Climate Chaos – Peculiar Faith

Shelter to Storm, Crown to Cross: On the Road in Holy Week

We begin a symbol-rich journey tomorrow morning on the first day of the holiest week on the Christian calendar. Much of Holy Week can feel like we’re engaged in a religious version of historical re-enactment—tracing and “performing” the events of the last week of the life of Jesus—but if so, it’s certainly not chronologically tidy.

Biblical accounts of the Gospel likewise resist theologically neatness, too, which makes it almost impossible to focus on what we might want to believe about whatever it is we happen to be doing on any given day of this week—if you observe a service of Tenebrae on Wednesday, for example, you’ll likely be reflecting on the Cross, even though we haven’t had the Maundy Thursday observance of the “last supper” yet.

In addition to the biblical, liturgical, and doctrinal complexity, we now face the cultural chaos of the wider world: bombs falling in the Middle East; “No Kings” rallies around the United States; a new Archbishop of Canterbury “enthroned” for the Anglican Communion; and planetary ecosystems devolving into climatic chaos faster (much faster) than scientists had predicted (and that’s a short list).

The title of that wonderful 2022 film notwithstanding, we can’t think of “everything everywhere all at once,” but we can take one step a time, with biblical stories in one hand and liturgical texts in the other—and especially with the deep breathing and gentle accompaniment of companions to travel with us along the road.

Even more, I’ve realized over the years that the Holy Week journey is made richer by choosing just one image or a single vignette or a narrative arc among the many stories we’ll hear and then letting that carry me through the week into Easter Day. This year, I’m intrigued by the image of a road, and a particular one at that: the one from the village of Bethany to the city of Jerusalem.

The lectionary this year has been giving us a series of stories from John’s account of the Gospel on these Lenten Sundays, and last week’s was one of my favorites: the raising of Lazarus from the dead (11:1-45).

The small village of Bethany—just about four miles or so from Jerusalem along a road that crosses the Mt. of Olives—was apparently a place of rest and renewal for Jesus in the home of Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. That quiet spot was sufficiently removed from the urban hustle-and-bustle of Jerusalem (including all the religious intrigue and imperial adornments) that I can easily imagine Jesus relishing that spot as a place to take a deep breath and leave his worries behind, at least for a short while, whenever he spent time with that family of friends.

Having lived for many years in the metro-urban San Francisco Bay Area, moving five years ago to Michigan in the lakeshore resort of Saugatuck felt luxurious. This beautiful shoreline region certainly qualifies as a type of “Bethany” for me, and I am so grateful to be living and working in a place that offers both comfort and renewal in so many different ways, not least the trees, and dunes, and the lake itself.

Tomorrow morning, Palm Sunday, the lectionary Gospel narrative pivots away from the Bethany of renewal toward the Jerusalem of confrontation. This particular day on the liturgical calendar, the one that begins Holy Week, carries a rather awkward liturgical title: “The Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday.” Well, which is it? Do we engage with the story of the suffering and death of Jesus (his “passion”) or his so-called “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem as people waved palm branches? Like so much else in Christian traditions, the answer is both.

Palm and Passion belong together, not as juxtaposed opposites but as mutually informing symbols—even though their convergence on a single is something of an historical accident. Back in the sixth century or so, when some Christians, especially in remote areas of the vast Roman Empire, could not attend Good Friday services, the story of the crucifixion was mashed together with the story of the palms on the Sunday before Easter, that way everyone could reflect on the death of Jesus before celebrating his resurrection.

Yes…and: the palm-strewn entry into Jerusalem is not really a victory lap, and the “triumph” is not removed or separate from the “torture” that soon follows. The historical “accident” of Palm Sunday is actually more closely attuned with the very heart of the Christian Gospel than it might at first appear: it speaks directly of God’s deep solidarity with us, not just in comfort but also in confrontation, not only in shelter but also the storm. (I love John August Swanson’s painting of this story, which he names only as the “entry” into Jerusalem, no “triumph,” which includes a stormy sky to greet him.)

“Entry into the City,” John August Swanson

As our liturgical calendar pivots this week from “shelter to storm,” leaving the safe harbor of Bethany behind and into the turbulent sea where religion and imperial politics mix, I’m particularly mindful of the importance of this shift for those of us (myself included) who live so comfortably, actually insulated from the wider world of pain.

As war continues and oil fields burn (on the far side of a vast ocean) and spring temperatures break all-time heat records (climate chaos all the way on the other side of this country) and the island nation of Cuba sits in the dark (still securely south of the U.S. border), very little of the world’s trouble seems even remotely close to the Blue Star Highway—the lovely two-lane road the marks a kind of border between this shoreline resort and the world “out there.”

Reflecting on that road—together with the one from Bethany to Jerusalem—the Sunday of the Passion is indeed Palm Sunday precisely because Jesus refuses earthly power of all kinds in favor of a costly solidarity with the most vulnerable—and in this case, those dominated and oppressed by imperial power; Cross displaces Crown.

I’ve actually walked much of that road between Bethany and Jerusalem myself, back when I was (much) younger and testing a career in archaeology. The terrain is hilly, the route curvy; when walking from Bethany, it’s not always easy to see the city around bends in the road or through scrubby olive trees, but one trusts the journey anyway.

We embark on the Holy Week journey knowing that Easter is just a week away—or rather, we know it’s on the calendar. Trusting the promise of Easter is another matter, and more difficult, and frequently fraught with all sorts of cultural and personal entanglements (I try to stay liturgically focused but can’t stop thinking about the canker sore on my tongue and an achy jaw from a long session in the dentist’s chair this past week).

“Kaleidescope Cross,” Kathy Manis Findley

I’m grateful for the liturgies of the Prayer Book at a time like this; I myself am not responsible for generating the words and gestures to evoke hope, much less joy—the stories and the rites bear that up, thank God.

But this much I must do, and not alone but with others: decide to walk the road, to leave Bethany’s shelter for Jerusalem’s storm. What will that ask of me and require of us, now, in these days? That’s the question to carry with us…

A River Runs through It

The Bible begins and ends with a river.

A river runs through the Garden of Eden in the opening chapters of Genesis, and a river runs through the Heavenly City in the closing chapter of the Revelation to John.

We might say that a wonderful storyline runs through Scripture just like a river: God sustains and nurtures what God has made with the water of life; and when things turn truly grim and dire, that same God heals and renews with the water of life.

This storyline invites our faith, which is to say, our trust, in Creator God.

I try always to remember that faith is not the same thing as “certainty.” Faith is our willingness to trust the God we cannot possibly understand. And I have to wonder if whether that might be why biblical writers seem so enamored with the image of a river. As the old saying goes, “you can never step into the same river twice,” because it’s always changing.

The infinite mystery of the living God is exactly like that, like a river: it sparkles on a sunny day, reflecting the sapphire blueness of a clear sky; it waters a thirsty land and promises fruitful harvests; and it will not sit still.

Just like a river, our knowledge of God is slippery; we can cup our hands to hold it but it will always, eventually, run through our fingers. As one theologian has put it, trying to speak with certainty about God is like “catching water with a net.”

This approach to faith used to make me quite nervous; I usually prefer a bit more stability, something that feels a little more secure. Over time, my love of rivers has helped me embrace a more “fluid” sense of faith. Rivers that move, whether with slow, eddy-like currents or quickly in foaming rapids, are rivers flowing with “living water.”

Water that doesn’t move—water that sits still and stays put and never changes—that water stagnates, becoming acrid and foul. The best known example of that kind of water can be found in the Jordan River Valley and is quite rightly called “The Dead Sea.”

This past Sunday was the fourth week in the “Season of Creation” and its theme was in fact “river.” This whole season has invited an embrace of faith, a deeper trust in God, the God whose own grace flows like a river for healing and renewal on an Earth that is parched for it.

We’re invited, in other words, to live with hope, precisely what feels so tenuous these days, nearly impossible in a world of runaway climate chaos.

The biblical passages some of us heard on Sunday sounded triumphant notes of hope—just like the kind Noah must have tried to muster as the flood waters were rising, higher and higher. And clearly the kind of hope the closest friends of Jesus tried to muster as they watched him die a terrible death.

We now stand on the other side of those classic stories, the side where we can breathe easier. The Creation lectionary gave us the story from Genesis about the “rainbow promise” God made to Noah (Genesis 9:12-17), and also the Easter story from Matthew (28:1-10) where startled women encounter an angel at an empty tomb.

But we’re not on the other side of the climate story, not yet. And that’s what makes faith, and trust, and hope so challenging right now in a world rather full of grim realities.

My own journey toward an ecological faith and hope was a rocky one. I grew up in a Christian tradition that emphasized the importance of avoiding Hell and going to Heaven; Earth was mostly just a stage on which that cosmic drama played out.

That view of Christian faith continues to linger around the edges of my life and it’s common in many Christian communities; for many Christians, it’s the very essence of what the Gospel itself even is. But that view changed dramatically for me, and ironically I suppose, by paying closer attention to Christianity’s own traditions. Just one example comes from the “Lord’s Prayer.” When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he urged them to pray that God’s will would be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Here, on Earth, is where God’s will should be done. And here, on Earth, is where God is calling us to spend our lives bearing witness to that earthy Gospel.

My journey, in other words, began as an “other-worldly” Christian, and I still am one, but I now believe that “other” world of God’s love and grace is emerging here, on Earth, and that makes all the difference, for everything.

So many people today are desperate for communities of spiritual practice and environmental healing, especially for ways to integrate spirituality with ecological renewal. It has never occurred to most of them that churches might actually be places for exactly that kind of community.

That’s exactly where my own ecological passion has emerged over the years, to tell the old, old story in fresh, new ways. The Church must tell the story of faith not as a story of escaping to some other world, but always and only as the story of love and healing and new life in this world.

New Testament scholar N. T. Wright makes this very point when he notes that many modern Christians suppose that the Gospel presents us with a choice between going to Hell or Heaven. But Scripture, he says, is not the story about us going somewhere; it’s about Creator God coming to make a home with us, right here—on Earth as in Heaven.

One of the obstacles to that compelling vision is actually the Bible itself, especially the last book of the Bible, from which the Creation lectionary also tapped this past Sunday. The temptation is to read the Revelation to John as wild spectacles of an apocalyptic age far beyond this time and place.

But No—the outrageous visions and complex symbols of that book are not about leaving Earth but about Earth transformed.

In that final chapter from Revelation, John, in one of his ecstatic states, sees a vision of the heavenly city arriving on Earth. An angel shows him a river running through that city, watering the Tree of Life. The tree bears “twelve kinds of fruit,” John says, and its leaves are for the “healing of the nations.”

Early readers would have recognized right away the number twelve, referring to the tribes of ancient Israel and thus to God’s own chosen people. But those same readers would have been shocked by how far the healing of the tree reaches—to the nations.

That word, “nations,” does not mean “country”; it means “all the others,” “strangers,” “outsiders,” all those whom we think don’t belong with us: different races and creeds, different histories and cultures, different philosophies and religions, different species! All of them find healing; all of them reside together, praising God in the Heavenly City on Earth, and a river runs through it.

Life is short, and we do not have much time to tell this amazing story for a wounded world. A story few of us can even imagine. It’s a story of that river watering the Tree of Life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations—not just some of the nations, but all of them: Potawatomi and Pakistani, Irish and Canine, Nigerian and Bovine, Taiwanese and Feline, to name but a scarce few.

That’s a vision worthy of giving our hearts to in trust.

That’s a story compelling and hopeful enough to tell others.

That’s the hope we must share of that river where—as the old Gospel song would have it— bright angel feet have trod, with countless dear and precious saints of God, who yet dance in the silver spray, as they lure us onward to that happy, golden day…

…a Day right here on Earth.

Divine Vulnerability

The Gospel according to John has a nativity story, just like Matthew and Luke have one, but I can’t quite imagine making a children’s Christmas pageant from those opening verses of John.

John’s “nativity story” is cosmic in scope, rich in metaphysics, and conceptually dense in its prose. Countless philosophers have spent a great deal of time pondering the very first verse: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

That lofty language, stretching back to the dawn of time, sets the stage for an equally mind-bending claim in the fourteenth verse: the Word that was with God from the beginning, that Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Not everything about this “prologue” to John’s account of the Gospel, however, is quite so abstract. John writes of a divine advent, a coming into the world that is marked by very human, down-to-earth realities—feeling out of place, like a stranger in one’s own land, even outright rejection.

This Word-made-flesh that John extols with such lofty language actually seems quite precarious. So whatever John means by “nativity,” that sense of vulnerability—the notion that God shares vulnerability with us—that is what makes John’s version of the story not just astonishing but also life-changing.

Notice where John begins, with three simple words: in the beginning. These are of course the first three words of the Hebrew Bible, the very first chapter of Genesis: in the beginning.

This is, in part, why some scholars treat John’s gospel as early Christian commentary on Genesis. The refrain in that first chapter of the Bible about the goodness of God’s creation runs throughout John’s gospel as well.

Goodness stumbles, of course, with the so-called “fall” of humanity in the third chapter of Genesis. And “stumbles” would be too mildly phrased for some. That “fall” has led far too many Christians to suppose that just being human is a problem that we must overcome; for others, God’s creation more generally is therefore suspect, or tainted, or even irredeemably spoiled, and Earth itself is disposable.

But that’s not John’s gospel at all.

To the contrary, John frames his account of the Good News by reminding us that the very Word of God is intimately involved in the creation of the whole world, in every aspect of it, from the very beginning. The universe, all that exists, has always been and remains God’s own handiwork; the imprint of God’s own hand is on everything.

This declaration, by the way, has direct bearing on our current climate catastrophe. Among the many reasons why ecological collapse is so distressing, theologian Elizabeth Johnson pointedly reminds us that our wanton destruction of ecosystems and habitats and countless species of plant and animal amounts to an act of blasphemy.

She can say this, without reservation or hesitation, precisely because of John’s close intertwining of God’s own creative Word with God’s creation.

This cosmic framing of John’s Gospel sheds further light on that pivotal fourteenth verse, what we might call the “Christmas verse” in John—the divine Word, with God from the beginning, and through whom all things were made, that Word becomes flesh.

Let’s pause here for a short lesson in ancient Greek. John had some choices in how to express this pivotal claim about God dwelling among us. He could have said that the Word became a person—prosopon. Or, he could have chosen to say that the Word more generally became human—anthropos.

Either of those two words is how most people likely hear that key claim from John, that the Word became a person or a human. But John didn’t choose either one of those options. John chose this instead: the Word, he wrote, became sarx—and that’s the Greek word for “flesh.”

And with that word—flesh—John signals how God chooses to be among us, not in garments of splendor or cloaked in military power or with superhero strength but in simple, frail, vulnerable flesh.

This prologue to John’s Gospel is not about the birth of Superman or Captain America or Wonder Woman; Christmas is not the story of a divine superhero coming down from the sky to save us. The story of this season is far more astonishing than anything Marvel Comics has dreamed up: Christmas celebrates the Creator God choosing to accompany the creation—as part of it.

Consider what this means: Our vulnerability as fleshy creations of God is not a problem to overcome or a condition from which we need rescue or in any way cause for shame. No, our shared vulnerability as God’s creation is precisely where the Word of God meets us as one of us, in the flesh.

Surely in this time of ongoing pandemic and ecological fragility, we don’t need any further reminders of our own vulnerability or the weakness of our fleshy bodies and of the body of Earth itself; we know all this only too well.

Perhaps what we do need—what the whole wide world needs and what God is calling Christians to manifest with boldness in the world—is the reminder we hear from John: Christmas celebrates the God who meets us in our vulnerability by becoming as vulnerable as we are.

That’s what it means, John says elsewhere, to speak of God as love.