John 1:1-5, 14-18 | Colossians 1:15-20
Jeremy Richards
There are many things we’ve learned and continue to learn from the Covid-19 pandemic. One lesson that has struck us most forcibly, especially in our individualistic, Western culture, is just how connected we are to one another – how connected we are to our neighbors here in Portland and in the United States, but also to our neighbors around the globe. Covid went from being a mysterious sickness in a relatively unknown city in China, to overtaking much of Europe, to finally arriving on our shores and quickly shutting the United States down as well.
So the speed at which the virus overtook the world drove home how interconnected we all are, but our interconnectedness was also driven home by the precautions we had to take all of a sudden in the wake of the pandemic. We had to wear masks, constantly sanitize our hands, and be careful what we touched. We were encouraged to stay home and only go out when absolutely necessary, because simply walking out our front doors could get us sick. Singing in church, something we never thought twice about, could suddenly be deadly.
Prior to Covid, most of us had just assumed that we were, more or less, autonomous beings, navigating time at space for the most part independently, only connecting with and contacting those we wanted to, like our family and our friends. But the novel coronavirus turned that assumption on its head. It turned out a stranger in a convenience store could pass the sickness on to us, simply by breathing (or god forbid sneezing) or simply by touching the keypad on the credit card reader before we did.
Covid brought home the reality that we are at the mercy of one another, something that has only become clearer as the months have passed. The refusal of some to get vaccinated has led to mutations and new strands, which put the rest of us at risk. Other mutations have emerged due to unjust distribution – financially prosperous nations are wasting vaccinations, while poorer countries are still waiting to receive theirs, and as these poorer countries wait, new variants develop. In both cases, we see that both individual and larger systemic decisions can have global effects.
But, while Covid may have driven this all home in a new way, it certainly wasn’t the first or the last event or circumstance to reveal our interconnectedness. We’ve been warned for decades now that the cars we drive and the waste we produce affects not just our local environment, but the global environment. We know that the clothes we buy could very well have been made by children or underpaid adult workers on the other side of the world. We know our need for gas to fuel our cars creates demand for oil which in turn fuels wars and conflicts in the Middle East. The decisions individuals, communities, and nations make affect other individuals, communities, and nations the world over, and these affects may last years, decades, or even centuries. I could go on about the history of colonialism and racism and any number of historical events.
But there are also positives to our interconnectedness worth noting. As the world has become smaller, we have more opportunities to learn from one another. We can learn about and appreciate the beauty of different cultures in ways we never could have before the advent of global travel and the internet. Our medical professionals join together across the world to address various health threats, such as Covid. Activists from different countries can connect and share strategies over social media. Also, when disasters strike, countries from around the world can give aid to one another. If a nation’s political leader or party commits an atrocity, it’s much harder now for them to keep it a secret, and the global world will often hold them accountable. All these are examples of the positive ways our interconnectedness impacts everyone around the globe.
But according to scripture and Christian teaching, as well as many other religious traditions in the world, our interconnectedness isn’t just on a physical, historical level. And it isn’t a new phenomenon resulting from the rise of technology and world travel. It’s always been true and is even more true on a spiritual, metaphysical level. We are undeniably interconnected because we are all rooted, all grounded, in the same reality: the one we simply call God. We are all born out of the same source. We have the same Mother. She is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end and everything in between. We come from her and we will return to her and even now, though we so often fail to realize it, we depend, every millisecond of everyday, on her for our very existence.
In the Christian, Trinitarian understanding of God, God’s interaction with the world, God’s physical manifestation, is the work and presence of one particular member of the Trinity: the Word, the Logos, who became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. This second person of the Trinity didn’t begin existing for the first time as Jesus, but has always been with God and, confusing as it may seem, in fact is God. While God the Parent is the unknowable, incomprehensible ground of all existence, Christ is the one who holds it all together. He is the “image of the invisible God.”
So before Covid, before the internet, before the invention of the airplane, the early Christians were already saying we are all connected, and what connects us is not simply a web of impersonal associations, but one ultimate and very personal relationship. The common ground of our shared existence is not objective but subjective. In fact, the ground of all being is overflowing with goodness, fullness, life. It is, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, inherently relational, existing in relationship between Parent, Son, and Holy Spirit from all eternity and for all eternity. In a word, what binds us to one another, the ground upon which our existence depends, is Love with a capital L. As Richard Rohr says somewhere, “God is relationship itself.”
I recently started reading Mirabai Starr’s translation of the Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross for my morning devotion, and in the introduction to the book she says, “Maybe we have forgotten that the only reason to strive and to surrender, to sit in the silence or to make a joyful noise unto the Lord, is because ultimate reality is love.”[1]
As we’ve talked about many times before, the Christian tradition, like all the great theistic traditions, says that God is not simply a being among other beings, but the ground of being. Existence itself exists within God. If God were to mysteriously cease to exist, all that is would, in the snap of a finger, also cease to be. This is what Mirabai Starr is referring to when she speaks of the “ultimate reality”: God. And Ultimate Reality is Love.
This is a wonderful sentiment, isn’t it? It sounds beautiful. We are all connected not only to other people but to all the earth, even more than the earth, “brother sun and sister moon,” in the words of Francis of Assisi, by love. Love binds us together, bind the stars and the galaxies and the black holes together. Love is the thread that weaves its way through the tapestry of creation.
The problem, of course, is if we actually look at the tapestry that’s been woven, the world that exists, the histories we know and perhaps even worse the histories we don’t know, the future which often looks bleak as the severity of natural disasters like fires in Tahoe and hurricanes in the Southeast increase and political extremism ramps up. It’s nice to say that we are connected by love to our fellow humans, the birds and fish and animals, the trees and grasses and flowers, the rivers and oceans and mountains and deserts. But if one simply reads the morning headlines it all seems laughably, pitifully naïve, maybe even dangerously naïve.
This is where the biblical, Christian notion of sin comes in. As I’ve shared before, sin is a very important concept. One we can’t avoid. Though we probably also have to do a lot of work to free that word from a lot of harmful misunderstandings we’ve come to associate it with. Sin is ultimately a rebellion against God, it’s a refusal to live into the full life God offers all of us through Christ.
So, if God is love, if the ground upon which we all stand is relationship, sin would be a denial of that love, and refusal to accept our relationship to God, creation, and our fellow human beings. And if we were to rebel against that relational love, if we were to sin, what would it look like? Maybe we would begin to live as if only we mattered. Maybe we would parse up the world and create categories of us and them. Maybe the us’s would wage war against the thems. Maybe we would treat the earth not as a living ecosystem upon which we all depend, but as an inanimate object to be exploited.
Speaking of the Creation story in Genesis 1, Lisa Sharon Harper, in her book The Very Good Gospel, says, “The Greeks located perfection within the object itself. A thing or a person strove toward perfection. But the Hebrews understood goodness to be located between things.”[2] According to Sharon Harper, when God ends the process of Creation with humankind and sees that it’s very good, it isn’t that humankind is very good while everything else in creation is just good. The very good refers to the whole, beautiful, interconnected cosmos God has created, and the way it all works together. Sharon Harper says, “The original hearers and readers of Genesis 1 would have understood that the writers were not merely saying that each part of God’s creation was very good but rather that God’s mighty web of interconnected relationships was forcefully good, vehemently good, abundantly good!”[3] Sin, “the Fall,” would be a breakdown in that interconnectedness.
We’re in the last week of our 4 week sermon series on love of neighbor and with each week the circle has grown: from love of individual neighbors, to love of neighbor in the Church, to love of neighbor in our neighborhoods and city, to now the love of our global neighbors. How can we love our neighbors on the other side of the world? What does it look like to love the people of Afghanistan and Haiti right now? What does it look like to love people even in Louisiana, which is in our country and yet very far away from us here in Portland?
Understandably, the magnitude and quantity of the global crises we learn about every day can be overwhelming. A few weeks ago, the reality of “compassion fatigue” was brought up during our worship service. And a few days later I sent out an email sharing some wise words from Nadia Bolz-Weber in which she said that prior to modern times, we only had to worry about immediate, local crises. We aren’t cut out to hold all the disasters, catastrophes, and atrocities that happen all over the world. The problems are too big and there are too many.
I totally agree. And at the same time – and I’m sure Nadia Bolz-Weber would agree with me on this – the proper response isn’t apathy or intentional ignorance. In light of this idea that we are all interconnected, and that the ground of our interconnectedness is the living, Triune God who is love, I would say that our first step is simply to recognize the fact that we are connected to one another in love, to make a conscious effort to see the world through that lens and in that light.
The next step is to recognize that, because we are all connected, the decisions we make here and now will affect others, for better or worse. There’s no way out of it. When I was in divinity school, I remember sitting with a group of other students and hearing from a woman who grew up in a small town in China. Her town was located near one of the dumps where electronics, batteries, and hazardous materials from the United States were dumped. She said that many people in her town had health problems because of this dump.
I had never thought about that. I never thought about where my old computers and printers, my batteries, and my outdated video game systems went after I disposed of them. It was sobering to learn that the trash I threw away here was affecting innocent people on the other side of the globe.
When we buy cheap clothes made in countries without ethical labor laws, when we order from Amazon, which is so awful to it’s workers, when we eat factory farmed meat, we need to realize that those decisions will directly affect people, animals, and the environment.
At the same time, when we buy from certified B corporations, when we get food from local farmers, when we buy our goods from minority owned local businesses, that will also have a direct impact on people, animals, and the planet for the better.
In the famous words of Mother Teresa, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” When we forget that we belong to one another, when we forget that we all share the same divine ground of being, then we can justify all kinds of unloving, unethical decisions. But when we remember that the Ultimate Reality is love, we will begin to make choices that reflect that reality.
We can’t solve the world’s problems on our own, but we can do our part to make sure that the decisions we make every day positively affect the world in which we live. Because our influence, whether we recognize it or not, extends beyond our families, our friends, our churches, and our immediate communities. It extends to the whole world. So if we are to love our neighbor, we must love everything and everyone, the whole world over. Because God’s got the whole world in God’s hands – you, me, the woman begging on the corner a block away, the people of Afghanistan, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, the trees and the salt flats – and God holds us all in love. We are all held in love.
Amen.
[1] St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Mirabai Starr, 22.
[2] Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right, 31.
[3] Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right, 31.