Advent 2: Of Locusts and Stumps

At dinner this evening, we all seemed to be sitting before the precipice that is reading period here at Harvard. Classes ended on Thursday, folks slid into this weekend with a sigh of relief, and now preparations are beginning for a week of paper writing, or for final exams that begin the following week. Some are writing three or even four papers. Suffice it to say, a lot of work looms. And the very idea that this is unfolding during Advent, a season that calls us to simplify and slow down, seems, as someone put it at dinner, somewhat cruel.

In a sense, I suppose the end of lectures last week marks a simplification of sorts (and with my lecturer hat on, I can definitely attest to the truth of that!), but finals more than takes up that slack. If anything, the other side of Advent that I dwelt upon last Sunday, its strange spacio-temporality of endings and beginnings, its newness erupting into the humdrum of everyday life, seems a more accurate reflection of what life is like this time of the semester. And while those who don't live by the academic calendar may not have final papers and exams in the next two weeks, they have plenty of other equivalent or worse deadlines and crunches-- 'tis the season.

In the midst of this crush, two images stand out for me from today's readings: John the Baptist's abrupt appearance on the scene, and the strangely hopeful image of the shoot growing out of the stump of Jesse.

First John the Baptist (courtesy of Matthew 3:1-12). In a way, his clothing and diet say it all: he wears "camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey." I think about this garb and what immediately comes to mind is a) it can't have smelled very good and b) it must have itched something terrible. And the food? Three words: locusts are bugs. Grasshoppers, basically. Sometimes they swarm (and this Discovery Channel article explains why, amazingly-- the image at top is from it), which makes me think of Indiana Jones saying, "Snakes... why did it have to be snakes?" And while I do realize that bugs are consumed in various places around the world, I have to say, no amount of wild honey could get me to eat them. But if bugs and itchy, smelly clothing are part of John the Baptist's prophetic demeanor, his message is this: prepare the way for the one coming after me. You think I'm startling? The one following after me "will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire."

Second, the shoot coming out of the stump of Jesse. We got this image twice-- once from the second reading, Paul's letter to the Romans, and once from the first reading, the prophet Isaiah (the whole passage is Isaiah 11:1-10):

"A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD."

This shoot is the messianic prophecy-- this image suggests this messiah emerging from a previous generation, the tree of Jesse the father of King David. But more specifically, this emergence opens out just when all seems lost-- hence the stump. The passage goes on to say that this bursting forth of hope will unfold in ways that confound expectation and change rules both social and natural: wolves lying down with lambs without temptation to eat them (not, needless to say, equivalent to me and locusts), a little child leading a band of erstwhile enemy animals, a nursing child safely playing over the den of a poisonous snake. And further, as our Kellogg Fellow Zack Guiliano emphasized in his sermon at the divinity school on Friday, this same messianic figure balances the scales in favor of the "poor" and the "meek," judging and deciding "with equity," even "strik[ing] the earth with the rod of his mouth," and finally "kill[ing] the wicked" with "the breath of his lips." Isaiah envisions a series of harsh judgments, a righting of injustices that create a world in which enmity and danger are subject to radical reconciliation.

When Paul takes up this image (Romans 15:4-13), he goes right to the bottom line: hope. The shoot improbably growing out of the stump of Jesse is to him a sign of "the one who rises to rule the Gentiles," in whom "the Gentiles shall hope." Hope on the heels of chaos, hope that brings with it "all joy and peace in believing." This is the hope that gathers momentum, growing from a mere spark in the night to the full glow candle, that it may yet grow to full firey stature.

This is the hope that accompanies us this week, as we all dig in, making our way into the final stage of the semester, and into the rest and joy coming to us at Christmas.

Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

Advent I: Alert in the Threshold

After returning from a family Thanksgiving weekend away, I offered this sermon last evening at the chaplaincy:

Advent 1: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 28, 2010
Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge

Welcome to the threshold that is Advent. Today, the first Sunday in this season of watchfulness, falls for us here in the United States at the end of Thanksgiving weekend: a time of plenty and need, of origins and colonizations, of mythologies and counter-mythologies. Since at least the end of the Great Depression, this weekend has also been a threshold of its own, framed as the gateway to holiday consumer spending, and an economic barometer of the season to come. And now, as the highest volume travel weekend of the year amid the increase of counter-terror measures, Thanksgiving has intensified the liminal—or in-between—space of airports with such innovations as body scanners and “enhanced pat-downs.” Having now passed through the threshold of TSA screening twice in the last few days, I resist the urge to render today’s Advent message as a liturgical code orange or red and, rather, wonder what it might mean in my various contexts, with their distinctive pressures, to practice watchfulness. How indeed do our various contexts—from our families to our friends, colleagues and church communities – call us to practice watchfulness in the threshold of Advent?

At least one answer to that question, I suspect, is that we are being challenged to watch the watchfulness of our various contexts. In other words we are called to check pernicious and unjust forms of watchfulness that our worlds may take up out of fear of the thresholds in which we stand. Particularly in a cultural matrix that experiences border territories as dangerous, as vulnerable spaces to shore up against intrusion, I wonder how we can learn to practice a watchfulness grounded in the certainty that thresholds can be spaces of holiness, places of peace, even vehicles of grace? I wonder, how can we unmask the anxieties that plague the border territories of our lives, and help reveal and cultivate thresholds as spaces of strength and of growth.

In fact, we stand today at one of the great hinges of the liturgical year, the top of the liturgical clock, if you will, when we begin our sweep once more through the great cycle of readings, prayers, and music. The liturgical year is a narrative of narratives—a cohesive sequence of stories laden with productive incoherences and narrative gaps, calculated to catch our lives up into its cosmic sweep. Advent launches us into this cycle with a message that we – or at least the muzak at CVS — might presume to be straightforward hope and expectation, of looking forward to Christmas. But what Advent actually launches us into—and with which it frames the entire liturgical year—is much more strange and jarring. For starters, the theme of cosmic endings is still with us. And since Episcopalians are not known for exuberant exclamations of eschatology, you may well be sick to death of it and perplexed that here at the beginning of Advent, a term that literally means “coming” or “arrival,” this theme of endings has not gone away. From the macro view of the liturgical year, today is indeed the alpha to last week’s omega (the Sunday of Christ the King), but alpha and omega turn out to be co-present. Ending and beginning strangely bleed into one another at the onset of Advent.

On this peculiarly liminal day, we receive a series of readings that urge us to celebrate and to pay attention to our location. Now is the time, proclaims the prophet Isaiah, the Psalmist, Paul and the gospel of Matthew. The Psalmist calls all the tribes of Israel to go up to Jerusalem to celebrate a day of gladness, of peace and of prosperity. Isaiah envisions a day when all the nations will stream to God’s holy mountain, to a height higher than any other, to learn the ways of the holy one. In this sacred time and place God will become the great arbiter, fashioning harmony in place of strife, reforging weapons of warfare into implements of peace. In the fourth century of the Common Era, the Christian theologian Athanasius of Alexandria interpreted this prophecy through the lens of the Incarnation, transforming it from a future vision to an accomplished reality and a sign of judgment against those who continue to wage war. “By His own love,” Athanasius proclaimed in On the Incarnation, Christ “underwent all things for our salvation” in order to usher in peace. Athanasius found it incredible, in light of the Isaiah vision, how various nations can continue to be “mad against one another, and cannot endure to be a single hour without weapons.” Against this impulse, he argued, the “teaching of Christ” is meant to transform such impulses from warfare to husbandry, from arms raised against one another to hands lifted up in prayer. But what requires watchfulness and elicits legitimate warfare is evil itself, the evil that works upon the very psyches of human beings, intensifying anxieties, inciting inter-personal conflicts and inflaming inter-national strife (On the Incarnation, Ch. 52).

The Apostle Paul issues a similar warning when he declares in our reading from Romans, “you know what time it is, how now is the moment for you to wake from sleep.” Having just summed up all the commandments with the call for love in the verses just prior to ours, Paul is calling out, “the night is far gone and the day is near.” In Paul’s mind, we stand in a cosmic perch akin to those early morning moments when the moon has set, the stars are fading and the sun is preparing to rise. His call to “put on Christ” evokes the foundation of our baptism, the moment of our full incorporation into the body, when our humanity is clothed anew with the one who, as Athanasius put it, “became humanized that we might be deified” (On the Incarnation, ch. 54). In this threshold moment, Paul calls upon us to activate that clothing, to be strengthened by it, as if by armor. But while Paul’s watchfulness grounds us in the threshold in which, he assures us, we know that we stand, Matthew reminds us how much we don’t know, how suddenly and unexpectedly the reign of God will break in to the order of the world as we know it. Nothing we can do can truly prepare us for this in-breaking. The parousia or great arrival—the Advent of the Son of Humanity—is unexpected because it is, by definition, unexpectable. And so the awareness we must cultivate is grounded in both expectation and humility. This threshold is not one that can be mastered, controlled or even, ultimately, known. It is an awareness in the face of profound uncertainty and ambiguity that must be lived, or better, practiced.

One of the moments of our fall semester that suddenly erupted upon us was an awareness rash of suicides across the country among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people. For those of us who have long been aware of the increased risks in this community, what was surprising about this moment was not so much that it happened but that it happened in the full glare of the spotlight, and how national awareness seems to have been increased because of that attention. As you know, the Chaplaincy was one of several groups that co-sponsored a rally and a vigil in support of the LGBT community on October 12th. And Harvard was one of a number—probably hundreds—of university campuses across the nation that held events that week. As I stood on the steps of Memorial Church with a large group of faculty, staff, and students at that vigil, wearing both my hats as Chaplain and a Lecturer, I felt as though we were all standing on a threshold, a simultaneously terrifying and holy place, a space in which people had come together to offer one another reassurance and support, determination that what was happening had to stop. When we stand together in this way, and particularly when Christians witness our support for the LGBT community, we begin to transform the legacy of judgment, condemnation and conflict to one of support, hope and growth.

And so here at Advent I, at the beginning of the liturgical year, and even at the top of the three-year rotation of readings we begin in the Revised Common Lectionary that we share with most major Christian denominations, we are invited to be alert in the threshold. Amid whatever ambiguities and intersections we may carry with us, whatever strange permeabilities may pervade the borders on which we stand, and particularly in the face of whatever anxiety or even terror such thresholds may generate in ourselves and in others, the message of Advent is to be alert and to cultivate peace, indeed, to be watchful for the sake of peace. And so may we be alert to, and prepared to combat, the ways in which the anxieties generated by borders can cause people to dehumanize one another, and indeed to cultivate widespread injustices. May we watch for reversals of pruning hooks and plowshares into spears and swords. May we be ready to be an agent of the in-breaking of God’s reign in the here and now, not simply the bye and bye. May we open ourselves to participation in what Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, and Verna Dosier alternately termed the Dream of God. And even as we prepare the way for this justice-making, may we watch our assumptions, expecting God to invite us into a world we can only begin to imagine. But most of all may we stand together today in awe and expectation, understanding that this threshold on which we stand is holy ground. Amen.

If necessary, use words...

I was sitting in Memorial Church a few Sundays ago, listening to the Reverend Dr. Dorothy A. Austin deliver her sermon, my mind drifting in and out, when she began telling an anecdote that grabbed my attention. She related a story told at by the Dean of Harvard College, Evelynn Hammonds. In September, the Dean hosted a discussion with a group of freshmen. There, she asked them, “What is the one thing that people might not know about you from their first encounters with you during freshman orientation? ...What one thing, perhaps, that’s not so readily discernable, seeable?”

The reason this story caught my interest was because I knew instantly where Dorothy was going with this story. I knew what the answer was to Dean Hammonds’ question because I would given the same answer: Dorothy shared that “more than half of the freshmen in her group told the Dean that the people they had encountered had no idea that their religion or spirituality was one of the most important aspects of their lives… there were Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists in this freshmen group who spoke absolutely eloquently about the power of religion and spirituality in guiding their lives and their choices and in shaping their identities.”

I’m no first week freshman. I’m a sophomore now and have been here for nearly three semesters. I’ve made close friends, joined many groups, and had numerous conversations on a variety of topics. Yet, outside of conversations at the Episcopal Chaplaincy and occasionally with members of Memorial Church’s University Choir, I could probably count on one hand the number of conversations I have had at Harvard regarding my faith.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint a reason for this lack of discussion. I suppose that my silence comes in part from an unease that people will equate my beliefs with ignorance or naiveté, but this is no reason to feel uncomfortable talking about religion. First, my peers are smart enough to realize that religious faith does not imply blind devotion. Second, even if I was afraid of the first impressions people might form without knowing me better, my friends know me well enough by now that they would not view me as a different person if I opened up about my religion.

Religion has always held an important place for me. I grew up in an Episcopal family, my dad the Rector at St. Francis Church in Holden, MA, and I’ve always gone to church every week. It’s just what I do. Regardless of where I have felt in terms of my personal faith and belief, service has always there for me on Sunday. At Harvard, singing in the University Choir at Memorial Church in the morning and going to the Episcopal Chaplaincy at night, church has been there for me twice most Sundays. In my encounters with others, I try to be a good Christian. As a student, I am fascinated with issues of development, economics, and social justice in large part because of what I have come to believe from attending church weekly and thinking about God’s path for me.

One of my favorite saints is Francis, the patron saint of my home parish. One of the most famous quotations attributed to him (though Google just informed me that he never actually said or wrote this) is, “Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.” I’ve always been a fan of the saying. The lesson is that we can live the Gospel without necessarily talking about it. We can show people’s Christ’s love by our actions. This is liberating for one uncomfortable talking about religion. There is, however, another side to this wisdom: “If necessary, use words.” There are times when it is important to talk about God and share our stories of religion.

My challenge for myself is to not hesitate to voice these ideas. I imagine others may have similar experiences to me. Do not be afraid of bringing religious texts or ideas into conversation. If God plays an important role in your life, own that and share it. I hope to become better at doing this and I suspect that by talking more about religion, that will allow my faith to grow and develop.

The Archbishop Speaks

As you can tell from the poster, Archbishop John Sentamu will delivering the William Belden Noble series of lectures at Memorial Church next week. John Sentamu is the Archbishop of York, the second ranking member of the Church of England. He will be addressing several themes, but they boil down to the following:

1. What are Jesus' priorities for work in the world (mission)? 
2. How can we be transformed for mission? 
3. How is mission related to Restorative Justice?

We will likely organize a group to go hear at least one of these.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

The William Belden Noble Lectures were established in 1898 by Nannie Yulee Noble in memory of her husband. According to the terms of the bequest: “The object of the Founder of the Lectures is to continue the mission of her husband, whose supreme desire was to extend the influence of Jesus as ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life,’ and to illustrate and enforce the words of Jesus — ‘I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.’ The Founder has in view the presentation of the personality of Jesus as given in the New Testament, or unfolded in the history of the Christian Church, or illustrated in the inward experience of His followers, or as the inspiration to Christian Missions for the conversion of the world. The scope of the Lectures is believed to be as wide as the highest interests of humanity.” The Noble Lectures are free and open to the public.

Refusing to Forget-- Stigma and the LGBT Suicides

A week ago today I made my way from the Episcopal Chaplaincy building on Garden Street, through the chill evening to Harvard’s Memorial Church. As I rounded the corner by University Hall, the light of over two hundred candles flickered ahead of me on the steps that face Widener Library, the same steps from which the liturgics of commencement are enacted every spring. This was a vigil to mark, cry out against and be galvanized by the recent rash of LGBT suicides across the United States over the last several weeks. This series of events, and the unprecedented public conversation that has circled about them, has been devastating to many in the Harvard community, particularly LGBT and allied students.

I came to this vigil to represent the Episcopal Chaplaincy (as indeed Episcopal Chaplains across the country have been responding to this rash of violence), which was one of several co-sponsors of the event, and to reach out to LGBT students across the University at this difficult time, letting them know that they are not alone. Voices of people of faith too often stoke the broader cultural dynamics of violence at the root of all of this, and it felt important to be visible as an Episcopal priest standing against that violence. I was also present as a Lecturer currently teaching—and having previously taught—a number of LGBT students deeply impacted by the rash of suicides. Though I’m not sure how many other chaplains were present (there was at least one other), I know I was far from the only professor or staff member there, and that sense of institutional solidarity and support moved me.

But it was also personally important to me to be there as someone who has experienced that broader culture of violence as a member of the LGBT community. Following the example of previous speakers, I spoke in the brief open mic period at the end of the vigil of coming out. In my case, I explained, I happen to have come out twice—first, my sophomore year of college as gay, and then in graduate school as a transgender man (I transitioned from female to male in 2002). I spoke of the importance of community, real community based on authentic relationships, and how important it is right now to reach out to one another across the borders—particularly of faith traditions — that too often separate us.

Two days before the vigil, the combination of the Sunday lectionary readings and the rash of suicides already had me thinking about what it was like to be a young person struggling with the intersection of faith and social stigma. The theme of leprosy in the readings inspired me to open my sermon with a story of how, when I was in fifth grade, I stumbled upon a library book, Damien, the Leper Priest about Damien de Veuster, a Roman Catholic priest (recently included in the new collection Holy Women and Holy Men) who had served a community living with what is now called Hansen’s Disease. Damien went to this shunned community, fought bureaucrats to get them basic living supplies, built them a physical infrastructure (water supply, housing, etc), bound up their wounds, worked to de-stigmatize the disease, and ultimately contracted it himself, dying as a “leper among lepers.” This was the one book report I did that year that really meant something to me. There was something about the shape of Damien’s ministry in relation to the dynamics of social stigma that rocked my ten-year-old world. It didn’t hurt that as a gender nonconforming kid, stigma was very familiar to me.

The intersection of stigma and faith emerged in another recent Harvard event, a Divinity School panel entitled “Queer Youth and Religious Debates Over Sexuality." When I arrived, I was struck first of all by the Harvard police who stood guard at the doors to the room where the panel was held. Even in its absence, this visible reminder of potential disruption felt overbearing; I could feel it actually raising my heart rate as I listened. While all the remarks were moving, I was struck particularly by those of Professor Mark Jordan who spoke of how “the fights about [LGBT youth] often try to claim them for one camp or another — either religious or queer, but rarely both.” This is one of the peculiar challenges for those of us who are indeed, and have long been, both.

And so as this moment of grief and anger— here at Harvard and far beyond—begins to fade from media coverage, we must refuse to forget this episode. I don’t want any of us, whatever our age, sexual orientation, or gender identity, to lose sight of the violence—psychic and physical-- that underlies and emerges from the workings of stigma in all its forms. I'm particularly cheered to read the several statements that communities and individuals across the Episcopal Church have made (see Episcopal Cafe for a collection of them)-- reading them makes me grateful for the support I received as a young person, and galvanized to continue extending that support here and now.

Rev. Dr. Cameron Partridge
Interim Episcopal Chaplain

Weekly Discussion Group

In case you hadn't heard at service or by e-mail (I've been sending announcements to the wrong list, apparently!), the Episcopal Chaplaincy and the Harvard Icthus are co-sponsoring a weekly discussion group.

Basic Details

• Theology discussion group
• Weekly: Thursdays at 8pm
• Dunster House 
• Small Dining Room

The group will be discussing some classic themes in Christian theology, as well as considering how these difficult issues and topics actually relate to the daily practice of our faith and our wider vocation in the world. Our topic for this past week was the Atonement: how does Christ's death save us?

This next week we will be asking what relevance this question really has. Does it matter what view we take of the Atonement, and how does it relate to questions of violence, justice, war/peace, and other similar questions?

Hope to see you there. We'll have another announcement up mid-week.

Zack Guiliano

Kellog Fellow

Season of the Saints

Starting on Oct. 10th, the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard began an emphasis on the place of saints and community within Anglicanism, asking questions concerning the place of devotion to saints, the place and definition of sanctity or holiness, and our understanding about both the communion of saints and our own community as the Episcopal Chaplaincy.

We will be continuing this emphasis until Nov. 10th, and we hope to see you on Sunday at our 5:30pm Eucharist at Christ Church in Harvard Square.

Believing in Folly

There are certain things in Holy Scripture which we find completely confusing. All of us confessed last Sunday that one of our readings (Luke 16:1-13), a parable of Jesus, falls into that category. It seems almost incomprehensible.

An incompetent manager is called to account by his 'lord' for mismanaging funds. To avoid becoming a pauper, the manager brings in his lord's debtors and lowers their debts, so that they will receive him into their homes when he loses his job. Yet, at the end of the story, his original master is pleased at 'the injustice', and the parable is framed by Jesus saying: 

Makes friends for yourselves by means of unjust wealth so that, when it fails, they might receive you into the eternal homes. Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is unjust in a very little is unjust also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the unjust wealth, who will entrust to you what is true? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Again, this parable offers us a conundrum, and we considered several ways of resolving the question on Sunday, though each brought its own difficulties. I also spent over an hour tonight, reading and re-reading this text, poring over it in several English translations and in the original Greek before writing this post, trying to think through another way of interpreting the text and hoping to deliver some sort of solution. After having thought through that option, I was once again dissatisfied with the way my new interpretation construed some of the details of Jesus' parable. 

I hope we can make a larger point regarding this issue, though, and I hope we can continue to talk about these types of questions. Namely, what do we do when we don't understand every part of our Scriptures? What do we do when the meaning of a passage eludes us, frightens us, or even seems improper? How do we wrestle with the text and with the problems we think we see, yet still remain faithful to our tradition and to God? Finally, can we come to the realization that there are some things in our faith we may never fully understand, no matter how hard we try?

Let me give an example which I hope will be comforting to you, rather than depressing. I am working on my second theological degree, I've spent years learning biblical languages, and I've spent hours just looking at this parable alone. I'm still not sure about every detail. Cameron, our chaplain, has spent even more time in theological education and just as much time grappling with this text, and he is also unsure of the parable's meaning. I want to suggest to many of you something that you may or may not find surprising: intense study is never a guarantee for understanding. If you are confused and unsure about aspects of your faith or of the Bible, you should not be surprised nor should you think you're alone. 

Now, I want to make it clear (and perhaps, ease some of your worries) that this 'confession' of mystery is no prelude to jettisoning the Christian faith. It's not all mystery, nor is everything unclear. Our faith is not without content or reduced to simple 'sincerity of opinion' as C.S. Lewis's parody of 'the Anglican bishop' puts it in The Great Divorce. I do believe there is a way to live as a Christian which is completely faithful to our tradition and yet honest about its difficulties and challenges. To paraphrase the Psalms, we can love even your rubble, O Jerusalem. 

If this idea intrigues you (or offends you or even causes you dismay), you should take an opportunity which the Chaplaincy is offering soon. At the beginning of October, I will be starting a weekly discussion group. This group will grapple with the sorts of questions raised in this post. We will be dealing with some more difficult passages and questions like the one above and like the Jeremiah passage from a couple weeks ago, constantly asking these two questions simultaneously:

1. How do we make sense of these? 
2. How do faith, challenge, and inquiry all relate to each other and, just as importantly, to my daily life? 

I hope that you're intrigued by the idea and that you have questions, problems, and difficulties in mind. We're going to take the time to explore them, and we're not going to settle for all the easy answers.  But, we will look for and find answers to our questions, even if they're not the ones we expect.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow

Let them have dominion...

            After this Sunday’s service at the Episcopal Chaplaincy, we spent a good deal of time talking about what it means to interpret the Bible and particularly in how such interpretation directly impacts our sense of who we are, both as individuals and as human beings. These sorts of questions are nowhere more crucial than when we are engaging the topic of our current series: the world as God’s creation.

As an example, the majority of airtime in American discussions of creation have tended to revolve around debates about evolution and creationism. When forming this series, we were incredibly conscious of this preoccupation, to the point that we almost entitled our series Creation, not Creationism rather than In the Beginning. What I believe is notable about such debates is that they rarely involve a careful interpretation of the Christian Scriptures, often reflecting little serious inquiry about both the original context of the Genesis narrative and other creation accounts in the Bible and how such narratives have been appropriated theologically by Christians before the modern period.

But, as I mentioned before, we are emphatically not addressing these concerns. Rather, we’ve been asking questions about what a robust theology of creation has to do with our spiritual life, our relationships with other human beings and the whole of creation, and (this week) how creation theology informs our understanding of all human action in the world, negative and positive.

Allow me to address in my remaining space this last concern, namely, the question of how human beings are called to act in the world, particularly in positive ways. While there are many entry points for this topic, I am going to relate the question to two passages from the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1 and Psalm 72. I’m utilizing these passages because I think they both demonstrate what human beings are called to do and point out what that ‘doing’ ought to look like.

Genesis 1, perhaps the most famous creation account, reaches its climax with the creation of human beings. God is portrayed as saying, “Let us make the human as our image, in our likeness, and let them have dominion” over all creation. This passage has received a great deal of criticism in the past couple decades, with the rise of environmentalism but also with the rise of various critiques of Christian theology and its historic (and ongoing) influence in Western culture. The idea in Genesis of humans ruling or having dominion over creation is sometimes seen as the ideological source for the destructive exploitation of the resources of the earth and of the labor of other human beings.  Other, putatively more harmonious relationships are often envisaged in its place.

However, I think we must allow this idea (have dominion) to be tempered by its context in the passage and in the entirety of the Scriptures. Human beings, after all, are made in the image of God, the one who has structured the earth harmoniously that life might exist and flourish (“be fruitful and multiply”). Genesis 1 itself would militate against the idea of an exploitative dominion. Other biblical accounts of human dominion would as well.

Take Psalm 72. When speaking of the King of Israel this hymnic text envisages a universal dominion but also a supremely beneficial dominion. To rule over the whole earth as a truly human being will result in the flourishing of creation and will bring about justice and prosperity for all humanity, rather than accomplishing the desolation of the earth and the exploitation of the others’ labor.

Of course, what does this tell us? In its most basic form, for interpreting our Scriptures and for understanding Christian theology, it lets us know that we must be careful not to allow some features of one text to overshadow the full ramifications of the whole text and of the whole body of Christian teaching and spirituality. More importantly, though, we can begin to see the practical angle of a robust theology of creation. We are acting most fully, most entirely “as the image of God” not simply by exercising “dominion” over the earth but when doing so in a way that leads to the proper protection and safety of the whole creation. We are most like God when we work for justice and help bring about the flourishing of every other creature. Our life’s work, in the words of Psalm 72, is to:

Come down like rain upon the mown field, like showers that water the earth.

In other words, we exercise dominion and are “as the image of God” by engaging in work that brings benefit to others. This idea has a wide application, and I hope you will think about it throughout this week. I imagine that many of you reading this blog are attempting to engage in such work, whether it is through your studies, through volunteer activities, or through your future careers.

And, I hope, you can begin thinking of your work as this: the very purpose for which God created you.

Zack Guiliano

Kellogg Fellow 

In the Beginning...

Come join us as we spend some time reflecting on the Christian understanding of the world as God's creation and the many ways it intersects with our lives. Our creation series began September 3rd and will stretch to the beginning of October, with the Feast of St. Francis. 

Keep your eyes fixed here for blog posts on various topics related to Christian theology and spirituality, and come to Sunday Services at 5:30pm at Christ Church, Zero Garden St. 

Change and announcements

Our initial post is simply to let everyone who may have followed us before that we have moved from our previous location Episcopalians! at Harvard to this blog.

Expect this page to undergo many changes in the coming months as we begin plans to better communications, but we will soon start posting announcements, meditations, sermons, and other things we want to pass on to everyone.