If God should take back her spirit to herself, and gather to herself her breath, all flesh would perish together, and all mortals return to dust. Job 14:14-15

Advent started Sunday November 28th, and November 30th is Extinction Species Remembrance. I realize with auto-immune disease my own mortality and that I probably will not be alive in a decade from now. Why in a decade? That is the time where humanity has to turn around its lifestyle and develop a sense of urgency to deflect planetary temperature rise by 1.5 degree Celsius, marking a significant point in climate change’s irreversibility.
There is an urgency to examine what you can do deflect the consequences of human impacted climate change.
Advent looks to Christ’s return (parousia) by remembering four central virtues: peace, hope, joy, and love. We look to Christ’s arrival after his resurrection. This made sense when we viewed God transcendent to the world and not immanently present the world. I will suggest the arrival language needs to be applied to ourselves. The risen Christ and the Holy Spirit are already involved in creation and in particular, the Earth. What I will suggest that the four Advent virtues are intentional practices. Intentional practices are deliberate actions to improve yourself. In spirituality, it is the practice to consciously intend a way of behavior. I suggest in meditation/prayer each evening that I intend to be kind to every person I meet the next day. It begins to work as you practice kindness and eventually, this practice becomes a natural daily action. The Advent virtues—peace, hope, joy, and love—are intentional practices that allow to arrive at perceiving the presence of the risen Christ is in our midst and in the living world. We arrive rather than Christ returns.

I recommend that the meditation upon our scripture be reconnected with nature as also a location of wisdom and divine presence. Both are formative for seeing the risen Christ and the Spirit active in the Earth processes and all nature. Such intentional practices of the four virtues reconnects us to the organically living processes which Colossians 1:20 affirms that risen Christ is reconciling all things to God. I am arguing for reconnecting scripture with nature to assist to slow down, listen attentively, and meditatively discern that the risen Christ is present in nature.

First Week of Advent: Peace with Earth and the web of life.

Humanity, in general, does not live in peace with the Earth and the community of life. Actually, we aggressively wage war with nature and the Earth. Our mode is to conquer, dominate, and extract resources in pursuit of greed. War mentality includes entitlement, domination, ownership, and power. It involves incursions, invasions, and conquest against nature. Steven Chase notes that nature is “consummate conscientious objector.” (Nature as Spiritual Practice) Nature’s cries remain unheard in human war, rape, poisoning, and degrading bio-regions. Nature is objectified, impersonal, degraded, and disposable. From the Creator God’s perspective, nature is alive, persona, intrinsically valuable, and especially, beloved.

Second week of Advent: Hope.

Hope for the Earth community of life cannot be discussed without ecological heartbreak. Today is Extinction Remembrance Day where we remember the casualties and loses of this war: “Remembrance Day for Lost Species, November 30th, is a chance each year to explore the stories of extinct and critically endangered species, cultures, lifeways, and ecological communities.” (https://www.lostspeciesday.org/) These losses are directly the result of human social, economic, and political actions that impact climate change and exploit the resources of the planet without limit. We fail to realize that we part of continuum of life begin with the first cell billions of years ago. Many of us are even unaware of the loss of these species and the loss of biodiversity. November 30th is a day of ecological grief. We are neither attentive to loss nor do we hear the silent cries of the Earth.

Can we hope in the desecration of the planet for short term greed and profit at the expense of the vulnerable. The words of Mark Wallace are vividly remembered in the struggle for hope:

…we can imagine that the Spirit today is pleading with the human community to nurture and protect the fragile bioregions we all share…Because God as Spirit is enfleshed in creation, God experiences with the core of her deepest self the agony and suffering of an earth under siege. The Spirit then, as the green body of God in the world, has become in our time the wounded God. (Finding God in the Singing River)

Compassion literally means to “suffer with.” The choice for close intimacy with the natural world and the Spirit enfleshed in the world is the path of compassionate solidarity with the suffering. Mourning and heartbreak is accompanied with the loss. It s in the phoenix of ashes of environmental grief that the site of the both of resilience and resistance. We do not grieve for what is not related to us. Berta Caeres, environmental activist from Lenca indigenous people of Western Honduras was assassinated in 2016. She claimed “We come from the Earth, the water and the corn.” She continued:

Let us wake up, humankind. We’re out of time… We must answer their call (threatened rivers).. Our Mother is militarized. Fenced-in, poisoned. A place where basic rights are systematically violated, demands that we take action. Let us build societies that are able to co-exist in a dignified way, in a way that protects life. Let us come together and remain hopeful as we defend and car for the blood of the Earth and of its spirits. (quoted in John Dear, They Shall Inherit the Earth)

Thomas Berry writes,

We need to hear the creatures of the Earth before it is too late, before their voices are stilled forever through extinctions occurring at such rapid rte. Once gone, they will never exist again be available to us. (The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth)

If we take the time to move away from our self-centeredness and become other centered, we will notice the growing silence or absence from extinct species. Several years, Sixty Minutes highlighted the photography project of Joel Sartore, a National Geographic photographer, developed a digital Photo Ark. He has photographed over ten thousand species. His purpose is to help us to look at these non-human animals and be inspired to care for them while there is still time. Sartore and Berry remind us of the heartbreak of loss of more than human life and poisoning of bio-regions for an extractive fossil economy of death. Let us find in our environmental mourning flashes hope that ignite resilience and resistance. I find this in our indigenous brothers and sisters who fought for the waters, the land, and life.

Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental activist, is born of environmental grief at loss. Environmental heartbreak inspires hopeful actions to fight against climate change.

Third Week of Advent: Joy in Reconnection to the risen Christ in nature.

There is a profound joy in reintegrating ourselves into the goodness of the Earth an aliveness that God pronounced good. Daniel Spencer, UCC eco-ethicist describes, the “the act of restoration—of restoring our place within the Earth community, of restoring the ecological and divine integrity of the community itself.” (Spencer, “Restoring Earth, Restored to Earth”) Earth restoration is mutual presencing of ourselves and the Earth community of all life. Indigenous botanist Robin Kimmerer writes,

What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from understanding multiple meanings of the land? Land as sustainers, Land as identity. Las grocery and pharmacy. Land as connection to our ancestors. Lad as moral obligation. Lad as self. (Braiding Sweetgrass)

By mutual restoration, we are entangled God’s original grace, restoring our spirit to an earthen identity, repairing damaged environments, slow-down rapid extinction of species and the elimination of biodiversity. In looking carefully to the land as teacher, healing, and creativity, Earth-loving Christians may develop novel eco-systems to counter destructive human impact and destruction of the environment. We realize that our spirit, imagination, and embodied sensory actions do not belong to ourselves but belong to the Earth and ensouled Spirit. This is the joy of belonging and creating the kinship of God’s kin-dom.

Fourth Week of Advent: Love.

In God is Green, I explore the question that Jesus asks of the lawyer in story of the Good Samaritan. “Who is my Neighbor?” Neighbor indicated a nearness and/or a proximity. When Jesus argues for compassion and love for neighbor. Daniel Miller argues that Jesus’ intention is to upturn the exclusiveness and restrictions of the lawyer’s question. Miller extends the parable to nonhuman animals. He writes. “The Parable of the Good Samaritan embraces nonhuman animals as neighbors because it focuses on the action rather than the recipient of neighborly love.” (Animal Ethics and Theology) Miller continues,

By taking humanity’s earthly human nature, Christ becomes a neighbor not only to human but also to creatures of the earth…Because has become our neighbor, we can then be neighbors to others…Because Christ drew near as neighbor to all earthly creatures, we are able to do the same. (ibid)

Miller argues for a “taxonomy of nearness” in our evolutionary history to become human animals. He expands the definition of neighbor as Jesus expanded the Leviticus definition of neighbor but to extend the notion of neighbor to nonhuman animal species. I recommend reading chapter 8 of God is Green for the full argument.

I end off with a quotation of Rev. Jim Antal, former UCC Conference Minister)

No longer can we claim the moral high ground when we treat only our nearby human neighbors as ourselves. No longer is it morally adequate to expand our understanding of justice to include in the circle of neighborly treatment more distant neighbors. We must recognize that all people, indeed all creatures alive and all those yet to be born are our neighbors. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, ‘We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” (Climate Church, Climate World

In summary, Jesus’s words in the Gospel, answers the question of the return of Christ.. “Truly I tell you, just as did it to the least of those who the least of my family, you did it to me.”(Mt. 25:39) The least of my family is the most vulnerable Earth and the web of interconnected life. The body and presence of Jesus the Christ is resurrected in all life.
When we intentional practice the four Advent virtues together, we may participate in the ecological grace of Christ multiple forms of presence.