Season of Creation – Peculiar Faith

Pierced by Beauty

Contrary to most pop culture depictions, Francis of Assisi was not primarily interested in cultivating cozy relationships with other animals. There’s nothing wrong with those relationships—I enjoy one right now with an Australian shepherd dog named River. But Francis devoted his attention to the larger horizon on which such wonderful creatures of God reside.

What the world needs from the church today is mostly what the twelfth-century world of Francis also needed: a voice for the voiceless; solidarity with the abandoned; healing among the wounded; and justice for the oppressed and exploited.

Of course, the voiceless, abandoned, wounded, and exploited ones include not only other humans but also other-than-human animals. As Francis would also tell us, sometimes the only way to understand what this world needs is by paying attention to the other species with whom we share this planet.

“St. Francis of Assisi,” Kevin Pawlowkski

The complexity and also challenge Francis presents today came vividly to light when I stumbled upon a beautiful though also rather haunting image of Francis by visual artist Kevin Pawlowski. Notice the bird on his shoulder, near his ear (signifying a posture of listening to creation), and the dog in his arms (symbolizing loyalty between different species), and also the stone wall, the cross, and the subtle marks of crucifixion on the hands of Francis himself.

This is not the typical symbol set most people associate with Francis of Assisi, so a few notes about his life might bear rehearsing. We might recall that Francis was born into a very wealthy family in medieval Italy—his father was a silk merchant and his mother was from French nobility.

Francis was never entirely comfortable being comfortable; over the course of his life he grew increasingly unable to reconcile the wealth of some with the abject poverty of so many others. A familiar story from his life illustrates this very point: when he happened upon a beggar in the street, he was moved with such pity that Francis gave him all the money he had with him and even the cloak on his back.

Gestures like that enraged his wealthy father, of course, until finally Francis simply renounced his family’s wealth, his family’s estate, even the family name. He did this rather dramatically, in the middle of the town square where he stripped naked. From that day on, as he would say, he was married to “Lady Poverty.”

Disgusted equally with the opulence of the parish church in Assisi, Francis hiked out to the countryside, to a dilapidated and crumbling chapel in San Damiano. There, as the story goes, a crucifix with the suffering Christ on it, spoke to him. “Francis,” the voice said, “Francis, repair my church!”

So, Francis began dutifully rebuilding that chapel, by hand, one stone at a time, while also preaching to the peasants living in that valley (the “working poor,” as we would call them today, a population that the institutional church at that time had simply abandoned). He also began ministering and eventually living among those with leprosy—shockingly, both then and today, he not only embraced but also kissed many of those lepers as symbols of that same suffering Jesus who had spoken to him from the cross.

How in the world did someone born into such privilege and comfort decide to set all of that aside? Stories of his life offer a number of possible reasons for this, including suffering from a severe illness, engaging in disturbing service in the military, and having more than one vision in a powerful dream.

Here’s what I think, which of course occurred to along the “arts coast” of Michigan, where I currently live: I think heart-rending beauty changed the course of his life.

As strange as that may sound, there is a subtle thread of this running in the Bible and historical Christian traditions, this sense of the life-changing ache in beauty.

I’m not talking about beauty as merely “decoration” or “adornment.” I mean the kind of enticing beauty shimmering throughout what God creates—from mountains and rivers to birds and bears, sky and forests—a beauty the mystics would say awakens our yearning for communion and consummation…or whatever better words we might find for this longing that mostly defies our ability to speak.

“Ache” and “yearning” work for this, the mystics would say, because this kind of beauty feels like the absence of a lover.

Back in the second century, a Greek theologian by the name of Origen described the human soul as being naturally attracted to divine splendor; the soul is drawn to such heavenly beauty and then falls in love, receiving what he called the dart or wound of love.

Origen seems to suggest a piercing quality in divine beauty, piercing us with a longing for what will finally satisfy what we cannot name. Francis was keenly aware of this elusive desire, and even more keen to denounce our fruitless scramble to acquire all the things and stuff and wealth that have nothing whatsoever to do with it. The pierce of Beauty urges us ever onward—not superficially, or temporarily, or greedily—but genuinely and fully toward whatever “it” is that will satisfy our deepest yearning.

Right there, that’s what the world truly needs: hearts broken open by compassion and empathy; hearts capable of seeing and attending to the pain of others; hearts with the capacity to give nothing less than everything for the sake of life, for thriving, flourishing life—all this would be an offering for the truly beautiful, an offering which is Beauty itself.

And that is what Francis heard in the voice from the cross and also toward the end of his own life. Much like St. Paul wrote about in his letter to the Galatians (a passage that some lectionaries assign for the Feast of St. Francis) apparently Francis received his own set of bodily “marks,” the wounds of that cross on his own body, on his hands and feet and even his torso.

The pierced body of Jesus was for Francis the image of God’s own pierced heart, broken open by the beauty of the world and for the sake of life.

“Repair my church, Francis.”

That voice was not referring to a building, and Francis eventually realized his mistake. Rather than a building, that voice was referring to the purpose of the church in need of repair—the Church is not meant to accrue wealth to itself but to give itself away, for love, for life, for beauty.

I love welcoming companions of other species into worship with humans when we celebrate Francis. And Francis himself would whole-heartedly endorse the presence of other-than-human companions in the sanctuary—especially if the beauty of their intimacy with us breaks open our hearts, pushes the boundaries of our hearts ever outward, extending the reach of our compassion still further toward the despairing and the lost and forgotten.

In the parish where I am privileged to serve as the rector, we practice an “open table” posture toward the Eucharist: everyone is welcome at the Table, no exceptions. And I believe Francis, who was thoroughly devoted to the Eucharist, would remind us that such an invitation is only a foretaste of what is yet to come.

His Eucharistic devotion invites all of us to imagine a world where not a single living being is excluded from the blessings of divine life, not a single one, no exceptions—and that’s a beautiful thing.

“St. Francis Mandela,” Giuliana Francesca

Think like a Mountain

Mid-twentieth century French novelist René Daumal imagined mountains as bridges between the profane and the sacred. In the world’s great mythological stories, he noted, a mountain creates a bond between Earth and Sky; its summit stretches toward eternity and its base spreads out among the foothills in the world of mortals.

In nearly every religious tradition, mountains have become symbols of divine presence. It matters that we have to exert energy to climb a mountain. It matters that we can fall off a mountain and die. And it matters that so many people today still refer to intense spiritual moments as “mountaintop experiences.”

The image of a mountain is never a neat and tidy religious symbol. It stands for all the messy entanglements of the divine and the human in our endlessly complex lives, and the rich texture of life itself, including the mysteries of death.

“Mt. Temple,” Brandy Saturley and Gisa Mayer

For all of these reasons, the Season of Creation featured this image this past Sunday and also assigned an astonishing reading from the prophet Isaiah (65:17-25), a reading in which we learn something about God by learning something about God’s holy mountain.

In Isaiah’s vision, humans treat each other unfairly and even violently because that’s how humans treat the wider world of God’s creation. On God’s Holy Mountain, the injustice among humans will be remedied because the injustice we inflict on the world of nature will be remedied—one because of the other.

This profound and unsettling connection between the world of humans and the world of other animals occurs multiple times in Isaiah, and always on God’s Holy Mountain: there, peace with justice among human beings will appear first among wolves and lambs, and among lions and cattle, and also between the calf and the bear. And a little child, Isaiah says, shall lead all of them into God’s own realm of thriving life.

I am sorely tempted to embrace this prophetic passage with every ounce of sentimentality I’ve got, and that would be a big mistake. This is not a sentimental image from Isaiah, and it should not feel cozy. Isaiah’s vision is one of profound transformation that leaves nothing untouched—even the most basic elements of how we expect the world to work will change.

Walter Brueggemann, one of the leading modern scholars of the Hebrew Bible, admits that Isaiah’s vision of God’s Holy Mountain is so “overwhelming” that even he is “at a loss to know how to interpret adequately [this] majestic scenario.”

The astonishing vision of this ancient prophet continues to pose an urgent question today, as it does for every generation: How should we then live if Isaiah’s vision is what God intends for God’s own creation?

A question like that is a reminder that prophets are not particularly interested in predicting a far-off future; they are far more concerned with how we live in the present. How the world will one day be, in other words, ought to shape the way we live now.

That reminder might help us read the longer version of the final chapter in Mark’s Gospel (16:14-18), which this season also assigned for “Mountain Sunday.” Most biblical scholars treat this extended account of the resurrection of Jesus as a later addition to Mark; for some, that’s reason enough to ignore it. But what shame that would be! If we just skip over these verses as just not “originalist” enough, we might miss a key insight about early Christianity.

We could recall, after all, that all four accounts of the Gospel blend stories and sayings and traditions about Jesus, each of them a kind of mashup of various sources, including first-century Judaism. The Judeans at that time held closely to an image of what some have called “the cosmic mountain” to which all nations would one day be drawn and where God would remake the heavens and the earth—and this was especially compelling after the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.

Early Christians adopted and adapted that image, which is still lingering around the scene from Mark in which the risen Jesus—the one the Romans had crucified, the one God then raised from the dead—when that Jesus instructs his closest friends to preach good news to the “whole creation.”

That phrase in Greek could be translated as preaching to “every creature” or even “every created thing.” So we have here a trace from the first century of Christian faith of a remarkably expansive vision, a claim about just how far God’s new life will reach—and it’s nothing short of everywhere, and among all creatures, and for all created things.

How then should we live in the light of this “good news”? What does it mean for us to live as messengers of this new life for this entire, precious Earth?

How should we then live?

To live as Gospel messengers, we must “think like a mountain”—that’s a wonderful phrase from Aldo Leopold, who propelled modern environmentalism into a new chapter with his 1949 book: A Sand County Almanac. That book inspired a whole generation to think differently about the land, and the importance of cultivating what Leopold called a “land ethic.” (A short overview of Leopold’s “land ethic” can be found on YouTube here, and you can also go here for more on his “thinking like a mountain.”)

We must stop thinking of the land, he wrote, as a commodity we own and instead think of the land as a community to which we belong. We must “think like a mountain”— never for short-term gain, the cost of which is almost always destruction and death, but instead for the longest term possible, for the lifespan of a mountain, for the sake of life.

Leopold lost a lot of friends and colleagues because of his “land ethic.” As he noted rather poignantly in the early 1940s, “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

This, it seems to me, is also the risk of theological education. Gospel witness can be lonely; sometimes our religious commitments will put us in conflict with our neighbors, and with friends and family. Sometimes our vital convictions call into question what the wider society around us just takes for granted—we might be viewed as odd, eccentric, or even a threat.

I think this tension will become increasingly evident as Christians draw from images like Isaiah’s for our shared work of ecological healing. Promoting the kind of transformation the human world now needs so that the world of God’s creation can thrive will certainly not make us popular, and likely all the more alone in a world of wounds.

This is one of the best reasons to keep gathering with others for table fellowship every Sunday morning. This quirky passage from “late Mark” includes a reference to this as well, to a shared meal, which is yet another significant feature of first-century Christian faith. Very early in church history, Christians expected to encounter the risen Christ at the Table, whose Easter life with them would shape their life together.

At the Table, we join a community devoted to the God of life, we gather with people who are trying their best to follow the God of new life, and we’re hoping to catch a glimpse once again of God’s Holy Mountain—a vision of transformed life to inspire and sustain us.

And when this work becomes more challenging and grows more costly, we can return again to the great eighth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, another rich passage for “Mountain Sunday.”

I, for one, need to hold fast to Paul’s astonishing confidence in that chapter: nothing, absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God, not ever. And this is the very same chapter in which he describes the “groaning of God’s creation.”

This counts as astonishing, too: the whole wide world of God’s amazing creation actually groans in eager anticipation, waiting for our transformation, for our liberation, for our conversion to life at last.

It won’t make us popular, but God is calling us to live as witnesses to that new life now—and there are plenty of other-than-human creatures who would be terribly grateful if we did that today.

“The Whole Creation Groans,” Claudio Rossetti

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.

Made to Set Others Free: The Image of God in the Community of Creation

Crown of creation or apex predator?
Endowed with dominion or called to service?
Forged in a divine image or descended from apes?

What is the human animal, anyway? Must we choose only one of the foregoing images? Some combination of those images? None of the above?

For millennia, poets and mystics, philosophers and scientists have struggled to articulate what it means to be human. Among the countless proposals, no consensus of any kind has emerged on this question, including among religious traditions and theologians. Even biblical writers do not answer this question directly, and one could construct multiple points of view about humanity using various biblical passages.

“Humanity” is the theme for the second Sunday of the Season of Creation in this year’s lectionary cycle, which we observed yesterday. And even though biblical books represent a wide array of perspectives, those books do seem to offer a singular note of caution about this theme: whatever it means to be human cannot be isolated from the rest of God’s creation.

This is a cautionary note because separating ourselves from the rest of God’s creation is precisely what makes us stumble into arrogance and fall into tragedy—we might recall that the so-called “fall” of humanity in the third chapter of Genesis is mostly a falling away from intimacy, and relationship, and communion.

Embracing the essential and non-negotiable social character of humanity has always been challenging for our species, but especially so in modern Western society. Nearly everything from public school curricula to advertising and popular entertainment trains us to aim always for self-sufficiency as one of our primary virtues—but this is entirely delusional. Every single breath we take relies on the trees growing from the soil and the algae blooming in the oceans to provide the oxygen for our breathing.

“Seven Days of Creation, II,” Sushobha Jenner

No one is self-sufficient, not one single creature of God in what Roman Catholic and feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson calls the “community of creation.” All life on this planet—all of it—is interdependent.

The lectionary last week featured the ancient story of creation from Genesis, except for the creation of humanity, which the lectionary assigns for this week (Genesis 1:26-28). I think that’s a helpful strategy, a way to underscore that the wider world of God’s creation is clearly good without us. But splitting up the story that way also comes with significant risk—we risk perpetuating a deadly isolation from the rest of God’s creation.

Let’s be sure to note that we humans don’t even have our own day in the creation story from Genesis; we’re created on the same day as all the other mammals—the “cattle and crawling things and wild beasts”—and I note this not to denigrate our humanity, as if threads of relationship diminish us; to the contrary, being woven into the vast web of creation with all other animals is a thing of startling beauty.

The beauty itself evokes, it seems to me, the deep communion for which we all yearn, even when we can’t quite name it that way. Biblical writers often evoke this sense of an ancient wound with which all of us live, and for which only communion can offer healing.

Author Kate Forster writes about all this in the frame of consolation, which she invites by paying attention to the wider world of animals—“consolation” because the notion that we reside at the top of the animal heap leaves us precariously alone.

“I think it’s a deep consolation,” Forster writes, “to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead.”

We aren’t speaking about “their life and our life,” she says, “nor your life and my life.” No, there is only “just one teetering and endless thread” of life, “and all of us are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.”

I love that phrase, and I think it summons a poignant beauty from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, also assigned for the second week of this season (2:1-8). “As deep as entanglement goes” is also where God has gone in Jesus, and where we still encounter that divine presence in all the entanglements of life itself.

Paul is apparently quoting from an ancient hymn of praise to Christ in this portion from his letter, a hymn of praise for the Jesus who lives a fully human life—going all the way to the cross and tomb, as “deep as entanglement goes”— and by doing so, shows us God with us.

Early in Christian traditions theologians argued that Jesus saves humanity by showing us what it means to be truly human. Hearing stories about Jesus, we catch a glimpse of what it means to act humanly, what it means to live in authentically human relationships, what it looks like for the fully human person to thrive and flourish—free at last from the shackles of bitter resentments and the cycles of violent retributions.

All four Gospel writers grapple with this notion of a divine humanity by using a title for Jesus that we usually see translated as the “Son of Man.” This strange title has a long history in the Hebrew Bible, where some prophets will refer to themselves as “Son of Man” as a way to underscore their own humanity, without any prestige, just an ordinary person like anyone else. For other biblical writers, it’s a title of divine authority, for one who is designated by God to represent who God is.

Both of those meanings merge in the indigenous translation of the Christian Testament, The First Nations Version. In the lectionary passages for this day, that version renders that ancient title as “The True Human Being.”

Mark’s Jesus (10:41-45) describes imperial rulers as those who “show their power over people and push them around.” But this will not be so for those who follow me, Jesus says, for those who live like “The True Human Being” in humble service.

Standing in that long line of Hebrew prophets, Gospel writers present Jesus as the truly human one who lives with divine authority. Just imagine what this might imply for the claim that we humans are created in the “image of God,” as the short but galvanizing portion from Genesis declares, an image that remains stubbornly undefined, not only in Genesis but in the rest of the Bible.

Isn’t time—way past time, actually—for us humans to stop assuming that the divine image grants us godlike power to dominate other humans and subjugate all other animals. And why is “godlike” even associated with “domination” at all? How might the world change if instead of a swaggering coercion, God’s image is instead a posture of humble service that sets God’s creatures free?

Quite honestly, that very possibility slapped me awake like a clap of heavenly thunder as I tried to preach on these texts. Reconfiguring the divine image would surely shift dramatically how that short portion from the very first chapter of the Bible is usually read, especially when Creator God gives humanity “dominion” over all the other animals.

The history of that little phrase is ghastly and horrific—which is putting the matter quite modestly—not least because that sense of dominion has too often applied to particular humans who are counted among those “other animals.”

Lurking around in that troubling word “dominion” is of course the Latin word for “lord”—dominus. Strikingly—and I mean this ought to jolt us all awake—the Gospel writers and Paul insist that that the “dominion of the dominus,” the power of the Lord Jesus, appears most vividly in humble service to others—to all other creatures of the same God.

Now is the time to define these powerful biblical words that have remained so despairingly vulnerable to distortion and even torturous manipulation; Earth herself is crying out for this religious intervention, and this is it: To “have dominion” is to serve others and to set them free; this is the very image of God, and the only definition that matters for what it means to be human.

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

Daily and Deliberate Acts of Kindness

This past Sunday I realized that the wonderfully rich Season of Creation we’ve been observing for the last few weeks was missing something, something vital and crucial. As we celebrated St. Francis’ Day, I realized how much I have been missing all the other animals with whom we share this precious Earth.

“St. Francis of Assisi,” Jennifer Wojtowicz

Feeling the absence of animals in this season can help us name a bit more directly their absence in our lives more generally. As modern Western people, we don’t interact with other animals very much, unless we live on a farm or have to remove raccoons from our attic.

There are some good reasons for our distance from some animals, which the domesticated variety often obscure: the wider world of God’s creation is actually quite wild and feral, and even dangerous. Much to our chagrin, we don’t have full control of this planet, and a great deal of it remains far beyond our understanding. The passage assigned from the biblical book of Job for the Feast of St. Francis is meant to convey precisely that sense of an untamable world (Job 39:1-8).

Mountain goats at birthing time “burst forth” with their babes (v. 3). That verb in Hebrew means quite literally “split open” in the act of birth—a rather violent description. And do you really suppose that you are harnessing the full strength of an ox with a yoke? Oxen serve us at their pleasure, not ours (v. 9-12). And while the original Hebrew about the ostrich is mostly untranslatable (v. 13-17), the point seems to be how miraculous it is that they even survive given how thoroughly they neglect their own young.

The world remains untamable and far beyond the reach of our understanding—not unlike God, actually. And that’s what Job wants to say rather emphatically.

Earlier in this book, Job runs out of patience with his terribly pious and self-righteous friends, who are trying to explain Job’s suffering to him. They want it to make sense (mostly, we should note, by blaming Job himself for it).

So Job urges his friends to “ask the beasts” (12:7), and they will teach you. Talk to the birds of the air and the fish of the sea; they will tell you. Speak to the earth and it will enlighten you, Job says. The God who made all of us, the beasts will say, is the same God who cannot be squeezed into your neat and tidy systems.

St. Francis’ Day at All Saints’ Parish 2020

I truly love the custom of “blessing” animals during worship on St. Francis’ Day. The weather was perfect for this here in Saugatuck on Sunday, and we welcomed some of those “beasts” into our outdoor sanctuary to worship with us, the ones we embrace as our companions. That we enjoyed their company with us while we gathered at the Eucharistic Table on Sunday was also a moving reminder that the word “companion” means “the one with whom we break bread.” This alone is a remarkable and beautiful thing: in a wild and feral world where so many other animals remain entirely beyond our grasp, we live with some of them as our companions.

I am constantly astonished by how much we do not know about this planet on which we live. We have, to date, identified and named at best only 25% of the species on Earth; more likely only around 10%! Many of these—we can’t know for sure how many—are now extinct because of climate change and we will never know what they were. That should be cause for our deep lament.

In a world of mass extinction and human violence, it matters that we treat these beloved creatures gently and kindly. We humans have not always done so. In fact, and to our shame, we continue to use dogs in laboratory experiments (usually beagles), and we still test beauty products and cosmetics on rabbits; from petrochemical companies to military installations, fish, monkeys, cats, owls, and pigs are all pressed into laboratory service against their wills and under tortuous conditions. (Faunalytics is a good source for learning more about animal testing and how to advocate for ending it.)

Beyond mere sentimentality, treating other-than-human animals with kindness is actually an act of repentance, and also a gesture of hopefulness for a better world. Yet one more added benefit: it might encourage us to treat other humans with the same kindness.

“Come to me,” Jesus said, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you…for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

That Gospel passage is also assigned for St. Francis’ Day (Matthew 11:25-30). While most of us hear Jesus addressing humans in that verse, let’s notice that he uses the image of a “yoke”—in case you haven’t seen one recently, a yoke is a wooden frame or collar that joins two oxen together at their necks as they plow or haul a load.

It turns out that yokes have also been used, in ancient and modern societies, on human slaves during transport, to keep them from running away—a chilling reminder that how we treat other animals often gives us permission to treat other humans just as badly.

Come to me, Jesus says, all you heavily-burdened humans, all you tortured creatures, every weary species and I will give you rest.

If you find yourself moved when you see an act of kindness, you are touching the very heart of God. As theologian Robert Neville says, this is the God who treats us with kindness in Christ.

That’s not usually how most people hear the Gospel described. But let’s recall that the root of that word kind is kin. When we treat someone with kindness, we are treating them as kin, with kinship, as if they are members of our own family. That is the good news of the Gospel—by treating us kindly in Christ, God is treating us members of God’s own family; we are loved as God’s own kin, and we are called to love all others in the same way.

Indigenous communities made these vital connections a very long time ago, including the practice of referring to all other beings on this planet as our “relatives.” Surely our engagement with climate change and the need for ecological renewal and healing would deepen significantly if we thought of ourselves and all other creatures of the same God as members of a single family.

St Francis’ Day at All Saints’ Parish 2023

How we speak about these things matters, because the way we speak shapes our behavior. I learned just recently, for example, that in the traditional Hawaiian language you don’t refer to yourself as the “owner” of a pet. The word instead is “kahu,” and it has multiple meanings: “guardian, protector, steward, and beloved attendant.”

A kahu is someone entrusted with the safekeeping of something precious, something cherished. What a kahu protects is not their property; what they protect is part of their soul.

Many centuries ago, St. Francis urged us to think and pray in exactly this way, and even more expansively still: not only did he refer to other animals as his siblings, but also the many other features of God’s creation—like “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon.”

Perhaps just a single day devoted to Francis is not enough, not in this age of climate chaos and ecological disaster. Perhaps we need to be remembering him every single day as we seek to live ever more gratefully for all of our relatives, and as we seek to live ever more gently on this precious Earth.

This ecological commitment begins, perhaps, not with “random” acts of kindness, as the old aphorism would have it, but with deliberate ones.

Every single day.

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.

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…