Compassion Grows–An  Excerpt from Henri Nouwen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUkZTR0pPLQ

Several years ago, I asked all invited speakers who preached at our anniversary to imagine this was their last sermon. It was based on an academic movement in universities to ask a professor to imagine giving his/her last lecture. After 13 years, this is my final sermon at MCC United Church of Christ. So here goes my attempt:

I am grateful to this church for many reasons. We have done great things over 13 years.

Let me start personally. I met my future husband Joe at Claremont School of Theology when I was invited to speak about Queer Theology. As we quietly dated, he came to Sunday service one week. And Larry Duplechan, during announcements, mischievously asked, “Are you not going tell us about your guest?” Larry had outed us, and I speak for myself, that it felt like my family had to give their stamp of approval. Joe grew into his ministry and finished his work at Claremont with two Masters. Our non-legal holy union was blessed in 2007 in this church by Rev. Troy Perry, and he legalized our marriage a year later with several others. That night of illegal wedding, I promised him that there would be a day that I would follow him. I have honored that commitment, and I follow him to Petaluma in a couple of days. Joe was ordained as a clergy here.

I am grateful to you for your faithfulness to Christ, and I take so many wonderful memories of all of you with me and those who have moved away or passed: Ray Therriault, Bob Cross, Roberta, Elinor, Dante, Gerry, Barbara, Joe, and Gregoir to name some. I grieved with you at their loss while we remembered and celebrated their lives. Their stories as well as your stories are woven with my own.

I am grateful to Venus and Emily for rescuing Friskie on the streets, after canvasing the neighborhood for the owner, but they slyly brought him to church after I lost my dog of sixteen years ago. I wouldn’t touch Friskie then because of my grief, but as I was talking with Roberta, Friskie jumped into my lap. And he became part of my family. And he loves to come to church.

But not all memories have been good. There were troubled times, drama, and pain directed at one another. I publicly apologize for my contributions to causing pain, whether rightly or wrongly. People left over disputes on using inclusive language, music, spouses, because I was male, Avatar, the service was too liturgical and not evangelical enough, the age of the congregation, and many other reasons.

But this church known for resisting change has changed over 13 years and achieved remarkable accomplishments. Let me share what stands out:

The greening of our church: We made the Earth a member of our congregation and embarked on a journey of living more sustainable with the Earth from solar panels, to retrofitting the campus to more efficient energy and water usage, the garden and the garden. The garden has been a gift to us all. We were named the first Creation Church of the UCC.

I am grateful to Michael and James who painted the mural for celebrating LGBT families and relationships on the wall. They started the process of jackhammering the asphalt to create an herb garden in front of the mural. But they unleashed the gardening passion of Gregoir who jackhammered more asphalt to create our garden.

We led the campaign to raise monies to place solar panels for Las Memorias AIDS Hospice in Tijuana. They have half of the needed solar panels, and we have freed up funds for people living with HIV.

I can remember the feeding programs, knitting scarfs for the women’s shelter and for the homeless, and knitting caps for the LGBT retirement at Triangle Square.

We produced and launched Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi: It became a missionary arm to tell the story of LGBT inclusion to numerous venues: churches, Edinburgh and Dublin Fringe Festival and off Broadway. The cast became an unchurched church speaking about radical inclusiveness of the Jesus/Joshua story. And he cast produced a documentary of their journey and faith—Playing with Redemption is now on Netflicks. They were a wonderful ministry outreach. But we have produced Godspel, The Man Who Killed Jesse James, and Vicki’s one woman play.

Paul Allison would not forgive me if I did not mention the acquisition of the pipe organ from MCC San Francisco when the building was condemned.

I remember Daddy Nick, who suffered a broken hip, and recovering in our living room for 8 months. Nick became a deacon, and then in gratitude he with a crew of folks renovated our kitchen.

This church has recognized my difference from the first time I interviewed when I identified as Buddhist Christian. You have welcomed all visitors with an extravagant hospitality in your midst– all who were non-Christians as fellow sojourners and companions on a variety of paths to discover the mystery of God called by many names.

As the denomination MCC has declined significantly, you struggled with myself about the future of the church whether we should dually affiliate with the United Church of Christ and after months of prayerful discernment chose to dually affiliate.

Of course, we know how to party and throw events: Out at the Circus with fire-spinners, jugglers, and high-wire acrobats and lots of fun; Our Night of Intercultural Music and Dance in our garden, concerts and plays, square dances and celebrations. We love to celebrate life. There is so much I can speak of our success, and I have so much gratitude for our work together.

Now, you have chosen an interim pastor, Rev. Pat Langlois. The board has taken a leadership role with confidence, and I believe that the best days of growth and service are ahead.

But I want to share some words of wisdom. There are a few words of wisdom that I learned over the decades and want to leave with you.

The first is that this church and all other churches need to follow the path of compassion. The video of Henri Nouwen’s words on Growing Compassion are pertinent, for they are expansion of Jesus, God’s prophet of compassion: “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate.” (Lk. 6:26) Jesus rightly connects compassion with Abba God, the source of compassion.

Jesus’ compassion is kindness towards a stranger that is unexpected. Compassion is linked to generosity, empathy, sympathy, and mercy. The life of Christ reflects for Christians the very essence of the meaning of compassion. Christ has also inspired Christians throughout history to found hospitals, care for the poor, feed the hungry, work in leper colonies, create schools for the children of the poor, fight for the vulnerable, and other such charitable acts. It is also Christ’s example that challenges Christians to forsake their own self-interested desires and act compassionately towards others, especially, but not exclusively, towards those in some type of distress or need.

Christ says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit because apart from me you can do nothing.” This is an organic metaphor used by Jesus in his farewell discourse to indicate the interconnections between us and the risen Christ. Our interconnectedness with Christ the Vine becomes the basis of Christian compassion and Christians living together in the world and with the world. As individuals and as a church, we needed to be rooted in God and Christ. When rooted in God’s compassion, we become a school of compassion, training others on Christ’s path of compassion. Grow in God’s compassion, and imitate Christ’s compassion.
Make compassion a part of your life, and you will turn things around in the world. If you treat others the way that you want them to treat you, it will be a more compassionate world. You do compassion acts, and you will make a difference by making this world a bit kinder and interrelated.

Henri Nouwen writes about Christ’s compassion:

Compassion 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. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human (and all life: my corrective).

When we recognize our pain and suffering, we connect deeply with other people’s pain and suffering. One of the insights of both Jesus the Christ and Siddartha the Buddha is that everyone experiences suffering and pain. Compassion becomes a means for us to connect other people’s pain and suffering and find common ground.

Compassion tears down walls between us and other people. Jesus encouraged his disciples to follow the example of the Good Samaritan to reach out beyond people like us to those who are different, strangers, and enemies. When the Samaritan looked into the eyes of the man beaten on the road to Jericho, he recognized a common humanity—that could be “me.” The Good Samaritan did not confine his compassion to his people alone but to a Jewish stranger. Jesus asked his disciples not to confine compassion to their own people and friends, but to the stranger and even to an enemy.

Let me take a sideline to help contextualize a story from Karen Armstrong, religious scholar and compassion activist; When I was youth, I read the Iliad more than 20 times. At first, it was about ancient Greek myth and culture, but there was an intimate relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. I identified with that intimacy and did not name myself as gay.

One of my favorite authors Karen Armstrong in a speech promoting the Charter of Compassion, draws an example from Homer’s Iliad. Achilles has withdrawn his men from war against Troy. Unbeknownst to him, his intimate Patroclus dons Achilles’ armor. He engages in combat with Hector, the champion of Troy and is slain. When Achilles experiences the death of his intimate, he is enraged and grieved. He challenges Hector to combat and kills him. He strips Hector of his armor and ties his feet to his chariot and parades the mutilated body before the walls of the city to dishonor the corpse.
Achilles refuses to bury or turn the deceased body of the trojan prince for burial. In Greek religion, an unburied body damns the soul to endless loss and wandering. Hector’s father, King Priam disguises himself and makes his way through the Greek encampment to Achilles’ tent. He drops his disguises and pleads for the body of his son. Achilles looks into the eyes of his enemy King Priam weeping, and Priam asks him in tears to remember his own father. He recognizes a common bond of suffering, and the two men weep together. They recognized the divine in each other and share compassion for each other. Achilles tenderly lays the body of Hector into the feeble arms of Priam. This is compassion in action—a recognition of our common humanity.

Compassion in action, to me, is defined as the ability to step back from any personal differences I may have with another human being and see that person as they are at their core, as another child of God, and acting in accordance. It is the ability to look past the details of what creates the illusion of separation between myself and another child of God who is on an equal plane to me in the mind and eyes of God, and behave as if I cannot see that which may create division. It is seeing clearly through the eyes of love, letting love filter out conflict, letting love guide my actions. It is remembering that no matter what differences another person and I may have as individuals, that we are both are children of the same God. My faith calls me to display the same unconditional sense of love and care to that person that God shows me. Remember Christ’s words, “When you do this to the least, you do it to me. “

One of the great accomplishments of our church is the expansion to the Earth. Compassion is the language of the Earth and life, it is the grace of realizing our interrelatedness to everything. It is incarnational and risen Christ whose roots are deeply found in all life and all matter.

We are aware that our bodies are not limited to what lies within the boundaries of our skin. There is no phenomena on this planet that does not intimately concern us or involve us. Our ego-centered existence only separates us and distances us from the suffering of other humans, animal species, and the suffering of the planet.

We practice compassion to save our planet. we save the Earth for those who come after us. We protect the Earth because we are motivated by compassion and respect for all things, animate and inanimate. We respect and care for life, for we inter-exist as siblings before God.

Anyone feeling compassion sees no boundary between one’s self and others, we feel compelled to do something when a fellow creature of God is hurting and suffering–whether it is another species, a human, or the planet. Christ has helped to realize that all life suffers and that Christ suffers with us.

I end this reflection with a paraphrase of Teresa of Avila’s prayer:

God has no eyes in this world, but ours, to identify injustices, to see a better way, to locate and reach out to those in need;
God has no ears in this world, but ours, to hear the cries of those in need, to listen with love and compassion, to hear the need in another’s voice and minister to them;
God has no mouth in this world, but ours, to speak out for justice, to offer words of encouragement and support for those in need, to let others know how much they are loved;
God has no feet in this world, but ours, to walk the extra mile alongside others who need a friend, to travel to places to help those in need, to go and share God’s Love with those who are not aware of it;
God has no hands in this world, but ours, to heal the sick, to create sanctuaries for other life who have loss space, to carry those who cannot walk on their own, to hold someone in our arms when they need comforting; to recycle and create environments of sustainability, not waste;
God has no mind in this world, but ours, to seek and find ways to make our lives and those of others better, to create works of art and ways of sharing, to create a better world and to arrest the causes of global warming. God has no heart in this world, but ours, to feel and share love with all others and to love God’s creation—the Earth.

The latest report from scientists is a sobering report. The glaciers in Greenland are melting faster than first thought and now the western ice sheet in Antarctica with a sea level rise of 5-6 feet or more by 2100 and 20 feet by 2200. Already at high tide, the oceans are flooding the streets of Miami, and most of Florida is 1-3 feet above sea level. Coasts are threatened around the world, and a large majority of humanity live near the oceans.

The Trump administration has declared war of the Earth, denying the existence of climate change. Trump’s executive order this week attempts to roll back all the climate initiative of the Obama administration and its commitment to the Paris Climate Accord. The EPA have removed studies of carbon atmosphere studies, looking to remove discussion of the science that studies global warming.
Today, our scripture is the story of the Garden of Eden, but it is not just the story we are accustomed to hearing. It is the voice of the Earth. Just shifting the story from the human story-teller’s voice to the Earth mind remind us to listen to the voice of the Earth today.

God loves planting trees. The original garden. envisioned in the story of Eden, is a royal park full of trees or a grove of trees. God delights in planting trees. Trees are significant in the biblical and religious stories of humanity.

Let me focus on trees for a moment. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna observes:
The birth of trees is truly the most blessed in the world, for they contribute to the well-being of all other creatures. Just as no one needy returns disappointed from generous persons, so too one who approaches trees for shelter. They meet the needs of others with their leaves, flowers, fruits, shade, roots, bark, wood, fragrance, sap, ashes, and charcoal.

Trees are symbols in the spirituality of humanity—representing symbols of life, abundance, generosity, energy, food, strength, shelter. Trees are gardeners in their own right. They provide shelter for other species—plant, nonhuman animal life and insects. Leaves fall and decompose to create a rich humus-like soil. Trees circulate water from their roots into the trunk and branches. They protect biodiversity. Trees capture carbon dioxide and release oxygen that we and other non-human life require. Trees live in communities, and they are one of the most ancient life forms, for they stabilize the weather and are useful for recycling water. They are intelligent and have stable children. I have met redwood trees who are 800 years old and few trees 1600 years old in the Armstrong Forest in Russian River. They have stories to tell us and a wisdom to communicate to us if we chose to listen. In fact, the midrash on Eden came from a morning walk among the ancient redwood trees in the Armstrong Forest with my husband and companion dog. I listened to the trees and found a deep spirit within them, connecting to God’s Spirit and the risen Christ. And I realized that they were faithful gardeners as intended by God.

The female Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, Wangari Mathai writes, “When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and hope.” Mathai has founded a movement whose goal is the reduction of poverty in Africa and environmental conservation. In order to protect biodiversity and forests, China legislated a law requiring its citizens to plant 4 four trees or pay for the planting of four trees. China has remained the top in human planting of trees in the world.

God creates the earthling—adamah from the humus of the Earth. The soil is able to hold God’s breath, and God is concerned for the earthling and creates animals for companions, but that remains unsatisfactory. So God e divides the earthling to create humans male and female. God compassionately cares for the welfare of each creature and the dirt creature now male and female. The Earth rejoices in all her children.

God commissioned the walking dirt creatures to care and serve the garden. And the walking earthlings followed God in gardening, caring and tending the community of the soil. They learned to work the abundance of life in the garden—preserving and caring the community of trees, plants and vegetative life, and other life. God expected the walking earthlings to follow in God’s vocation as gardeners and gave them one instruction not to eat of the fruit of the tree of good and evil.

Of course, we know that in the familiar fable, the couple in the garden ate from the fruit of the tree of good and evil at the prompting of the serpent. They became aware of their nakedness and now separated themselves from the animals in their nakedness.

And the Earth lamented, “Sadly, they lost all connectedness to myself and their siblings. They forgot their humus origins.” God placed them outside of Eden to learn how to re-connect to the Earth community once more. Humans, however, forgot a deep truth of the soil that all life shares a common ancestry from the humus or soil and are a part of the community of my body.

As I wept at the loss of my earth children, but God comforted me with hope. One day there will be a new earth creature (adamah) born again from the soil. He will be born from a cave tomb in a garden and become a great gardener, carrying on the mission of his parent who loves gardening. He will instruct humanity on gardening once more, and they will return to the community of the soil and once again connect to all life forms as an interdependent community of the soil. Hope was born once more in my dreams….

Humanity has lost its connectedness to the Earth and other life. Humans forgot their origins from the Earth and their soil community. Humanity is placed outside the garden to learn how to re-connect to the Earth. Instead we have continued to separate ourselves from the Earth and all other life.

Note that the Earth has not transgressed any intention of God. Nor have the trees, the plant life, or animal life. Both Celtic and Orthodox Christianities maintained that the Earth never fell. It still retains the holiness, its original innocence and blessing, beloved of God and carrying on their intended mission by God.

God comforts the Earth with the promise of new Adam, born in a cave with animals. He would be lifted upon a tree and die, but he would be buried in a cave in a garden. Let me point out that Golgotha was originally an olive grove of trees as well as Gethsemane and the grove of the resurrected Jesus. This new Adam, the risen Christ, will be a true gardener, following in God’s footsteps

Today humanity suffers from anthropocentrism, we are the center of the world. Everything is for our benefit. The Earth is our warehouse of resources to use whatever we choose. Animals exist for our purpose, and they are soulless, and we can hunt, abuse, and kill them for our use. They are inferior. We suffer from an arrogant apartheid the Earth and the community of life. Humanity practices an exclusivity not only with other humans but also with all life. We are exceptionally arrogant, and we are conditioned by our culture and religion to separation. Separation from the Earth is pervasive in our culture. That is why we can pollute, dump radioactivity and toxic chemicals into the environment. We can frack the Earth and explode mountain tops to get at coal. We factory farm, and not only raise and slaughter animals inhumanely, their waste releases methane into the atmosphere. It heats up the atmosphere 40 times more than carbon pollutants. If we reduce our eating of meat produced from factory farming, we could significantly reduce the warming of our climate.

And I will say strongly, “If we are separated from the Earth and the community of life, we are also separated from God.” We have as a church defined our ministry the radical inclusive love that Jesus practiced. There was a time when I as a gay man, along with other LGBT folks, were excluded, and we had to form a ghetto community to survive and practice our faith. Tearing down all walls that exclude and separate is not only the mission of Jesus but is our church mission; radical inclusivity and extravagant hospitality to everyone. And I would add to all life. I am proud that my own church made the Earth a member of our church eight years ago, and today they renew their covenant to the Earth and all life.

Christopher Uhl, a Professor of Biology and Ecology, has been interested, for decades, in environmental healing. You might be surprised. He understands that responding to the environmental crisis is not by repairing the environment. He argues that we first need to repair ourselves. This means to change our attitude and perceptions of ourselves and the Earth. That means we need to break down the conditioning of separating out our selves.We need to awaken, letting go our ego-centeredness and realize that we are interconnected with all life and the Earth. We are not above or separated from the Earth, but participants in the Earth community.

Chris Uhl talks about antidote to anthropocentrism that we are practicing here, for the solution is radical inclusivity. He writes,

Inclusivity is grounded 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 to create a world that works for all. (Uhl)

Inclusivity is the key, it tears down the barriers with any person or being or even the Earth. When I read John’s Gospel, there is the affirmation in the prologue: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” A Danish theologian, Niels Gregersen writes,

…the incarnation of God in Christ can be understood as a radical or deep incarnation, that is, an incarnation into the very tissue of biological existence, and system of nature. Understood this way, the death of Christ became an icon of God’s redemptive co-suffering with all sentient life as well as with the victims of social competition. God bears the cost of evolution, the price involved in the hardship of natural selection.

This means that Christians hold a deep incarnational viewpoint that God’s incarnation did not start with Mary’s “yes” to the Angel Gabriel and her pregnancy. It started before the big bang and during the big bang when the molecules of Christ were formed. like our own, 15 billion years ago and later would form the embryo in Mary and the physical body of Jesus. This process of deep incarnational roots would spread through the resurrection of Christ into the Earth, all fleshy life, human and other, and the entire universe. The resurrection would tie us to risen Christ in a soil community in the Earth’s story. Jesus would become a new Adam.

Jesus described himself as the vine and us as the branches. The risen Christ is mistaken by Mary Magdalene as a gardener. What a prophetic insight Magdalene makes. The risen Christ restores us as members of the soil community, the community of the Earth.

Thomas Berry writes,

We come into being in and through the Earth. Simply put, we are Earthlings. The Earth is our origin, our nourishment, our educators, our healer, our fulfillment. At its core, even our spirituality is Earth derived. The human and the Earth are totally implicated, each in the other. If there is no spirituality in the Earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves.

Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff claims, “the human being is the Earth who walks.” Or Zen Buddhist Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh , “We are the Earth and the Earth is in us. We have always been one with the Earth.”
Sallie McFague writes,

I am of the earth, a product of its ancient and awesome history, and I really and truly belong here. But I am only one among millions, no billions of other human beings, who have a place, a space, on the earth.

Pope Francis I reminds us, “We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7). Claim your earthiness this Earth Day. Our siblings are suffering and dying. If we proceed as we are doing, a sixth extinction will occur in the near future. So today I want you to remember the theme of my new book, God is Green: If you fall in love with God’s Earth, you will fight for the survival of the Earth. The risen Christ is incarnated in all life and in the Earth. Let us practice our incarnational discipleship as gardeners and may the Trees this remind us that God intended us to be Gardeners.

I have written queer theology for the last 27 years, and I now write about a period of 8 days, the queerest days that I can imagine. I am speaking from the moment that Jesus arrives in Jerusalem on a donkey to God’s resurrection of Jesus from the death.

Now let me dispel a notion: I am not writing about LGBTQI concerns, they are included but not the focus this morning. Queer theory and queer stories focus usually on LGBTQI concerns and inclusion in history, but I am speaking about God’s dream for life and humanity, and that dream is very queer. It is God’s unconditional grace and love for creation and all life.

Let me define queer for a moment. To “queer” is to interfere or disrupt. It is to transgress exclusive categories, notions, boundaries, and all boxes. I queer Christianity because it has remained exclusive, often violent and oppressive of someone or some life. Queering exclusiveness is to interfere and spoil exclusiveness and make it more inclusive.

My colleague and friend Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng, understands queering as eliding dualism. Dualism is a destruction form of binary thinking used by dominant theologies, church leaders and politicians. It separates the world into male and female, culture and nature, the have and have-not, human and non-human, and so. For Patrick, God’s love is queer because it elides such thinking and behaviors. Dr. Justin Tanis comprehends queer as dawn or dusk, that liminal or ambiguous space between night and day. My deceased theologian and friend speaks of indecent and perverse. In Luke’s gospel, the Temple high priests bring a charge against Jesus before Pilate: “This man has perverted the nation.”

I have engaged with God’s Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit have made me “queer” and more so over time. I describe myself as “a queer seeker of God and disciple of an even queerer God.” Jesus laid the foundations of ministry and message of the companionship of empowerment or kindom of God as a “topsy-turvy and upside-down kindom. He opens God’s table to everyone and upsets nearly every religious Jew of his time. Just listen to the parables of Jesus—the Good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the mustard seed, the baker woman who sneaks leaven into 50 pounds of flour, and so on. They provoke and disrupt religious exclusivism that reserves God’s grace and favor for the chosen “holy.”

My often quoted author, Diarmuid O’Murchu, calls the parables as “enlightened confusion.”

The story Jesus told them turned their world upside-down,
Bombarding every certainty they knew.
The boundaries were disrupted,
Their sacred creeds corrupted,
Every hope they had constructed,
Was questioned to the core!
By the story ended,
Stretching meaning so distended,
What they had known for long before.

O’Murchu speaks about Jesus’ parables. But what if we understand the gospel stories of Jesus as a parable about God? God is queering in the story of Jesus on a massive and unprecedented scale, not since the big bang. God has incarnated in a human being—such a queer and scandalous notion. God is queering and communicating a thoroughly queer and radically inclusive love. All are beloved—all humanity, all life, and all creation. No on is left behind or out.

Let me point out the queer highlights of this week:

For Jesus, God was a king unlike all kings and rulers. God’s rule was “queer,” meaning “not fitting in, strange, at odds with, out of place, disruptive, blasphemous, revolutionary, dangerous, outside the box, or my word “mischievous.” It is a topsy-turvy non-ruling but luring us through unconditional gift and love. God’s strategy is never coercive but always luring us through unconditional grace and love.

The Temple high priest and his colleagues brought Jesus before Pilate with the charges: “He perverted the nation.” Here “perverted” means inverting religious values, hierarchies, breaking all sorts of purity codes and religious laws for the sake of compassion. Jesus was always out of place; a peasant was meant to be quiet and subservient to the rulers of the Temple. Jesus spoke out compassion and was not afraid to break religious rules to extend God’s compassion.
Let’s examine today’s gospel a little more carefully. Unfortunately, the distribution of palms on Palm Sunday has become a spiritual blessing for us today. Many Christians tie up their palms into a bow and hang the palm crosses in their homes. And I am not opposed to anyone doing so if you determine to ask God to make you a bit queerer. But Palm Sunday has a deeper meaning than just the palms. Jesus rides on donkey into Jerusalem accompanied by a ragtag group of male and female disciples.

Jesus enters Jerusalem or to use biblical scholar Warren Carter’s phrase “making an Ass of Rome:” The conflict between Jesus and Pilate begins the day that Jesus enters in Jerusalem on the back of a donkey and praised as the “Son of David.”

Roman entrances into city were always triumphant. No red carpets, but soldiers trumpeting, followed by cadence war drums sounding the entrance of the conquering hero. In this case, it was Pilate who represented the triumphant Roman Empire and Emperor Tiberius. Days before Pilate rode on a war horse from the sea resort of Caesarea followed by marching his Roman legionnaires with standards, Pilate entered Jerusalem as conqueror and made it clear to the populace that the Rome was in charge of their city and their lives. They paraded and displayed extravagantly the power of Tiberius Caesar and Rome. It communicates Roman greatness and military power, reminding the crowds that they were conquered by the powerful Roman legions—the greatest power in the world blessed by the Gods. Augustine was the true Son of god Apollo, and the savior of the world.

But Jesus intends to literally make an ass of Pilate and Rome. He choreographs his own dramatic and symbolic entrance into Jerusalem. He queers some of the Roman ritual entry or rather mischievously reframes them as symbolic challenges. His entrance into Jerusalem reminds the Jews of their religious history in which God enters the holy city to serve, not dominate. He chooses an ass, not a war horse in which Pilate rode into the city. Matthew remembers the line from the prophet Zechariah: “Tell the daughter of Zion, your king is coming on an ass”(9:9). The rest of the verse states that your king comes triumphant and victorious, and humble riding an ass.

Jesus is recognized not as a king but more likely anti-king. He teaches humility, non-violence, compassion and love, forgiveness, and peace-making, empowerment through mutuality and service, not conquest and domination. God’s community is constituted by a new a kinship as children of God—not be wealth, prestige, gender, or ethnicity. It is constituted by God as Abba, our parent in love with all and equally. And God lives within us and in our midst.
Another example of this last week of Jesus’ life that reveals God’s queer activity among people as empowering mutual companionship is the Last Supper. Companionship is created when we share food together, and we eat with God in our midst. Companionship was based on exclusion but gathering together to eat with God and one another.

I want you to remember the video from Centering Prayer this morning, Eating Twinkies with God. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9N8OXkN0Rk It expresses the incarnational vision of the Last Supper and Jesus’ ministry of eating together with God and finding God present.

There is no question that for Jesus the Last Supper had to be open and inclusive. I cannot accept the readings of the Last Supper as an exclusive meal. It goes against the very queer nature of who Jesus was and who God is. People from the highways and byways were to be invited into the meals. It was populated with diversity: outcasts, prostitutes, abominable people, tax collectors, those folks that terrify Pharisees and Christians alike. He did not moralize, berate them how to change their lives, or threaten them that could not share the table if they did not change their ways.

In Christianity’s Dangerous Memory, Diarmuid O’Murchu describes Jesus’ parables, healings, and ministry. The description is equally applicable to his meals and his to Last Supper:

They defy the criteria of normalcy and stretch creative imagination toward subversive, revolutionary engagement. They threaten major disruption for a familiar manageable world, and lure the hearer (participant) into a risky enterprise, but one that has promise and hope inscribed in every fiber of the dangerous endeavor.

There were no hierarchies at table, no one in charge and in power. 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. And God was mischievously present through each other. Jesus encouraged them to dream a future with hope, with God with shared resources and the abundance of food created by the companions of the bread and the cup.
Jesus’ Last Supper, like all his meals, undid social ordinary patterns and hierarchical behaviors, introducing people into a new egalitarianism, an equality before one another and God. No Roman official like Pilate would ever serve food to another person, especially with a male lesser of status or serve even his wife. No religious Jew would invite men and women together at table, suspected impurity and sinfulness.

And then there is the radical service of Jesus at table that evening– washing the feet of his male and female disciples. This was the service of only household slaves or women. No free male would do such a washing service because it demeaned his masculinity and patriarchal authority. Jesus turns the social hierarchies inside out, breaking down the gender boundaries and social hierarchies. There is only table fellowship of mutual service and equals, revering those who were the socially least, and inviting the disciples to imitate Jesus in his act of foot-washing.

Finally, Jesus dies a cruel death inflicted by the powers of imperial domination and religious exclusivism, always an unholy marriage of violence. It is an ultimate queering of human expectation, God’s vulnerability and suffering on the cross. God understood vulnerability in the incarnated Christ on the cross, and God identified with the suffering Christ and the least and vulnerable humanity and life in history. We have no comprehension of the depths of God’s suffering for all suffering life, but we do have a window into the depth of God when Jesus told his disciples: “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate.” Abba God suffered and died with Christ out of compassion, for God has suffered with all suffering life and human life. God the Creator becomes vulnerable and experience suffering the incarnated Christ on the cross and the Holy Spirit that groans and suffers with all created life. This is the queerest notion of God in history—God who becomes vulnerable and experiencing suffering. God is with us in so many unimaginable ways.

But the queer God surprised all of us. God said “no” to such violence and cruelty, God proclaimed a “yes to unconditional love” on Easter Sunday. Next Sunday I will speak how the queer God queers death for resurrected life!

We heard this morning in our centering prayer, Richard Feynman’s PS in his letter to his deceased wife D’Arline. Richard Feynman was a noted American physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, and he was a Noble Prize recipient in Physics. His PS —“PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.” Death intrudes upon our lives, whether we like it or not. It is an inescapable fact of life. Everyone will die, and that includes each one of us. Feynman’s PS struck me funny the first time I read it, but it hits every person who has experienced lost and grief that they feel like Dr. Feynman. A dear one, just moments or day before alive, but the life force or spirit has moved on. Where do the spirits of deceased loved ones and friends go?
I co-wrote with a colleague Dennis Klass a book: Dead But Not Lost: Grief Narratives in Religious Traditions. It came from coffee each morning before class, where we shared our expertise in religion and the psychology of grief. The book is about the gap between the living and the dead and how people have tried to bridge that gap. First I need to tell you that Dr. Feynman was an atheist, for him there was no supernatural world for him to access his wife. But his love for deceased wife continued. Almost every human being has experienced the continued bond of love or friendship after someone has died. We all find ourselves there sometime in love, grief of love lost and closeness giving away to physical absence. I want to come back to this point shortly.
Our afterlife conceptions and theologies have been impacted by our modern cosmology, the story of the universe. Traditionally, the address was understood as God’s place as heaven, purgatory, and hell. It was this world, Earth, transitory illusory, sinful, and fragmented. The next world is real, eternal, and whole. Heaven was envisioned in sky with clouds, and that was where Jesus ascended to be with God. Hell was imagined as a place of fire underground. Heaven, hell, and purgatory were understood to be physical places until the 20th century. Because of death, in this this old model, we become cut off from the cosmos, for death separates us from time and space. God’s space is envisioned separated from the universe, above or outside of the universe. I think this is disincarnational as well as not connected to the story of the universe from the big bang on.

These afterlife images no longer hold our attention, and we are like Feynman’s dilemma of no knowing the address of his deceased wife. Where are our beloved deceased? What address can use to mail letters? Where do we find or speak to our deceased loved ones? Death is a stark physical absence. We miss our loved ones, and we would give anything to hear their voice, touch them, and be and share with them again.
My answer is simple but has a depth of unfathomable mystery as well. I look at human grief at loss of someone dear, and I find people across history and many cultures– bridging the gap between this world and the address of the departed.
For example, the Romans had feasts and picnics with the beloved dead at their tombs, a sort of Day of the Dead that Mexicans now celebrate. Other people have bridged death to access their loved ones through the dream world.
My colleague Dennis colleague Dennis Klass counseled, listened to, and remained a member of bereaved parents. Parents clung to pictures of their loved ones or some meaningful item, some wrapped the clothes of their loved one in plastic wrap to preserve the scent of their deceased. I have inscribed a Catholic Missal with words written by my deceased spouse Frank: ”You are my priest forever…” It is a linking object given to me, and I remember the occasion vividly. The missal stirs memories in myself, and I now can smile and feel his presence with that missal. We have all mementos because they are doorways to God’s space where are loved ones abide. And many folks will tell you stories how dead loved become present to them.

I want to read a section from Dead But Not Lost:
The most sense (of bridging the gap with the dead) is presence. Sometimes the presence is undifferentiated, a feeling of “something there,” but just as often the sense of presence is quite specific, as in one bereaved parent’s report, “I just knew that Jim was watching over me through all that.” Memory is a special kind of presence. Often the living recall the words or deeds of the dead as guidelines for present behavior. At other times memory is reverie in which the time becomes more plastic so that past and present can merge. Living people also maintain contact with the dead through linking objects. Being near the object evokes the dead’s sense of presence. The objects can be physical—for example, an article that belonged to the deceased—or nonmaterial—for an example, a song that deceased liked.
Presence can appear or become real in physical absence. Christ is present in the remembered ritual of breaking bread and sharing the cup, yet he is physically absent. He is simultaneously present and absent like of our beloved dead.
A clue may be located in our traditional Christian notion of the communion of the saints. When we celebrate our Sunday eucharist, our dead are with us. The living and dead come together at the table. When we intentionally or unconsciously remember our loved ones absent through death, we open a door way to Christ’s space and presence.
If our deceased loved one are with Christ, they are closer than we are to Christ. If Christ is active and present in our world, then those with them are active in some fashion in this world–through memory and the love in our hearts. Then our loved ones are present as Christ becomes present to us in the linking objects of bread and wine and the open table.
Heaven and hell have evolved into states of being, states of joy and states of suffering. All of us have experienced emotional/physical states of joy and pain. This is built in our universe. We are trained here in our worship to learn how to live in infinity. Our lives are attuned to resurrected life but also aligned with the suffering of the cross.
We are mixtures of attunement and estrangement. We live in a world of change, birth, decay, death, and rebirth. The cycles of life and the seasonal cycles of nature provide us a clue to our lives.
As a Christian person of faith, I turn to Christ’s death and resurrection. It points to change, dramatic change of Christ dying on the cross, and God resurrecting Christ from the dead. The continuity of God’s Spirit points to life and transformation. This has an impact on traditional and fundamentalist understanding of the end of the world.
Jesus ascended to God’s space. I use God’s space rather heaven. It is how Jesus phrase “on earth as it is heaven.” Jesus envisioned God’s space as interlocking space, inclusive of heaven and earth, which intersect and interlock in many ways. This sounds to me like quantum physics and a quantum universe, not above or outside the universe, but intersecting with our space and time. At the end of time, they will be one universe: God space and our universe. God’s space is not above or under the Earth or outside; God’s space co-exists quantumly with our space, whereby our universes are knitted together, which builds matter and energy into molecules, plants, other species and us together. This quantum universe preserves our consciousness after death with the possibilities envisioned by God of learning to live into infinity.
God is not out there, or above, or beyond. Jesus’ revolutionary way of speaking about God as God’s kindom is to proclaim that the kindom of God or God’s presence is within us. God’s space is where the presence of the risen Christ and our deceased abide. But they break through into our universe whenever we do something to remember them.
There are two folks whose thought impacts my notion of death.
The first is St. Augustine who wrote these words: You have us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. We have been created and intended to abide with God in God’s space.
The second is Wendell Berry—a great American author, farmer, and poet—who lived with the land and nature for some eighty years. Diarmuid O’Murchu writes,
People who work closely with nature, especially in environmental and ecological settings, often attain a high level of spiritual awareness. Their rootedness in creation awakens in them a sensibility to the sacred, which then becomes a catalyst for spiritual or religious exploration. (O’Murchu)
Likewise, Norman Wirzba, a Duke theologian, claims, “Gardens are places where people learn that death is not simply an end to life, but a vital ingredient and partner in furthering life.”
Wendell Berry speaks from a land wisdom from his rootedness in farming and co-living with nature. He speaks with a land wisdom, how God has given us God’s breath to breath. He hearkens to the Genesis story where God took a clod of clay and breathed into the clay to shape and form the earth creature (adamah).
He notes that at the end of our lives with our final breadth, God takes that breath back into God’s self. That unique breath abides in God. Our vitality, our energy, or consciousness is taken into God’s self at our death.

It is hard to practice radical compassion. Practicing compassion requires several movements. It often, when we are distracted or fully overloaded with many stimuli, we need to pause and take a breath.

Zacchaeus has two obstacles, one is physical and the other is socio-religious. First he is short of stature, and he cannot see over the crowds. Secondly, he is an outsider, a despised tax collector, he collects taxes for the Roman occupiers. Both obstacles are related. His shortness prevents him from overlooking the heads of the crowds. But his social occupation makes it so the crowds who hate him as a national traitor will not make way for him to see Jesus coming. No one will budge and stand aside for him to see. Zacchaeus is shunned as a social pariah and outcast by those who follow a sin management religion with clear walls and boundaries to exclude. I have maintained a sin management religion or church is graceless. Such a religion is graceless when it creates scapegoated folks, stigmatizes them as sinners, and excludes them the faith community. It minimizes, at the very least, grace or overburdens grace with a sin management strategy of connecting to God. But that type of religion is graceless, and it uses shame, guilt, and exclusion to rule people. It leaves out the heart of God, unconditional love. God loves us into loving.

When Zacchaeus, tax collector, climbs a tree to secure Jesus’ attention, he catches Jesus’ gaze in one of those moments of a pause, then noticing him in the tree and waving and trying to secure his attention. He sees the man in own particularity. His attentiveness is open, non-reactive curiosity.
Jesus pays attention to his surroundings, the people in the crowd as well as the man in the tree waving and trying to get his attention. Frank Rogers, in his book, Compassion in Practice: The Way of Jesus, writes:

…we pay attention. We simply notice non-reactively and non-judgmentally what others are doing and what they look like while they are doing it. We gaze upon them contemplatively, the way of the artist would observe them or as if they were character on stage or in a film. In the same way we cultivate a radical acceptance of our interior movements, we nurture a welcoming posture and expansive hospitality toward people we are beholding. This is how Jesus gazes upon people.

People present themselves to Jesus for healing physically or for acceptance from outcast/impure status. But Jesus also pauses enough during his ministry to notice people. I hold that Jesus’ saying in Luke 6:36 is central to Jesus’ teaching and ministry: “Be compassionate as Abba God is compassionate.” He takes the time to understand and assess their social situation.

Jesus pays attention to people. He comprehends people and their behaviors in their own context. Initially, Jesus does not react, but as he understands a person social reality, he responses without judgment and compassionately. And this was a common everyday experience around—people excluded for religious reasons and prejudices. Suffering and emotionally pained individuals were not invisible. Human beings have an uncanny ability to ignore the pain of others, and we make them invisible even when a person sits on the sidewalk with a side, “Am I invisible?”

He is open to their pain and suffering. He is initially non-reactive but becomes responsive to their human situation. His responsiveness includes a loving gaze, trying to understand their social experience. He reads their emotions, their bodily messages.

Bodies and bodily actions can communicate as much as words. Bodies carry the scars and wounds of our emotional and physical struggles. Facial gestures likewise communicate our feelings and struggles.

The gospel carries numerous stories of people’s pain, their grief and oppression, and their heart-felt sorrows. Jesus breaks rules and laws only for the sake of compassion. His healings on the Sabbath or the healing of the centurion’s boy are examples. Compassion is the driving force of his ministry.

When Zacchaeus catches his attention, Jesus recognizes the man’s humanity. He sizes him up. His shortness of stature and the crowd’s reluctance to allow him through indicate that this man in a sycamore tree is a socio-religious outcast. Zacchaeus is tainted because he collects taxes for the Romans, impure Gentiles and conquerors. He is a national traitor. “Zacchaeus

What is remarkable about Jesus to me is Jesus manifests compassionate for those he meets. It propels his ministry of radical inclusiveness and unconditional love in his invitation to an open table.

Compassion is dangerous. The Dalai Lama has said, “Compassion is the radicalism of our time.” Compassion for the outside or the suffering is always counter-cultural and resists cultural norms and power structures. Compassion creates upheavals, for it challenges the core of our prejudices. And we all have been conditioned to some form of social prejudice.

Jesus invites himself: “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for I must stay at your house.” Jesus, who invites all sorts of suspect people and sinners to the open table, invites himself into the house of known public sinner in Jericho. I want to talk about Jesus’ action here.

Two weeks ago, I preached at the Convention of the Eastern Oregon Episcopal Churches. While preaching about the Great Feast in Luke chapter 14, I talked about Jesus’ open table that tolerates no outsiders.

The open table includes the virtues of extravagant hospitality, but it overlaps with compassion, forgiveness, and unconditional love. It occurred to me that Jesus was the open table, he embodied the open table and God’s grace. It is easy for us to understand Jesus as the open table. But his invitation to the open table transforms us also into God’s open table.

Therefore, when Jesus invites himself into Zacchaeus’ home, Jesus brings God’s open table into his house. He is God’s table, he incarnates God’s compassion and unconditional grace. The radical of his invitation into Zacchaeus’ house is not unnoticed by the crowds of Jericho. He went into that sinner’s house. You hear the voice of the crowd murmuring; “Jesus has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner!” The crowd is often the ones who are scandalized Jesus’ behaviors. Compassion is God’s interruptive, and I would add, God’s liberating grace. It forces the crowd to question their religious expectations and norms.

Jesus creates the open table space within Zacchaeus’ home; he brings the sacredness of compassion, hospitality, and unconditional grace there. Zacchaeus is surprised as well. He has been ostracized, treated as dirt and a traitor by the Jewish community of Jericho. He defends himself before Jesus: “Look, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” Jesus accepts the tax collector as he is. He does not require him to give up his profession. Jesus declares to Zacchaeus and the crowds, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” Jesus has alleviated the outcast status of the tax collector. His “today” declaration says to Zacchaeus and the crowds; he is a part of God’s community. Compassion not only alleviates suffering, but it transforms Zacchaeus.

Once more Jesus has messed up the socio-religious lines and barriers that protect the insiders from the sinful outsiders. But the real question is “who is the outsider?” Zacchaeus is the sinner and outsider to the Jericho crowds. But I would suggest that crowds are the real outsiders because of their exclusion of God’s table. God’s hospitality messes up Zacchaeus as well as the crowds. For what they believe and practice creates social walls and barriers, and it messes up psychologically and causes suffering to the tax collector but it also messes up those who excluded him.

God’s hospitality disrupts all religious barriers that human beings build. God’s hospitality disrupts those human walls and tears them down. All walls are broken down, even the walls between human and divine. By pausing, listening, and paying attention to the pain and suffering or the deep cries of another person moves us beyond pausing and listening to acting lovingly and with care. When compassion moves us to compassionate action, we see the real beloved child of God, a sibling in need. We unite with Jesus’ compassion and God’s compassion by becoming God’s compassion to another. But grace rebounds on us, for the grace of compassionate love transforms us as well. Our self-less love delights in our compassion connects to a wounded person like Zaccaheus. We recognize his humanity as Jesus did. We bring the open table of grace and hospitality to Zaccahaeus.

From our centering prayer video this morning, we learn about the Big Bang nearly 15 billion years ago. Scientist Neil DeGrassi ends with how big he feels as he looks and connects to the night sky and realizes that his atoms were forged in the fires of the Big Bang. The scientific explanation of the cosmic story inspires wonder in him, but I want to tell a refinement of the cosmic story, full of wonder, but one that is not against science but one that not many scientists include. There is the cosmic incarnation story embedded in the story of the creation and the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of life on the planet Earth.

A Franciscan theologian in the 13 the century John Duns Scotus claimed that the Incarnation was the first thought of God before creation. God’s Incarnation was intended before the Big Bang. That is when God actually decided to incarnate, materialize in the universe and to expose God’s vulnerable and unconditionally inclusive love for us and everything in the universe. God self exposes God’s self in Christ’s incarnation in Jesus.

We tell the story of Christ’s incarnation with Mary’s pregnancy and the birth of Jesus. But that story goes back 15 billion year ago. In the preface poem of John’s Gospel, we read, “all things came to be through him (this Word)” (John 1:3); that the Incarnate Word became human out of love, not primarily to make up for our sin but because of the infinite and unconditional love God had for creation.
In today’s scripture of the Letter to the Colossians, the hymn declares that Christ is “the first-born of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). Early Christians sang their faith convictions that Christ is the reason for creation and has a primacy in the story of the universe. The atoms of Jesus were also forged in the fiery furnace of the Big Bang. Divinity entered the atoms forged in the Big Bang.

The story of the universe is also the story of God and the utter availability of God as the incarnate Christ. Jesus is both the Incarnate Human One and the Eternal Cosmic Christ at the same time. The incarnate Christ is God’s active power and energy in the unfolding and evolving the universe.

This morning we heard an ancient hymn of a particular community in Asia Minor. One of the creative movements in the Christian movement’s reflections on Jesus as God’s Christ is their reflection that understood Jesus as God’s prophet of Wisdom and after his resurrection as Jesus Christ as God’s incarnate Wisdom operative in creation. The Colossian hymn affirms that Christ is the firstborn the dead, “that he is in everything so he might be pre-eminent,” and “in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and “through him to reconcile all things, whether on earth on in heaven,” and “making peace on the cross.” Christ, “the fullness (pleroma) of God is linked to creation, heaven and earth, as well as to the fulfillment and end of that creation.

The community, from which the Colossian hymn originated, recognizes that through Christ’s death and resurrection, the transformation of creation has a specific direction intended before the Big Bang and accelerated in the fleshly incarnation of Christ in Jesus. The incarnation of God with the fleshly and material reality of the human Jesus tells us much about God’s love for us and God’s creation. And the resurrection of Christ reveals the intended completion of the universe from the Big Bang. There was a strong conviction of the post-Easter community that what happened to Jesus on Easter morning would happen to them, all life, and the entire universe.

One of my favorite theologians Karl Rahner taught me so much how God’s grace is available to us and surrounds us and is in us. Rahner writes, “When the vessel of his body (Jesus) was shattered in his death, Christ was poured over the cosmos, he became actually, in his very humanity, what he had always been in his dignity, the very center of creation.” His divine atoms spread in time past, present, and future in the whole expanding universes, in the billions if not trillions of galaxies of the universe. He was now the cosmic Christ.

In the resurrection, Jesus becomes God’s agency of transformation for a new fulfilled, divinized, and transfigured creation; he is interconnected and interincarnated with all life and the Earth and the entire infinite cosmos. Easter affects everything alive and dead, the Earth and the complex web of interrelated processes and life, and the cosmological processes of the universe, past and present, into the future. The Colossians hymn ends with the mind-expanding vision: “he is the first born from the dead, so that he might come to have a place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” (Col. 1:19-20) God has never stopped loving, dreaming, and creating through the Christ. God intends to reconcile all life, all the universe with the fullness of God—where God will be all in all.

In the nineteenth century, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, with a deeply Franciscan mind and heart, referred to a similar notion to the Colossians’ verse: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” For Hopkins, the “dearest freshness” in all creatures has to do with the cosmic Christ who “fills the universe in all of its parts.”

The cosmic Christ is in every human being, in every form of life, and the life processes of the Earth, and cosmic fulfillment of the universe where God is all (pleroma) in everything. The Cosmic Christ determines each creature’s being and unifies all that is, bringing differentiation and union in the universe. Christ is found in the least of my family. It includes humans, nonhuman animals, nature and the planet Earth and the whole universe. We are interconnected and deeply connected to the cosmic Christ.

My students viewed the video the Journey of the Universe, which I also aired at church one Sunday. It was produced Brian Swimme and Mary Ellen Tucker, a student of the Catholic priest, geologian, and Earth lover Thomas Berry.

Berry noted three principles operative in the journey of the universe;

 Differentiation is the primordial expression of the universe.

 Subjectivity: A capacity for interiority increases the unity of function through ever greater complexification of being.

 “Communion” of each reality of the universe has the capacity of living in communion with every other reality. The universe is a communion of subjects.

The cosmic incarnate Christ is operative in all these evolving principles. Christ is birthing God’s body, the body of Christ, in all creation through ever complexification and the directionality of evolution and cosmological processes. Christ is reconciling all into God’s fullness. When Thomas Berry speaks about the universe as a communion of subjects is speaking about the continued work of the cosmic Christ and the Holy Spirit to divinize the universe, to bring the fullness of God into all.

We no longer have a world of inherent value, no world of wonder, no untouched, unused world. We think we have understood everything. But our human actions indicate we have not. Berry says, “To wantonly destroy a living species is to silence forever a divine voice.” We have been silencing the voice of God, the incarnate Christ in suffering and groaning of the Earth.

All of creation, has been obedient to its destiny, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “each mortal thing does one thing and the same … myself it speaks and spells, crying ‘What I do is me, for that I came’” (When Kingfishers Catch Fire). Wouldn’t it be our last and greatest humiliation of our human arrogance of being above and exceptional that we listen more closely to Jesus’ words that the “first being last,” (Matt. 20:16). And we realize that all other creatures have obeyed their destiny unblinkingly and with trustful surrender to God. And we have not in our pride, greed, and belief in human exceptionalism over all other creatures.

The late Thomas Berry called for an “ecologically sensitive spirituality.” He writes,

The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

Berry argues,

Our children should be introduced to the world in which they live, to the trees and grasses, to the birds and the insects and the various animals that roam over the land, to the entire range of natural phenomena.

 In using this term “living” in speaking about a tree as a living being and in speaking about the Earth as living being, we are indicating that some of the basic aspects of life, such as the capacity for inner homeostasis amid diversity and the diversity of external conditions, are found proportionately realized both in the tree and in the comprehensive functioning of the planet.

Berry notes that we need to create an Earth language to connect to nature and the web of life. It is an ability to pay attention to nature and life as plant and nonhuman animals around. Each plant and each creature bears something of the freshness of the incarnate Christ in unique ways, not as distinct but connected together as a communion of life, united by the cosmic Christ who dwells in all creation as God’s spoken love to all of us.