Sermon to Acworth Congregational Church (note: I deliver sermons and generally follow the script but add to the sermon with examples).

Today’s gospel is the Q tradition of the temptation stories in the wilderness that appear in Matthew and Luke. It is chosen to begin the church’s season of Lent, a time of testing and spiritual growth.  I want to present Jesus’ wilderness ordeals from Episcopal Bishop Steven Charleston, who is also a member of the Choctaw nation. He, like a number of American indigenous people, who have converted to Christianity but also carried over their religious culture Into Christianity. Bishop Charleston understands Jesus’ baptism experience as a vision quest wherein Jesus emerged from the waters of his baptism experience a visionary experience of Spirit as Mother Dove landing on him and hearing God affirming, “You are my beloved child, in whom I am well-pleased.”

Then Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the place of dried bones and deep mystery. Here the wilderness expresses the fragility of life. Both modern and ancient seekers have experienced the wilderness as the terrain of the soul, a place of solitude between oneself and God. For indigenous peoples, natural places of solitude reveal identity and mission of your life. The Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to forge his future ministry of God’s kin-dom and test Jesus for his struggle against empire

The wilderness was a place of trial where Jesus would confront the central issues of empire and domination. It is easy to contextualize the Q temptations as counter-narratives of Jesus’ ministry of God’s reign as alternatives to the oppressive Roman Empire and the coopted Temple. The wilderness was outside of imperial rule; it was not taxable as land asset. The three ordeals depict the diabolical nature of imperial Roman rule, which is committed to an oppressive rule to benefit the elite and to stress Jesus’ resistance to the empire.

In his own vision quest, Steven Charleston struggled with his own Choctaw spiritual heritage of his tribe’s assimilation into colonizing Euro-American Christianity with his tribal spirituality, and the horrific tribal history of the forced relocation from Mississippi to Oklahoma– the “Trail of Tears.” The colonial decisions of President Andrew Jackson led to deaths of thousands of Choctaw children, men and women. Their burial customs involved burial of their bones in a common tribal grave. Many who died on the “Trail of Tears” were unable to bury the dead appropriately. This is the legacy of colonial empires.

Through an inner spiritual voice, Steven Charleston was instructed to read the Matthew’s Q tradition of the wilderness temptations of Jesus to understand his two spiritual paths that he was interweaving, his own Native American spirituality and the American legacy of colonial Christianity. He blends his vision quest with Jesus’ temptation experience in the wilderness.

This is a fruitful interpretative context to explore Jesus’ vision quest and American Christian empire. He notes how spiritual power can be transmitted through elements of nature. Matthew presents Jesus going out into a lonely wilderness “in the spirit of lament, open to being tested and tempted in his weakness.” He is attended by others—prayers of the Baptist and his disciples, the beasts, and spirits, angels and demons. Charleston notes that the purpose of a vision quest is spiritual challenge and transformation, but his Choctaw Christianity does not hold to Christian notions of original sin and demonic spirits.

The three challenges are struggles for choosing self over the needs of others—the heart of Jesus’ notion of God’s kin-dom as compassionate love of others, not the violence of the Roman Empire. Indigenous people pay attention to the Earth, for the details of surroundings are full of the echoes of divine love and harmony.

In the first challenge, Jesus looked down to the ground.

He pays attention to the stones around him in the desert. And in his hunger, he imagines the stones as loaves of bread on the desert floor. What did the stones have to teach him? Are they physical nourishment for him alone or spiritual nourishment of a different kind? (Charleston, Four Visions)

According to indigenous culture, stones are the “oldest of living things,” and Jesus listened to his eldest stone relatives who told him that they embodied the One. They were not there for him alone, but for all people. The stones led him back to spiritual balance from self to the needs of others, thus Jesus professed, “the people do not live by bread alone but every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Charleston writes,

The vision of the stones establishes from outset of his quest that he will be true to the oldest principle of the Native covenant. He will be grounded in the faith of the One God. He will not let any sense of self lure him away from his calling to be one with the People. Spiritual unity will be maintained and, therefore, spiritual equilibrium.

The second challenge is the sky vision that takes place on a mountain top, where Jesus glanced downwards Charleston notes that for humans this is the expansive lure of ego-centeredness, and Jesus stood in a small circle at the top of the at the edge of the mount, connected to the limitless sky. The Devil asked him to throw himself off the edge so that God might save him through the angels, preventing him from falling down and smashing on the Earth. For Charleston, there is an alignment of Mother Earth, the human tribe, and God. The challenge here is not about right relationship with God but primarily right alignment between the Earth, humanity, and God. Jesus chose balanced alignment. This alignment is reflected in his prayer “your will be done on earth and heaven.” Earth reflects the heavens.

Finally, while humans imagine the sky as limitless, the third challenge examines that “everything out there is up for grabs…The open sky, the endless expanse of creation, becomes not an object of wonder, but an object of plunder.” Bishop Steven Charleston reflects that this sky vision reflects the European colonists and white supremacy under the guise of the Doctrine of Discovery) that envisioned the endless resources of the North American continent in terms of profit, Jesus decides a question: “Is the right relationship to all that there is a question of stewardship or of ownership? Which will it be?” Jesus chose kinship with the Earth. Charleston summarizes the choice of the third challenge:

We are not to insult God by claiming that we can use creation for our own purposes., much less for profit. We are not the masters of all we see. We cannot swallow the universe into the stomach of our greed. We do not need more. The ethic implicit in a culture that understands family as a vast matrix of kinship is an ethic of sharing. The sky vision shows Jesus the fundamental value of native life: it Is to be lived in a spirit of stewardship. Human beings are entrusted with everything that they see. They are responsible for it. They are to be in awe of it. They are to delight in it.(Charleston)

Jesus learned the wisdom of indigeneity of his Hebrew ancestors in the Sinai wilderness and many indigenous peoples’ lifeways: that we do not own the Spirit’s Earth, for Earth is an unconditional gift. Psalm 24:1 says “The earth belongs to the Lord and all that is in it, and those who live in it.” The Choctaw, as well as indigenous peoples of North America, claim that the Earth is the Spirit’s gift to us. The Hebrews and indigenous peoples share a revealed wisdom—that the Earth and all that dwells on the planet are an original divine gift.

Jesus experienced God’s wild grace in the wilderness as compassionate concern for life, with unexpected and expansive love, desiring wholeness and flourishing of Earth creatures, and ever-present to suffering and death. Jesus incarnated those wilderness values and wisdom into his kin-dom message and ministry. The wilderness challenges gave voice to Jesus’ pain, struggle, and emotional turmoil as he underwent in Gethsemane as he prepared to die at the hands of the Roman empire and colluded Temple priesthood. Jesus learned his kin-dom lifestyle and ministry in the wilderness. Similarly, a Christian animist website concludes, ”Jesus was a wilderness person. Wild places were where he went to find solitude, pray, grieve, rest, escape arrest and often to teach. Places energized by God’s free and feral Spirit. Being, ‘with the wild animals’, examples genuine ‘nature connection’, plus the biblical principle that truly spiritual people live in harmony with wild nature. Jesus’ wilderness spirituality always trusts God for provision and protection.” (Christian Animism, http://www.christiananimism.com/thinking-animism/jesus-and-wild-nature/

Today’s gospel is about Jesus’ interpretation of scriptures. His critics argued frequently that he was cavalier about scriptural law and was frequent rulebreaker. But Jesus counters the charge, ”Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets but to fulfill them.” This emphatic statement indicates that Jesus is speaking to a pro-law and not a pro-prophet audience. The scripture just follows Jesus’ beatitudes, the core values of God’s kin-dom. He is reassuring his pro-law audience that his teachings are grounded in the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus argues two points: scripture’s authority will last “until heaven and earth passes away.” His second point is that they exercise authority “until all is accomplished” that refers to the coming of God’s kin-dom. God’s kin-dom’s arrival renders the law as completed and replaced. He continues to make his case: the authority of the law will pass when God’s compassion and justice requires exceptions.

Jesus’ principles may instruct our own readings. Such principles are important to me as I engage other Christians on Facebook and other situations, and they use narrow readings or fundamentalist interpretations to weaponize Jesus or narrow readings of Hebrew scriptural law against their opponents who do not fit their understanding of Christianity. They create outsiders by abusing and excluding.

Many of my Facebook friends have suffered the religious abuse and traumatic exclusion. Naturally, they are turned off by self-righteous, hate-filled, and aggressive Christians. I navigate the charged position of being a follower of Christ but do not weaponize Jesus or the scriptures. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Gandhi’s indictment has often troubled and influenced me. I often respond in a similar vein, “I am not that type of Christian, I follow Jesus.” Or another important comment I write, ”Jesus was not a fundamentalist, he told stories and parables; he used metaphors, poetic language, and symbols.” In other words, Jesus did not interpret his scriptures literally. This is to undercut distorted literal interpretations of scripture turned against specific groups,

Weaponizing Jesus or the Bible betrays the historical ministry of Jesus. He often quotes the prophet Hosea (6:6), “What I want is mercy, not sacrifice.” The Hebrew word for mercy (hesed) is often translated as “steadfast love,” “kindness,” or “compassion.” In Luke’s sermon on the plain, Jesus instructs us, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate. (6:36)” For Jesus, all religious law must be strained through God’s compassion.

There are strong parallels between Jesus’ his pro-law, fundamentalist opponents, then and now. Jesus challenged religious law when it lost its heart and sense of grace, and it became rigidly interpreted against people and excluded violators. Jesus placed all law prescriptions through a strainer of compassion and justice. He tested many religious laws through the Great Commandment to love God and love neighbor. But Jesus also revolutionized the Leviticus commandment to “love your neighbor” whereas “neighbor” means fellow Israelite. Jesus expanded the commandment with his experience of a compassionate God. Jesus revolutionized the commandment to love neighbor by expanding the narrow definitions of neighbor. In his dialogue with a lawyer before the “Good Samaritan” parable, the lawyer interrogates Jesus, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells us a loaded parable, with a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan. The lawyer is compelled by the story that structures to answer, the one who showed compassion, a member of a despised ethnic group. The lawyer refused to name the Samaritan, probably gagged at the thought of saying the words. So he uses the words “the one who showed compassion,” But Jesus transformed the definition of neighbor to include outsiders, outcasts, the poor, enemies, and Gentiles.

For the Pharisees, the scribes, and the Temple priests, Jesus consistently broke boundaries and religious laws. Jesus scholar Marcus Borg comments, “As one who knew God, Jesus knew God as the compassionate one, not as the God of requirements and boundaries.” God’s compassion must be brought to assess all religious laws in and out of the Bible. If we see Jesus as God incarnate Christ and a ruler-breaker, then what does that say about God? I have learned that the Spirit colors outside of religious doctrines and practice. The Spirit is a mischief maker or rule breaker. God breaks human rules all the time out of motive of compassion and justice.

For example, holiness was not a negative force of exclusion as used by Pharisees and priests who mapped and classified people and their actions into categories: clean and unclean, pure and impure, holy and sinful. Jesus understood God’s holiness foster an inclusive mandate. Jesus practiced and proclaimed God’s radical inclusive love as true holiness. Author Diarmuid O’Murchu writes,

Gospel based compassion tolerates no outsiders. It embraces and seeks to bring in all who are marginalized, oppressed, and excluded from empowering fellowship. It evokes a double response requiring a reawakened heart that knows it cannot withhold the just action that liberates and empowers. The transformation of the heart which might also be described as the contemplative gaze, asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless.

Jesus preached and practices God’s radical inclusive love because God is both compassionate and just. Jesus’ meals were inclusive of outcasts, prostitutes, tax collectors, and all those people that legally defined “holy people” feared and despised.
Another modern feature is the literalizing the Bible: This is relatively a modern phenomenon when the biblical cultures that formed the scriptures understood a good metaphor. Today for fundamentalists, the real is literal interpretation. People in Jesus’ culture understood what symbol and metaphor were, perhaps, better than fundamentalist Christians.
In his book, Creativity, Matthew Fox, a popular spiritual author, relates a story about the election of fundamentalist Christians as a majority of town school board in New Hampshire. Their first decree was directed to teachers: They were forbidden to use the word “imagination” in the classroom. When he asked “why,” they responded, “Satan lives in the imagination.” The UCC biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, “Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants urge as the only thinkable one.” God’s Spirit is operative in creativity, and to limit or ban creativity is to ban the Spirit.
Let me tell a classroom story. Usually, I have students introduce themselves during the first. One student had transferred from an evangelical fundamentalist college. I asked, “why.” She said that the school confiscated all her Harry Potter books from her dorm room because they promoted witchcraft. I asked, if that was the real issue. The Harry Potter books are full of values that Christian promote family values, friendships, self-sacrificing love, and compassionate care. The real issue for the confiscation goes back to the imagination. Why is imagination so dangerous? Imagination produces multiple meanings when interpret the story. Fundamentalists fear and bash the imagination, but they really fear the consequences of the imagination: The possibility that there is not one interpretation but plural interpretations. I lead a Bible study on Mondays, and there are more interpretations of a text than people in attendance. All are valuable as we discern the meanings of scriptures for our lives.
For Jesus, justice and compassion steered the imagination as they served the greater cause of God’s kin-dom. When we yoke compassion to our imagination, the Spirit assists us in the creative process of understanding.
One of my favorite stories is the woman caught in adultery in John’s Gospel (8:1-11). The men catch a couple in adultery but only bring the woman before Jesus to test his judgement. Blame the woman is typical in patriarchal dominated societies.
But Jesus enacts a parabolic action by writing in the sand. He tells the accusers that one without sin may cast the first stone. But Jesus continues to write in the sand. He symbolically communicates that religious laws are not written in stone, rigid and inflexible. They are written in the sand whereby the wind or rain may dissolve the writing. Laws need to be flexible and tentative as the sand, not rigid as stone. God’s heart-felted compassion must always be factored into religious regulations. God requires mercy, not sacrifice. God makes exceptions all the time: God wants mercy, not regulations. This becomes evident in his Sabbath controversies on healing a crippled woman on the Sabbath (Lk. 13:10-17) or explodes the logic of Sabbath fundamentalist in their critique on his disciples picking grain on Sabbath. He challenges their rigid interpretations of the Sabbath observance. They literalize the Sabbath while the Sabbath observance is grounded in God’s distributive justice and beloved love for the crippled women and hungry disciples. God inscribes compassion upon our hearts, it not a law but an invitation to imitate God: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”
Now back to our Gospel! Jesus was not a fundamentalist. He refused to interpret his scriptures from a perspective of fear and threat. Do we experience as ruler-maker, who expects to literally obey the rules and commandments? Do we box in God’s grace and mercy? Do we undo God’s radical inclusive love?

Would Jesus be an Environmentalist? Carol Meyer

…..Unfortunately, many Christians see little connection between the health of the Earth and the mission of Christ. Historically, much theological and spiritual emphasis was given to fleeing the world and putting one’s sole hope in life after death. Thus, the world had little value in itself. It was merely the backdrop for the great drama of personal salvation, a purely spiritual endeavor.

And maybe because a thriving planet provided the basic support necessary for the spiritual quest, it was taken as a given and didn’t need to be theologized about.

But now in the wake of a dying or extremely ill planet, we are suddenly realizing that God’s dream can’t materialize without the aid of the natural world.
When we examine the life and teachings of Jesus, he certainly spoke up boldly about the critical issues of his day. He proclaimed that his mission was to bring glad tidings to the poor, liberty to captives and release to prisoners (Luke 4:18). He was concerned for the sick, downtrodden, and anyone oppressed by unjust systems. The whole environmental tragedy is rife with injustices—the rich exploiting the earth for their greed at the expense of the poor and powerless who bear the heaviest load of negative consequences. Jesus would never have sanctioned or been silent about that.

We all know the famous last judgment passage in Matthew 25 where Jesus makes the feeding, housing, and clothing of those in need the criteria for salvation. In our day, the stakes are raised to a much higher collective level, beyond just individual actions. By every unsustainable personal or societal choice, we choose to create more deserts and starvation, more impure and scarce water, more erratic devastating storms, etc., that will harm millions of people and other sentient beings. By every sustainable choice, we choose actions that will contribute to the feeding, housing, and clothing of our fellow human being. We don’t have to guess at what position Jesus would take. We know he would be speaking out for a more committed stewardship of the planet, even if it means sacrifice and dying to self.

Jesus lived close to the land and drew the images for his parables from creation. It is unthinkable that the Christ who loved God so deeply did not also love all that God had made. If we grieve over the current irredeemable losses to the grandeur of creation, surely that is nothing compared to the One who knows the divine value of what we are destroying. Jesus could not have known God so intimately had he not had intimate rapport with the natural world.
Were he alive today, I’m certain that Jesus would be outspoken in challenging the powers that be and each one of us regarding the pillage of the Earth. And no doubt he would be in great trouble as he was in his lifetime–vilified, condemned, marginalized, and characterized as radical and extreme. And yes, perhaps killed for speaking truth to power, as happens to many of the prophets. Surely we should be unafraid and willing to risk a little more too.
I believe Jesus walks beside us every step of the way as we seek to find ways to live sustainably and in partnership with creation. May we be true to him and call upon his wisdom and power in this great work.

Covenant with the Earth:

We, the Federated Church of Marlborough, proclaim our love for God’s Creation and profess our belief that the Earth, ourselves, and all life are interconnected as part of the sacred Web of Life.

We covenant together to commit ourselves as a church and as individuals in the great work of healing, preservation and justice as we strive to reduce our individual and collective negative impact on the environment and to repair the damage that has been done to God’s Earth. In worship and church life we will express our appreciation and give praise for the Earth and will display a reverence for the Earth community of life.

We commit ourselves to Earth care and to the biblical principles of taking only what we need, healing the harm we do to the Earth, and keeping the Earth in repair for the future.

As Earth Protectors, we make this covenant in the hope and faith that through our Earth care we will be able to help improve and sustain the health of the land, air and water for the benefit of all current and future inhabitants of this Planet.

Jesus as the Green Face of Abba God

Throughout human history, when the state either coopted or controlled institutional religion, religious institutions, almost never, worked for the benefit of ordinary people or the poor. This is true today as it was during the history of Israel and the first century Palestine.

Jesus was formed by his Jewish creation-centered spirituality. There are some significant features of creation-centered spirituality. God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, looked at creation good and delighted in creation. Creation was beloved and valuable to God. God was experienced in creation: mountains rivers, wilderness, and even Jesus’ claimed in his meals and living compassion. God promoted kinship relationships among the people, whereby hospitality and love of the stranger was highlighted. Love was a central relationship with each other.

The Creator God encouraged love of neighbor and just relationships. One of the chief claims in the Psalm 24:1, “the earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it he world, and those who live in.” Other places in the scriptures make clear that we are tenants. Jesus was grounded in the Hebrew biblical tradition of creation spirituality “…..…grounded in the experience of ongoing relationship with the Creator God, leading to a covenantal bond between God and God’s people for the blessing and abundance of all people and all creation.” (Wes Howard- Brook)

Jesus’ parables and sayings are full of an intimacy nature–the sower and the seed (Mt: 13:3-9, 18-23); the vine and the branches (Jn. 15:1-17); Mark 12:1-12). He illustrated his stories by referring to the lilies of the field (Luke 12:27), the birds of the air (Mt. 6:26), and foxes and their lairs (Lk. 9:58). These were to awaken his audience to the divine presence in their midst. He understood well that the divine presence of Abba Creation and Spirit in the natural order of creation. Jesus’ healings justly restored the ill and possessed to God creation community.

A Canadian Christian clergy Bruce Sanguin describes Jesus as a “bit of an earthnik:” “He looked everywhere around at the natural world and saw God everywhere.” Popular spirituality author Matthew Fox argues, what Jesus saw in creation he incorporated within God’s kin-dom. The Spirit graced Jesus with a vivid vision of God’s creation as a gift. Kin-dom of God was the community of Abba God’s creation or the household.

For Jesus, God’s kin-dom was neither patriarchal empires nor state sponsored religion that normalize violence to promote income and power inequities. Empires and state-sponsored religion work closely, hand in hand to oppress, legitimizing abundance for the privileged few at the expense of the general peasant populace. Empire and temple financially benefitted from their mutual relationship, and this benefitted the elite or 1%. Creation-centered spirituality criticized this mutual relationship that oppressed the vulnerable and the poor.

God the Creator is envisioned as Householder of the Heaven and the Earth. Jesus’ notion of kin-dom is the earthly place of God’s transforming presence.
Abba God is Householder Creator (1 Cor. 8:6), Protector (Isaiah 63:16), Provider (Isaiah 10:1-2), and Parent Householder. These metaphors express a close, loving, and intimate relation to our specific location of creation—on earth. Jesus experienced Abba as Householder. Abba compassionately cares for the poor and needy, widows and orphans, migrants and refugees in human imperial civilization. Empire takes advantage and exploits the vulnerable and the poor. God champions the vulnerable, the oppressed, and poor.

God provides abundance to creation, both human and the more than human. In the creation story that opens Genesis, God rests and delights in creation. God values and finds intrinsic worth in all creation from human to the more than human life to the Earth herself. All are beloved and dear to God.

As I prepared for this sermon, I am so mindful of the climate catastrophe in Australia, where 27 million acres have been burned, human loss, over 1 billion animal wildlife have died, not including valuable insects for the flourishing of the biodiversity. So how would Jesus respond to the Australian climate catastrophe, in particular, and the pending global climate Armageddon?

Jesus taught love. He revolutionized the notion of love of your neighbor in Leviticus beyond tribalism (Lev. 19:18). He expanded the notion: love your neighbor as yourself (Mt.22:27-28), neighbor as the Good Samaritan, as prostitutes, tax collectors, outcasts, and those afflicted with illness. He stretched the Great Commandment to the love of enemy, and love outsiders, the poor, and the vulnerable—all parts of the community of creation.
Let me rehearse a few of the principles of Jesus’ creation spirituality.

1) After creation, God rested, delighted. and found valuable and beloved from the whole of creation to the smallest microbe and atom.

2) Abba God nurtures creation. God sends the rain and the sun for growth, clothes the grass, feeds the birds, cares for the flourishing and thriving of both human and the more than human. God is concerned with the well-being of the planet. Jesus regards God’s creation—the earth—as a gift to all life. All life shares that gift.

3) Jesus’ expansion of “love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus makes it clear that every ‘person’ we encounter – human and all life– is our ‘neighbor’.

Love of God involves love of God’s creation. This means that all family members deserve a fair share at the table and that the house must be kept in good order for others now and for the future.

One of my favorite theologians, Sallie McFague says, “That God is constantly, annoyingly present in the world and concerned with the basic and ordinary physical well-being. That God cares about lilies and sparrows and hungry stomachs…” God is present through the Spirit the world and intends that humanity and more than human life share the household. Both have the right to flourish and thrive. This includes food, water, and a place to live. We love God as we love all creation.

The Creator providentially created an abundance in the natural world. Abba taught the Israelites in the wilderness that their experience of scarcity was turned into abundance. Jesus learned that in the wilderness, and this appears in his feeding stories of the multitudes in the wilderness. The forty days in the wilderness taught Jesus the lessons on created kinship of all creatures and God’s economy of abundant giftedness to life. He learned first-hand the Spirit’s earthen economy, ”freely you have received, freely give.” (Mt. 10:8).

The justice ministry of Jesus is open to the extension to nature—nature is certainly among the poor and oppressed in our time. Right relation to nature can be guided Jesus’ praxis. Jesus mirrors God’s distributive justice of material grace, symbolizing the grace of God’s unconditional love. Distributive justice is a divine concern of Household God as provider. God has provided the whole universe, and for us, the Earth as an original gift. Air, food, land, and water are provided for us as gift. In the Hebrew tradition, land is God’s gift.

To be just means to distribute everything fairly. The primary meaning of “justice” is equitable distribution of whatever you have in mind … God’s world must be distributed fairly and equitably among all God’s people. … When the biblical tradition proclaims that revolutionary vision of distributive justice, it is imagining neither liberal democratic principles nor universal human rights. Instead, its vision derives from the common experience of a well-run home, household, or family farm. … Are the children and dependents well fed, clothed, and sheltered? Are the sick given special care? Are the responsibilities and returns apportioned fairly? Do all have enough? Especially that: Do all have enough? Or, to the contrary, do some have far too little while others have far too much? … Do all God’s children have enough? If not – and the biblical answer is “not” – how must things change here below so that all God’s people have a fair, equitable, and just proportion of God’s world? (Crossan)

Distributive justice is what biblical scholar John D. Crossan calls “enoughism ” in the Lord’s prayer. “Give us this day our daily prayer.” Enoughism is giving everyone the exact same thing. A family of six has more needs that a family of two such as Joe and myself. Enough varies, but the goal is to meet our daily needs. This extends to all of us but also extends to include more than human life—wildlife and the Earth herself.
At the center of Jesus’ kin-dom ministry was the invitation to see the world differently and to see it as beloved as God does. I turn to words and life of Jesus as the Green Face of God, “Just as every insect, flower, animal, tree, and life suffering and perishing in the fire storms of Australia, who are members of my family, you see me.” (Mt. 25:40)

Meditation Today –Tehra Cox

Meditation Tehra Cox
“When I moved from the noisy concrete and steel canyons of New York City to a small Hudson Valley village with its serenely-forested highlands, I was stunned by the radical change of scenery. As late summer turned into fall, my favorite season, nature’s magic began its work on me. From one of my first autumn walks along the wooded mountain path behind the old Victorian house that was my new home, I was introduced to the uncanny voices of the natural world.

My first encounter with what I call “Earth-Speak” was nothing less than phenomenal for its impact on my life and sensibility. As I came around a bend at the top of the mountain, the lush goldenness of maples along the trail nearly took my breath away. They colored the very air around them. As I stood transfixed, it seemed that all the flora of the woods began to sway toward me. The dramatic red-orange-gold hues in all shapes and sizes were pulsating with light, sounds and scents so intoxicating that I wasn’t sure if I was breathing or drinking. Suddenly, I “heard” a whispering of words that I will never forget: “Ah yes, the very things you humans love about us – our different colors and shapes and smells and languages – are the things you often hate about each other. Alas, you have lost touch with your beauties because you have lost touch with us.”

Having just moved out of a city teeming with the tensions that densely-populated diversities of culture, creed, economy – and yes, race – too often provoke, this message was stunning and timely for me. During that first year of “life in the country,” I became unusually acquainted with this sentient world. In my daily walks with pen and paper, the presences of nature enfolded me in their lushness while I chronicled their wisdom-teachings. As these “inner tuitions” invited me to consider some of life’s most paradoxical mysteries, they required only one thing of me – to be utterly present and receptive. I didn’t know to call it that at the time – I was only aware that I felt light and free, as if all the space around the trees and the flowers and blades of grass was also around, and even inside, me.”

Sermon Epiphany, Baptism and the Wilderness
Epiphany refers to the Twelfth Night of Christmas and the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus. It is the end of Christmas and the beginning of the church season of Epiphany. Epiphany (epiphaneia in Greek) means appearance or manifestation. Epiphany means an experiential discovery or an illuminated realization. As a senior in high school, we read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the main character Stephen Daedalus has a series of epiphanies to realize who he is and realize his vocation as artist/priest.

Epiphanies are a series of sudden manifestations. In religion, epiphanies are spiritual discoveries, manifestations, enlightenment, or revelations. Epiphanies resolve tensions and deep personal conflicts in life. More importantly, epiphanies are frequently gifts.

Before I address the baptism of Jesus and his wilderness retreat, I want to look at the prior life of Jesus. It requires that we imaginatively fill the historical gaps of knowledge that we know about Jesus. The Jesus Seminar of scholars have tried to do such an imaginative retrieval of the life of Jesus. There is the story of Jesus’ rejection in home village of Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30), where he recites from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue, not a building but a square in the village for Sabbath prayer and sermons. The men of his hometown become so enraged at his teaching that they try to hurl over the cliff to his death. A biblical scholar friend and colleague, Ric Talbott, speculates that the rage was incited that he was a “disobedient son.” Talbott claims that Jesus’ conflict escalated as he helped other Galilean villages through his healing ministry. Jesus was unable to perform miracles for his own hometown. Thus, he had lost honor and shamed himself as the eldest son by failing to accept responsibility for his household after Joseph’s death.

I argue differently. Nazareth is a small village of 200-300 people. Everyone knows everyone’s business. They are aware that Joseph was not the father of Mary’s child, and therefore, Jesus is placed in the outsider category of mamzer, illegitimate or bastard. Illegitimate males and heir male heirs were not allowed in synagogue or Temple for ten generations. Jesus’ presence at the synagogue is serious offense against Jewish purity codes. This sparks a village rage that results in the attempt to kill him.

One of the issues about Jesus that I always wondered about was his extraordinary sensitivity to outcasts and outsiders. How did he become so sensitive to include outsiders?

If either Talbott’s or my own interpretation of the status of Jesus is correct then Jesus at certain age set out on his personal question to resolve father and family issues and how to become a child of Abraham, accepted as a Jew in good standing. He had heard of John the Baptist, and his message through itinerant rabbis, and he went to hear John preach for himself and seek membership in the Baptist community of disciples.

The Baptist prepared future disciples for baptism in Jewish meditation instruction, a stilling mental process and envisioning technique or transporting his spiritual body into God’s heavenly court. Jewish prophets and the monastic community at Qumran, several miles from John baptized people.
So our story this morning. With his shame as illegitimate, Jesus is baptized by a marginal figure John in the waters of the Jordan River. The geography is important. John baptized folks at the Jordan River, in the Judean wilderness and outside of Roman occupation.

Jesus has an epiphany as he emerges from the waters. Jesus has visual and auditory epiphany: The Spirit descends in the form of a Mother Dove. He hears a voice: “This is my child, the Beloved, with whom I am pleased.” Then Jesus embarks a forty-day wilderness retreat. God is at work at the margins of the Empire with all those who are risk to live an alternative dream of society. God revealed Jesus’ identity to himself, outside the centers of Roman power and control. This is significant for Jesus will develop a vision of God’s kin-dom that will challenge Roman power and the coopted Temple priesthood.

Now let me stop here. All the founders of the major world religions experienced epiphanies: revelations or spiritual manifestations in the natural world: The Buddha under the Bodhi Tree at the edge of the jungle, Moses in the burning bush and on Mt. Sinai, the prophet Mohammed in a cave outside of Mecca, Lao-tzu in the wilderness, countless indigenous peoples on vision quests, and many nature mystics–John Muir—and nature lovers such as Tehra Cox who learned to Earthspeak. The natural world has the sacramental potential surprising us with the Spirit’s presence and communication.

Remember Tehra Cox’s Earthspeak from our opening meditation. We read similarly in Psalm 19:1-4,

The heavens are declaring the glory of God,
And the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
And night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech nor are there words,
Their voice is not heard;
Yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the word.

Earthspeak is really the Spirit speaking in a still quiet voice through the natural world. The Spirit is immanent in the natural world, sustaining, suffering, and influencing us through the natural world. The Spirit instructs Jesus through the natural world. Jesus’ vision of an alternative kin-dom to the Roman Empire is formed from his baptism and on-going transformation through the Spirit.

There are several things we learn:

1) At his baptism, Jesus was immersed in the waters of Jordan that opened him to an epiphany of the Spirit as Mother Dove and the self-discovery as God’s beloved child. God’s ruah or breath is the Spirit. For Jesus, God’s ruah became the amniotic fluid, the baptismal waters of earthen womb where incarnational interconnectedness was realized. Jesus became Spirit-born and a Spirit-led prophet.

The Spirit interbreathes in all the Earth’s processes and all life. The Spirit is the energy of all epiphanies. Jesus inhales the freshness of the Spirit’s breath, and he became a Spirit-led prophet, healer, and wisdom teacher. The life and the ministry of Jesus was the empowering work of the Spirit.

Wilderness is the geography of the Spirit and transformation. It has been traditionally the place of spiritual epiphanies and encounter. It symbolized a wildness and resilient energy of the Spirit. The natural world of trees, streams, wildlife, deserts, mountains and oceans are places where we can learn with Jesus Earthspeak and carefully listen to the Spirit speaking through the natural world.

2) Jesus sought to understand his relationship to Abba God and deepened an intimate and loving experience of Abba God. He was beloved child. He resolved unresolved issues about Joseph his adopted father and family issues. Remember the story when Mary and his brothers come to get him when they heard, “He has gone out of his mind.” (Mk. 3:21)

Jesus resolved his family conflicts and the shame as outsider with the disclosure that he was God’s beloved child. He realized God’s unconditional love for him—that grace supersedes the Temple sin management system of guilt and shame. He found himself included not only a child but e “beloved” child, in whom God was well pleased.

He broke the cultural- bondage of religious exclusivism and fundamentalism that some are God’s people and others are not. Jesus leaned that God has no favorites: all of us are God’s favorites and beloved children.

During his retreat in the Judean desert, he would learn that creation has an inclusivity. Biologist Christopher Uhl mindfully discovered inclusivity within the natural world. He writes,

Inclusivity is grounded in relationship whereas exclusivity stems from separation. A consciousness rooted in inclusivity generates trust, one moored in exclusivity foments fear—especially, the fear of the Other. When our goal is exclusivity, we silence those with whom we disagree; but when inclusivity becomes our goal, we seek to create a world that works for all.

Remarkably, Jesus’ notion of radical inclusiveness was forged in solitude of wilderness, separate from Jewish religious exclusiveness and the exclusive hierarchies of the Roman Empire. In the wilderness, Jesus discovered God’s inclusive love for all created life. On the Seventh Day, God rested and delighted in creation. All created life was beloved. God loved not only “pure” Jews but outcasts and Gentiles and creation. God’s beloved is inclusive of humanity and creation, both beloved. When you experience as beloved and extend that belovedness to others, we see the seeds of Jesus’ practice of radical inclusiveness in his kin-dom ministry.

3) In the wilderness, Jesus widened his heart with God’s inclusive compassion. Abba God was compassionate. In Luke 6:36, Jesus states, “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate.” This is the core of Jesus’ ministry of God’s kin-dom. The prayer he taught petitions Abba to give us this day our daily bread and release us from spiraling indebtedness.

The word “compassion” comes from the Hebrew word for “womb.” God’s womb-like love is expressed for the suffering. But Jesus was revolutionary in calling for disciples to imitate God’s compassion. “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” Compassion means literally to “suffer with.” It is just not a feeling moved to care; it is that and more. Compassion is a spiritual practice, cultivated with Buddhists call mindfulness or Christian describing as centering prayer. Jesus promotes the social dynamics of compassion, and this message of compassion becomes a dangerous message to the religious establishment and the Roman Empire.

4) Jesus was reintroduced to Jewish creation-centered spirituality: It was grounded with the Abba God as a Household God– Creator, Protector, and Provider for the people. He tapped into the wilderness theology of the exodus grounded in God’s gift of the Earth and abundant generosity for the people.

The Temple religion was coopted by empire, and it provided justification that provided abundant blessings for the elite at the expense of the many poor. In God’s kin-dom, there would be no hunger. Empires then and today argue an ideology of scarcity. Income inequality and hunger plagued Jesus’ time as well as our own. Scarcity is an economy of greed and selfishness. The wilderness was where God demonstrated the abundance of creation. There is always enough for everyone shares with each other. Now what would Jesus do and say about minimum wage bills vetoed by governor in New Hampshire? What about the political attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act? What about the poisoning of our atmosphere with carbon from coal plants, or the poisoning our streams with toxic chemicals and carcinogen? There is profound selfishness in the ideology of scarcity, and it counters God’s abundance in the wilderness with the Israelites and with Jesus’ feedings of the multitudes. Jesus’ proclaims God abundance in compassionate sharing.

5) Finally, the wilderness is a place of epiphany and the gift of surprised discoveries or revelations. In the wilderness, Jesus practiced an awareness of self in relationship to the elements of nature: the heat during the day and the coldness of the night, the beasts, and scrub plant life,

Canadian clergy and author Bruce Sanguin writes,

The soul feasts on silence. It is God’s first language. Silence is not simply the absence of noise. It is a presence unto itself. The kind of stillness is the font of all creativity, the womb of creation itself… Silence reminds us that we are not separate and isolated. To enter silence is to enter a field of interconnectedness and share in the consciousness and intelligence that animate all of life.

Wandering in nature is one of the most soulful practices for us today. It connects us with solitude, simplicity, vulnerability, and a sense of presence. It is locus for epiphanies. I don’t want you to mistake that epiphanies only happen in nature and wilderness. Often they do, but not always.

Richard Dawkins, an Oxford University evolutionary biologist, has made a career in his scientific claims of the “God delusion” and the “selfish gene.” He wrote a book, The Selfish Gene, where he argues that gene selfishness produces selfishness in organisms, including human individuals. We are selfish. Contrary to this position, there are sociobiologists, who claim an altruistic gene that provides for cooperation and made kinship possible. There is mounting research evidence that there are altruistic or compassionate genes in ourselves.

Let me give an example of the biological basis of compassion. Recently the primatologist and atheist Frantz de Waal has argued that human morality has its biological roots with our primate and mammal ancestors He writes:
Mammals have what I call an “altruistic impulse “in that respond to signs of distress in others and feel an urge to improve their situation. To recognize the need of others, and react appropriately, is really not the same as a preprogrammed tendency to sacrifice oneself for the genetic good.
He traces further altruism to the prototype of maternal care in mammals. De Waal documents in-group altruism in his observation of Bonobo apes, when an older female Bonobo can no longer move and get food and water, other Bonobos bring food and water to her. De Waal refers to Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan but calls this behavior “The Good Simian.” He comments about apes: “Clearly they are not as selfish as has been assumed, and they might actually beat the average priest or Levite when it comes to humane behavior.” There are many more documented observations of species of female mother exhibiting altruism and care for their offspring.

There is another piece that I want to add the conversation between selfish and altruistic genes. In high school, I was required to read the Russian-American novelist, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrug. I had an intense dislike for it. I would have preferred reading J. R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Hobbit. Ayn Rand promotes a philosophy of rugged individualism: She writes,

There is nothing of any importance in life–except how well you do your work. Nothing only that. Whatever else you do will come from that. It is the measure of human value.

She built up a strong case for unbridled capitalism and selfish individualism. Success is the only measure of human value. And it includes not caring for anyone else but myself. Many politicians and wealthy folks follow her philosophy. This has led to income inequality and policies of removing safety nets for people experiencing tragedies and downturns in their lives.
Inequality is the basis of Rand’s philosophy. She claims that compassion, kindness, and charity are moral weaknesses. As a follower of Christ, I cannot accept such a premise. My whole being bristles at this ego-centered philosophy.

Let me quote first Jesus: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate” (Lk. 6:36). And I want to add the Dalai Lama’s assertion: “Compassion is the radicalism of our time.” Or last week I remember President Obama at his eulogy for Congressman Elijah Cummings said. “Kindness is not a weakness.”
How do we handle Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount? “Give to everyone who begs from you” (Mt. 5:42). Do you contribute money to homeless people on the sidewalks, despite the objections of friends and family members? What about when you hear a story of horrific disaster from a severe climate event of hurricanes in Puerto Rico vs. Houston?

There were Christians that place restrictions upon their charitable giving. For example, conservative Christians were reluctant to contribute to certain victims of Hurricane Kathrina when it decimated New Orleans and displaced hundreds of thousands of refugees? The PEW Research Center found that these Christians would only contribute to people like themselves and not different from themselves to the refugees. They seemed to miss the intent of Jesus’ parable of The Good Samaritan, where there is cultural enmity and racial prejudice between Samaritans and Jews, in the parable, the Samaritan puts aside all prejudices to help a Jewish man robbed, beaten, and left to die in a ditch. Compassion is the radicalism of our time, but it also was the radicalism of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus said “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate’ in Luke’ sermon on the plain.

The Dalai Lama instructs people that might look to think of the needs of strangers in the same way that a mother responds to the needs of her child. Buddhists have a meditational exercise of considering someone you dislike or an enemy. Buddhists believe in reincarnation. So the Dalai Lama instructs someone to view someone you dislike as your mother in your previous life. Imagine that person was your mother I a previous life and that she gave birth to yourself. Feel a sense of gratitude for the life that she gave to yourself.

What does this have to do with the reading this morning? The story of Zacchaeus is a wonderful story of compassionate breaking down of barriers. Gospel compassion tolerates no exclusions; it is inclusive and welcoming of those who are outsiders. Zacchaeus is vertically challenged, that is, he is short of stature, and he belongs to a despised class because he makes a living by collecting taxes for the Romans. His physical stature symbolizes his socio-religious status because no one will step aside to let view Jesus. Zacchaeus is doubly excluded because of his shortness and his traitorous work as a Roman tax collector. He is a symbol of double exclusion.

Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree to see Jesus, and he catches Jesus’ attention. Jesus, I imagined, smiled as he saw him, ”Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” There is grumbling of the crowd because Jesus has gone to the house of a sinner and traitor.
Zacchaeus, aware of the grumbling, claims: “Lord, I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will back four times as much.” Jesus responds, “Today salvation has come to this house because he too is a child of Abraham.” Jesus recognizes the person that people label a sinner and traitor does not conversion. It is the grumbling crowd who are in need of conversion because of their judgmentalism and prejudice.

Zacchaeus represents the outsider trying to live a morally as he can. He cares for the poor and provides financial restitution to anyone that he has defrauded. He lives already as kin-dom disciple.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy is the world view of Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene produces self-centered or selfish people. These are people who see that the world is “all about me. Me first.” There is little room for social compassion. Let’s take all away social safety net programs for those who are poor, can’t afford medical insurance, disabled, not enough to eat, and so on. Corporate tax cuts benefited the privileged 1%, but the middle class and the poor must make it on their own. In Jesus’ time, the elite of the Roman Empire owned nearly 30% of the wealth, today 150 families in the US own 40% of the world’s wealth. Some contribute to the care of less fortunate people; others follow the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Compassion and charity are dirty words; they are socialist.

Now I want to get at the heart of Jesus message. In Mt. 10:8, Jesus tells his disciples, “freely received, freely give.” This is the heart of God’s economy of unconditional grace, it is also the heart of God’s compassionate care.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the LGBTQ church in North Hollywood that I pastored and another LGBTQ church in West Hollywood decided to pull resources for the victims of the storm. We identified an African-American church in Mississippi, devastated by the storm and off the radar of national aid. We gathered food, clean-up supplies, food for companion animals, and monies. We were aware that this black church was not supportive of LGBTQ issues. We had church discussions about giving to a church seemingly homophobia. Some church members raised the Parable of the Good Samaritan in our discernment, and it was decided that we would limit providing hurricane relief to the church. There was cultural prejudices between Jews and Samaritans, ye the Samaritan crossed those barriers to aid a fellow human being.

We loaded up the truck with supplies, and folks drove to Mississippi, and the church folks were grateful even though we were LGBTQ churches. I was proud of our unconditional giving and tearing down barriers of race and homophobia to find common ground of humanity.

This morning Jesus instructs his disciples as they are sent on mission of God’s Reign I want to focus on the significant line: “Freely received, freely given.” Jesus expresses his whole notion of the economics of God’s kin-dom and symbolize his whole notion of God’s unconditional and inclusive grace. Just as he instructs his male and female disciples, so we today we received his instruction.

Jesus sets the criteria of gift exchange, for what it means to freely receive and freely gift. UK eco-theologian Anne Primavesi writes, “His (Jesus) injunction to his disciples lays bare the radical, anarchic nature of relationships within the kin-dom (kingdom) of God.” “Radical” and “anarchic” are used to describe both the economic and grace relationships in God’s kin-dom.

It raises a profound and dangerous question for myself: “To whom does the Earth belong?” Walter Brueggemann writes,

Once the claim of the Creator God has been sidelined, the sense of human entitlement may stretch in the contemporary world all the way from private consumer desires to aggressive pursuit of oil as “our oil.” The inevitable outcome is a loss of common good, and a refusal through taxes an infrastructure that will keep life livable (and sustainable my addition), because taxes take away from private self-aggrandizing.

The idea of “property” has developed in contrast to the biblical tradition that the land (and the Earth) belong to God. In the eighteenth century, the British jurist and legal scholar William Blackstone wrote, “The Earth, all things therein, are the general property of mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator.” British eco-feminist theologian Anne Primavesi has explored how starting from the Reformation, property was transformed into the colonial instinct to English colonization and domination. She writes, “God gave the land to be used by industrious and rational men. However, it was the potential to exchange the potential wealth of the land for hard currency that fueled the massive appropriation of the land by the English colonists in the seventeenth century.” Thus, the European notion of property ownership and land, and the Earth, was translated destructively into the Doctrine of Discovery, originated by European Protestant and Catholic Christianity. It propelled colonial conquest and appropriation of the Americas by giving religious justification to seize the lands of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the Doctrine became a principle of American authority and ownership of conquered and appropriated lands. Christian colonization and the legal justification of land conquest and seizure of indigenous lands became a property war. It was a conflict of property ownership against indigenous notions of the gift of land. There was a disdain for the spirituality of North American indigenous connected to the Earth. Even today, the Doctrine is still used in courts in legal cases against Native Americans fighting in defense of their sacred lands against the fossil fuel and mining corporations.

In the US and many other countries, humans not only own the land but the wildlife that inhabits their lands. Wildlife, even on private property, is owned by the state. The state of Oregon mandated through legislation, “Wildlife is the property of the state.” How many states exercise their ownership of fish and wildlife by issuing fishing licenses and hunting licenses? Human claims the rights to land, water, wildlife, and minerals or fossil fuels in the Earth.Environmental conservationist Aldo Leopold observes sadly, “We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

The culture, economics, and politics of property—especially, within a “winner take all” capitalism that is driven by short term greed and profit—recklessly exploit the fossil fuel resources of the Earth at all cost. They abuse the land by misusing the land and the Earth as God’s gift. The root of the our misuse is the failure to realize the Earth is a gift from God.

Our government justifies corporate greed at the expense of life. The EPA just placed Dr. Ruth Etzel, Director of the Office of Children’s Health Protection, on leave. Her office focused on protecting children’s health from environmental dangers to children—such as lead poisoning and cancerous toxins. Children’s health and along our natural environment does not need regulation or protection.

Another example is that Nestle corporation has been denied draining valuable water in California during drought conditions and bottle and sell the water. This commodification of a natural resource for life needed that should be a right and available for human life. The state of Michigan has allowed Nestle to expand it water extraction while not correcting the polluted drinking water for the town of Flint. Corporate greed treats the land for continual profit while disregarding the original divine gift of Earth to all life.

Indigenous peoples, however, do not understand the land and the Earth as property as the European and later American colonizers did. In fact, indigenous peoples understand the land as divine gift as the Hebrew Bible and Jesus understood. Let me give you few contrary examples to the notion of Earth and land as property.

For example, Quaker author Parker Palmer contravenes this notion of ownership and control of land:

The ownership of private property has long been a touchstone of the American dream — for better (when we’re able to meet our basic needs) and for worse (when need becomes greed and overwhelms generosity and economic justice). But when “ownership” is applied wholesale to nature, there’s no better, only worse. The arrogance that leads us to say “We own this patch of the planet” has also led us to foul our own nest and desacralize much of the earth.

Palmer reverses the notion of ownership, and he directly quotes Margaret Atwood’s poem, The Moment. Here nature responds to humanity:

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around.

Chief Seattle said in the 19th century. “The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to man.” He reflects the perspective of indigenous peoples of the Earth. Pope Francis in climate change encyclical, Laudato Si:

From them (indigenous peoples), land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God and from their ancestors who rest there, a sacred space, with which they need to interact if they are to maintain their identity and values. When they remain on their land, they themselves care for it best.

Indigenous peoples relate to Earth as sacred, full of animate life and divine presence (which Christians identify as sacramental presence), the interrelatedness of all life, and as a gift. Indigenous peoples understand their indebtedness and thus gratitude to the gifts of the Earth. They understand Jesus instruction to his disciples: “Freely received, freely given.”

Let me answer the graced economy of Jesus’ saying. “Freely received, freely given.” Jesus reflects a Jewish creation spirituality and its giftedness, and the fact of planetary evolution (and the evolution of the universe over15 billions years ago). The Earth is God’s primary gift to us. It is not property owned by any human or species. Anne Primavesi and scientist and author James Lovelock together write:

Within the community of life in earth such an irruption of abundant and available flower seeds brought about a flourishing of animal life and reciprocal, beneficial relationships between birds, insects, animals, and plants. These contributed to the evolution of the biosphere in ways that later gave emerging human communities the water, temperature range and nutrients necessary to support life.

The Earth, its antecedents for life, the evolutionary context of temperature and environments sustainable for all life and human life. These are the pre-original gift of the Earth to us. How aware are you of the gift of the air you breathe right now, the land that you walk, bio-diversity, our ancestors, and our descendants?
Today property-oriented society has diluted the original biblical principle of land as God’s gift. The arrogance of private ownership of the land and its misuse for personal greed and wealth undergirds Jesus’ aphorism, “No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and mammon (wealth)” (Mt. 6:24). For Jesus, God’s reign took precedence over unbridled pursuit of wealth through violence.

The divisions between the elite and the poor are the result of the exploitation and injustice. God’s ownership supersedes the drive for greed and power of the elite of the empire. For Jesus, the violation of God’s ownership is the violation of neighborliness, the coveting of your neighbor’s land and its acquisition through indebtedness.

Indigenous peoples live closely with the land, and they understand the land and, in turn, the Earth as sacred and gift. There is no direct ownership view of the land, for the land remains as divine gift, somewhat similar to the Hebrew biblical notion of land and the Earth as divine gift. Both the Hebrews and indigenous peoples practiced the gift of the Earth. Abuse of the land and the Earth is misusing them without a sense of God’s giftedness to all life. Here are some examples of indigenous peoples’ recognition of the giftedness of the Earth. They have pioneered a movement of promoting the rights of nature. Maori in New Zealand, and indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia also, have moved their countries to legalize the rights of the nature in their legal constitutions. Many First Nation tribes in Canada and the US have entered the rights of nature into their tribal constitutions. It is now time for the UCC to move in that direction.

All life depends upon the gifts of other life and the conditions that Earth that are produced to sustain life. The interrelatedness of all life on each other, both in the past and the present. Our earthiness is the true gift of God. Our home is the Earth.