A Moment of Conflicted Conscience

Much of the research on microplastics has focused on rivers, lakes and oceans. But plastics are a major problem on land, too. From water and soft drink plastic bottles, and single use plastics such as grocery bags, discarded plastics pollute soils and ecosystems of the planet. Tiny microparticles of plastic have been found everywhere — from the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, to the top of Mount Everest, to our waterways, and even in the food we eat. The plastic pandemic has permeated nearly everywhere. In the last year, researchers have documented microplastics in the human body, in lungs, maternal and placental tissues, human breast milk and blood.

At Annual Gathering of the Florida Conference, we celebrated all the 2023 Synod Resolutions passed, including the Plastic Free Resolution to attempt to mitigate plastic usage. I am not pointing any fingers at anyone, for I am as complicit in buying food wrapped in plastics from the grocery market, and I eat peanut sandwiches from bread wrapped in plastic. We have reduced plastic bottles in our household and even recycle them when I know the municipal waste management does not really recycle but burn plastics when 30% remain in the ashes and slag and cancer-causing dioxins and furans are released into the atmosphere. In the last two years, plastics research has escalated how it ecologically hurts the environment and human and other life.

At the meeting luncheon, several people looked to me to monitor and speak about the plastics used in plastic luncheon containers since I participated in the drafting of the plastics resolution. I finally said to a person, “It is also your responsibility as well.”

At the closing worship, we included a communion service. Pitchers of grape juice and gluten-free wafers wrapped individually in plastic wrappers were on the table. It was significantly different for me than the luncheon plastic containers. My body became anxious, and I found myself decentered. I have a peanut butter sandwich once or twice a week and take bread wrapped in a plastic bag.

I had been writing on baptism and water for Earth Justice Lectionary project. I reflected on te headwaters of the Jordan River that are relatively pure and safe, but the lower Jordan River where Jesus was baptized, the waters are polluted with untreated sewage, agricultural chemicals, industrial waste, and brackish water. The polluted waters of the Jordan are no longer sanctified or even safe for human baptisms.

The Christian writing of the Didache at the first century CE emphasized the use of “living water” over stagnant water in administering baptism. Stagnant water was determined to be detrimental to the symbol of the gift of the Spirit and new life, and even more contaminated water destroys the symbol of God’s providence in the sacrament. How can water that endangers health and safety of the baptized be used for sacrament that represent God’s Spirit, who cares for all and is prayed to a the sustainer of life> and new life? Water’s physicality as clean and safe matters for the administration of baptism. Would you baptize a child or adult from local waters, many of which are contaminated waters with agrochemical fertilizers and pesticides or other dangerous toxins? This is true of Florida’s waterways and the reason for a public ballot initiative for the right for clean and safe water. Water symbolized as new life and the living God is distorted by polluted chemicals, industrial waste, and dangerous toxins.

Now the eucharistic meal that Jesus performed in his open commensality and last supper has been a central feature of my spiritual growth and praxis of compassion and justice since young. As pastor, we celebrated a communion rite each Sunday. (There are a few UCC churches and Disciples/UCC churches also do so). It is central symbol practice of Jesus’ radical inclusive love, hospitality and compassion, and connection to a Jewish creation spirituality. Some scholars have argued that Jn. 6;51 was the part of the bread prayer and Jn 15:5 may have included as the prayer for the cup. No matter what I have perceived that in both discourses in John’s Gospel indicate that God becomes part of the food cycle. Food is a perquisite for nourishment and life. It intimately links us to creation. Eating mattered to Jesus, “give is this day our daily bread” and his practice an open table. New Zealand theologian Neil Darraugh observes, “God’s gift of Earth resources for human survival (and other life as well) and delight (ask my dogs about treats) is not detached from God by being given. God remains immanent to those resources and to human (and other life) users.” (At Home in the Earth: Seeking an Earth-centered Spirituality)

The risen incarnate Christ is particularly present for me in bread and juice at the eucharist. When confronted with the celebrant’s prayer of consecration over the bread, I remembered what I wrote about polluted waters as incompatible with the symbol of living water and the Spirit symbolized in the rite of baptism. I looked at the wafer wrapped in plastics and remembered my peanut sandwich with bread wrapped in plastic my awareness of the plastics pandemic and harm to life, and the UCC Synod Resolution. My reverence for eucharist was so offended by the symbol of plastics covering the wafer. I remembered all the times, as pastor unwrapping communion wafers made by Catholic nuns for weekly Sunday communion rites, but I could not receive the wafer with plastic pollution around what I considered the consecrated body of Christ. I chose not to receive the wafer, and during the music.

I walked up to altar and took a piece of consecrated bread into my body, felt interconnected to Christ incarnated in earthen and ecological life. (Jn. 6:51).
We are in a plastics pandemic that threatens life, and we need to take a stance to limit our exposure to plastics and mitigate and eliminate the microplastics that spread virally in our ecosystems and the ecosystem of our bodies. I quoted Thich Nhat Hanh,

When a priest performs the Eucharistic rite, his role is to bring life to the community. The miracle happens not because he says the word correctly, but because we eat and drink mindfulness. Holy communion is a strong bell of mindfulness. We drink and eat all the time, but we usually ingest only our ideas, projects, worries, and anxieties. We do not drink our beverage. If we allow ourselves to touch our bread deeply, we become reborn, because our bread is life itself. Eating deeply, we touch the sun, the earth, and everything in the cosmos. We touch life, as we touch the kin-dom (my edit) of God. (Living Buddha, Living Christ)

Spiritual Ecology and the Middle Ground

For several years, I have viewed environmental organizations as spiritual communities, whose spiritual practice is environmental activity and/or Earthcare. I listened to webinar presenters from environmental groups, and I find deep faith commitments comparable to my own nurtured the in a hybrid Buddhist Christian spirituality. I have tried the notions of spiritual ecology in a lecture to graduate studies in Environmental Studies at Antioch University. When I have suggested to interfaith groups that we might include environmental activists at the table, they have rejected such proposals. What I propose an inclusive shift in our thinking what spirituality and a new ecumenism. .

Anthropologist Leslie Sponsel uses “spiritual ecology” to recognize the interweaving of nature and spirituality. Spiritual ecology” refers to “the diverse, complex, and dynamic arena of intellectual and practical activities at the interface between religions and spiritualities on the one hand, and, on other, ecologies, environments, and environmentalism.” (Spiritual Ecology, xiii). Spiritual ecology allows for an inclusion of an open-ended, non-modern notions of ecology of original peoples as well as scientific and theological knowledge of nature. This allows for respect of peoples’ wisdom who lived with the land for generations as well as scientific understanding of the Earth. It may preclude clergy dismissing the spirituality of environmentalists or environmental scientists or anthropologists rejecting indigenous people as the “first ecologists.”

Spiritual ecology is inclusive of religiously motivated environmentalism and environmentally motivated spirituality. Spirituality is a more inclusive description than religion, for many outside of institutional religion, who describe themselves, as “spiritual but not religious.” Spiritual ecology allows for a middle ground where religious folks, whose spiritual practice lead to environmental action, meet fellow travelers, whose environmental work fosters a spirituality in nature. As I listen to the stories of environmentalists, I hear comparable stories of faith gestalt, albeit different and simultaneously similar to people of faith. There is a common ground of shared environmental action and spiritual practice. I flashback to similar discoveries as I engaged in the Christian-Buddhist dialogue and shared practices years ago.

Spiritual ecology becomes an integral framework for all those people who do not conceive the spirituality inseparable from nature and interwoven into an organic natural unity. There are variety of paths to that common middle space of ecological spirituality, and it has allowed me to identify environmental organizations as “climate churches” and environmental spiritualities as sharing ecological spiritual practices. Are environmental communities the post-modern church of the 21^st century? If so, then we need to engage in a new ecumenism of Earth spiritualities. Finally, the Spirit draws together networks of peoples, environmental and spiritual, indigenous and non-indigenous to defend the Earth. The North American indigenous prophecy that multiethnic “Warriors of the Rainbow” will arise up “to make the Earth green again,” gives me up that indigenous and non-indigenous peoples will form the Warriors of the Rainbow to protect and heal the Earth. Maybe we can a step forward in expanding the paradigm of spiritual ecology as a new ecumenism.

Consider the Lilies in the Field (Lk. 12:27-32)

September 1, Creation Day at the Nelson Church

Consider the Lilies of the Field”

Today September 1 is the World Day of Prayer for Creation proclaimed by the leaders of the two largest Christian denominations; Bartholomew, known as the Green Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, and Pope Francis of the Catholic Church. Both have been at the forefront of Christian concern for the Earth and against climate change. They have asked for prayer for the Earth. Also today also begins the Season of Creation for four Sundays in the month of September celebrated ecumenically by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Churches. My own church—the Federated Church is participating in the Season of Creation.

The UCC has defined its mission in the three loves. The love of neighbor, love of children, and love of creation. All three are interconnected loves.

First, I want to define creation. It is a theological term, not a cosmological word. Let me simply define creation as “the universe as God sees and finds delights in.” The universe is beloved—all of creation is loved by the Creator. When I speak about creation, I speak from a faith perspective. It is easy to talk the cosmos, the Earth, and the natural world. Many people consider the natural world as thing, an object to be This commodification of the natural world reflects a contemporary, emotional and spiritual apartheid from the natural world. Thus, they see the world as a thing to be used and exploited for profit. And this is one of the major points of view that has produced our climate crisis. Today I grieve with God’s Spirit at the massive fires around the world—the Amazon, Alaska, Western Canada and the US, Spain and Russia. Climate change is a deep personal concern on what humanity is doing to change the planetary environments.

But I have a different intention in sermon today. I want to further your love for creation, for our neighbors and children.

Let me start with an interesting, perhaps scriptural paradoxical notion. Let me quote Psalm 19:1-4.

The heavens are declaring the glory of God, and 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, and yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of world.

Before I talk about the meaning of the Psalm. Let me recite another passage from Job 12:7-10. God says,

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In the Spirit’s hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all humanity.

The Psalm tells that the earth has its own language, a voice not heard but yet a voice that goes out through all the earth. In Job, God instructs Job that animals will teach, the birds of the air will speak to you, and the fish will inform you. In both passages, God reveals that whole universe is God’s speaking in a language more ancient than any scriptures or their languages. Creation is a more primal scripture, and that is why Galileo speaks of the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, both sources of God’s speaking to us.

Have you taken the time to listen to the natural world speak? Each morning I walk my dog, I take time to listen to biophonic sounds of life and/or the geophonic sounds of nature, the raining falling down, the brook streaming below our home, or the wind, sometimes soundless, or the trees rustling in the breeze. Have you taken the opportunity to listen to the Spirit speaking through the environmental souls of the natural world? For our indigenous peoples, the Earth and the web of life are our older siblings to us. They listen to the mountains, trees, plants, animals, the streams and lakes, and so on require that be attention to siblings around us. Belden Lane, a Christian theologian, who has developed a landscape theology, writes, “We’re surrounded by a world that talks, but we don’t listen. We are part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it.” He engages in ancient practice that goes back to indigenous peoples and the fourth century Sinai desert fathers and mothers, lectio divina, praying from the book of nature.

Let me address Jesus’ words on the lilies of the field. I confess that I love lilies. When I lived in St. Louis, I had hundreds and hundreds of lilies in my backyard. Each morning during the summer, the lilies would open to the sun and reveal their majestic beauty and colors facing the sun. But they became parables of living parables of the enfleshed presence of God’s spirit.

My husband and I saw on channel 9 that there was a place nearby with six hundred varieties of lilies. No we did not buy all six hundred, even though I wanted to one of each, but we bought only seven varieties this year. And there is next year.

This morning’s reading from Luke on the lilies of the field was inspired by the farewell party for Rev. Dawn. I fell in love with the beauty of the garden of flowers. They attracted my attention and sparked ideas for this Sunday’s sermon.

The poet Emily Dickinson, from her Congregationalist heritage, found God manifested everywhere in nature, and she considered her garden as church. Dickson had in mind these words of Jesus when she remarked, “Consider the lilies is the only commandment I ever obeyed.” The greatest commandment for Dickinson is consideration of the lilies of the field. It is not a commandment in words but a living parable. Lilies find God in the present moment, in the air they interbreathe, their presence and sheer colorful beauty speak of God’s amazing artistry in plant life. The lilies incarnate a spirituality for us by providing us physical and sensuous connections to God in nature. Ecotheologian Jay McDaniel observes, “But the lilies also have something important to say not in words but in sheer presence. In their naturalness and spontaneity, in their receptivity to the breath of life, they embody the heart of spirituality. They find God in their present moment.”

There is a lesson to be learned. Dickinson reminds us that are deepest calling is to be totally open to God in a distinctly human way as the lilies do in a lilies way.

Lilies transport us into amazement and wonder of our Creator. The lilies provide an example how to be open to God in their own flora ways. They are attentive to their Creator, dependent upon the natural gift of the Earth, sun, water, and often human care. They greet the sun with a burst of color, giving praise to God and totally dependent upon God’s creation gifts. Jesus instructs his disciples to imitate the lilies. Certainly, that is what caught the spiritual awareness of Emily Dickenson.

But a little more about Emily Dickinson. She often skipped Sunday morning at her Congregationalist Church for Sunday during the summer months for the church of her garden. She writes,

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –

I, just wear my Wings –

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –

I’m going, all along.

I offer my own disclaimer that my words are not as eloquent in the brevity and beauty that God speaks through lilies. Nor is Dickinson’s justification excuse you to skip Sunday worship, for Dickinson makes the point that church is found outside these four walls. We might want to move Sunday church in the outside in the garden. Th Federated Church did that for sunrise service on Easter Sunday and moved to the ruins of the original town square of Marlborough and its adjacent cemetery. It captured an aspect of that original Easter morning with sun, trees, and the rebirth of Jesus as the resurrected Christ.

Back to Jesus’ words consider the lilies of the field that something to say to us this morning. The lilies speak to us in their presence and beauty, their naturalness to open to the sun during daylight and close at dusk. They witness to God in the present moment. Lilies, for me, teach me how to listen and pray in the present. Teach me how nforgo be anxious, or at least, remind me of a larger presence here and now.

Jesus teaches his disciples how God’s providence and abundance within creation. Life in God’s kin-dom is sufficiently abundant. God’s creation is a pre-original grace where we live and abide. When I use pre-original, I mean the created Earth, its evolution of the conditions for life exists. It is a gift to us, and we seldom pay attention to that gift providing for life.

As we listen and learn from lilies and other siblings in our environment. The Earth is alive and a primal gift of love. When we take the time to mindfully engage the natural word, to listen to plant and wildlife, we fall in love with what is alive around us. We are willing to protect what we love. If we ever reach the point of indigenous people’s intimacy with the natural world, we will protect our family and kin from human devastation.

I want to give you a wonderful example how listening to creation around us we discover the truth of our creatureliness among other creatures. We live in a matrix of grace. I want to end off with two earth sages who have listened to lilies and other plants of the Earth. They took the book of creation serious.

The first is Wendelll Berry, an American farmer, author, wisdom sage and poet.

Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world, within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine—which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight is turned into grapes.

Listen to another earth sage, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a research botanist and indigenous woman:

Generosity is simultaneously a moral and a material imperative, especially among people who live close to the land and know its waves of plenty and scarcity. Where the well-being of one is linked to the wellbeing of all. Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away. Hoarding the gift, we become constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance. A gift asks something of you. To take care of it. And Something more…The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all. Every bowl has a bottom.

This morning I invite you after the service to go and be aware of the flower garden. Allow your senses to explore some wonder at disciples of God’s miracles of life. Those flowers are our siblings, along with the trees, streams, lakes, and mountains, and wildlife. Listen and learn and fall in love with God’s creation.

Consider the Lilies of the Field”

The UCC has defined its mission in the three loves. The love of neighbor, love of children, and love of creation. All three are interconnected loves.

But I have a different intention in sermon today. I want to further your love for creation, for our neighbors and children.

Let me start with an interesting, perhaps scriptural paradoxical notion. Let me quote Psalm 19:1-4.

Before I talk about the meaning of the Psalm. Let me recite another passage from Job 12:7-10. God says,

There is a lesson to be learned. Dickinson reminds us that are deepest calling is to be totally open to God in a distinctly human way as the lilies do in a lilies way.

But a little more about Emily Dickinson. She often skipped Sunday morning at her Congregationalist Church for Sunday during the summer months for the church of her garden. She writes,

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –

I, just wear my Wings –

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –

I’m going, all along.

The first is Wendelll Berry, an American farmer, author, wisdom sage and poet.

Listen to another earth sage, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a research botanist and indigenous woman:

Eating is a Dangerous Memory (John 21:1-19)

One of my favorite books is Christianity’s Dangerous Memory by an Irish social psychologist, theologian, and clergy—Diarmuid O’Murchu. We may argue that the UCC is accustomed to look at Jesus as dangerous prophet who challenges our conscience, complacency, and any tendency to tribal exclusivity. Over the years, I have found Jesus continuously as the most dangerous person. I study him in scripture and attempt to get to know him in prayer and follow him daily in my intentional practice of compassion. He is a messenger of the Spirit, who teaches and lives God’s radical inclusive love. Jesus communicated to his disciples in Luke’s sermon on the plain: “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate.” (Lk. 6:36) Compassion is a major theme of his ministry.

Jesus apprenticed to John the Baptist, he was instructed and taught to mediate as preparation for his baptism and retreat in the Judean wilderness. At his baptism, Jesus experienced the descent of the Spirit as a dove and a revelation that the was he beloved child of God. He went into the wilderness to understand what God as Abba meant in his life and learn what the Spirit instructed him. His wilderness experience became a visionary quest that many indigenous peoples go through as they become adults. There he discovered God’s presence in creation as Spirit and what he would describe as the kin-dom of God. I use kin-dom not kingdom for non-patriarchal usage. Kin-dom signifies the dangerousness what Jesus understood as living in the presence of God. It is not like the kingdoms and empires of this world. A Canadian theologian Bruce Sanguin writes,

The metaphor of kin-dom is a family metaphor. To be kin is to belong, no questions asked. In an evolutionary universe, I’m interested in kin as a metaphor that includes “all of us,” not just “us.” From this perspective, kin is not just about our tribe, our nation, our family, our religion, or even our species. Kin suggests the radical belonging of all our relations human and other-than-human. Viewed holistically from the perspective of the universe story kin-dom breaks down false boundaries that separate and alienate.

Kingdoms and empires are full of economic and political inequalities between the have and have nots. For an example the 1% in the Roman Empire owned 15-18% of the wealth, now 150 families in the US own 45% of the world’s wealth. Income inequality is real and has grown even further in the last several decades. Jesus used the symbol of the kin-dom of God to indicate that God lives in our midst, Kin-dom is both a familial term as well as Jesus was very conscious that God’s kin-dom required a different ritual than John’s baptism.

Jesus adopted eating as a more dangerous ritual than baptismal immersion. Meals reflect hospitality, or they can be tribally exclusive. My Greek grandmother would welcome all who came into house, sit them at table, and bring out food to share for guests. There were no strangers, all were guests were welcomed as family.

Jesus practiced an open table fellowship, and all were welcome to the table—poor, male and female, sinner and righteous, outcasts, impure, throw-away people of his society. The inclusive table of Jesus stood in contrast to the hierarchical meals of imperial aristocracy, the exclusive meals of the Pharisees, or the exclusive holiness meals of the Temple priests. Jesus’ meals triggered terror in his religious critics and political opponents—both whom cannot comprehend eating together with discrimination and hierarchies. There were only those who voluntarily served others, gladly washed the feet of their companions, who assisted folks at table to heal from the years of religious abuse and oppression. Many holiness groups and churches today practice inclusion through exclusion while the radicalness of Jesus’ inclusiveness through inclusivity.

Today’s gospel has Jesus after his resurrection cooking breakfast on the beach of the Sea of Galilee for his disciples. In setting a charcoal fire, he is setting up a meal for an important personal encounter. Remember in John 18:18 when Peter was warming himself besides a charcoal fire in the courtyard of the high priest Caiaphas and where he denies Jesus three times. Cooking with a charcoal fire was intended to bring the memory to Peter of his three denials of Jesus in the courtyard of the High Priest Caiaphas.

While the disciples are fishing, Jesus inquires about the fishing and invites them to bring some fish for breakfast. The beloved disciple recognizes Jesus, and when he says, “It is the Lord,” Peter strips down and swims for the shoreline. Peter is often portrayed as impulsive. The disciples have breakfast with Jesus’ blessing bread and fish. As sideline, I want to mention that bread and fish were use for early first century resurrection communion services as well as other foods.

But as I said eating is a dangerous memory of grace. Think about what Peter first thought when he saw the charcoal fire. A flashback to the High Priest’s courtyard…There is no question that Jesus intends to interrogate Simon Peter. He does three times with a question.

The first question: “Simon son of John, do you love me? In the first and second questions, Jesus uses the Greek word for love (agapan). It is word of agape, the sacrificial love of a mother for children. It is the type of love a fireman laying down his life to save a person. Peter answers, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” But Peter in this first and every other answer uses a different word for love and different type of love, (phileins), the love of friends. After each question and answer, Jesus instructs Peter: “Feed my lambs,” “Tend my sheep” and “Feed my sheep.” In his third questioning, Jesus uses the same word for love philein that Peter uses. Jesus recognizes that Peter, is squirming in his guilt over his denial and abandonment of Jesus: he is still not yet ready to attain the sacrificial love that Jesus is asking him to practice. Jesus abandons the sacrificial notion and word for love for Peter’s own word of friendly love. He accepts where Peter is in following of Jesus. in the own way he can emotionally do.

The gospel John has Jesus predicted Peter’s fate: ^“Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” The evangelist inserts a bit of history on the end of Peter’s life and death in Rome.

This breakfast meal and the meal at the end of the journey to Emmaus highlight that these are crisis meals for Jesus’ disciples wherein the risen Jesus confronts and instructs his disciples to practice a sacrificial style of love, the type of compassionate love that Jesus understood invited to live that God practices for all of us.

Christian memories of eating with Jesus are critical moments of grace and challenge, for grace challenges us in the world within which we live. I am speaking about creation or the Earth and web of life, for creation and the Earth herself are a gift to us. It is, to use the words of Jesus, “freely received, freely given.” We actually live and dwell unaware in a freely received ocean of original gifting. God has gifted us with creation and the Earth, a continuum of life going back 2 billion years ago as life microscopic life began and evolve. This continuum of life continues with the emergence of trees and countless animal and plant species, long before the emergence of hominids and humanity. We as humans are born into continuum of creation grace, an ecological continuum of creation grace unfolding to the grace of incarnation of the Christ. God has always abundantly provided for creation and all its life.

Our celebration of the communion meal today reminds us that gratitude is the appropriate response to this ecology of grace. We are interconnected to the Earth, our bread we share is the flesh of the Earth. It is planted in the soil, rain and sunshine, gardening care, harvesting, grounding the wheat into flour, kneaded, and baked into bread and served today at our meal. The grape juice represents the blood of Christ, also the blood of the Earth grown from grapes on vines, crushed and fermented into juice, and served today as well.

Communion meal represents several importance signs for us:

First, there is the insight that I am what I eat. I eat and drink the body of Christ. The body of Christ is part of me, and I am in communion with the body of Christ. Yet the body of Christ is this and more.
In creation, there is no life without eating. Eating is life and creation grace, and Jesus interprets his body with bread and his blood with grace juice. He becomes the bread of life. But even more significant God becomes part of our food cycle and comes to us as food this morning.
Radical inclusive love does not stop with including people who are different. It includes the Earth ad all life. In John 3:16, the favorite quote for stadium games, ”God so loved the world that God sent God’s only begotten Son…” Most people who hold such signs miss the word “word” (cosmos, creation). God loves dearly creation and the Earth and all life.
Finally, if God is found in the food cycle as food, it requires us to care for the Earth and her resources, to use with care and responsible love. Earthcare is connected with which this church and every church that celebrates the Earth and Earthcare. God is annoyingly present in the world, and we may understand the body of Christ as extended to the earth and all creation. That has consequences and the need for responsible care.

Now let me interrogate you and myself with the voice of the risen Christ:

“Do you with a sacificial love me?” “Yes, Lord.” Then feed my sheep who are hungry and suffering from poverty and food injustice. This instruction also includes non-human life as well.

“Do you love with a compassionate me?” “Yes, Lord.” Then tend to my rivers, the soil, and atmosphere by removing the poisons and pollutants. Many indigenous peoples and a few townships have incorporated a bill of rights for nature into their communal documents.

“Do you love friendship me?” “Yes, Lord.” Then feed and care for all life. It means that we are call to see nature as God sees and love nature as God loves nature.

Blessings!

Season of Creation: Oceans

I am divided this morning. Do I speak about our deep connection to the Earth’s oceans or do I address the beginnings of an oceanic apocalypse? I will speak to both, and with God’s grace, may I do justice our interconnectedness with our oceans and all life and the challenges to those oceans and to ourselves in the very near future.

The oceans originated as the planet cooled down, releasing steam that became the oceans of the earth. But there was another source of waters of the oceans as thousands of comets, made of ice struck the Earth, adding to the oceans’ water. I marvel as we are part of the Earth’s story, the formation of oceans and 2 billion years ago life arising in the oceans. The Season of Creation is an opportunity to celebrate God’s creation, that story, and how we fit into that story. This Sunday we look at the oceans.

Today’s reading is from Rev. Dr. Leah Schade, a Lutheran Pastor and author of Creation Crisis Preaching: Ecology, Theology, and the Pulpit. I already read her book before I attended her workshop at the Parliament of World Religions last October. She drafted me as a participant into the reading. Her refrain “I am water, I am waiting…” is so important to realize. It is even haunting. It raises a deep question for me: We are water. What is water waiting for?

We humans have our sense of kinship with water and the oceans. The oceans cover some 70% of our planet. Our bodies carry the markers of our kinship with the oceans. Our bodies are 65-70% water and we have sodium in the waters of our bodies. We enflesh ocean water in our bodies. Our flesh marks our profound kinship with all waters and the oceans, and if we did a genealogical or ancestry tree, we can trace our origins to that very day in the oceans when the first cells became alive.

The oceans are full of mystery, a myriad of life forms and species, and,
of course, beauty. When you were last on the beach, watched the waves come in, and the waters appear to be dynamic and alive with motion and life. People gravitate to the beaches not only because they enjoy the sun and water, but we are drawn there because we have a distant memory ofancestral kinship. We are interconnected.

There is a strong biblical tradition between the Holy Spirit and water, from the creation of water on this planet, to the formation of lakes and rivers, streams, to the water used to baptize Jesus and ourselves, to water we drink and bathe in. Water is a symbol of the Spirit, and the Spirit brings life and healing. Water is the vitality, and the waters of the Earth form the blood of the Earth. The Spirit is involved with life-giving faith (Jn. 1-15), baptisms (Acts 8:26-40, 11:1-18). She is the Spirit in the water flowing from the pierced Jesus’ body on the cross. As fire, there is the story of tongues of fire descending on the disciples in the upper room on Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). The Spirit sparks the inclusive and multicultural mission of the Jesus movement to the nations.

For theologian Mark Wallace, God’s Spirit has been infusing the universe and the Earth, in particular, since their inception. It is in its Earth-centered mode; the Spirit is cruciform—that is, She suffers the pain and torment of the Earth and its life: “God as Spirit lives among us in great sorrow and deep anguish. She suffers and groans with creation, and she suffers in her connection to the oceans as we pollute it, trash, create climate change that warms the waters and kills the coral reefs, and as we hunt marine life to extinction.

From the viewpoint of green spirituality, the God who knows death through the cross of Jesus is the crucified God, but God is also the Spirit who enfleshes divine presence in nature and the elements of the universe. God the Spirit the Sustainer of life experience the woundedness of nature, of the oceans, and the suffering of marine life. .

Now let speak me about the spirituality inclusive of the ocean. A wonderful example is Rachel Carson, naturalist and author, and she recounts a formative epiphany in college that drew her to the sea:

Years ago on a night when rain and wind bear against the windows of my college dormitory room, a line from (Tennyson’s) “Locksley Hall’” burned itself into my mind—“For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.” I can still remember my intense emotional response as that line spoke to something within me seeming to tell me that my own path led to the sea—which I have never seen—and that my own destiny was somehow linked with the sea. And so, as you know, it has been.

Carson became a “biographer of the sea,” detailing direct, personal appreciation of individual organisms as well as her love for the Maine seacoast. Paul Brooks writes, “She felt a spiritual as well as a physical closeness to the individual creatures about whom she wrote: a sense of identification that is an essential element in her literary style.” She wrote three books on the seas, sea life and the shores of Maine. She took scientific samples of sea-life near the shore, examined them carefully and tenderly, so that she could release them back into the ocean without any harm. This expresses a profound reverence for life.

She addressed human harm to the oceans some sixty years ago: “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.” (The Sea Around Us)

In the later years of her life, Carson became a public champion for not only the oceans but for all human and non-human life:

In contemplating “the exceeding beauty of the earth” these people have found calmness and courage. For there is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds; in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy – no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Carson models for us a spirituality of connecting with the natural beauty of the Earth’s oceans. Natural beauty and the experience of wonder was pivotal for spiritual development. When humanity replaced the natural with the artificial, Carson understood that humanity blocked its spiritual growth because we are ocean life that transitioned to the land. Yet we are still connected to the ocean. We human need nature to teach us the wonder of creation, it complexity and beauty.

At communion, after you receiving communion and the blessing, go the water in container in front of the altar. It is salt water, and touch the water and bless your forehead to indicate your connectedness to the oceans and concern for oceans ensouled with God’s Spirit.

The Oceanic Apocalypse:

The former NASA climate scientist, James Hansen, called our attention to climate change in 1988. Some listened to Hansen then, and more recently, he is co-authored a scientific study of the ice melting in Antarctica, yet to undergo review that we will find disturbing. They suggest the seal levels could rise 10 times faster than previously models suggested. It could reach 10 feet by the end of the century, and such cities as New York, Miami, London, Shanghai and Rio de Janiero, and other cities will be submerged. Some island nations will disappear, and many countries will experience massive population dislocation from the seashores on a scale hard to imagine.

Weeks ago we have witnessed massive flooding in Louisiana destroying more 40,000 houses. If we do not cut down the emission from carbon dioxide, methane, and climate warming gases, Hansen and his team share,

We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.

This is an apocalypse, in my opinion. Let me first, say we need to vote in November for the Earth, for the oceans, and for life.

Just look not at the rising sea levels but examine what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.

But there are other Earth signs of the health of the oceans: the coral reefs are blanching and dying, the acidification of the oceans. Scientists discovered the congregation of 35,000 seals on one beach. This indicated the increased loss of artic ice. Melting artic ice and warming oceans jeopardize all plant and marine life, and other connected life. All life in the ocean may become extinct through global warming, over-harvesting of fish, or callous hunting tens of thousands of shark for their fins for shark-fin soup or medicinal properties. The prognosis for continued life in the oceans this century is bleak.

I can’t wrap my spirit around the fact what humanity will be like if the oceans die and all ocean life. The oceans, like the Earth, are alive. The Spirit of God is the sustainer of all life and universe processes that began at the Big Bang to evolve into galactic processes and then planetary processes that produced life in the oceans 2 billion years ago. God’s Spirit ensouled in the waters and early Christians maintained that Christ is in all the waters of the Earth. When we crucify creation, even a part of creation, we are crucifying the Spirit and Christ. We trample upon what is beloved and dear to God. There, I invite you this Season of Creation to re-invigorate your commitment to fight climate change, vote for candidates that support responsible care for the environment, and live with compassion with God’s Earth.

Breakfast with Jesus (John 21:1-19)

Eating with Jesus was always event. You never knew exactly what might happen and who would join this open meal, literally open to anyone and excluding no one. A homeowner, such as Simon the Leper, invited Jesus, only to have a woman , a known sinner, wash Jesus’ feet with her tears and dry his feet with her hair. Or the Last Supper where Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and shared a meal relating it to his impending death. Or you might be surprised by the locations of a meal—on the field with 5000, or at home of an infamous regional tax collector Zacchaeus, or in the home of a religious critic.

Meals provided Jesus with occasions to stress the central themes of his message of God’s companionship of empowerment. The themes of forgiveness, unconditional love, shared abundance, compassionate care, inclusivity, healing, the mutuality of discipleship, love, and non-violence. Jesus loved food and wine, and he took the opportunity to break all the etiquette rules and purity codes for meals held by Pharisees and other religious groups.

For outcasts, throwaway people such as tax collectors and prostitutes, these meals were therapeutic and liberative. The open table was healing for many participants. The meals were egalitarian, where all were equals and where all were beloved children of God. They shared stories of their pain at religious exclusion and social shunning at these meals and dreamt about God’s empowered companionship and the type of new society created. They experienced healing from destructive elements of Jewish religious fundamentalism with its stress on a judgmental, patriarchal God. Religious people stigmatized them as sinners, and Jesus told them were forgiven before they even came to sit down at table.

The table of radical inclusivity was revolutionary. Around meals, they found companionship with Jesus and God and with one another. In the nourishing and healing environment of meals, they discovered friendships and some felt call as disciples. Jesus’ meals as healing and empowering occasions have been overlooked by the church over the centuries.

In addition, Christians have read the Last Supper not in the context of Jesus’ meals but the only meal and gave it undue importance, making it an exclusive event for justifying an exclusive male priesthood. For Jesus, his last meal with the disciples was important but so were all his meals with folks. Its particularity was his emotional preparation of his female and male disciples for his death for God’s reign. All Jesus’ meals symbolized the inclusivity of all into God’s reign.
But meals with the risen Jesus were even more eventful. They were to be inclusive, healing, and empowering. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus invite a stranger who had accompanied them on their journey to join them for an evening dinner. When the stranger broke bread, the two grieving disciples recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread. He symbolized his continued presence in community with remembered events and the breaking of bread. His walking on the road to Emmaus and joining them for dinner addressed their grief over his death and ritualizing his mission and presence.

Or today’s gospel, after two appearances of the risen Christ, the disciples went back to what they know best, fishing. Did they have to get away from the intensity of feelings from community scoffers, doubters, or their own feelings of guilt from abandoning Jesus to the Temple police and ultimately final crucifixion? Jesus surprises a group of disciples at the Sea of Galilee; they returned to their ordinary lives and have gone fishing.

Easter night and the following week, Jesus appeared to his disciples in the upper room. The first meeting was mixed in its emotions, happiness in Jesus as risen from the dead, deep shame and guilt at abandoning Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Peter, both for his denying Jesus three times and his abandonment of him. Peter brashly professed his faith and commitment as a disciple to the ministry of Jesus. He faced Jesus with shame and guilt over his betrayal. Jesus forgave him and started the process of healing.

Jesus appears as a stranger, and he calls out to them: “Have you caught any fish yet?” Then he instructs to cast the net on the right side of the boat, and they did so and caught a multitude of fish. The beloved disciple recognizes the stranger: “It is the Lord!”

Peter strips off his clothes and swims to shore. The disciples bring the fish to Jesus who has lit a charcoal fire to barbeque the fish and serve bread with the meal. None of the disciples were bold enough to ask. “Who are you?” The stranger reveals himself in the serving a meal of fish and bread.

This meal on the shore of Lake Tiberias was thus no ordinary meal. Jesus was not presiding over the meal, but preparing the meal for several disciples. This is reminiscent of Jesus’ action at his final meal where he washed the feet of his disciples—the duties of slave and women. Here again he takes a service role in cooking fish for breakfast for the few disciples after a night of fishing.

Jesus’ risen presence is revealed at meals, and these risen meals also include healing and empowerment. There was unfinished business between Jesus and Peter. Even though Peter betrayed him and abandoned him, Jesus is there to restore his relationship with Peter. The grace of unconditional love and forgiveness counters the past failures of Peter. The breakfast on the beach was to continue the healing of Peter and to empower him as whole as possible for the on-going mission of God’s companionship of empowerment.

Peter got a lump his throat and became speechless for a moment; he was more embarrassed by his denial of Jesus than his nakedness, dripping with water. He is confronted with his own guilt and shame in letting down Jesus in the moment of his greatest need—his own death. He promised Jesus faithfulness and reliability. Instead he abandoned Christ; he lied and denied that he even knew him to save his own skin. He faced Christ stirring the charcoal fire and looking him straight into his eyes. He melted with shame and guilt. But Jesus served him breakfast and reminded him of the many times that they shared meals of forgiveness and love during his ministry.

Peter knew that this appearance was meant for him and about his relationship with Christ. There was unfinished business yet to be dealt with. Maybe for a moment, he wished he was anywhere but there. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus spoke to Simon Peter. Now, we are getting to the point of the story. This story is about the rehabilitation of Simon Peter. But Jesus’ questions to Peter are wider than this event; the risen Lord asks these questions of ourselves. This may be the important question asked in the Bible.
“Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” Love meaning self-sacrificing love, love “more than these.” And write “boats, nets, fish, food, family, and friends.” Jesus was asking what are you prepared to do for me? Peter answers, “I love with the love of a friend.” He is not able to love unconditionally as parent loves a child. Jesus said, “If anyone wishes to follow me, let that person take the cross and follow me.”

Why did Peter deny Jesus three times in the first place? I think it was because he, like all of us, loved life and the things of this life such as family, friends, fish, boats, nets, etc. Peter loved this life, and he didn’t want to die. It is simple as that. That is why I think Peter denied Jesus in the first place. He loved the things of his own life way more than the possibility of his premature death for God and Christ. But Jesus probes Peter of his reliability. Are you prepared to deny yourself and give up everything to follow me? Can I rely on you and your word to continue my mission?

Peter’s threefold profession of his friendship love for Jesus parallels his threefold denial, that Jesus is giving Peter the chance to fill the hole he has dug for himself with three huge shovelfuls of love.

But there is more. Jesus is not only trying to bring Peter back to where he was before but to move him beyond that. Jesus looked Peter in the eyes intently. Peter answered, “Yes, Lord, I love you as a friend.” Then Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”

Jesus wants to be assured that Peter loves him. Jesus is not sure about the reliability of Peter’s love and so Jesus asks Peter a second time, “Do you love me as a friend?” Jesus changes the verb from self-sacrificing love to where Peter is at and uses Peter’s verb to love as a friend. Even this friendship love requires reliability and consistency of word.

By the third time, “do you love me as a friend?” Peter feels hurt and responds, “Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you.” The risen Christ entrusts those whom he loves to one who loves him.

Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.” He goes on says, “Very truly, I tell you when you were younger you were able to fasten your belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you, and take you where you do not wish to go.” Jesus predicts, “Peter, you may love me as a friend, but over time that love become unconditional love that I now share with you.”

Suddenly it is clear. Jesus has made this encore appearance for Peter’s benefit. In the same way, he returned for Thomas in the upper room, to move him from doubt to faith, he now returns for Peter, to move him from faith to active discipleship.

Jesus also asks us that same basic question: Do you love me more than these? Do you love me more than your family, your friends, your occupation? This is a personal question for each one of us. We, too, like Peter, will come to that time and place in our lives when Jesus will ask us that fundamental question: Do you love me unconditionally more than these things and people? Do you love me more than your own life?

There is a consequence in saying “yes”. Jesus says, “Feed my lambs and tend my sheep.” The Latin word for shepherd is Pastor. How do Christian pastors feed the lambs and tend sheep?

The first purpose of a pastor’s life, of a shepherd’s life, is to feed the lambs in the community and to help them grow into good disciples. Pastors are called to remind the community of their mission, radical inclusive love—the vision of God’s unconditional grace.

He is instructing him on how to become a Pastor, open-hearted and open to the new requirements of serving the post-Easter Church. He had to reliably live up to his word with courage. Peter learned that he had to think before acting. We finally got to the core. Jesus knows everything, including the death by which Peter was going to die, by Roman crucifixion, being lifted up onto his own cross.
Jesus knew that eventually, in his old age, that Simon Peter was going to mature and that his love for Christ would move beyond friendship love to unconditional love and that he would die by crucifixion. It did come true. Simon Peter died a martyr’s death, on a cross, upside down, in Rome, under Nero. Peter who had denied Jesus three times at the home of Caiaphas would be faithful to Jesus onto death. Jesus knew the future and prophesied about Peter’s death. At his death in Rome, Peter thought that it would be too much of an honor for him to be crucified in the way Christ was crucified so he requested to be crucified upside down. Peter learned the humility to follow Christ.

The Wilderness: The Making of God’s Upside-down Kin-dom (Luke 4:1-3)

Today we hear the account from Luke of Jesus’ journey into the wilderness for forty days. Wilderness was the wild place, the waiting place, the place of preparation. It also connected then, as it does now, to very basic spirituality: a place to grapple with God, a place to learn dependence on nature and its provisions, a place of extremes or contrasts, of wild beasts and desert.

Displaced peasants fled into the wilderness from the imperial Roman system that stole their lands for larger plantations. The wilderness was a place of safety as well as to carry out raids against the system. Many had to become bandits to rob from the rich to share what they secured for those impoverished by the system.

Jewish religious revolutionaries sought out the wilderness as a staging platform to fight against the Roman Empire and the Temple authorities. The hopes for liberation lived from the stories of liberation, especially the story of Moses who fled into the wilderness, called by God to return to Egypt to liberate his people.

Pious groups, like the Essenes, created the Qumran community, a priestly and pure settlement in the wilderness, waiting for the messianic drama and climax. Individual religious figures like John the Baptist made the wilderness their starting point where his baptismal ministry would be forged.

Jesus went to the wilderness. He has had a profound experience and revelation of God’s beloved child during his baptism. I suspected that he needed time to process the meaning of the event. In the wilderness, today’s gospel focuses on the temptations that Jesus faced for his future mission. I will talk about those later, but I want to speak on what we usually don’t’ focus: the wilderness.

A number of authors suggest that Jesus learned and accepted his messianic ministry in the wilderness; some of have suggested that he learned his lifestyle there. My observation is that the wilderness presented him with opportunities to learn about the “wild grace” of God, his dependence upon God, and perhaps an itinerant, carefree lifestyle. In a wild habitat, the Spirit is everywhere, and one needs to pay close attention so not to miss the Spirit.

Passionist priest and earth theologian (geologian) Thomas Berry recognizes at the heart of nature there is “a wild component, a creative spontaneity that is in its deepest reality, its most profound mystery.” He comments on the wilderness:

Wilderness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneities of any being. It is that wellspring of creativity whence comes the instinctive activities that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young: to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea. This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist and the power of the shaman. (Berry)

The wild, especially in the wilderness, presents a sense of sacredness. If the natural world reflects the image of God, then the wilderness reflects a wildness of God that we witness in the action of the Holy Spirit as coloring outside boundaries and human categories. Nature is wild, and the Holy Spirit, and we come from the wild—original life from the surging oceans, then our hominid ancestors from the savannahs of Africa. Wilderness is a type of out of bounds or wild gardening by God, and we discover in the wilderness the wildness of God in the uncultivated and disordered wilderness. I believe that Jesus discovered this insight about the wildness of God/

Wendell Berry, American novelist and ecological activist, understands “wilderness as a place” where we must go to be reborn—to receive the awareness, at once humbling and exhilarating, grievous and joyful, that we part of creation, one with all that we live from and all that, in turn, lives from us.

Wendell Berry writes of the three principles of the “kin-dom of God.” I will suggest that Jesus learned these three principles of the kin-dom of God:

The first principle of the Kingdom of God us that it includes everything in it, the fall of every sparrow is a significant event. We are in it whether we know it or not and whether we wish to be or not. Another principle, both ecological and traditional, is that everything in the Kingdom of God is joined both to it and to everything else that is in it, that is to say, the Kingdom is orderly. A third principle is that humans do not and can never know either all the creatures that the Kingdom of God contains or the whole pattern or order by which it contains them.

Wendell Berry described the kin-dom of God as, the Great Economy or what Jesus includes in his notion of the companionship of empowerment, for Jesus expressed the economy that God designed in creation. It is a considerate economy found in nature, and all human economies need to fit harmoniously with that companionship ship economy. It is an extension of the Great Economy of companionship of empowerment into the natural world. Berry perceives an ecological and economic sustainability within the words of Jesus. He sees an inclusivity of human and nonhuman animals and nature as part of this kin-dom.

The image of wilderness most characterizes our relationship with the Spirit. Jesus discovered he wildness of the Holy Spirit in the wilderness across the Jordan. And in in the wilderness, he discovered how God sees life so differently from human beings.

The wilderness experience revealed how God colors outside human categories and religious boundaries, for God’s grace is wild, untamed, and disruptive of human exclusions. God’s grace and love were wildly inclusive, beyond human imagination. God’s inclusivity was incarnated in his own flesh and blood, and he sensed that in his intimate moments with God in the wilderness. He intuited a sense of God’s inclusive love for all humans and for all other life. God’s providential care was expressed in God’s love for the lilies of the field, and God’s sustaining the life of the birds of the air and for animals in the wilderness.

For Jesus, God’s empowered companionship denotes community, mutuality, co-creating together through the mobilization of diverse gifts. It includes the virtues of forgiveness, unconditional love, non-violence, compassion, sharing goods, and care for the vulnerable. God’s inclusive love was extended to humanity and nonhuman animals.

The wilderness retreat helped Jesus to distance the option of empire and power games of domination and conquest that he witnessed with Herod Antipas, the co-opted Temple rulers, and the Romans . He affirmed the counter-option of the companionship of empowerment. Let me read quotations of authors that capture what Jesus learned in the wilderness:

There are no more outsiders! Everyone is in—irrespective of their religious state or condition. Radical inclusiveness is a core value in the new companionship. And then comes the bombshell, the queerest twist; the final act of inclusiveness is done by one regarded as a radical outsider, and a hated one. (a Samaritan who shows compassion for Jewish man beaten and left for the dead on the road to Jericho). Diarmuid O’Murchu

Here is the radical act of inclusion envisioned in his retreat in the wilderness. This would significantly impact the style and flavor of his ministry.
The three temptations in Luke’s Gospel are temptations to a style of messiah, exemplified by the rulers of the Temple and the Roman Empire. The Roman emperors were proclaimed as gods and saviors in conquering the world through the force of the Roman legions.

The first test is the temptation for food: He rejects the temptation for his own self-interest and comfort. He will not have a regular place to lay his head to sleep. He will be itinerant and dependent upon Abba God. Jesus will be hungry and dependent upon the gracious gifts of others to receive shared gifts. This temptation is based on false notions of scarcity, for it points to the abundance of shared goods by disciples of the companionship of empowerment. Empire takes food, and its logic is one of scarcity, abundance for the elite and taking away of what is necessary for life of the poor and the peasant. God’s logic is shared abundance for all is celebrated in the new meals, not of scarcity of food or grace but an extravagant abundance of both. Scarcity is the logic of the ruling classes, the 1%. for Jesus, God’s table had to always be open to everyone. Scarcity, privilege, and exclusion were not God’s ways, but abundance, inclusiveness, and compassionate care.

The second temptation is the possession of power and domination: It is the logic of empire, mainly the Roman Empire.

To resist empire—as-such we must know what we are up against. It is something inherent in civilization itself. Non-imperial civilization is something yet to be seen upon earth. John Dominic Crossan

The logic of God’s kin-dom is not imperial domination and ruling, but service of the greatest as the least and the least the greatest. Those who wish to be disciples must choose the lowest position at table, that of a slave, in serving the rest. The first will be last, and the last first. He would tell his disciples, some of them with their notions of power share similarly those notions with the Romans: You are to take the role of the lowest, a slave in service to all. This is the counter-vision that Jesus learned of the upside-down kin-dom in the wilderness. It is humble service over dominating power and coercion of Empire.

The third temptation is to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple. It is a temptation to test God. God does not need to be tested but trusted. It is not wonders and miracles that will generate faith, but the great miracle of all, changed lives—the transformation of people, who have become more compassionate, and who are reaching out to outsiders as brothers and sisters in love and care. It is God’s grace that is effective in people’s lives:

The logic of domination, violence, reward, and punishment that prevails in the everyday world is challenged and replaced by a new logic, the logic of grace, compassion, and freedom. Peter Hodgson

Grace is ordinary and unseen, but more effective than the powerful signs.
All three temptations have bearing in shaping Jesus’ ministry of God’s empowered companionship when he returns to society. They were rejected as style of ministry. It chose not the privileged position of religious leaders then and now in many churches. Remember the priest who walked by the man beaten and left for dead on the road of Jericho. Just imagine a high priest, or now a bishop, elder, or moderator who refuse to take up Jesus’ model of humble service, willing to wash the feet of his disciples or serve at table. These temptations were countered by a new vision of service and inclusiveness with forgiveness and compassion.
Jesus would begin his ministry by preaching the good news of the forgiveness of sins without requiring any penance, he would invite the pure and impure to sit at table to eat at God’s table, he would heal on the Sabbath because compassion was greater than the law.
So in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus recites from the scroll of Isaiah:

To preach good news to the poor.
To proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the
blind.
To set at liberty those who are oppressed.
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Jesus preached a new vision of God’s compassion for those who are not included in the vision: God care for the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed, and those enslaved through indebtedness. Jesus proclaimed a new freedom of God’s Spirit for a new era. It was the freedom that the Holy Spirit, who is God’s wildness,” and whose wildness was passed into the message, ministry, and person of Jesus.

The Transfiguration (Lk. 9: 28-36)

This story is traditionally read as a miracle story during Jesus’ ministry. But all indications from a careful reading this story is a resurrection or Parousia story. This story in the gospel attempts to help the disciples come to an understanding of the difficult moments of Jesus ministry, his arrest, and death. And his death leads to the victory of Easter Christians have called this event the “transfiguration” of Jesus. Transfiguration means to change forms or transform, but it is a transformation into something more beautiful or spiritually elevated. So Jesus’ face changes, and his clothes are transformed dazzlingly white. This event occurs on a mountain top, usually, a place of encounter with God.

These are other indications of a resurrection appearance. Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus on the mountain top, and they converse with Jesus about his death. These two figures, Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet, are religious prophets in past history. Climbing up a mountain is significant to Jews of Jesus’ time. Mountains are places where God is met. Think of Moses on Mt. Sinai where he receives the covenantal law. Elijah is taken to heaven by a fiery chariot in a whirlwind.

There was a common belief that these two prominent figures from the Hebrew Bible would return to earth at the end of the messianic period. Todays’ gospel story is thick with biblical allusions and symbols. Moses and the exodus are part of Jewish history of liberation from slavery in Egypt. Here is a comparison to the death of Jesus as the new exodus, a liberation from oppression and the bonds of death to resurrection. Elijah is a prophetic hero from the past, and at the end of his life, he is transferred by a fiery chariot in a whirlwind or tornado into heaven.

When Peter is mentioned in the gospels, you know to expect something will go wrong. He is well-intentioned but brash and does not often think through what Jesus says or does. Peter wants to do something to capture the moment, to make it possible to stay there in this light, in this understanding, in this encounter with God. He was wants to build three shrines or tents to honor the three religious figures. His babbling indicates how uncomfortable was he at what was taking place.

A radiant white cloud covered Jesus and, Moses, and Elijah, and the three, and a voice rendered Peter silent, proclaim Jesus as the beloved child and said to them, “listen to him!” They fell to the ground in terror. Jesus touched them, told them to get up and not to be afraid.

Like Peter, silence often makes us uncomfortable, but if we are not silent, how will we ever hear the voice of God? Can we be simply still ourselves and be silent in the face of the wonder of that surrounds us? How can we listen if we are babbling like Peter, how can we really hear if we are not first silent? If we are not still enough to take in what is being offered to us?

God reminds the disciples to commune or listen with nature. God says, “Be open. Receive. Don’t share yet. Don’t freeze this moment. But be aware. Enjoy the moment. Keep your eyes on Christ. And receive.”

This practice of stopping and listening is difficult, for it takes practice for those who are not used to being receivers, but it can be done when you relax the business of your mind and remain receptive.

300 million Orthodox Christians read this story of the transfiguration of Jesus as very important to the practice of their spirituality. They turn to the Earth as a location to encounter the Incarnate Christ transformed into the comos. They understand nature has the potential to become sacramental or transfigured and how God becomes present in nature from this story. Nature is generally empty, but it is also sacramental. Orthodox Christian spirituality has much to offer our own on encountering the natural world.

The heart of Orthodox Christian spirituality consists of the vision and the experience of the world as sacrament. This means that the world becomes a place for the transfigured presence of the risen Christ. To know and accept the sacramentality of the world in a truly effective way for encountering God yet, that experience transforms the way we feel and act toward creation and God present within it. All encounters with trees, rivers, oceans, deserts, and mountains can become “transfigured.” What they mean by “transfigured” it to be transformed into something beautiful, or in this case, something wonderfully magnificent and divine, God.

Nature is an icon. For Orthodox Christians, an icon is pictorial representation of sacred—God, Christ, and Spirit–or saints or event from the scriptures. They are not just for beautiful decoration of a church. Icons teach us as we see and contemplate them. They remind us what we are and what we should be. They show us the importance of matter and of material things. But they also show us the transfiguration of matter under the power of the Holy Spirit.

Some have called icons a window into the sacred. When you gaze at the icon, you see something beyond the representation. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, you bring the silence of James and John in today’s gospel story. It is the proper response at what you are really gazing. The icon calms the mind, it brings an inner stillness as a wakefulness or deep look at the heart of the icon to listen and see God. We experience that presence within the icon.

Today’s gospel about the transfiguration of Christ on the mountain top is an important lesson for training us to not only appreciation and experience transformation from engaging icons. The Orthodox Christians also understand nature as an icon of God’s presence. If we take the attitude of James and John’s silence, not Peter’s response, we come to nature with silence and awe. We come to an experiential realization of the presence in all created things.

Humanity has de-sacralize nature, taken the sacredness out of nature. And we commit ecological atrocities to the Earth and sin against God. Today’s gospel and the ancient practices of silent meditation and prayer in the Orthodox churches point to an openness to meet nature as the site of the holy. When they speak of nature as containing sacred presence, it is just like realizing that our blessing and consecration of the bread and grape juice at worship on Sunday. They become windows or icons into the sacred. The sacramentally charged nature of creation defies all sacrileges on our part, reminding us at all times that the world embodies the divine, the triune God. Ordinary nature can be transformed and revealed the transfigured Christ.

The Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Churches Bartholomew has been called “Green Patriarch” by the Orthodox churches. For the last 25 years and well before we heard about “climate change,” he has carried on a campaign to sensitize Christians to the issues of human harm and degradation of the Earth.

It follows that to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation, for humans to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the Earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands, for humans to injure moral ground, other humans with disease, for humans to contaminate the Earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life with poisonous substances—these are sins.(Bartholonew I)

He names pollution, destruction of forests, contamination of waters and streams, releasing toxic carcinogens and other toxins into our atmosphere, change of climate and the extinction of species, these are sin. It is sin against God’s creation and God’s body.

The Ecumenical Patriarch has tirelessly convened symposia around the world, including one in Santa Barbara, on degradation of global bioregions at most risk. He launched September 1^st as Creation Day to pray for the healing of God’s creation. That starts the ecumenical practice of the Season of Creation, which we as a church observe for four weeks, ending with the blessings of our companion animals. Like Pope Franics, he has been a vocal champion around the world for Earth protection and Earthcare.

The Earth and all its life forms and processes are not just objects to be exploited but a vast sacrament revealing God’s presence as Christ was revealed on the mountain and God spoke through a cloud over the risen Christ. The sacramental principle is the understanding that world around can break open, become transfigured, and reveal the radiant presence of Christ. In other words, nature becomes an icon of the sacred, the place we can encounter the risen Christ. Mountains, clouds, water, gardens, lakes and rivers, the wilderness can become spiritual windows to envision Christ.

Where are our icons? I first look to the gospel. The stories point to nature where Jesus experienced an intimacy of Abba God. The gospel becomes a visualized icon to experience the risen Christ.

Nature and God’s incarnation in Jesus are intertwined. Jesus is born in a cave. His parables are full of natural images: the good shepherd, the vine, the mustard seed, planting seeds, and so. Jesus experienced Abba God under the night stars in the countryside, in the olive groves, at the Jordan river, the wilderness,

Jesus is experienced on the mountain top, but the cloud becomes a manifestation of Abba God who declares that Jesus is the beloved child. And there is Jesus’ baptism in Jordan. Or in the wilderness. Jesus found God at night under the stars in countryside. Or in the gardens: the garden of Gethsemane and the resurrection garden where Jesus was buried.

You can nurture an opening of your mind which acts like a portal of connection with them and they will use this portal to commune with you. Sometimes this connection can happen quickly, surprisingly so, and some will need some time. A type of trust is needed to develop, not with the tree or whatever your source, but you must trust in your mind to become relaxed and vibrantly receptive.

The natural world becomes a window to experience the transfigured Christ in the world. The natural world is a window to find manifestations of the presence of God. When I speak of God is green, it means that the face of Christ is found in all living things.

This Lent make it a practice to visit our church garden. Find a plant that captures your attention. It may be the shape or color or something personal. Note the shape and color of the main body of the plant. If the plant has blossom, relish and enjoy the richness of the color. Try to develop a relationship with the plant, and give it a one word description. Focus on the word and the plant. Express your gratitude for this plant.

Try to be still to appreciate the plant. Be still and listen to the plant. Plants have a different language than ourselves. Listen to the plant, try to envision that this plant is God’s creation, it Remember when God look at the plants, God said it was good. This plant is precious and valuable to God. Remember how Jesus was transfigured on the mountain top; the risen Jesus is here today. In the plant and in you, and in your interrelating, there is the risen Christ. Honor the Christ in you and in the plant. Recognize that this is sacred moment together. Before you leave for reflection, repeat your holy word. By bookmakring it, the next time you visit the plant, use the word and it will transport into the experience where you left off. Thank God for this time with a beloved creation of God.

What might happen this Lent? Here is a description of Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas give us a clue.

I also began to connect with nature. I began to see that God loved not only my body, but also the whole ‘body” of creation. My prayer began to change. It was like turning my pocket inside out; whereas once I found God merely in the silent inward contemplation, now God began showing up around me—in the pond, the rocks, the willow tree. If you spend an hour gazing at a willow tree, after a while it begins to disclose God.

Blessing Our Companion Animals. Who is Blessed? (in honor of the blessing of Animals on the Feast of St. Franics of Assisi.

St. Francis of Assisi is not only honored by Catholics but also by Christians of many denominations as well as many non-Christians. We honor him and we remember animal life. The great historian Arnold Toynbee called Francis “the greatest of all men who ever lived in the West.” He goes on, “The example given by St. Francis is what we Westerners ought to be imitated with all our heart, for he is the only Westerner who can save the earth.” I believe that there is a lot of truth in Toynbee’s last claim. St. Francis inspires many folks who care deeply about the environment and love their companion animals.

Today we remember the great saint of ecology and model of living with nature and God’s creatures as siblings. I like the description made by some environmentalist who use “human and non-human animals.” It stresses that we human are animal as well and removes the attitude that humanity is above animals, The two Genesis creation accounts make the point we human are siblings to other life. On the sixth day, human and non-human animals were created. Or in Genesis 2, God forms adamah, the earth creature, and animals from the stuff of earth. St. Francis stressed human and other life were siblings.

We bless our companion animals, recognizing how our family members are blessings for us and are part of our household. Our companion animals are not poster children for environmental concerns, but they begin the process of helping how important are animals to the Earth community. All have intrinsic value to God the Creator.

There is no question that Francis never fit into his time; he was considered crazy, perhaps better described as a “holy fool,” during his lifetime. He did not fit in the early 13th century. I am sure that Francis would not fit well in our time as well. But he certainly presents a model for all of us to consider.

I want to focus on Francis of Assisi and his kinship relationship with other life, for this is why we bless our companions today. Blessing honors our relationships within our household companions and blesses our households. In my blessing, I pray for the companions who live together and mutually relate.
Francis’ Canticle of Creatures was written in the final year of his life. One

Franciscan writer Ilia Delia affirms,

(the Canticle) is the way the universe looks after ego has disappeared. It is a vision of the whole that sees the self as part of the whole in the unity of love. The way to this vision for Francis was compassion. His life was an ever-widening space in union with the divine, a space between God and Francis that included the leper, the sick brother, the sun, moon, and the stars. …He felt the tender love of God shining through creation.

When he saw the weakness of another creature, whether it was a human or non-human, he saw Christ’s passion re-enacted and saw Christ in the suffering. To be compassionate is to be related to others and view ourselves as a mirror of the others and Christ.

But what about non-human animals show compassion? The non-human animal does not itself reflected on the other; but non-human animals intuit that a human or non-human animal is in need and is kin, part of the pack. I want to share a wonderful story why it is important to develop a kinship relationship with our companion animals.

I ask the pardon to cat folks, but I am a dog person and will focus on dog stories. But I welcome you sending me or sharing with me your cat stories. So next time I can balance off today’s sermon.

The first story is the called the “Dogs of Egypt:” I took this story from Dr. Ken Stone, a Hebrew Bible scholar in an article in Divanimality. . He tells the following story.

Emmanuel Levinas, the Jewish French philosopher, was drafted into the French Army to fight against the Germans during World War II. His unit was captured by the Germans, and he spent confinement in a military prison camp and assigned to the Jewish barracks. Levinas narrates a story of his time in the prison about a dog named “Bobby.”

One day he came to meet this rabble as we returned under guard from work….We called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him there was no doubt that we were men.

The philosopher makes a clear distinction between Bobby the dog and the Nazi guards in the concentration camp. The Nazi guards treated their Jewish prisoners as animals. They dehumanized them. Levinas observes, “We were subhuman, a gang of apes.”

Bobby recognized these prisoners as human, part of the pack, and greeted them with joy and unconditional love as dogs are wont to do when you leave and return. Again Levinas points out, “For him (Bobby) there was no doubt that we were men.” He reminisces,

He (Bobby) was a descendant of the dogs of Egypt. And his friendly growling, his animal faith, was born of his forefathers on the banks of the Nile.
Levinas reminisces that Bobby was like the dogs of Egypt in Exodus, where Moses speaks about the last plague, the death of the first born, that the dogs do not bark. They silently recognized the humanity of the Hebrew slaves in Exodus.

Biblical scholar Ken Stone observes,

By holding their tongues, the dogs mark the liberation of Israelite slaves. And here, Levinas observes we see what it means to say that the dogs are friends of humanity, for…. “the dog will attest to dignity of its person.”

Levinas speaks of “animal faith” and “friendly growling” of Bobby. Bobby recognizes the humanity of the prisoners. Levinas associates dogs in the scriptures with human freedom and the dog Bobby with humanity. That is a wonderful story of how dogs humanize us.

St. Francis knew that loving animals provide human animals with an expansion of relationships. “Animals” then and often now are perceived less than humanity. In history of Christianity, most Christians have viewed dogs and animals as inferior to humanity and having no soul.

Humans are thoroughly relational, and we realize that we are human through other human beings and companion or non-human animals. I have had five dogs in my life since 1978, and I have been with four of them as they were euthanized, several weeks with Joe and his dog Harley. It was emotionally hard to lose a household companion, Harley. I cling to a statement of Pope Francis to a young boy whose dog died: “One day we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all God’s creatures.” Pope Francis’ words, I believe, speak to a truth that St. Francis could have easily uttered, and I have always believed since my first sacred event of saying good bye to a good friend.

I have heard folks say that they would never have another dog after they experienced the death of dog and the pain of grief and loss. But despite the grief of loss, an non-human animal theologian Stephen Webb claims:

Like forgiveness, animals are a gift; they come to us with their own beauty and dignity, and they plead for patience and understanding. In turn, they give us more than we could otherwise have known about ourselves by allowing us to venture into a relationship that goes further, due to its very awkwardness and limitations, than the boundaries of human language normally permits, “The fact that animals are so generous in answering us is what makes it okay to train them but a human duty one way we enact our gratitude to the universe that animals exist.” (Webb)

I want to add the training is mutual. My dog Friskie trains me as I train him. There is a reciprocal giving and sharing. He responds to people speaking to hm. He communicates with myself by gazing into my eyes, or sitting not to me, jumping in my lap grabbing my hand to herd me, communicating “let’s go to church” or later “let’s go to the dog park.”

Companion animals bring joy but expect a return, care, attention, and love. They show us love and will extend that love to others. One day I was in the church social hall talking to a couple, one of which was disfigured from cancer, and he had a hard time speaking. Friskie immediately jumped into his lap and started to lick his face and gave him unconditional love. His canine intuition was correct about the need for love in this situation. I know that many dogs as they get to know you they love you naturally and unconditionally. When I think of how dogs have been introduced into nursing homes for the chronically ill, they have a therapeutic presence by being themselves. The introduction of dogs has produced remarkable successes in alleviating loneliness and help healing. One program that promotes and use dog therapy writes:

Therapy Dog volunteers and their dogs have contributed significantly over the years in bringing warmth and joy to residents of nursing homes. Residents learn, in the company of dogs, to overcome loneliness and fear. The residents are delightfully entertained by the dog’s tricks and antics and warmed beyond words by their unconditional love and acceptance.

They connect physically with touch and emotionally with the residences of nursing homes, and they provide touch so vital to all of us as human beings.
Stephen Webb makes the insight:

The interconnections among God, humans, and dogs are rich. Both God and dogs love unconditionally, both God and humans are masters in their own realms, and both dogs and humans are creatures and servants. Humans are in between, both masters and servants, loved by God and dogs alike.

Dogs are remarkable companions if we take the time to listen and learn from our dogs, and they will communicate with us in many different ways if we engage them.

Both relationships– God to us and dogs to us—are places we experience unconditional love. When we come back to either, there is a joyful hospitality of welcoming.

Finally, there is a Native American legend that when you die, you cross a bridge into heaven. At the head of the bridge, the soul of the human meets every non-human animal that they have met during their lifetime. The non-human animals, based on what they experience of this person, decide who may cross the bridge and who will be turned away. Companion or non-human animals have an uncanny ability to judge character.

In her book, Certain Poor Shepherds, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas tells the story of a goat and dog who are companions on a journey to Bethlehem on the first Christmas day. They are searching for an animal redeemer, not human. Thomas writes, “No redeemer appeared for the animals; however none was needed. The animals were much the same as they are now, just as God had made them, perfect to God’s plan.”

That is why we not only bless our companion animals but they bless us. We could not be fully human without them. And that is why take the time to remember St. Francis who reminds us that animals our siblings.

Let us pray: I want to share a prayer sent to me from Kathleen:

O God, you are a playful puppy; I’ll never be lonely. You knock me over in your desire to have fun. You return eagerly no matter how I behave. You calm my spirit. You remind me to keep things in perspective because the only thing that matters to you is love. Even though life can threaten to crash in on me I will not be overcome; your bark and soft fur soothe me . You bring me to the park to play in the middle of the work week. You lick my face and my hands. We never get tired . Together we’ll keep playing as long as we live. And the sun will shine always. (Erik Walker Wikstrom)

Eco-Theology Powerpoint

Educational resource in developing basic eco-theologies for Christian communities. It was part of training program for developing an Environmental Justice Team in congregations and in UCC Conferences.

Eco-theology Powerpoint

Eco-Actions: Resources for Building an Earth-centered Church

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Shore-Goss

Category Archives: Ecology

A Moment of Conflicted Conscience

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Spiritual Ecology and the Middle Ground

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Consider the Lilies in the Field (Lk. 12:27-32)

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Eating is a Dangerous Memory (John 21:1-19)

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Season of Creation: Oceans

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Breakfast with Jesus (John 21:1-19)

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The Wilderness: The Making of God’s Upside-down Kin-dom (Luke 4:1-3)

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The Transfiguration (Lk. 9: 28-36)

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Blessing Our Companion Animals. Who is Blessed? (in honor of the blessing of Animals on the Feast of St. Franics of Assisi.

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Eco-Theology Powerpoint

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