Ecotheological Reflection on the Holy Trinity

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary

by Leah D. Schade

 Trinity Sunday, Year B

 Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

(This commentary is also found at Lutherans Restoring Creation, an excellent resource for ecotheological approaches to worship and preaching.  http://www.lutheransrestoringcreation.org/trinity-sunday-in-year-b-2105) 

            The Isaiah text and Psalm 29 for Trinity Sunday contain strong, masculine images of a king seated on his throne above Creation, exercising his power in magnificent, yet frightening ways.  God speaks and the voice is like thunder over the waters, resonating with enough force to break trees and send entire countries running like scared young animals.  The personification of the deity as a mighty ruler whose power flashes like lightning and whips up catastrophic storms on a whim is common across many religions.  Yet in light of earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, and other natural events that can shatter lives, communities, and nearly entire countries, we must be careful not to attribute such occurrences to a capricious deity who appears to arbitrarily wreak havoc on Earth.  If this is who our Triune God is and what this Abba/Father does, our awe may turn to abject fear, and there may be little reason to trust and love such a God.

A better way to explore the concept of the Trinity is provided by theologian Elizabeth Johnson, who, in her authoritative and preeminent work She Who Is, seeks to appreciatively uncover, recover and assess those classic theological resources that may fund a feminist theology (Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, New York: Crossroad, 1992).  For example, she draws on the Cappadocian Fathers’ idea of the perichoresis, or mutual in-dwelling of the persons of the Trinity, to describe a three-way partnership that is fully relational with each other and with the world.

At the same time, she is not hesitant to point out the way our forefathers in theology created a religious system that inscribes patriarchy into all aspects of the faith.  Drawing on the work of Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Sallie McFague and Rosemary Radford Ruether, Johnson recognizes the importance of language to both name and create reality. She beckons us to expand our images of the Trinity and offers us new ways to understand our triune God’s relationship to humanity and nature.  She insists that Sophia, the female personification of Holy Wisdom, can and should be the lens through which the Trinity is viewed, as well as the language through which we speak and hear about God.  Thus she coins the terms Spirit-Sophia, Jesus-Sophia and Mother-Sophia as an alternative Trinitarian formulation which places Wisdom/Sophia as the primary metaphor.

According to Johnson, the Church is the most obvious candidate for modeling what it means to answer Wisdom’s call to undergo transformative attention to those most vulnerable, including the species, habitats, and human beings most threatened by oppression, and to take responsibility for the health and respectful treatment of all Creation.  As Johnson describes:

 

Alive in the koinonia of SHE WHO IS, women and men are called to be friends of God and prophets, that is, appreciators of her wonders, sympathizers with her resistance to whatever degrades beloved creation, companions to her passion for the world's flourishing, starting with the nearest neighbor in need and extending to the farthest flung system by which we order, or disorder, our common life. (She Who Is, 244).

Johnson also suggests that Jesus reimaged as Jesus-Sophia can be understood as Wisdom incarnate, thus joining him with the Hebrew feminine images of shekinah and ruah. Seeing a connection between the Greek masculine logos, or Word of God, and Hebrew shekinah/ruah, or Spirit of God, she argues for the recovery of the feminine Sophia in order to counterbalance the preponderance of male imagery so often associated with the Trinity.  This is an especially poignant insight when considering John’s Gospel, which is replete with references to the logos, while often presenting Jesus as a Wisdom figure along the lines of Lady Sophia from Proverbs.

            So if the “voice” of the Triune God is more than a masculine roar triggering cataclysmic events, how might we recalibrate our hermeneutic for hearing the “voice” of SHE WHO IS, Spirit-Sophia, Jesus-Sophia and Mother-Sophia?  One way is to remind listeners that if we listen to the voice of Jesus-Sophia, we will clearly hear that God is not intent on inflicting pain and suffering on Creation, inclusive of humanity.  How do we know this?  Because, as Jesus-Sophia clearly stated, “God so loved the world,” (John 3:16, emphasis added).  The Greek word here is cosmos – meaning not just the human “world,” but all of Creation.  Thus God is not intending to destroy that which God loves.  Nor does God intend for humans to destroy what God loves.  Rather, God intends to redeem all of Creation, which serves as a model for humans to care for what God loves as well. 

            At this point, the sermon might invoke the image of the searing, yet cleansing, heat from the fiery ember placed on the prophet Isaiah’s tongue.  We know our own lips are unclean and that we live among a people of unclean lips, especially regarding the realities of environmental devastation. The successful attempts to either “spin” the truth about the dangers of extreme energy extraction, cover up or minimize the horror of the damage, or tell outright lies about the science of climate change illustrate the ways in which we live in a time of manufactured realities peddled by the “Merchants of Doubt” (referring to both the book and documentary by Naomi Oreskes [see http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/].[1]

In the face of such deception, we hear the voice of our Triune God asking, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" (note the plural pronoun, which lends itself well to a perichoretic model of the Trinity!). To which we – individually, collectively, and as people of faith – can boldly answer: "Here am I; send me!" In other words, we can answer the call to announce the prophetic truth – that God is indeed the sovereign over all Creation, and we are called to be servants in this Earth-temple.  And that we, as the beloved Children and caretakers of this temple of Earth, will be held accountable for what we have done and what we have left undone.[2]  The sermon should encourage listeners to bravely join their voices and efforts with others to speak truth to power and work on behalf of Earth and those most vulnerable.  

Here the preacher may echo the call for collective action – in this case, inviting listeners to write down concrete actions they can take for caring for Creation, thus increasing their level of commitment and participation. Other possibilities for listeners to live out the Gospel might include asking them to sign a petition stating their support for a piece of environmental legislation, or signing up for a road clean-up, or taking part in a field trip to a local creek. In any case, such a sermon might use more direct language to state the need for action in the face of environmental degradation and call on listeners to respond with the courage of Isaiah:  Here am I – send me!  Send us!

The Rev. Dr. Leah Schade in Washington D.C. doing advocacy work for higher mercury emission standards for the coal industry, 2011.

 

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[1] See also the short documentary film by Josh Fox, The Sky is Pink, recounting the deliberate attempts of the fracking industry to deceive the public about the dangers of shale gas drilling:  http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/sky-pink/.

[2] See Pope Francis’ injunction against those who harm God’s Creation:  “God Will Judge You on Whether You Cared for Earth” http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_REL_VATICAN_CLIMATE_CHANGE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT 

Day of Pentecost: Ecotheological Reflection

Readings for Year B – 2014-15

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary

by Leah D. Schade

Day of Pentecost, Year B

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (alternate reading)

Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

Acts 2:1-21

John 15:26-27

Fire and wind are strong symbols for the Day of Pentecost.  The image of the tongues of fire from the Holy Spirit lighting the air above each of the disciples gathered in the upper room of Jerusalem is iconic.  This sacred fire has the power to ignite a revolution of justice, to enable a provincial person to suddenly speak to another from a foreign land, to provide light in a place of darkness simply by being a presence there.  Yet as with any symbol of power, we must also recognize that fire has an equally destructive potential that, if used with selfish or thoughtless intentions, can wreak incredible damage.

For example, we encounter “tongues of fire” of a wholly different and sinister kind when we see the “flaring” of toxic gases near shale gas drilling sites and oil refineries.   

A gas flare burns at a fracking site in rural Bradford County, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Les Stone/REUTERS

This is an unholy fire, contributing not only dangerous greenhouse gases into the already compromised atmosphere, but also releasing hundreds of toxins such as benzene, naphthalene, styrene, toluene and xylene, all of which cause serious health problems.  Thus we must be careful to distinguish between the spiritual fire that God intends for the illumination of our hearts and minds, and the fires that come from burning fossil fuels that have created our climate crisis.

Wind is the other elemental symbol that invokes great power on this day of Pentecost. Again, we know that wind can have both positive and negative effects.  In a stale room cut off from ventilation, opening a window fills the space with fresh air.  A hot summer day is more bearable when just a zephyr blows across our sweated brow, cooling our bodies. 

But the power of wind to destroy through hurricanes, tornadoes, and other extreme weather events is a reminder that the elements cannot be contained nor controlled.  And yet, it is our human activity that has so affected the weather in ways we would never have thought possible as a species on this planet.  Talk about the weather is no longer just an exchange of pleasantries as we collectively recognize the “global weirding” going on around us.  

 “Nature at the end of the twentieth century, as [Bill] McKibben has so cogently argued, can only be understood as a product of human agency. Thus its destructiveness cannot be understood as [divine] judgment but rather as that for which we will be judged,” Catherine Keller states in her essay, “Talk about the Weather: The Greening of Eschatology,” (Ecofeminism and the Sacred, edited by Carol J. Adams, New York: Continuum, 1993).  The wind of the Holy Spirit bears witness not just to God’s continual efforts of renewal, but humanity’s relentless imposition of its own will on this planet.

Another way to approach the lectionary readings for Pentecost is to provide an ecohermeneutical reading of the “dry bones” from Ezekiel.  While the ancient Israelites would have originally heard this story in the context of the Babylonian captivity as a vision of God’s restoration of the people, a contemporary reading finds a different kind of captivity.  Ironicallyit is the “bones” of the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and other lifeformsthat roamed the earth during the Cretaceous Period millions of years ago thathave been used to power our human society today.  

The challenge for the preacher will be to help listeners understand that the same Holy Spirit, or ruah (God’s breath) that fills our lungs today is the same ruah that gave life to the thundering lizards millions of years ago.  In our insistence on using fossil fuels, not only are we undoing the best carbon sequestering system God could have ever designed (as theologian Barbara Rossing has put it), but there is something deeply sacrilegious about drilling into the remains of the sacred burial grounds of these fossilized remains and burning them for our own purposes.  “Can these bones live?”  The fossil fuel industry has put an end to that question, commodifying the depths of Earth and creating a planet captive to greenhouse gases.

And yet all around us blow the winds of the Spirit that (along with other clean forms of energy such as solar and geothermal) have tremendous capacity for creating the energy we need without disrupting the climate system of the planet.  

 And like the disciples in that upper room, there are more and more individuals carrying the message of forgiveness and hope that comes from the Spirit.  The efforts of the few urging us to turn from our ecological sin and embrace Earth-honoring strategies is creating a Pentecost-like moment in human consciousness.  “What must we do?” more and more people are asking.  And through collaboration and community-building, we are finding surprising answers to that question.

 

One way to frame a sermon for this day is to remind listeners that just as the wind from God brought about renewal and a reforming of God’s people in the Bible, so has the Church experienced those same winds of change.  The Protestant Reformation was a time of much upheaval but also incredible inspiration (notice the play on words – in-spire, “breath in”) that led to the renewal of faith for generations of Christians to the present day.

Lutheran preachers can remind their congregations that as we are approaching the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, the winds of the Holy Spirit are again moving us to renewal. After having laid out the problem of environmental devastation and climate disruption in the first part of the sermon, the second part can share the ways in which the church is seeking to address these issues by calling for a continual re-formation that includes Creation care and attention to ecological justice issues (http://www.lutheransrestoringcreation.org/500th-anniversary-of-the-reformation).

Preachers from other denominations can make reference to the ecotheological work done within their own denominations.  Make the good news of this renewal real for listeners by highlighting ways that congregations are helping to revitalize themselves and the larger Church with outreach projects such as installing solar panels and creating community gardens (see http://www.thelutheran.org/article/article.cfm?article_id=12519).

The sermon could end by inviting congregants to think about ways in which their own congregation could experience the renewal of the Holy Spirit by incorporating Creation care into their ministry.  Challenge them to create a green visioning team to imagine what their church will look like in five or ten years if they throw open the windows and allow the Holy Spirit to blow across their brows, tussle their hair, and fill their lungs with the refreshing wind of new life.

This reflection can also be found at the Lutherans Restoring Creation website, which you can visit for weekly ecotheological scripture reflections:  http://www.lutheransrestoringcreation.org/the-day-of-pentecost-in-year-b-1

Sermon: Celebrating our Mothering God

The Rev. Dr. Leah D. Schade

Reading 1:  Genesis 1:24-27  (Male and  female – made in the image of God)

            Last week the Confirmation students did a Bible study looking at the various names and descriptions of God.  Some of them were familiar – God as king, lord, shepherd, and, of course, God as the Son, Jesus Christ.  But we also read some passages that surprised us because we rarely, if ever, hear them read in church or Sunday School.  These readings described God as a mother bear, a mother eagle, and a mother giving birth. This took some mental adjusting, but, really, it shouldn’t surprise us that these images exist. 

            Because right in the first chapter of Genesis we have a passage that clues us into the fact that God is more than a male pronoun.  Genesis 1:27 reads: 

So God created humankind in God’s image,
   in the image of God they were created;
   male and female God created them.

  

         

So if both genders are created in the image of God, this must mean God is both genders as well. We are a reflection of who God is, men and women.  So why do we only refer to God as “he”?

            It didn’t used to be this way.  The earliest humans imaged the Divine as The Great Mother, often equating God to Mother Earth herself.  With her bountiful body providing all that living creatures needed, she was depicted in primitive statuary as having wide hips and ample bosoms.

            This began to change, however, as human beings began to expand in population, spread out across the earth, and develop different cultures.  The Divine was no longer limited to one Earth Mother.  Instead, there developed a panoply of gods and goddesses, each having their own sphere of influence over the processes and aspects of life.  Ancient peoples told stories about these gods and goddesses to help explain how the world came into existence, what parts of the world they influenced, and how best to gain their favor.

            Another changed occurred about 4000 years ago when one of those ancient people’s named Abraham received a revelation that there was but one God.  And this God was imaged and “languaged” primarily as male.  This God has many names, including Elohim, El Shaddai, and Jehovah.  But what primarily set this God apart was the maleness of this sky God in contrast to the female mother god of earth, as well as the pantheon of mini-gods and goddesses. 

            Yet the holy writings of the Hebrew people, as they came to be known, do contain some passages that expand upon the notion of God as having both male and female within God’s self.  These are the passages we will explore as we continue our readings.

   Reading 2:  Deuteronomy 32:11-18 (God as mother eagle, mother giving birth and nursing mother)

As I mentioned earlier, the notion of the Judeo-Christian God as being exclusively male took hold about 4000 years ago, and has become so firmly ensconced in our thinking, our language, and our liturgy, that it is jarring to think of God as having so-called female attributes.  In fact, so strong has the notion of God as male been cemented into our thinking, that for nearly all of those 4000 years, it was inconceivable even for females to be rabbis, priests or pastors within Judaism and Christianity.  Women simply were not believed to be made of the same stuff as God.  They were believed to be inferior to males.  So how could they be given positions of leadership?

As Donald Gelpi observes, “[W]e become what we worship, since we worship what we value ultimately and absolutely. [Donald L. Gelpi, Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), 140.] It follows that if our images and metaphors for God continue to be male-dominated, we will continue to worship the male as divine.  Which sounds pretty good if you are a male.  But for females, this kind of thinking becomes exclusionary, even oppressive, to the point where it can be abused and used to relegate women to a status of second-class citizens.

In the last 200 years, however, more and more people have advocated for a reorientation of our religious language, images, rituals, symbols, and practices to be expanded to include women and all of Creation into the sacredness of God.  And we have the images to draw from right here in the Bible.  Take this passage from Deuteronomy, for instance.  Just in these eight verses we have images of God as a mother eagle with her young in the nest, God as a nursing mother, and God as having given birth to the Hebrew people. 

This is not to say that God’s power and majesty is necessarily softened.  A mother eagle, for instance, has sharp talons and beak and will use them to make sure her eaglets are fed.  And notice this passage in verse 18:  “You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you;  you forgot the God who gave you birth.”  This is not a soft and flowery image you might find on a Mother’s Day card – mother as a rock.  But isn’t it much more realistic?  How many of us remember times when our mother was like a rock – steady and secure, solid in her discipline, providing us a firm foundation for our upbringing. 

But, of course, the gentle and comforting aspects of mothers exist as well.  And we see God described using these images in our Third Reading, Psalm 131 (God as comforting mother).

¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
³O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.

 Reading 4:  Hosea 13:1-8a (God as a mother bear)

“I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs.” (v. 8a)  What happens if a mother bear’s cubs are threatened or taken away?  She gets angry!  She comes after you with claws ready and teeth bared!

And God is angry in this passage.  But who is God angry with?  She is angry with her own children.  This passage is a complaint of God against the people who have sinned.  God says:

Yet I have been the Lord your God
   ever since the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me, and besides me there is no saviour.
⁵ It was I who fed you in the wilderness, in the land of drought.
⁶ When I fed them, they were satisfied;
   they were satisfied, and their heart was proud;
   therefore they forgot me.

The people worshiped other gods.  They forgot who God raised them to be.  And they sinned in ways that were abhorrent to God.  So God comes after her own cubs with claws ready and teeth bared, enraged at their behavior.  But this rage is borne out of a fierce love that is so deep and so devastated by the way the children are behaving.  This is not the way she raised them.

This brings to mind an image many of us saw during the riots in Baltimore a couple weeks ago where a mother grabbed her wayward son and lashed out at him for participating in the looting and mayhem.  Again, this is not the sweet and soft video you’ll see in an online Mother’s Day card.  But it reminds us that sometimes mothers must be as tough as a mother bear.  

#BaltimoreMom, Toya Graham, April 29, 2015

 The woman’s name is Toya Graham and she is a single mother of five girls and one son.  “That’s my only son,” she said in an interview later about the video.  “At the end of the day, I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray.” [CNN: “Mother of the year goes viral” https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=video+of+mother+in+baltimore&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-004]. In other words, when a mother’s own children are going down a path that is going to lead to their own destruction, you have to do whatever it takes to bring them back.  “Is he perfect?  No,” she said.  “But he’s my son.”

Of course we must also acknowledge that no mother is perfect either.  For example, if your mother was absent, abusive, unavailable, mentally unstable, addicted, or neglectful, then the metaphor of God as mother may not be helpful for you. Mothers can at times be smothering, nagging, distracted, overworked, and simply exhausted. Thus, we have to be careful the image of God as mother not put too many expectations on mothers and romanticize the state of motherhood, just as the old model did for fatherhood. 

Nevertheless, especially for the mother metaphor, as theologian Sallie McFague reminds us, “there simply is no other imagery available to us that has this power for expressing the interdependence and interrelatedness of all life with its ground. All of us, female and male, have the womb as our first home, all of us are born from the bodies of our mothers, all of us are fed by our mothers.” [Sallie McFague, Models of God : Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 106].  It is this relational aspect of God that even Jesus himself invokes in the passage we will read next from the Gospel of Matthew. 

Reading 4:  Matthew 23:29-37

Many years ago in a previous congregation I served, we did a service like this one where we used inclusive language for God, including female pronouns and feminine imagery.  The women’s group in the congregation worked for several weeks on Bible stories about women of faith and how liberating it can be to think of God beyond gender.  So we put together the liturgy and designed a worship service that was expansive and inclusive. 

But there was one gentleman in the congregation who, as soon as he opened the bulletin to peruse the service for the day, got up, handed it back to the usher and said he would not be staying for the service.  In fact, the man, who happened to be a lawyer, wrote a very pointed letter to the head of congregation’s Mutual Ministry committee filled with accusations of “shabby scholarship . . . distorting to vulnerable intellects,” and suggesting that I, as a pastor, be disciplined by the church council and made to leave the church.  Fortunately, the church leadership was supportive of what we had tried to do in the liturgy.  I sent a letter to him thanking him for his letter and letting him know that we would be planning more forums to be able to discuss the issues he had raised, and invited him to attend.  The senior pastor went to visit the man to try to convince him to return to the congregation, but he would not.  The man left the church and presumably found a congregation that stayed well within the boundaries of traditional patriarchal language.

While this response is not surprising, it does raise a point to consider.  If we strive to have our language in worship and preaching be more balanced by speaking of the so-called female traits of God and using inclusive language, we may run the risk of excluding those who are left out of this by their gender, namely males. And yet if we choose to remain with traditional patriarchal and paternalistic models of God, we implicitly endorse the oppressive nature of religious language that women have endured for millennia, and which has enabled the rampant abuse of females and the natural world. How do we walk this fine line?

 The theologian Sallie McFague states the problem this way: “The current resistance to inclusive or unbiased language…both at the social and religious level, indicates that people know instinctively that a revolution in language means a revolution in one’s world" [Ibid. 9]  Speaking from personal experience, this could explain the swift and negative reaction of that former parishioner when he was introduced to inclusive and feminine-oriented language in my preaching and the liturgical language of the service. How do we navigate this kind of tension?

The words of Jesus can be helpful here.  In this passage from Matthew, he compares himself to a mother hen trying to protect her brood. 

If Jesus, as the Son of God, can imagine himself and speak of himself using female imagery, doesn’t that give us permission to do likewise?  And, in fact, Jesus used many images that encourage us to conduct further “thought experiments,” as McFague calls them, and imagine even more metaphors for God. He describes himself as a vine, bread, living water, the gate, and the light.  He describes the Kingdom of God using images of a woman baking bread, and a woman sweeping her house looking for a lost coin.  Perhaps we could even speak of the “Queendom of God”!

So if Jesus himself gives us alternatives to the transcendent, hierarchical, father “sky god” of patriarchy, this gives us implicit permission, as his followers, to conceive of, articulate, and worship the Divine in a way that takes the feminine into account to at least an equal extent as males. This is not to say that the Divine is, in fact, a human construct. In many ways the mystery of God remains beyond the scope of human expression. The point we’re trying to make is that, in our human attempts to articulate a limited understanding of God, we not limit them even further to a strictly patriarchal construct. Neither do we seek to obliterate masculine imagery and concepts for describing God. Instead we are urging for a more expansive way to speak about and image God to include the feminine.

I’ll never forget the time I was leading a Bible study about these feminine images for God and one of the women in the study was at first shocked, and then profoundly moved by these verses about God as a mother.  She had been abused by her father and by a boyfriend, and her faith had been badly damaged thinking that it must have been God’s will as Father for this to happen to her.  It was very difficult for her to love a God who had not only authorized her suffering, but, had perhaps been the source of it. 

But when she encountered these biblical images of God as the mother eagle and mother bear, and Jesus as the mother hen, this was faith-saving for her.  She knew how powerful a mother hens wings are when they beat off an enemy trying to get at her chicks.  She loved the idea of God as a mother ferociously protecting her, and infusing her with power to protect her own children. 

You see, our words, our stories and our images shape how we see God, and how God shapes us.  If we use just one image, we are limiting our ability to communicate to people the kind of love God has for us. But when we open up our preaching and prayers, our hymns and liturgy to more expansive and inclusive images and words for God, we can listen to and learn from a multitude of stories and images spoken by voices previously unheard.  And we invite those stories and images to open our minds, change our hearts, bring us to our knees in repentance, and creatively resist evil with all our strength.

Thanks be to our Mothering God for this strong, powerful love.  May our Mothering Christ and Mothering Spirit, together as the Triune God, open her arms to you, bless you and send you into the world marked by a Mother’s divine love.   Amen.

[Hymn sung after the sermon:  "Mothering God You Gave Me Birth", text: Jean Janzen, based on writings of Julian of Norwich; tune: Carolyn Jennings] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKXxVpLZzSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKXxVpLZzSM