Tag Archives: anthropocentrism

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Resurrection of Our Lord (Easter Day) in Year A (Schade)

How does creation participate in this new life? – Leah Schade reflects on Christ’s passion and resurrection through an ecological hermeneutic.

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary 

Readings for Easter Day, Year A (2014, 2017, 2020, 2023)

Jeremiah 31:1-6
Psalm 118:102, 14-24
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 38:1-10

What a wonderful coincidence that the celebration of Easter is the same week as the secular celebration of Earth Day this year. Peter reminded the Gentiles in Cornelius’ house: “Jesus’ commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead” (Acts 10:42). Thus the preacher might consider taking a cue from St. Francis of Assisi, preacher of sermons to his Brothers and Sisters in Creation, and address the “congregation” of the other-than-human members of God’s Earth-cathedral.[1] The Earth-congregation can be directly addressed and the humans told that they can “listen in.” Thus anthropocentrism would be de-centered from the outset.

Moreover, the members of the other-than-human community could be identified by their role within the Passion and Resurrection narratives. The ecological hermeneutic can be woven throughout the sermon by seeing the events from the nature characters’ points-of-view. They were, in fact, witnesses to the events from Palm Sunday through Good Friday and were co-sufferers in Jesus’ crucifixion. The voice of the stones echoed the ringing “hosannas” along the road to Jerusalem. The Palm leaves waved from trees and human hands as the donkey’s hooves carried Jesus into the city. Olive Grove stood sentry over Jesus as he prayed at Gethsemane. The sun hid its face during the torturous hours Jesus hung on the cross, as Nephesh, the Breath of Life, was forced from his lungs with each passing hour. And two Trees—both felled in the prime of their lives after having housed countless birds, insects, and children’s playtimes—were lashed together and forced to become the scaffolding of death for Jesus. Even the Rocks trembled and shook, fractured and split as Jesus breathed his last.

By the same token, Creation witnessed the resurrection. Earth essentially took Jesus’ body into herself and birthed him from her womb as the Resurrected One, the earthquake reminiscent of the “labor pangs” Paul mentions in Romans 8:22. Imagine the elements of Creation providing a unique witness to the resurrection, allowing us to see that morning from a fly’s eye, stone’s eye, and birds’ eye view of the risen Christ. The Greek chorus of Creation is set in relief against the reaction of the women at the tomb on Easter morning. The description of what they see is echoed by Catherine Keller’s description of an ecological resurrection:

Only by locating the renewed body within the larger ecologies in which it dwells—of which it is a shifting configural space—do we allow renewed powers of desire and of healing to release themselves into feedback loops large enough to ’embrace’ us, to feed us back to ourselves more animate. . . [T]he old creation will remain, marred and scarred, to be mourned, healed, teased, its lonely phallic signifiers danced around like ancient maypoles (Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, pp. 179, 180).

Thus the sermon, through both its form and content, could enact a creative actualization of the biblical story from Earth’s perspective and situate the other-than-human characters as equals in the theo-drama of the Passion and Resurrection.

The sermon might remind Creation of its continued suffering of ecological-crucifixions such as clear-cutting and deforestation, oil and gas drilling, air pollution and children’s asthma, global warming and climate change. Mark Wallace makes the connection between the cruciform Spirit and “the continual debasement of the earth and its inhabitants . . . [T]he Spirit bears the cross of a planet under siege as she lives under the burden of humankind’s ecological sin” (Mark I. Wallace, Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature; Philadelphia: Fortress, 2005, pp. 23-4).

But even while recognizing that we are in the midst of “an environmental Good Friday,” the sermon proclaims the Cosmic Christ resurrected and Earth’s creatures as witnesses to the miracle. In this way, the Lutheran concept of Deus Absconditus, the hiddenness of God under the form of opposites, can be invoked and listeners given hope in the midst of the darkest hour of our modern-day Easter vigil. Further, the sermon must emphasize that Christ appears to us and calms our fears: “Do not be afraid” (Matthew 28:10). At the same time we are given instruction to “go” and announce to the world the one whom we have seen, the miracle of the resurrection that Creation itself announces to us. Concretizations of Earth-renewal and community restoration would be helpful in enabling the congregation to visualize what eco-resurrection might look like. What are examples of the local community “preaching” that Christ’s resurrection is for the whole Earth? Where are waterways being cleaned up, brownfields being reclaimed, churches being revived by their attention to Earth-care, conservation, and investments in renewable energy?

When, like the women on Easter morning, we stand at the tomb of the crucified Earth looking at the enormous stone blocking our way, might we look forward to the Resurrected One surprising us by calling our name and opening our eyes to Creation transformed to new life? Even as we do all we can to resist evil and teach our children to cherish and protect Earth, speak out against eco-injustice, and change hearts, minds, practices and laws, sometimes it seems all we see is Earth’s crucified body crumpled and dead all around us. An ecological homiletic urges us to return again and again to the biblical accounts of the resurrection to recover sacred memory and thus to renew hope.

What can we learn about resurrection from the biblical texts? The key is in how Jesus appeared: the same, yet different; transformed, yet with scars remaining. So, too, will be the resurrected Earth, which also bears the scars. Nevertheless, new life will emerge in ways that are sure to surprise us with God’s grace.

Originally written by Leah Schade in 2014. Read more by Leah Schade at www.patheos.com/blogs/ecopreacher/

[1] Francis’ first biographer, Thomas of Celano (1229) wrote: “When he found an abundance of flowers, he preached to them and invited them to praise the Lord as though they were endowed with reason. In the same way he exhorted with the sincerest purity cornfields and vineyards, stones and forests and all the beautiful things of the fields, fountains of water and the green things of the gardens, earth and fire, air and wind, to love God and serve him willingly. Finally, he called all creatures brother, and in a most extraordinary manner, a manner never experienced by others, he discerned the hidden things of nature with his sensitive heart, as one who had already escaped into the freedom of the glory of the sons of God.” (1 Celano, 81-82) [as cited in Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997). p. 210].)

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday July 24-30 in Year C (Saler)

Thinking with Nature Inspires Wonder:  Robert Saler reflects on Luke 11:1-13

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary

Readings for July 24-30, Series C (2013, 2016, 2019, 2022)

Hosea 1: 2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2: 6-15
Luke 11: 1-13

One of the oft-stated goals of ecological theology (and ecological philosophy more generally) is to help overcome anthropocentrism. A rough and ready definition of anthropocentrism might describe it as a mindset that values the nonhuman only in relation to its impact upon/usefulness for the human project. For instance, an anthropocentric perspective might value a tree only to the extent that it provides either wood or aesthetic pleasure for humans, and not for its vital role in sustaining nonhuman environments in ways that do not directly benefit us (not to mention valuing it for its own sake).

It is commendable for environmentalists to urge us to expand our mental horizons beyond anthropocentrism. There are some dangers to this, though. In these post-Enlightenment days, we have learned more and more about the pitfalls that accompany any pretense that we might have about our abilities to think from perspectives beyond our own limited social locations. For instance, as a straight white male, I might wish to overcome some of the negative effects of systemic racism under which I was raised by trying to learn about how African-Americans experience America; however well-intentioned my efforts might be, though, I should never allow this understandable desire to devolve into the kind of arrogance that fools me into thinking that I can “think like,” say, an African-American female. Pretense towards “universal reason,” however benevolent, is ultimately a dangerous form of intellectual colonialism.

The same applies to discussions around anthropocentrism. It is salutary for us to stop and ponder whether we are, at any given moment, valuing the nonhuman creation only for its potential benefits to us, and whether there are ways to expand our vision so as to appreciate the nonhuman for its own sake; that said, we must also have the humility to understand that, at the end of the day, we can only think AS humans and not, say, as a bird or a fox. Appreciation of the Other, including the nonhuman other, lives in this intersection between curiosity and humility.

In the Gospel lesson for this week, Jesus is employing his usual pedagogical technique of utilizing earthy, immediate images to get his teachings across. Here such “natural” images as stones, fish, snakes, scorpions, and eggs are offered up, and they are offered precisely in the context of inviting us towards valuation. We humans need the sustenance of the earth such as bread; moreover, some resources from nature will sustain us (fish, eggs) while others, when not dealt with carefully, will harm us (“snakes,” “scorpions”). The entire point of the lesson around God’s benevolence here depends, at first glance, upon a kind of human-centered evaluation: some of creation is friendly to us and can be received as such, while other nonhuman elements are not initially friendly to us and must therefore be managed or avoided. This is inevitable, and indeed it is its own kind of delusion to think otherwise—as Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and other masterful nature writers have reminded us, the nonhuman creation does not love us humans the way we love ourselves.

On the other hand, to the extent that this Gospel lesson is about training us to trust in God’s sustaining benevolence and to receive that benevolence as a gift, then it is also an invitation for us to imagine the scope of that gift more broadly. The basic lesson occluded by anthropocentrism (particularly in its post-Industrial Revolution forms) is that everything is connected to everything else such that human flourishing is essentially linked to the flourishing of the nonhuman. We might eat eggs and not scorpions, but the environmental degradation that affects scorpions is the same that hurts us. When the nonhuman flourishes, so do we, and vice versa.

THIS TOO is an element of God’s gift to us—the gift of imagination and wonder at the fact that we humans are NOT the ultimate standard of value, even as we admit in humility that there are deep limits to our ability to comprehend this fact. Part of the beauty of the gift of creation—and of God’s sustaining benevolence—is that it is “in excess” of what we can appreciate. To know that God values in ways that we cannot is its own act of faith; and it is this sort of risky faith into which Jesus invites those who would follow him.

The homiletic opportunity present in this Gospel is for the preacher to invite us into this sense of wonder, to invite us to expand our imaginations as to how we might value that which is Other than us in nature. We can only think, dream, and imagine as humans, but as humans we can also worship a God whose imagination and love encompasses all of creation. Wonder, curiosity, and humility might then intersect into a broadened vision for how we might participate in that love in our thoughts, words, and deeds.

For additional care for creation reflections on the overall themes of the lectionary lessons for the month by Trisha K Tull, Professor Emerita of Old Testament, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and columnist for The Working Preacher, visit: http://www.workingpreacher.org/columnist_home.aspx?author_id=288