Ecology – Peculiar Faith

The Land Knows, and the Land Remembers

The second Sunday of the Season of Creation invites us to reflect on the land—the soil beneath our feet and the landscapes we inhabit.

Many biblical writers imagined the land as much more than merely a stage, and landscapes as much more than props. A week ago, for example, the lectionary for this mini-season included the story from Genesis about God bringing forth a delightful forest from the land. The soil is where divine fruitfulness and abundance reside, bringing forth every tree that is lovely to see and suitable for food.

The situation changes quickly and dramatically in the third and fourth chapters of Gensis: one of God’s creatures is cursed; animosity appears in the garden of delight; intimate relationships are distorted by power and mapped to gender; the land itself is no longer apparently fertile and readily fruitful.

What happened?

The lectionary skips over the causes—a complex mix of lies and deception, of guilt and shame—and jumps ahead to the consequences, especially the way bodily shame can lead to an inward and downward spiral of isolation or it can turn outward, projected on to others as disdain and anger, or hatred and violence.

And here’s the key point for this season: the land knows all this, and the land remembers.

That is, admittedly, a rather strange way to put the matter, but perhaps you’ve experienced something similar about particular places, or buildings, or street corners, any physical location where something just doesn’t seem quite right. You feel a bit uneasy, perhaps a little anxious, and you’re constantly looking over your shoulder even though no one is there.

A mean spirit, the undercurrent of hatred, or threat of violence—we all know what it’s like to encounter these things in a person, or in a situation. It’s like riding through turbulence—you can’t see it but you can certainly feel it.

When those moments are sufficiently severe, they can leave a mark on us, a wound or a scar. For some, the experience lingers long after the situation has ended; we now call this “post-traumatic stress syndrome,” or PTSD.

More than a few biblical writers would have us notice exactly these same things about the land; the land knows, and the land remembers.

“Cain and Abel,” South African artist Margrit Prigge

The classic story about the land’s own memory comes from a passage of Scripture that we never hear on Sunday mornings from the ordinary lectionary; that might be why it sounded so shocking to hear it during worship this past Sunday as it was being read from the lectern. I mean the heart-rending story about Cain and Abel in Genesis 4.

These two are brothers, sons of the first humans. Abel is a shepherd, tending flocks; Cain, by contrast, is a farmer, trying to tend crops. Remember, by now in the story the land is no longer friendly to farming, and Cain is struggling. So he takes his brother Abel “out to the field,” out to where he has been trying to make things grow, to the ground that has already been cursed.

And there, in that field, Cain kills his brother.

When God confronts Cain about this, Cain tries to deny it, insisting that he knows nothing about it. Oh yes you do, God says, because “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground”; the land remembers.

It matters that this early story of violence is a story of fratricide. It is not a story about protecting one’s self from outside invaders, from people you’ve never seen before; it is not a story of war between peoples or nations. This is a story of fratricide, in which violence takes root among siblings, not strangers. It’s a horrifying story precisely because the actors in it are as close to each other as they possibly can be; they are kin.

These opening chapters in Genesis present a gut-wrenching tale of how the first humans are gradually alienated from all their kin—not only from each other but also from the garden-like forest and its fruitful land, which are also their kin.

The land knows, and the land remembers.

All over the world, in every corner of every country, including right where I’m writing this in the U. S. state of Michigan, we live on land that carries horrific memories—much of it soaked in blood from the violence that turns kin into strangers.

This remains a vastly under-diagnosed condition of distress and disease among all those who treat the land as mere stage and landscapes as inert props. The land not only cradles the pools of human blood spilled in violence, but also retains the wounds and scars of the violence we continually inflict on the land itself—strip mining, flaying Earth of her skin, burning her with industrial farming, and then casually pouring toxins and acids into her open wounds like salt on skinned knees. Not only the ancient storyteller in Genesis but also the Hebrew prophets are shockingly clear: the land will not remain patient forever; one day (perhaps tomorrow), the land will simply stop yielding harvests of any kind.

I confess to having trouble finding where precisely any good news might be buried in this second week of the Season of Creation. But I think it emerged from both Cain and then Matthew.

The very same God who did not abandon Cain—Cain, the one who killed his own brother—that very same God has also not abandoned us but has given God’s own self to us in Jesus.

Let’s make that standard Christian trope a bit more pointed: God stands in solidarity with us as our own kin.

Some theologians have coined the term “deep incarnation” for this kinship with God. The union of God’s creative Word with Jesus is not just superficial or merely apparent; God is truly united with the human body of Jesus, all the way down, as it were, to the cellular level.

This is what makes the suffering and violent death of Jesus so profound: God’s kinship with us extends to the very depths of human mortality, and all for the sake of love.

Consider this: what if this divine incarnational passion extends also to the land?

What if the depth of God’s loving union with God’s own creation does not end with the human body but embraces the body of Earth herself?

What if we read and heard more regularly the Gospel in exactly those terms?

Week Two in the Season of Creation also gave us a rather strange passage from Matthew’s account of the Gospel. There Jesus compares himself to Jonah, to that ancient prophet who spent three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish.

This is of course a foreshadowing of Jesus being laid in a tomb, but notice the phrase Matthew uses to describe the burial: in the “heart of the earth” (Mt 12:40).

God’s kinship with God’s own creation extends to the very heart of the earth herself, for love and healing and redemption.

I do believe this is good news indeed, but I couldn’t quite connect all these dots, especially how we ought to live in response, until I just happened upon a startling scene in the latest in the Star Trek franchise on television.

The second season of Star Trek: Picard features an episode in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard decides to engage in the tricky business of time travel, to go back in time. The situation was dire, so this dramatic step was needed. As Picard put it, “If we want to save the future, we have to repair the past.”

I nearly fell off my comfy couch when I heard that line so casually spoken. What a wonderful summary of the Gospel, of what God is committed to doing—has done and will do—to ensure a fruitful future!

And that’s exactly what God’s people everywhere are called to do in partnership with God: to repair the past, to heal so many broken lines of kinship.

Among the countless ways to do this, I was recently stumbled across a powerful example recently in the news from the upper Midwest, from a small slice of land in southwest Minnesota.

That small slice of land was the site of the short but often brutal U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. It was also the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history when 38 Dakota Sioux were all hanged at once that year by the U.S. army for participating in that war and after each had undergone a trial that lasted approximately five minutes.

In one of the precipitating events of that 1862 war, one of the Dakota bands was temporarily relocated to a federal facility, also on that same slice of land. Over the course of the subsequent winter months, they were all allowed to starve to death, most of them women and children.

Adding insult to profound injury—still more salt poured in the wound—that slice of land was later turned into state recreational parks with picnic tables, and trails for hiking and snowmobiling, and a river for boating. Local Dakota Sioux were then charged a fee every time they entered that park to visit the grave sites of their ancestors—to visit the ground where the blood of their ancestors cried out to God.

Sadly, little of this story caught my attention—it’s too painfully common in American history—until I read this: in 2021, the State of Minnesota returned more than 200 of those acres of land to the Dakota Sioux, and just this year, the governor and the state legislature returned another park as well.

These gestures of return of course come at a cost—the cost of public recreational facilities and picnic tables and visitor fees. But as President of the Lower Sioux reservation Robert Larson put it, the cost of that land was already paid for by the blood of those who died there.

There are many stories like this from all over the country and the world; we must learn them, and then tell them, for the sake of healing.

As God’s people, if we are indeed committed to a thriving future we must repair the past.

The land knows this; and the land remembers.

Living as Ikons of God

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

There are still four more instances of that declaration of goodness in the first account of God’s creation of the world in Genesis, and many Christians heard all seven of them this past weekend when we celebrated Trinity Sunday.

What does it mean to call something “good”? What makes something “good” and how can we discern when it is? And why would it matter so much to repeat this refrain of goodness so often in the story of creation?

I’m guessing that human beings have not changed so terribly much over the last few thousand years. Just like today, humans in the ancient Mediterranean world likely thought something was “good” when it was good for them; something’s good when we can use it, or sell it, or trade it for something else; we become the standard for what’s considered “good.” I cannot help but think of how often I called my dear dog Judah a good boy simply because he obeyed me!

So perhaps it’s time to notice again (or for the first time) that all but one of the declarations of goodness in the first chapter of Genesis occur before humans even existed. Six out of seven times, God’s creation is declared good without any reference to human beings.

The whole creation itself is thoroughly good—whether it’s useful to us or not.

Well, that’s rather rude, isn’t it? Don’t we count for anything? Yes, we do, and much more so than most of us have dared to imagine—and sometimes more than we want to believe. To be described as “very good”—as humans were in that story—comes with some responsibilities.

John of Damascus, a monk and theologian of the seventh century, was embroiled in what came to be known as the “iconoclast controversy.” This was a vigorous debate about whether it is appropriate to have icons, or visual images, in churches.

John was an ardent supporter of icons and actually cited a familiar verse from Genesis to support his case: “And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image…”

John would have been reading the Greek version of that passage, and in Greek that phrase—“in the image of God”—reads as the icon of God.

The human face as an icon of God! Shouldn’t this take our breath away? My face, and your face, and every single human face we see, all of them, icons of the God who made us!

And so, John of Damascus says, if you degrade and denigrate and reject visual images, you offend the artist—and in this case, the artist is God.

I think a lot these days about the visual arts, living and working as I do on what many call the “arts coast” of Michigan. We Christians actually have a lot to say and to offer, from our own Christian traditions, about the importance of visual images, the spiritual depth of art as it connects us to Creator God, the very source of creativity itself.

We might also note, rather urgently, that the stakes are rather high in this shared artistic endeavor with God. John of Damascus goes on to note something else about that familiar passage in Genesis. We are created not only in the image but also the likeness of God.

Those are not the same words; in fact, in Greek the word “likeness” is not a noun but a process, not a state of being but a state of becoming.

We are created in God’s image, yes, but we’re still on the way toward God’s likeness.

To be human is to be engaged in a profound process of assimilating to God, of resembling the One who made us, of being constantly formed and transformed into the divine creatures God intended to make from the very beginning.

The choices we make in this life shape the course of that journey; that’s why the stakes are so high, and that’s why visual artists can help us.

Visual artists can help us see at least a bit more clearly the imprint of God not only in our own faces, but also in the faces of those who are different from us, even different species, and in Earth herself. And by seeing more clearly the presence of God all around us and among us and in us and in each other, hopefully we will act and live differently.

As we launch into June, LGBTQ Pride Month, we need to see just exactly how high the stakes are for the varieties of gendered sexualities in the human race. Beyond the usual platitudes—“love is love” or “we embrace diversity”—we need to see much more clearly that those who do not conform to the standards of White Patriarchy are increasingly at risk of serious physical harm, especially with easily accessible firearms.

This risk pertains no matter where we happen to live or work or play in this country, from shopping malls and suburban streets, to national parks and urban office buildings—and this risk continues for black and brown people, just as it always has been present for women.

And still, it was good.

Everything depends on the goodness of God’s creation, and therefore on the goodness of God—a divine goodness in which we are invited to participate ever more fully.

That’s a key word—participation—for a celebration of the Trinitarian character of God. Rather than some abstract metaphysical doctrine, affirming God as Trinity is meant to draw us ever deeper into the never-ending mystery of God’s own life of self-giving, reciprocal love.

Returning to John of Damascus for a moment, he used a mostly untranslatable Greek word to describe this Trinitarian mystery of God—the word is perichoresis.

Some scholars have noted that there is at least a trace of our word “choreography” in that Greek term. John apparently was inviting us to think about the Trinitarian relationships of God like a cosmic dance—and if you’ve ever been swept away by the alluring rhythms of a tango or the gracefulness of a waltz, the energy often spills off the dancefloor and you can feel it pulsating across your skin, rumbling in your muscles, your heartrate rising.

And that, John of Damascus said, is how God creates. The creative energy and fertile relationality of God’s own life just spills over, as it were, and the whole Universe comes into existence—the whole cosmos itself as an unimaginable dance of evolving, changing, glorious life.

That mutual and eternal exchange of divine energy among the divine persons makes it impossible to tell the dancers from the dance and the dance itself is endless, deathless love—that’s the Holy Trinity, a doctrine that could actually change the world!

The very source of creativity itself is swirling all around us and in us and among us—our very faces the ikons of Creator God as we journey into God’s own likeness, from one degree of glory to another—world without end!

Now…let’s live as if this were true.

With Us All the Way Down

“If you listen carefully you will hear that the words are underneath the water.”

A father says that to his son in the short novel A River Runs through It, by Norman Maclean; you may have seen the film version of that story with Brad Pitt some years ago.

The river in that story is in Montana. There’s also a river running through Saugatuck, where I now live in Michigan.

And there’s a river running throughout the Gospel, and every year, right after The Epiphany, Jesus is baptized in it.

Do we expect to hear anything from any of these rivers?

Theologian Douglas Christie has noted that many of today’s environmentalists worry that we will not hear anything from any of our rivers because they have died, or because we are no longer capable of hearing them. Christie holds out hope, however, that there is still a presence in the living world, calling to us, and that we can hear it if we listen carefully.

So I wonder, what does that presence speak as Jesus is baptized?

Unlike my religious childhood, Eastern Orthodox Christians pay a great deal of attention to that story. They refer to it as the “Theophany,” or the appearance of God. And they offer a “Blessing of the Waters” to mark the occasion, and I mean all the waters—ponds, creeks, streams, rivers, lakes!

It would seem that for Orthodox Christians, the baptism of Jesus carries nearly as much significance as Christmas itself. Or more precisely: the Nativity of Jesus and the Baptism of Jesus are meant to convey the same profound truth about God’s fathomless and unending love for us and for the whole creation.

So what might this image of Jesus plunging beneath the surface of the water tell us about God?

A colleague recently reminded me that we must never grow tired of saying that God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead and whoever brought Israel up out of slavery in Egypt. That’s who God is.

In other words, God is for us, and never against us—God is always and unfailingly for our thriving and for our flourishing.

We must never grow tired of saying this because far too many have heard from an early age that the God who made us is angry, punishing, and vengeful. This is simply and absolutely not true. The God who made us is instead in solidarity with us.

This is what it means to say that Jesus is “God-with-us.” Jesus is God’s commitment to solidarity with us in the flesh, and for the sake of abundant life. And what better way to express this solidarity than to be immersed, to be submerged, to be baptized?

God is committed to our thriving, not from a distance, but as one of us, fully immersed in the glorious fragility of the flesh.

I’m particularly fond of Daniel Bonnell’s painting (posted below) called “The Baptism of Jesus.” The image evokes a sense of Jesus diving into the river in a way that I have often done myself, and above him is the Holy Spirit taking the form of a dove, just like we hear in the Gospel accounts of this moment.

But notice something else as well—the shape of his body, especially beneath the surface of the water. Look carefully and you can see one leg is partially tucked under the other, and one knee is slightly bent. This is the classic shape of a body on a cross, with arms not stretched for diving but nailed to wood.

The brilliance of Bonnell’s image is his blending of baptism and cross, because the baptism of Jesus reveals God’s immersive solidarity with us, not only in our life but also in our death.

This is also the shape of our faith as Christians and how we are meant to live—not on the sidelines, not remotely, or from a distance, but fully immersed in the struggle for abundant life, especially among the poor, the outcast, and the oppressed; fully engaged in the work of striving for peace and justice, and to respect the dignity of every living being.

Those last few phrases come from the vows Episcopalians make in our baptismal covenant, but I do worry about how easily those vows can sound like a religious “to do” list, as if the life of faith is about checking off tasks; or perhaps worse, that our vows become a recipe to ensure divine favor.

I worry about such things because it has taken me a long time, many decades, even to start to hear the astonishing truth of the Gospel: it actually doesn’t matter what we happen to do or fail to do—God is present; and God is for us; and God seeks our thriving. Always.

That’s what caught my attention in Douglas Christie’s theological treatment of Norman Maclean’s novel, and I would invite you to pause over that moment with me just briefly. (And by the way, Christie’s book—The Blue Sapphire of the Mind—is on my list of top five best and most beautiful theological books I have ever read.)

In Maclean’s novel, a father says to his son, “I used to think water was first, but if you listen carefully you will hear that the words are underneath the water.”

His son disagrees with him; the words, he says, are formed out of the water.

No, his father says, “you’re not listening carefully. The water runs over the words.”

Christie quotes this exchange to suggest this: the Divine Word that became flesh is older than silence and runs deeper than the water and is woven through both. (You might want to read that sentence out loud and let it settle into your bones and muscles.)

Here’s what I take from Christie’s insight: The Word calls to us from all the many rivers running through our lives—the flowing, dynamic streams of families, friends, other animals, places, events, and yes, actual rivers of water.

The Divine Word is present in all of it, calling us to pay attention.

Yes, we pay attention for the sake of justice and accountability but also and above all for reassurance. And do we not, all of us, need some reassuring? I mean this: that we are not alone, and that God is with us, and for us, always.

That is why Jesus was baptized, to show us just how deep and how far God’s solidarity with us goes—it goes all the way down, without end.

One and Only Noble Tree

Today is Holy Cross Day. This has always seemed to me like a strange time of year to remember and venerate the central symbol of Christian faith. We’re nowhere near Holy Week or Easter, and even Lent is a long way off. On the other hand, every single Sunday in our liturgical lives as Christians, even during Lent, is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead; likewise every Friday is an invitation to remember the passion and suffering of Jesus on the cross. Liturgical time is not particularly linear or even logical.

Today’s commemoration stems from fourth-century accounts about the Emperor Constantine and the buildings he constructed in Jerusalem to mark the sites of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus; those sites were purportedly dedicated on September 14, 335, and eventually became the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Since then, this mid-September day has been a time for reflection, though not so much on the death of Jesus per se but on the cross itself.

Yes, a bit odd perhaps but I’m reminded rather vividly these days, in an era of heightened ecological awareness, that the wood of that cross was once a living tree. The wood itself, as some strands in Christian traditions would have us ponder, “remembered” its own life as the Lord of Life was hung upon its “branches.”

What I appreciate about this view of the cross is how an otherwise “inanimate” object can still “remember” life, how life is still buried within it, perhaps like the faintest of heartbeats. Indeed, even some early depictions of the cross picture it as a slowly budding tree, as if still rooted, as if still living, as if by being touched by the flesh of the Incarnate Word of God, the life within the wood itself surfaced and blossomed.

Thinking about the cross in this way stretches my imagination and invites me to see life in every nook and cranny of everything God has made. Strictly speaking, there are no “inanimate objects” anywhere in the universe; everything pulsates with life from the Creator. This stands in shocking contrast—perhaps, as theologian Elizabeth Johnson has labeled it, “blasphemous contrast”—to the pervasive treatment of Earth’s ecosystems as a vast storehouse of lifeless stuff for us to mine, harvest, and burn at will.

And so I pause on this Holy Cross Day, not worried in the slightest about how oddly timed such a commemoration might be. The Cross will stand for some time to come for ongoing pain and suffering experienced by God’s creation. Perhaps as well the hope, deeply buried within that suffering, of God’s own life still to come. As with most artifacts and rites of a Christian life, this one is a complex brew of memory and hope—of recalling the death of Jesus and still proclaiming the (startling) promise of new life.

I am helped in all of this, as always, by music and by hymn texts. And every year on Holy Cross Day I recall one of my favorite hymns from Holy Week. It always brings me to tears. It’s an ancient text—some have placed it as early as the sixth century. It invites an astonishing level of adoration for the cross, not as an instrument of death but as the means to see anew the resilient presence of God’s own life. I offer two of the verses from that hymn for our shared pausing and reflecting. The text is by Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus and you can find it in the Hymnal 1982, #165 and #166:

Faithful cross, above all other:
one and only noble tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
none in fruit thy peer may be:
sweetest wood and sweetest iron,
sweetest weight is hung on thee.
Bend thy boughs, O tree of glory!
Thy relaxing sinews bend;
for awhile the ancient rigor
that thy birth bestowed, suspend;
and the King of heavenly beauty
gently on thine arms extend.

“The Beauty of the Cross,” Daniel Bonnell

LGBTQ Pride Month: Praying at the Intersections

Same-sex sexual acts have been legal nationwide in the United States only since 2003. Read that sentence again—I identify as a gay man and even I am shocked by how recent that is. That moment came as the result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas.

As LGBTQ Pride Month launches today, it might be helpful to recall why that case in 2003 mattered so much and also why it’s still important that faith communities pay attention to this history. Not only to the history but also to the crucial intersections this month invites for our commitments concerning racial justice and gendered equity, and still more, for ecological renewal.

First, let’s recall this: prior to 1962 in the United States, same-sex sexual activity was illegal in all 50 states and punishable by fine or imprisonment or coerced psychiatric hospitalization and electroshock therapy. (The term “homosexuality” itself was invented by nineteenth-century medical researchers and carried with it the stigma of pathology that could in theory be “cured” or reversed.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the police routinely raided gay bars and lesbian clubs and arrested patrons merely for gathering there. These laws changed slowly, state-by-state, until a series of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court between 1996 and 2015 finally decriminalized “homosexuality” nationwide and granted same-sex couples full marriage equality.

A turning point in that history came on June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City fought back when the police raided that bar. The “Stonewall Riots” launched the modern gay liberation movement in the United States in new ways. Anniversary marches began the very next year, and by 1971 more than a dozen cities in the U.S. and Europe remembered that watershed moment with “Pride Parades.” Today, those celebrations and rallies occur all around the world and in nearly every town and city in the United States. Embracing these public expressions of sexual identity with pride is an attempt to reclaim human dignity after decades of being shamed or coerced into silence.

Rather than supposing that “pride” is a “deadly sin,” as many religious communities have long taught, some embrace pride as a path toward flourishing; in contexts where self-denigration and violence are expected, pride is actually lifesaving. This has also been true in various ways for communities of color struggling against structural racism and for women grappling with patriarchal structures of oppression.

While gender, race, and sexuality are distinct aspects of everyone’s identity, they also overlap and intersect in some complex ways. Indeed, those “intersections” can help all of us appreciate our own multiple layers of identity and how labels simply fail to express fully the richness of human life and relationships.

Anne Sisson Runyan helpfully reminds us that paying attention to the “intersections” isn’t just about adding layers of identity, one on top of the other, like a big stack of labels. As she notes, “women of color actually experience a different form of racism from men of color, just as they experience a different form of sexism from white women. In this sense, gender is always ‘raced’ and race is always gendered.”

As a white man (albeit a gay one), I had a lot of trouble appreciating that sense of racialized gender when I first encountered it; but of course, people of color get it right away. As Runyan explains, “racialized sexist stereotypes of white women portray them, under the still-prevailing legacy of the Victorian age, as passive, physically weak, undersexed, and needful and deserving of protection. In contrast, racialized sexist stereotypes of black women…under the still-prevailing legacy of slavery and colonization, construct them as aggressive, physically strong, oversexed, and undeserving of protection.”

Attending carefully to the rich diversity of human experience eventually expanded “gay liberation” to include “lesbians,” and then “bisexuals,” and more recently “transgender people” in cultural and religious efforts for justice and inclusion. These labels, however, don’t work for everyone. Many African Americans, for example, adopted “same-gender loving” or “SGL” in the 1990s as a way to distinguish themselves from primarily white notions of “gay and lesbian.” There is also a long history among indigenous peoples in the Americas of using the term “two-spirit” as a way to name how gender and sexuality don’t fit into the neat binary boxes that often accompany European ways of describing the world. And still others prefer the word “queer” as a way to name their experience of not “fitting in” with any modern categories and expectations.

The complexity (and the richness) of these intersections grow when we expand this kind of analysis to include other species and the wider worlds of intertwining ecosystems. Leah Thomas is the founder of the online resource hub for Intersectional Environmentalism and writes compellingly about the urgent need to foreground the lives, experiences, and voices of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous People of Color) in movements of ecological renewal.

“Innocent Black and brown people are the most impacted by climate change,” Thomas writes, “but those same people are not present in environmental policy.” Just as race and gender are often co-constructed, environmental activism is typically populated with white people and actions are directed toward locations where predominantly white communities are affected. As Thomas notes, the health and vibrancy of BIPOC communities around the world are the only adequate standard by which to assess our progress on ecological renewal as well as the degradations we’re inflicting on ecosystems.

Given the history of religious condemnation of LGBT people, communities of faith bear a particular responsibility to promote social justice and to respect the full dignity of every human being, and indeed, of all creatures of the same God. “Pride Month” is an opportunity to make that commitment visible and intentional in every way we can and at as many intersections as we can name.

All Saints’ Parish, where I have the privilege to serve as the rector in Saugatuck, Michigan, will be “praying at the intersections” of human identities this month and endeavoring to appreciate in deeper ways the rich diversity of God’s creation, especially when gender, race, sexuality, and ecological renewal all coincide and overlap and intersect.

We will also be posting profiles on our Facebook page of LGBTQ pioneers in the Episcopal Church as well as artists who come from “two-spirit” indigenous communities in the United States. I hope and pray that these posts can elicit the complex beauty that arises from the intersections, those potent locations where God’s handiwork shines brightest when the fullness of our diversity is embraced and cherished.

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.

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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

Holy Saturday: Rest, Reparations, and Hope for Earth

In some Christian traditions, Jesus spent the day between Good Friday and Easter busily harrowing Hell, toppling its gates and freeing all the dead who were dwelling there from ages past. This is the divine version of “no child left behind” but for every human, and I would now revise this to mean “no creature left behind.” The whole creation finds healing and liberation in the unfathomable mystery of Easter.

But here we still live, in that great liminal day between imperial crucifixion and the divine burst of new life. If Jesus were to harrow Hell today, he wouldn’t have to travel very far from where most of us live—next to toxic waste dumps, petroleum refineries, poisoned water supplies, landfills brimming with plastic. Earth herself needs to rest, to recover, to repair.

Is it time to ponder reparations for the planet?

I fully support reparations for the descendants of African slaves in this country, and for indigenous tribes decimated by American genocide, and for many others as well. Perhaps now is the time to add Earth to that list, to offer this planet a reprieve from the daily torture we inflict on her ecosystems and many creatures, some space and time to repair and renew.

This is of course impossible; we cannot simply stop doing what we’re doing, not even for a day let alone what is more genuinely needed—at least a whole year. Impossible at first blush, perhaps, but not after a moment’s recollection of how quickly the world’s wealthy pledged astonishing amounts of money to fix Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It’s time they stepped up again, acknowledged that their wealth came in large measure from raping the planet, and chip in some reparations.

In 2018, the world had 2,208 billionaires with a combined net worth of approximately $9.1 trillion. If we created a planetary reparations fund and demanded a simple tithe from those wealthy folks, we would have quite a tidy little sum to get us started on what is now necessary: stopping most human activity and resting; the fund could go toward ensuring certain vital services remain operating and that people are fed while the planet rests, resets, repairs.

Holy Saturday is the perfect day on which to contemplate such a harrowing idea as we dare to hope for resurrection. It is a good day, perhaps, to plumb the depths of God’s grace, to journey with Jesus to the roots of our distress and resurface with hope.

I’m grateful for theologian Elizabeth Johnson and her elegant, eloquent words for precisely that hope. May her words accompany us into the blazing light of a deep resurrection, and inspire a renewed commitment to this planet, our shared homeland:

In our day we discover that the great incomprehensible mystery of God, utterly transcendent and beyond the world, is also the dynamic power at the heart of the natural world and its evolution. Groaning with the world, delighting in its advance, keeping faith with its failures, energizing it graciously from within, the Creator Spirit is with all creatures in their finitude and death, holding them in redemptive love and drawing them into an unforeseeable future in the divine life of communion (Quest for the Living God, 198).

Late afternoon at the regional park

Apocalypse Kind-of-Now: A Brown Green Season?

Ecological “issues” are an annoying interruption of the stuff that matters now. I don’t really believe that, but my blog posts would suggest otherwise.

I had a plan. Write about the war on women’s bodies in Lent and write about ecology in Easter – the new creation, totally tied to women’s bodies and gender. Lovely plan, but current events intervened.

And that is precisely the problem.

I totally support full marriage equality for all couples; the end to poverty and racism; full agency for women in decisions about their bodies. So why does the very framework that makes any of those possible in any way get such short shrift? I mean the planetary environment upon which each of relies for every breath.

Here’s the thing: “Apocalypse” is nigh; if not “now,” then soon, within my lifetime (if I’m lucky enough to live another 30 years). Hyperbole? Not really. Read just this one among many accounts of what we’re facing right now (here’s the lede of that story, which you shouldn’t read if you are prone to insomnia because of fretting: “The Earth is within decades of reaching an irreversible tipping point that could result in ‘planetary collapse’, scientists warned yesterday.”) Read yet another alarming account here.

Important digression: I adore my ten-year-old godson (oh, God, could he just say ten forever? No…not good. But he rocks my world right now). Okay, my point: Will he be able to live on this planet 30 years from now? Probably, but not likely in the same comfortable way that I am living on it now. That breaks my heart.

But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that my adorable godson is not the only reason why any of us should care about the environment, and passionately, with urgency. So why should we?

In some Christian circles (very similar to the one in which I grew up), there is no reason. We actually don’t have to care. The theological logic goes basically like this: God created a good world; humans screwed it up; God sent Jesus (oh, after that Israel interlude, of course) to save us; those who believe all this will go to heaven, a literally disembodied, unearthly place where we don’t have to fret about things like nuclear power plants, plastic choking our oceans, massive extinction events, or potable water.

I’m really not making this up. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians of a certain type truly believe that Earth is disposable; God will create a new one.

Let me be clear: I have no desire to set up an “us versus them” scenario here in which us good liberal Christians save the planet while those fundamentalists destroy it. That would be easier to write about, frankly. More accurately, there are some Evangelical Christians who are far more passionate about the environment than many of the liberal, “progressive” Christians I know.

Now that’s peculiar. And I take a great deal of hope from it. Decades ago Lynn White, Jr., wrote a devastating essay about religion and its deleterious effects on the environment (read about it here, and yes this is a Wikipedia link). Taking his critique seriously means that we need compelling religious and theological reasons why priority #1 right now is the planet itself. Thankfully, those reasons are ready-to-hand. (Check out this, and this, and this.)

But we do have a problem: current events will always interrupt us. The latest sound bite, the latest outrage about women’s bodies, LGBT people, the economy, war….all of these will always interrupt what we need to do and say right now about where we live, right now.

I don’t have any solutions to the problem of compelling interruptions. I issue only a plea: Let us please figure out how this long “green season” in the Church year after Pentecost can inspire all of us finally to do something about a planet that is dying, right now – our planet, this “fragile earth, our island home” (The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, p. 370).

Come on. Let’s figure this out – for my beloved godson, your grandchild, your niece, your neighbor, the puppies your dog is about to have, the litter of cougar cubs that will be born this year, the salmon spawning in our rivers, just take your pick – let’s figure this out for all of us, for all of them, for all.

“Enchanté, Madame”: Why Good Policy Alone Won’t Save Us

Christ is risen and we’re killing the planet. I know – you’ve heard something similar countless times. Another species extinct. Another ecosystem threatened. Global climate change. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Maybe you haven’t heard this one quite so often: If it’s okay to rape women, it’s okay to rape the planet.

That grisly connection is, alas, being performed right now on legislative stages in Washington, D.C. and in far too many states. The link between the current war on women and the war on the planet (the former talked about incessantly these days and the latter, not so much), is subtle but vitally important.

I firmly believe that the many complex “issues” we face today are woven together in complex, lovely, troubling, spiritual ways. I want to try to evoke that here, if only as a preface to the great work our species must now confront. So let’s consider just a few of the dots that need connecting at the moment:

First, access to birth control and abortion (which is still technically legal in this country) is under attack. If only this were old news. I appreciate the moral quandaries faced by people of good faith about abortion, but now we’re seeing restrictions appearing even when the health of the mother is at stake, and even in cases of rape and incest. So, is it really okay to rape women? (For more on access issues, read here, which is wonky and policy-heavy, but important; or Rachel Maddow’s take on it here.)
Second, access to clean water, clean air, and a safe food supply is equally under attack. This doesn’t appear often enough in the headlines. According to some, the current Congress is the most anti-environment Congress in U.S. history. (Read more about that here; though this is a partisan source, it nonetheless provides helpful links to actual legislation, and it’s disturbing.)
Third, access to the truth requires tedious knowledge of legislative riders, appropriations bills, and countless other political arcana that make most people reach for a cocktail instead. The U.S. House, for example, recently passed a much needed piece of legislation for student loans, but paid for it by reducing health care funding that might affect women the most. (The word “might” is important there and I recommend Ezra Klein’s take on this here.)

These are not sexy dots to connect. But connect them we must. Consider this recent pithy observation about environmental responsibility from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams: the world is “not just a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.” (Read a great essay on this here.)

I can’t help but wonder if far too many men think the same way about women – women’s bodies as warehouses, incubators, resources, objects. We’ve had a few decades now of insightful analysis about the link between male privilege and ecological degradation – men can control “mother” nature just like they (try to) control women. But I’m not at all convinced that such a link has sunk into our collective consciousness. (Even less likely to have sunk in are the connections between misogyny, homophobia, and global climate change…but I digress.)

So I wonder: How might all of us think differently about our own bodies, the bodies of others, the bodies of non-human animals, and the body of this planet? Would thinking differently make a difference in how we live, the social policies we support, the politicians we elect? I hope so. But what does “thinking differently” mean?

What about “enchantment”?

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a book that proposed precisely that and I’m still trying to tease out its implications. The book is by James William Gibson, called A Re-enchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature. It’s an insightful, heartbreaking, hopeful, and lovely book. I also believe Gibson captured something critical and essential: arguing about environmental policy won’t solve any of our problems unless we rekindle our nearly forgotten enchantment with nature.

By “enchantment,” Gibson means many things at once: nature isn’t anyone’s private property; it isn’t just a “resource”; it has its own life and value and beauty quite apart from humanity; and it’s uncanny, uncontrollable, lovely, grotesque, compelling, beyond categories of human meaning making. It is, in a word, enchanting.

I really want to think more and write more about this, and I will. But for now, in the midst of these Great Fifty Days of Easter (Easter is a season, longer than Lent), I frequently find my spiritual attention gravitating toward the image of the “new creation.” The resurrection of Jesus wasn’t just for him, and it wasn’t just for every other human. In some way, Easter proclaims God’s stubborn commitment to life for everything, without exception. Now that is surely peculiar, thankfully.

So, could that great Gospel proclamation lead us to a re-enchantment with the world and all its many wondrously uncanny and glorious bodies? Could it, at long last, dismantle the utilitarian and objectifying posture toward women’s bodies that so many politicians, not to mention religious leaders, seem to adopt? Could Easter move us to find each other and the world around us enchanting?

I believe it could. And not a moment too soon.

Green (Hornet) Grace

Welcome to the Green Season, when the polar icecaps are melting, the oceans are dying, and the air we breathe grows more toxic every day! The crafters of the Christian liturgical calendar didn’t have any of those climate catastrophes in mind, of course. They were literally unthinkable until recently. Yet the tragic if unintended liturgical irony persists.

Traditionally, liturgical vestments are green in this long season that follows the Feast of Pentecost and runs all the way to Advent (often the last Sunday in November). In the northern hemisphere, that color makes sense as crops are growing, fruit is ripening, and harvest is peaking up over the horizon. So also for the Church – Pentecost prompts growth, the blossoming of the Spirit’s work, and an anticipation of the divine harvest at the end of time, celebrated on the first Sunday of Advent.

Sounds great, but last month, just twelve days after Pentecost, a report was presented to the United Nations declaring that a massive, oceans-wide extinction of marine life is now underway and is all but inevitable. This should have been even more newsworthy than marriage equality in New York – we can protect the kids of gay and lesbian couples with the benefits of marriage but will we give them an inhabitable planet to live on?

There’s more at stake here than whether we should eat salmon. Think of the oceans as your own cardiovascular system – without it, you’re dead. And that report to the U.N. was just the latest of the “oops, it’s worse than we thought” reports about the devastating changes through which this planet’s climate is currently lurching. (Read about that report and others here.)

The planet is dying. Why aren’t we in the streets protesting vociferously the absurd policies of our world’s governments? Are we preaching about this from our pulpits?

So, green for this season? Really? What’s the color of sludge, or dead fish, or torpor?

No, none of those despairing colors will do, not even now, not if Pentecost is still worth celebrating. I’ll still go with green for this long season if it can stand for a vibrant hope. Yet even that needs a caveat. As some in President Obama’s own party have been reminding him lately, hope is not enough. And as Harvey Milk once said, “It’s not that we can live on hope alone, but that without it, life isn’t worth living.”

Maybe the Green Hornet can energize the hope of this season into action. I’ve always liked this about that fictional crime fighter: he doesn’t have any superhuman powers like Spiderman or Wonder Woman do. He was just an ordinary guy who grew sick of political corruption and rampant crime, someone who refused to believe that there were no solutions; he became a solution himself.

That sounds a least a bit like Pentecost. The Spirit doesn’t just snap her fingers and make things happen. She empowers people (and often the least likely by most standards) to transform, renew, heal, and generally “turn the world upside down” (Acts 17:6). (Read my take on the “Peculiar Pentecost Agenda” here.)

We need to tap that world-changing energy again, especially given modern western Christianity’s abdication of nearly all environmental responsibility and its acquiescence, especially in the United States, to the beguilements of corporate profit in the name of religious patriotism, which have nearly eviscerated any traction the Gospel might have had for our current crises.

And I’m pointing that finger at myself. I’m no less culpable than anyone else for the planetary mess we now face. I still drive my car whenever I please, buy way too much useless stuff, and rather naively trust that “good” politicians will sort this all out.

Here’s the thing: They won’t. It’s up to us, all the ordinary, unremarkable but fabulous creatures of God, empowered by the Spirit, to turn this dire tide. Because of the hope that Spirit inspires, I refuse to believe that there’s nothing to be done – but what do we do?

I honestly don’t know. I do know that I need lots of “Katos.” The Green Hornet needed a companion, just as the so-called “Lone” Ranger did.

I can’t change the world by myself. The earliest Christians couldn’t, either. They needed a community. And so do we, especially in this “green season” when the icecaps are melting, the oceans are dying, and we’re choking on the air we make by just driving to work (if we’re lucky enough to have a job).

So, how should we do it? How can we make the green of this long season more than a liturgical color? Where do we find the Green (Hornet) Grace we need and what do we do with it?