and how all of us feel for a different way to live.

And still more: a re-enchanted Earth would renew us with hope, perhaps even inspire us with joy, and move at least some of us to dance for the resilient goodness of Earth herself.

I would say yet more about Christian worship: a re-enchanted Earth is precisely why Christians should bother to gather around the Eucharistic Table every week, where God offers God’s own self to us in love, as bread and wine, with grain from the soil and grapes from the vine—this is my body, Jesus says, this is my blood: the very Word of God in the stuff of Earth.

And it was good.
And it was good.
And it is very good…

“Brother Francis and the Canticle of Creation,” Nancy Earle

Born Again to the Love of Trees

This past Sunday, Christians observing the Season of Creation heard from one of the classic creation stories in Genesis (2:4-22). Here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, we heard Robert Alter’s translation of that passage, a “tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”

That passage, in other words, and just like the one in the first chapter of Genesis, is a legend, a myth, a story. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, but it is not a scientific account of how things came to be; it’s a spiritual account of who we are and where we belong in relation to each other, to the wider world of nature, and to God.

This is precisely and tragically what we have forgotten as modern Western people.

The Season of Creation this year begins where the Bible begins, with this powerful reminder from an ancient storyteller of who we are and where we belong.

Notice just a few of the features of this tale of belonging, beginning with a forest.

I’ve read this story from Genesis many times over the years, and for some reason I never before imagined the Garden of Eden as a forest.

“Natives Playing on the Land,” Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Creator God makes the first human from the dirt and then causes the soil to bring forth every tree that is lovely to look at and is good for food. That’s where God places the human—in a forest.

And just like Saugatuck and Douglas, where I work and live, a river was running through that ancient forest. I started to pay much closer attention to rivers when I was living in California and how important they are on a drought-prone landscape.

Soil, water, plants, food—everything that first human needed for life, except for one thing: companions.

As a spiritual account of who we are and where we belong, this ancient story suggests quite directly that companionship is not optional but actually essential, it’s mission-critical for flourishing.

In this era when the Centers for Disease Control has identified loneliness as an epidemic in this society, with a whole host of health consequences, in this era when so many humans feel so isolated, even alienated from the wider world of God’s creation, let’s notice that the first companions of the first human were other animals.

“Adam Naming the Animals,” Barbara Jones

These other animals were not merely resources or commodities, or just a bunch of livestock; these were companions. The first human even gave them names! I don’t mean taxonomic classifications into distinct species, I mean names, like my dear Aussie shepherds Judah and Tyler, and my beloved golden retriever Sydney, and the beagle I grew up with, Ginger.

Perhaps now more than ever, the world today needs a spiritual account of who we are and where we belong with all the other creatures of the same Creator God.

This first week of the Season of Creation draws our attention in that regard to the forest where the first humans began and, I would suggest, to where we must now return—a long overdue homecoming, as it were, to the many forests where we belong.

Back in the 1980s, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture began studying a popular cultural trend of spending time immersed in nature—and especially in forests; people were doing this as a way to address high levels of burnout in the technology industry.

The researchers coined a term for this practice—“forest bathing”—and the results of that study were remarkable. Among people spending even short periods of time in forests, they documented significant improvements in immune system function, notable reductions in blood pressure, accelerated recovery times from surgery, measurable gains in the ability to focus, even among children with ADHD, and also reams of anecdotal evidence about increased energy levels and better moods—and all of this thanks in large measure to the quality of the air generated by the trees, the insects, the fungi, and the mosses.

Having just celebrated Labor Day, giving thanks for a social movement of human beings that vastly improved the conditions for the working poor, among others, let us also give thanks for the shared labor of trees that makes the conditions for life itself on this planet possible.

Trees perform this amazing feat in many ways, not least for the air we breathe in that magical process called photosynthesis that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Air, breath, breeze, wind—these are all equally suitable ways to translate the word we see rendered in the Bible as “Spirit.” John loved making that theological pun, as this season invited us to hear on Sunday from John’s account of the Gospel (3:1-16). “The wind blows where it wills,” Jesus says—that’s the Spirit, the very breath of God, the source of life everywhere on this planet.

It’s the same pun, by the way, made by the ancient storyteller in Genesis. That story begins with the Spirit of God moving over watery chaos like wind—it’s the very same word used to describe God’s own breath filling the nostrils of the first human who then resides in a forest.

As part of this spiritual account of who we are and where we belong, we might take note of what scientists have been learning about trees for several decades now—and it’s mind-blowing.

In his 2015 book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben, a forester, summarizes beautifully what we have come to understand about trees as truly social beings.

A forest, for example, is not just a collection of individual trees; it’s a community, with older trees supporting younger ones by sharing nutrients. Trees can actually count, learn, and remember. They care for and tend sick members and they warn each other of danger by sending messages through fungal networks—I saw this happening in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains back in California: when one tree succumbed to the drought-driven bark beetle infestation, nearby trees started to produce more sap to protect themselves.

We stand today as a society in need of profound change, a dramatic reorientation of how we see ourselves living on this precious Earth and with her many creatures, including trees and forests. The change we need is so pronounced we should probably borrow the now-classic image from John’s account of the Gospel: we must be born again.

“But how can this be?” Nicodemus says to Jesus. I can’t crawl back into my mother’s womb and start all over. We can’t possibly retool our electrical grid, redesign our whole transportation system, re-evaluate our entire food supply, or reconsider how we live with other species—plant and animal. How can we possibly do all that?

How? By falling in love.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould once noted that “we will not save what we do not love.”

For God so loved the world…

God saves the world not of anger but only and always out of love. Always and forever for love.

And so the stories we tell about who we are and where we belong must be stories filled with wonder and amazement and gratitude—stories told by people who have fallen in love with the world of God’s creation.

We must tell the kind of stories that sound like we have just been born all over again…

The Gate of Heaven on a Groaning Earth

The water is delectable in ways I find hard to describe. A week ago, I finally took my first plunge of the summer season into the Big Lake along the shoreline of Oval Beach; the water feels like home.

It’s a mistake to suppose that all the water on this planet is exactly the same. The difference between fresh water and salt water is only just the beginning of the differences. The water in every lake and river is distinctive; every body of water has its own peculiar mineral content, and sediment saturation, and oxygen concentration.

I don’t know any of those details about the water in Lake Michigan, but it does feel like I’m swimming in my own DNA—probably because I was born not far from these waters and so were both of my parents. Something about this great lake has shaped my own bodily life, and I can feel it whenever I swim in it.

The lectionary gave us a wonderful story from Genesis yesterday about this sense of place—about the significance of particular places (Gen. 28:10-19). Jacob falls asleep in a desert and dreams of a ladder with angels on it. Upon waking, he declares that place “the gate of Heaven.” He then assembles a stone pillar in that place and names it Bethel—the “house of God.”

Biblical writers pay careful attention to places, often finding or creating spiritual insights from how places are named. A classic example comes from Matthew, who portrays a pregnant Mary migrating with Joseph to Bethlehem—which means the “house of bread”—where Jesus would be born in a manger, a feeding trough for animals. Matthew later shows Jesus at table offering bread to his friends. “This is my body,” he declares (Mt. 26:26). Born in a feeding trough on the outskirts of the House of Bread, Jesus presents himself as bread—just as he does here every Sunday at the Eucharistic Table.

God always shows up not just everywhere all at once but in particular places: while Abraham sits by the “oaks of Mamre” (Gen. 18:1); as the Israelites pause on the edge of the Red Sea (Ex. 14:1-2); as Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River (Mt. 3:13-17); and where John sits on the Island of Patmos (Rev. 1:9) to receive his apocalyptic revelations.

Temples, altars, sanctuaries, sacred forests, holy ground—places of divine encounter are all around us, and not only inside our churches. Even so, I still kiss the Eucharistic table when I approach it during worship and I genuflect before the tabernacle when I open it—not because I think Christ is present only in these places but because it reminds me that Christ is present at every table set with hospitable grace and the love of justice.

Honoring and respecting these religious spaces can help us notice how physical, material places carry and convey the very presence of God.

This emphasis on physical places sounds very strange to most modern, Western Christians; we don’t usually think this way about our faith. The last three centuries of Western society have instead shaped generations of people with a disembodied faith, disconnected from the physical world we inhabit, separated from the land, even from our own bodies.

What the lectionary has been giving many Christians these last few weeks from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans has certainly contributed to that tendency, and for some the firm conviction that the material world of God’s creation stands opposed to life in the Spirit—the material and the spiritual realms not merely in tension with each other but in open conflict.

That has become such a commonplace reading of Paul’s letter that it is rather shocking to realize that Paul meant precisely the opposite: the material world of God’s creation thrives because it’s imbued with the very Spirit of God.

Body and soul, flesh and spirit—these belong together, inseparably united. Moreover, deadly consequences happen when they are divided, and that is precisely what the modern Western world has done with the vital ecosystems of Earth, treating them as a lifeless warehouse of resources for us to use or, quite literally, to burn.

If Paul were writing this letter today he would likely have much more to say about how deeply God’s entire creation is groaning (Rom. 8:22-23).

“The Whole Creation Groans,” Claudio Rossetti

That’s such a moving image, especially since Paul is referring to the kind of “groaning” that accompanies childbirth. The whole creation groans with “labor pains,” he says, struggling to give birth, eagerly anticipating the “redemption of our bodies.”

It sounds like he’s mixing metaphors, doesn’t it? Childbirth and redemption don’t seem to belong together, but I think Paul is inviting us to consider how they really should.

Christians have always wrestled with just how far God’s saving reach extends beyond our own bodies—to the bodies of our companion animals, perhaps, or to the wild ones in our fields and forests and seas, or how about to all the surging bodies of water that cover most of this planet?

St. Augustine, back in the fourth century, just couldn’t bring himself to imagine such an extensive divine reach. “Creation” in Paul’s letter, he says, refers only to the material parts of human bodies.

A few centuries later, Medieval mystic and theologian Hildegard of Bingen begs to differ. We might refer to her as “The Abbess of Earth” as her poetic visions and musical compositions invite us to imagine Earth in every respect and in every atom vibrating with divine energy: the wind is God’s breath; the water is God’s blood; we touch the very presence of God’s own body in the hills and valleys and mountains—just as we do in the bread and wine at the Eucharistic Table.

I find such a vision both enticing and terrifying. It’s actually easier and feels safer to keep Heaven ensconced at the top of the ladder, or to suppose that the ladder itself is our escape hatch from a world on fire. To suppose instead that the heavenly sanctuary sits on our own doorstep demands quite a bit more from us, right here and right now.

Or as David Wallace-Wells recently noted in the New York Times: “it is always comforting to believe disasters are far away, unfolding elsewhere,” never quite touching our own place.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires in New York, June 2023

But when Canada burns, we choke on the smoke—if ever there was a moment to recognize in more compelling ways the deep interconnections of all things, this is it.

Perhaps what is struggling to be born in the world today is a deeper consciousness of God’s own presence, not far away or in some distant future but in each and every ecosystem of Earth right now—and this would be the redemption of our bodies, of all bodies.

This is the hope to which Paul is drawing our attention in this richly packed chapter of his letter to the Romans. It’s a hopeful and yet unseen energy that animates all things. And I think God is calling the Church to make that hope visible, tangible, present, and believable.

The world of God’s creation groans in anticipation of that hope made true and real. And I can think of no more urgent or thrilling mission to join, nor any work more vital and important than that.

Every Christian community gathered in their particular places, in their churches on Sunday mornings, can and now must say with Jacob: this is the House of God, and we stand at the Gate of Heaven—Heaven on Earth, as it was always meant to be.

“Peaceable Kingdom 2,” John August Swanson

Divine Alternatives

Wilfred Owen was a British poet, born of Welsh descent in the late nineteenth century. He was best known in his young life for his poems about World War I.

He wrote most of his more than 80 poems in just slightly over one year, from August 1917 to September 1918, while on the front lines of that war. In November of that year he was killed in action in Northern France at the age of 25, just one week before the Armistice.

Owen experimented with a variety of images to convey the horrors of war, especially what transpired in the trenches of the First World War—let’s not forget that by the end of 1914, just five months into that war, more than four million men had already been killed or wounded in those trenches.

In one of his attempts to write about that war Owen turned to the harrowing story from Genesis about Abraham and the near-sacrifice of Isaac, his beloved son (Gen. 22:1-14). Here is what Wilfred Owen wrote:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

To our horror, the poem’s ending differs from the biblical story; Isaac is not spared—the offspring of Europe are not spared.

Perhaps more horrifying still, and just like the biblical version, there was a way out. God provided an alternative path—as Owen described it, to sacrifice their pride—and that path was not taken.

Owen shocks his readers with the violent ending hoping they would be equally horrified by their own actions—or inaction concerning war. He was convinced that war subverts everything we hold dear as human beings: goodness, justice, empathy, and compassion. Owen subverts the ending of the biblical story to make his point about what war itself subverts and destroys.

The iconic story from Genesis appears repeatedly in Christian history. Most of the theologians writing in the first five centuries of Christian traditions, for example, chose to read this story from Genesis symbolically. Abraham and Isaac arrived to the place of sacrifice on the “third day”; this represents the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Or it refers to the day of resurrection after Christ has been sacrificed on the wood of the cross—the very wood Isaac himself carries, who is himself a symbol of Jesus, who carried his own cross to his death…and so on.

While I whole-heartedly endorse symbolic language in our faith traditions, I also worry sometimes that symbols themselves divert us from the actual story right in front of us.

Abraham was poised to kill his dear son, the one he thought would never be born, and the one through whom God had promised to bless the world—Abraham nearly killed him, but he did not, and God prevented it.

Right there is the key to this story, especially when we keep its ancient Mediterranean context in view. In many of those societies, child sacrifice was not uncommon as a way to secure the favor of the gods—whether for a good harvest, victory over enemies, or prosperity for your extended family.

This story, foundational to Israelite history, suggests that Israel’s God is not like all the others. Israel’s God wants violence to end, and provides an alternative.

That’s exactly why Abraham calls the mountain where this happened, “The Lord will provide,” or as I heard that phrase growing up, Jehovah jireh! That’s a rough, Anglicized vocalization of the Hebrew phrase in this story—the Lord will provide.

Notice the significance of that confidence in this story: even when your course of action seems wise, or prudent, even socially expected, perhaps the only one imaginable, God will nonetheless provide an alternative—and in this case, it saves Isaac’s life.

This story of Abraham embracing God’s alternative still matters, perhaps now more than ever, especially given Wilfred Owen’s brilliant and deeply troubling insight about the human condition: even when we believe God will provide—even when we see the alternative with our own eyes—we won’t take it; inevitably, we choose our own path, even when it’s violent.

Inevitably? Really? Oh, I really want to reject that, which is what worries nearly everyone who reads Owen’s poem. He doesn’t question whether God provides; he wonders whether we will ever take what God provides! Today that quandary applies no less compellingly or urgently in the war we are currently waging against the ecosystems that give us life.

Embedded in a resource-extracting, profiteering, consumerist economy of relentless commodification, Jehovah jireh! God provides a way out—why aren’t we taking it?

Factory farming is simply today’s default standard for our food supply—the daily, hourly torture of thousands of sentient, living beings—Jehovah jireh! God provides alternatives; why aren’t we embracing them?

Meanwhile, the world runs on the burning of fossil fuels—Jehovah jireh! God provides a host of alternatives; but we aren’t adopting them, even while we choke on the smoke of our own fires.

Yes, I know all those instances of “we” are problematic. So whom do I mean?

I mean “we” as individuals, and also “we” as members of Christian churches, and also we the citizens of the United States of America, and yes, We the People—not we the corporations, not we the CEOs, not we the political action committees, not we the lobbyists, but we the people, who once upon a time declared our independence from an empire for the sake, we said, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We European Americans declared that independence nearly 250 years ago, and as members of the Body of Christ today, we have something to say about that agenda: the life must be for all beings on this planet and not just some, and that liberty must include every demographic category we can possibly ever imagine, and happiness should never come at the cost of anyone else’s wellbeing—true delight is shared, not owned.

Perhaps as we celebrate Independence Day this week, we might notice that God provided an alternative to the way things had always been done back in the eighteenth century. Some courageous souls stepped up and followed it.

It’s time we stepped up again, especially as the Body of Christ in a world that is unraveling and in pain.

The way we have done things in the past will not serve us in the future, nor even now.

The God who provided an alternative to the sacrifice of Isaac continues to provide alternatives today, and also the courage and companions we need to follow those alternatives.

This week invites the perfect occasion for giving thanks for such a generous God—Jehovah jireh!—and then, for the love of everything good, and true, and beautiful, to live like we believe it.

The Slap that Truly Matters Comes from Earth

I’ve enjoyed watching Will Smith in some of his movies; I’ve never really cared for Chris Rock’s humor. And that’s as much as I want to say about either of them.

I know there are other things that probably should be said after their recent performance during the televised Oscars ceremony—topics that include race, and white supremacy, and patriarchy, and celebrity culture, and toxic masculinity, and…the list goes on.

I have some opinions—even passionately held ones—about all of those topics. But here’s what I really care about right now: while white America debriefs the spectacle of two Black men in a fight (hardly ever mentioning race, let’s note), the planet is literally burning up and I’m wondering exactly when Earth’s slap across our collective face will finally wake us up.

Statistics rarely help but here are a few to ponder: the Western third of the United States has basically run out of water and it’s not coming back (the Washington Post says “the West is tapped out”); nearly 75% of Earth’s land area is already degraded on the way to desertification (please read that again: 75 per cent of this planet’s land is on the verge of becoming desert); according to the U.N., 27 of the 35 countries at greatest risk from climate change are already experiencing “extreme food insecurity”—food shortages are soon coming to an American grocery store near you if they haven’t already.

I know, stats are mind-numbing, especially since Smith’s slap of Rock’s face this past Sunday evening has now garnered more social media views than all six IPCC assessment reports on global climate change combined. I have no hard data for that statistic, just the intuitive conviction that many, many more know what “The Academy Awards” is than what “IPCC” stands for (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change); here’s an analysis of that agency’s sixth assessment report.

I didn’t want to write a blog post about any of this because everything feels demoralizing these days and hardly anything seems particularly ripe with any hidden fruit of hopefulness. I prefer to find reasons for hope and write about those, especially when I can recommend promising action steps—of which I have precious few to propose. But then it occurred to me: maybe it’s worth writing about “anti-action steps,” about the things we should stop doing.

I’d say it’s time we stop having awards ceremonies of any kind—no more Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, or local Tulip Queen Crownings at the local 4H Club come May. Just stop giving out awards for anything on a planet that is dying right before our eyes. Glitzy gowns draping over red carpets under the glare of media lights? Honestly, as my dear mother would say, that’s just tasteless in the midst of so much wanton destruction.

I’d say it’s time we stop all televised sports, all collegiate sporting events, every single music concert, each and every art exhibit, and any other gathering for the sake of “culture.” This planet’s ecosystems have selected us for extinction—exactly what kind of cultural artifact would you like to make right now and who would be left to enjoy it?

I’d say it’s time to stop going to school and earning degrees and teaching classes—just as teenager Greta Thunberg did for two years—because let’s get real: on what part, exactly, of a burning planet with little water and shrinking arable land for farming would you like to use all that fancy education? More to the point, what kind of job do you hope to have when food shortages in this “wealthiest country in the history of the world” leave our grocery stores mostly empty?

Some climate scientists themselves have said it’s time to stop issuing reports on climate change because no one is reading them and no one is doing anything about them. It’s time instead to go on strike. Good Lord, these are scientists—can we please pay attention?

It’s time we stop doing all these things (and more) because it’s past time to stop settling for half-baked measures from politicians who pander to their “base” constituencies—on both the “right” and the “left” not to mention the useless “middle.” As George Tsakraklides persuasively (alas) argues, our elected politicians feed us just enough empty promises about climate action to keep us mostly well-behaved and unwilling to rock the (leaky) boat. It’s past time to write to our legislators; as Extinction Rebellion urges, it’s high time for civil disobedience, and we Christians need to be clear that such disobedience counts as spiritual activism and sacred work; there is no “Planet B.”

It’s time for every single one of us simply to stop, to stop everything, right now, and let the buses run idle and the bakery shelves stand empty and the dry cleaning go unfolded and the construction projects languish unfinished and the garbage rot uncollected and the livestock roam unslaughtered.

And then, in that pregnant pause, it’s time for all of us to stand in the streets, or on our front yards, or along the sidewalks of our cities, or at the edges of shopping-mall parking lots and gaze upon what we have wrought, what we have allowed, what continues day after day despite what we have known for many decades is our collective suicide.

It’s time for us to gaze upon all of that and then refuse to do anything more until someone steps up, or multiple such ones lead the way into a different future, a future away from mutually assured destruction and toward something like collaborative renewal and collective healing for the possibility of shared flourishing—if it’s not already too late.

I’m thinking and pondering all these things after watching what should have been an unremarkable moment of feuding between celebrities on live television go viral on social media as we Western Christians approach the waning days of Lent and Easter is teasing us over the horizon.

I had some high hopes for this Lenten season as we emerge gingerly from the Covid-19 pandemic but I have mostly failed to preach repentance persuasively in this parish I’m privileged to serve because I really don’t know how to repent myself—only that I should.

“Crucified Land,” Alexandre Hogue (1939)

I’d like to harbor high hopes for the Easter season when Spring here in the northern hemisphere underscores with natural italics the reassurances of the new life embedded in the liturgical cycle.

But my hope runs terribly thin that we’ll stop much of anything or pause for long, if at all, or pay any serious attention to what climate scientists have been warning us about since 1896. Everything we know today about climate change we knew in 1970—and we’ve done nothing. The biggest spike in greenhouse gas emissions has actually occurred in the last twenty years.

This is precisely the kind of moment the world’s religious traditions were invented to address, certainly Christianity, with its endemic apocalyptic flavors. Religion exists for the end of the world—to remind us of its end (its purpose) while also helping us navigate its other “end”—its demise.

So I’m modulating my posture these days, adopting what I call “radically modest hopes.” I’m hopeful that Christian faith communities can become sites of climate refuge and solace as we face storms, droughts, famines, and civil unrest (all of which will not get better but will only continue and worsen).

I’m hopeful that a renewed discipline of shared worship in our congregations can create communities of genuine care, islands of infectious compassion and rejuvenating tenderness in a sea of violent divisions and toxic self-absorption.

And I’m hopeful that playing with our companion animals and hiking in our forests and wandering along our beaches will soften a sufficient number of our hearts to fall back in love again with Earth.

Surely none of us is too old, ever, to remember what it’s like to fall in love: that heady rush of infatuation, surfing those tides of giddy daydreaming, and then that sudden realization that all you ever really want is the very best for your beloved. We cannot allow the modern Western forces of industrialization and the ongoing onslaught of global capitalism to keep rendering Earth an inert lump of coal for us to burn at will; we must love her back to health.

Sociologist William James Gibson calls this vital need a process of “re-enchantment” with Earth. Or as biologist and environmentalist Stephen J. Gould once urgently noted, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.”

So, for the love of God—for the love of Earth—stop caring about that stupid celebrity slap and go take a hike.

Pentecost Matters: Convenience is Killing Us and Recycling Won’t Save Us

I found Lent rather harrowing this year, and these fifty days of Easter now coming to a close frequently sobering, with the long post-Pentecost “green season” looming in California as a mostly brown and brittle time, punctuated with wild-fire anxiety.

In fact, we’re expecting our first heat wave of the season this weekend, with the Day of Pentecost itself breaking the 100-degree mark; the National Weather Service has issued its first “red flag warning” of the year—a dismaying reflection of the color for this liturgical feast day.

fire_globe

Political discourse and national policies have been setting many of us on edge for some time, not least for the gut-wrenching treatment of migrants and their children at the U.S. border with Mexico. This would have sufficed to bathe our liturgical patterns with unease, but these distressing moments have unfolded in the crucible of a planetary emergency I can scarcely comprehend.

A short list of that emergency’s features: living in the midst of this planet’s sixth great extinction event, which we ourselves have caused; an alarming range of foods and beverages testing positive for the carcinogenic compound glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed-killer Roundup (even organic foods are not safe given the porous character of farming boundaries and “forever chemicals” lacing everything we touch); dozens of dead whales washing up on the western shores of the U.S., starving from lack of food or with their bellies filled with our plastic waste; otherwise pristine environments littered with micro-plastics (from the sea creatures at the deepest part of the deepest ocean trench to the crisp mountain terrain of the Pyrenees where it actually rains plastic). whale_air

I used to take some modest comfort when confronting these vexations by following an assiduous regimen of recycling; this too has collapsed toward the brink of despair—what we thought can be recycled efficiently, can’t; and what could be, no longer is. China’s refusal to take any more American trash and deal with our steady stream of barges bulging with “recyclables” simply revealed a nasty truth about Western approaches to “ecological management”: There is no way to live with the many conveniences we now enjoy without also damaging and, indeed, killing the very ecosystems that give us life.

That bears repeating: We can no longer live the way we do, and this will be profoundly inconvenient (a word, as Al Gore reminded us, that the modern West finds terribly distasteful).

The global juggernaut known as Capitalism lies at the root of this distress, but this means much more than dealing with questions of “free trade” or shareholder value. Scholar and journalist James Dyke aptly describes the situation like this:

Most of humanity is tightly enmeshed into a globalised, industrialised complex system – that of the technosphere, the size, scale and power of which has dramatically grown since World War II… The purpose of humans in this context is to consume products and services. The more we consume, the more materials will be extracted from the Earth, and the more energy resources consumed, the more factories and infrastructure built. And ultimately, the more the technosphere will grow…

The stark and grim reality of the “technosphere” is the depth of change now required to dismantle it; “conservation” is not enough and recycling will not save us. That is precisely the insight that shaped my Lenten discipline as I tried desperately to rid my daily life of single-use plastic and mostly failed. Achieving that goal would mean changing dramatically the way I live. And, frankly, I found this too difficult.

My longstanding attempt for quick-and-easy solutions to ecological disaster repeats a similar (and equally ill-founded) way to manage the sickening shock of crucifixion and death. Quite frequently in my life, whenever Easter arrived on the calendar, my spiritual temperature registered relief more than life-changing astonishment:

Whew! We sure dodged that bullet! Great to have you back, Jesus. Now, let’s pick up where we left off.

This is, of course, the very same posture Luke imagined the first disciples of Jesus to adopt in that first Easter season. Encountering the risen Jesus, they ask of him: “Is this the time you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) To which Jesus replies (patiently, I trust) with something like this: “No. This isn’t about going back or staying put; it’s about moving forward. It’s about something New.”

The great proclamation of Easter is not about restoration but rather resurrection, which is not a confirmation of what has been but rather a transformation who we are. This is what the flame-drenched outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost ought to signal—not the fortitude to keep living exactly the way we have before, but burning away the old to make room for a brand new kind of existence.

Pentecost matters—and by extension, the whole of the Church year—in large measure because of the reminders of hope scattered throughout its calendrical rhythms. More than this, for the sustenance needed to live with hope at all. I mean still more by evoking what matters for Pentecost, or the matter of Pentecost itself.

The celebration of the Holy Spirit has too often drifted toward the ethereal and immaterial, especially in the modern West, where the word “spiritual” carries with it at least a suspicion of the “physical.” That suspicion stands in stark contrast to how many of our ancestors in Christian traditions understood the presence of the Holy Spirit—a physical manifestation of a material reality, one that quite literally infuses our bodies, circulates through our arteries and remakes us (among others, see Dale Martin’s work on this).

Right there is where the hope I need resides, in the divine embrace of the bodily and physical announced at Christmas, marked during Epiphany, tested throughout Lent, and raised to new glory at Easter; it is the essence of marking the season of Pentecost with the color green–the living, breathing, animating presence of God on and in Earth.

advent_bubble3

This is not, to be clear, a hope that enables any passivity on my part, as if I can simply wait for God to fix the mess our species has made of God’s dear and precious Earth. It does mean that the transformation this planet now desperately needs is made possible at all by what Elizabeth Johnson compellingly describes as the “deep incarnation” of the Divine Word and the “deep resurrection” of life inaugurated at Easter. God’s creative and redeeming presence, in other words, runs “all the way down” into the deepest depths of God’s creation, to the cellular, atomic level.

That “great work” of God, the healing of our bodies and the body of Earth together, is the work to which the Holy Spirit calls us to join and encourages us to imagine and equips us to do. It is a call, and it does take courage, and we need help, because it will mean a complete and utter transformation of how we live.

Modern (Western) convenience is literally killing us and the planet. Recycling will not save us from this catastrophe, but conversion will, to use an old fashioned word that deserves a comeback.

If the “miracle” of the first Pentecost was the ability to speak in languages one had never learned to speak, then the equally miraculous Pentecostal moment we must pray for today is the ability to live in ways the modern West has not trained us to imagine—in a word, inconveniently.

Come, Holy Spirit.

pentecost

Christmas Eve and the Creaturely Flesh of God

The baby Jesus was human. More importantly still, an animal.

Most English speakers use the word “animal” for something other than human. But of course, we humans are animals, too. The Latin word anima simply means “breath.” Whatever is breathing is an animal.

This matters for the Twelve Days of Christmas, a season to celebrate God’s intimate embrace of creaturely flesh, and it matters on a planet in the throes of an ecological crisis. Christmas matters as a celebration of God’s solidarity with the whole of God’s creation and not only humans.

The Gospel according to John points us in this direction by insisting that the Word of God became flesh (John 1:14). As theologian David Clough notes, the key Greek word in that verse is not anthropos (human) but sarx (flesh), which is used elsewhere in the Christian Testament of the Bible as an inclusive term for all living things, just as writers in the Hebrew Bible used “flesh” to evoke the whole of God’s living creation.

Clough goes on to argue that the foundational Christian claim concerning the incarnation, therefore, “is not that God became a member of the species Homo sapiens, but that God took on flesh, the stuff of living creatures.”

More pointedly, Christianity does not offer an escape hatch from the material world of the flesh, as if all the gloriously messy realities of embodied life are sinful or evil (as the Christian tradition of my youth seemed to suggest). Christian faith invites instead a thoroughly materialistic spirituality.

Appreciating the material world not merely as a grand “stage” on which the human-divine drama plays out but as the location of divine encounter and the vehicle of divine grace has profound implications for how we treat all animals, human or otherwise.

We could begin by noting the mind-numbing scope of animal consumption. Conservative estimates suggest that 56 billion farmed land animals are slaughtered every year on this planet for food. That’s roughly 153 million every day, or 6 million every hour, or 106,000 every minute. These figures do not include marine animals or animals killed for sport or who die in zoos, circuses, and municipal shelters. factory_farm

(For the latest figures on animal consumption, see the online animal kill counter here, and the Animal Equality site for conditions on factory farms, as well as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. For resources on protecting the welfare of farmed animals, see CreatureKind, founded by David Clough).

How we treat other animals—whether in factory farms or on exotic hunting safaris—has a direct bearing on how we treat other humans. Feminist scholar Carol Adams noted back in the 1990s the correlation between how meat for consumption is packaged and how women’s bodies are similarly “packaged” in popular culture. Historian Thomas Laqueur analyzed early modern approaches to human sexuality that compared the “brutish” sexual acts of other animals to the “lower classes” of Europe. Womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas urges us to notice how white supremacy is maintained, in part, through the hyper-sexualization and thus “animalization” of black women and men. And these are but recent examples in a long history of dehumanizing through animalizing, as nearly every human society has done to its enemies before going to war with them.

Meanwhile, as the Apostle Paul insisted nearly 2,000 years ago, the whole creation is groaning with anticipation for the coming day of salvation (Rom. 8:19-23). Christmas marks the dawning of that eager hope, and other-than-human animals were most likely among the first witnesses of that glorious dawn.

The former Episcopal bishop of Alaska, Steve Charleston, offers an elegant reminder of that most holy night when the Word of God became creaturely flesh and of the animals (human and otherwise) who bore hopeful witness:

Now, on this day, all the animals turn, wherever they are, and look toward that place, that one place, where long ago they gathered, drawn by a wordless summons, to see the future of creation born, lying in straw, a sleeping hope, nestled safely among them. The animals know that this is the eve, the beginning. They sense the great cycle of sacred time, they know the meaning of the change to come. Now, on this day, on this eve of everything, they make ready the welcome they have prepared, since before the star above them first appeared, set alight by an unseen hand.

Kiss your spouse, hug a friend, pet your dog or cat—celebrate the flesh on this most holy night. And let us commit during these twelve days of Christmas to change the way we live with all other animals. nativity_animals_3

A Holy Week of Canine Quotidian Care

judah_profile_032818 I have been spending this Holy Week attending carefully to my Australian Shepherd dog Judah. After a “hot spot” appeared on his right cheek last week, the vet shaved a small portion of that cheek, put him on a course of antibiotics, and told me to “make sure he doesn’t scratch it.”

How in the world would I do that? Explaining this to Judah was out of the question. So I have been keeping watch, with a constant vigilance.

Thankfully, he is healing nicely, but I wondered whether this meticulous care would distract me from my Holy Week observance. I tend to think in grand arcs with epic stories and indulge in some thick theological reflection, often with a healthy dose of metaphysics tossed into the mix. Caring for a single creature, no matter how beloved, seemed rather beside the point of this most holy week of truly epic tales. But I now see my canine care as woven into the very point.

Caring for just this one creature in the midst of so many other concerns brought the death of Jesus to mind in a particular way. After all, his death on a cross was just one among many thousands of such executions carried out by the Roman Empire. Why should this particular one matter? There are, clearly, all those thick theological reasons I could offer in response. But the question occurred to me quite differently as I gazed on Judah: why care so terribly much about one among so many others?

Joseph of Arimathea came to mind, who cared tenderly for the dead body of Jesus, ensuring a proper burial—a tenderness not without social and political risk. I’m thinking, too, of Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (as Mark’s gospel account named them), the ones who cared about proper burial spices for this one among so many.

Judah has, in other words, brought to mind the singularity of care. I mean the intensity of focused attention, but also the care devoted singularly, to just one. Why does this matter? Should it?

noahs_ark

As he often does, Judah also reminded me this week of our ecological crisis currently wreaking havoc among so many species—so many individuals. Just as we now face an unprecedented moment of human migration, with more of us on the move than ever before, many of the other animals with whom we share this planet are also on the move, joining a growing number of climate refugees; indeed, half of all species on the planet are moving and shifting because of climate change, and with consequences far beyond what we can now predict or even imagine. Theologian Christopher Southgate has urged us to think of this present era as the “new days of Noah” and how God might be calling us to assist some of those creatures in their migration to safety—perhaps we can save enough for a species to survive.

In the midst of all this, can it possibly matter to care so singularly about just one?

Yes, it can. Caring for Judah over the last five days, I have noticed a remarkable focus in my attention and energy, which is usually and otherwise scattered throughout the flotsam of multitasking responsibilities. Such singular focus is itself notable in a world of constant distractions.

More than this, the kind of focus matters, too. I have been concentrating my attention on a body, on flesh, and quite particularly a patch of flesh about the size of a nickel. As John insisted in his account of the Gospel, the Divine Word became flesh. As noted eco-theologian Andrew Linzey has argued, the suffering of Christ is a divine solidarity with the suffering of all animals, of all flesh.

Caring so narrowly for just a slice of an ecosystem, or so particularly for just a single individual can indeed seem pointless in the face of global urgencies. And still, such focused, quotidian care matters for a whole wide world of peril. It matters first, perhaps, for our own character. We will not save that which we do not love, as the old aphorism has it. Practicing the love for an individual creature instills and nurtures a habit of loving much more widely. If we can become creatures who love, we will become creatures who can save, protect, and nurture.

More than all this, a species is not just a conglomerate of generic flesh. We know this (or perhaps try to remember this) about ourselves, about Homo sapiens, but rarely about other animals: a species consists of distinct individuals, each and every one miraculously and remarkably individual. I have learned this from the beloved dogs who have shared their lives with me over the years. Not one of them has been exactly like the others. It matters to care for just this one because there is no other just like this singular one.

factory_farm

The implications cascading from this Holy Week spent with Judah are far too many to enumerate here. Not surprisingly, they tempt me to travel once again along those familiar grand arcs into thick theological reflection. That still matters, too, if we can start thinking and acting differently, for example, about the horrors of factory farming (in which, as Matthew Scully notes, we treat living beings like crops), as well as the distressing analog to this in the mass incarceration of African American men in our prison system. Each one — on the farm, in prison, migrating — each one is a unique, irreplaceable creature of God.

I’m taking all of this with me into Holy Saturday, when a singular creature of God is laid to rest in a tomb. When the stone is rolled away, that singular moment of God’s unimaginable Yes to life extends beyond that singular one to all of us, and indeed to every creature, as the apocalyptic writer John would have us believe. There, in that text, John sees a vision all creatures of Earth (all animals, insects, and fish, as Denis Edwards urges us to imagine) united in a single song of praise to the Lamb, the symbol of the crucified and risen Christ:

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them singing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might for ever and ever!” (Rev. 5:13-14)

I’m musing on just that as I sit here just now with Judah to make sure he doesn’t scratch his cheek. This focused attention matters for him. It matters for me, too. And I pray it will matter in new ways for the whole glorious breadth and astonishing depth of God’s beloved creation.

pig_fence

Fresh Hope from the “Cold Storage”

A walk-in closet was tucked away in a basement corner of my childhood home. My parents called it the “cold storage.” It was always cool in there, even during sweltering, summer days in the suburbs of Chicago.

The Cold Storage was lined with shelves, most of them packed with canned goods – baked beans, peas, tuna fish, cranberry sauce. Boxes of dried milk and oatmeal and canisters of flour and sugar lined the lower shelves. The coolness of that space was soothing, a brief respite from a late-August heatwave, and the stocked shelves comforting, blunting our nuclear anxiety over the Cold War with the Soviet Union. food_storage1

Mom and Dad kept close tabs on those shelves, monitoring the inventory, checking use-by dates, replacing spent supplies. I grew up watching this routine, in the 1960s and 70s, occasionally afraid of falling bombs but reassured by the vigilance of my parents, our shared hope safely stashed away in the Cold Storage.

The Berlin wall fell in 1989 and the Soviets became Russians again in 1991. As a young adult, I looked back with chagrin on all that ambient anxiety in my childhood, not to mention the absurd confidence we placed in a basement supply bunker. I also learned that my parents hadn’t been saying “cold” all those years, but “coal.” That little closet had at one time stored coal for the furnace when the house was first built.

smokestacks2 I chuckled, a bit ruefully, at the irony: we stored supplies for a war we would not survive in a room built for a fuel that burned us into a climate disaster few of us will survive if we don’t live differently, right now.

And right now I sit in my comfortable California home wondering how far away North Korea is and whether any of its missiles can reach the Pacific shoreline sitting just a few miles from my house.

Nuclear weapons and global warming tap a familiar anxiety and dusty memories. I recall that “cold storage” in the basement with a nostalgic comfort. No matter what might happen, I often thought as a child, at least we have those supplies, and Mom and Dad will make sure we have plenty of them, all of them up to date.

Where does my hope reside today?

More than one answer occurs to me, but I prefer just to say “church.” It sounds so old fashioned, past its shelf life, but I breathe more deeply on my way to worship, walk less hurriedly climbing the church steps, smile at familiar faces and receive hugs from longtime companions, some of them newer. We all gather in our collective Cold Storage, this one warming us in the light of day. We dip into some old, well-worn supplies, often delighted by how fresh they taste, grateful for a bit of comfort food.

We sing together, pray, listen carefully to ancient texts, gather around a shared table and open up the canned goods.

So ludicrous, really, to tend so carefully to these patterns and that building and those people. There must be better things to do with my time and energy.

I never thought like that as a child, as I watched my parents unlatch the door of a strange room and survey their stock of hope. The Cold Storage feels warm to me today, stocked with love and compassion and resilience — fresh bread from Heaven and the life of God.

I stand in it, week by week, certain that it wouldn’t protect any of us from a nuclear war or the effects of climate change; but I couldn’t live without it.

good_shepherd1 — Good Shepherd, Berkeley