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Scripture Sunday: The Lord is My Shepherd

4/21/2024

by Ashtyn Adams

Psalm 23 (CEB)
1 The Lord is my shepherd.
I lack nothing.
2 He lets me rest in grassy meadows;
he leads me to restful waters;
3 he keeps me alive.
He guides me in proper paths
for the sake of his good name.
4 Even when I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no danger because you are with me.
Your rod and your staff--
they protect me.
5 You set a table for me
right in front of my enemies.
You bathe my head in oil;
my cup is so full it spills over!
6 Yes, goodness and faithful love
will pursue me all the days of my life,
and I will live in the Lord’s house
as long as I live.

As a kid, I often heard the remark “Remember, God is always watching.” It was usually deployed when I was fighting with my sister or suspected of doing something particularly displeasing to adults. It may have just been a silly, often desperately used phrase, which was not necessarily untrue, but without much else to go on, I came to understand God’s gaze as something I certainly did not want, a heavy burden, the unwelcomed attention from some deity breathing down my neck. It took time to understand that God’s gaze is less like a somber judge or pesky stalker and more like a shepherd who leads us to rest in grassy meadows, more like a host who pours us so much wine that our cups overflow. Deitrich Bonhoeffer so eloquently says, “God’s seeing protects the world from falling back into the void, protects it from total destruction. God sees the world as good, as created – even where it is the fallen world – and because of the way God sees his work and embraces it and does not forsake it, we live.” The CEB does a particularly good job of emphasizing God as the one who breathes breath into all life, translating verse three as “he keeps me alive,” rather than “he restores my soul,” and translating verse six as “I will live in the Lord’s house as long as I live” rather than “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” It may seem redundant, but its repetition is poetic in its own way, and is free from our Platonic ideas about the soul and misconceptions about forever as some other-worldly heaven. The Lord is our shepherd, here and now, pursuing us, and all of creation with loving-kindness: willing life, life, and more life. Not only does this psalm illuminate God’s gentle and protective gaze as shepherd and host, but it invites us to a radical recognition and embrace of our unity and interdependence with creation.

Something particularly striking about this psalm is its noncoercive guidance. God wills rest for us, solace from our anxieties and labors, wanting us to fully enjoy the beauty and freshness deep within his created things. However, it must be something we want for ourselves too: God will lead, but not force, God will let us be among the meadows, but not demand it. We may think, well who would not want this vision of peace? There is a reason it is such a famous psalm! Yet, our consumer-capitalist culture molds our desires into something completely foreign from this gaze of the good life: we want to extract resources from the land of the meadow, commodify and hoard water, and we are convinced we lack everything and need more, only to dispose of it in the next moment. We must recognize there are contradictory guides, or gods, of our world, and realize, as was said in CJM’s Green Lectionary Podcast, that contentment isn’t something we can do with our own power; it is a spiritual practice. We must train our eyes to want to follow where the Shepherd leads, train our feet to trust the slower path.

Not only are the grassy meadows and restful waters creation images that we ought to pursue and restore, but the oil we are bathed in and wine spilling out of our cups assume a fruitful, nourished, and tended-to land. The fabric of this psalm illustrates God as the tender of our being, as well as the One who cares for all other aspects and systems of life. No thing is overlooked. This includes even the dark valleys and dangerous aspects of creation: there too God is, with a rod and a staff, safeguarding our steps.

For us contemporary readers though, the Anthropocene feels like the darkest of the dark valleys, unleashing a barrenness to our Earth which makes God’s life-giving breath seem obsolete. I find myself wondering, “Is God here in this dark valley too?” since this state is something man-made, a product of our own ego, materialism, and love of violence. I hear the psalmists, “I fear no danger,” with a loud sting of irony, for it seems that we don’t fear the lasting danger that is coming from our actions. The table that is set in front of our “enemies” is ourselves. We are the predators destroying other life forms without limit, which is inherently an attack on humanity, as we jeopardize and make impossible the state of rest and pleasure God intends for us within the created order.

Yet, I hear the echo of another beloved psalm: “Where can I flee from your presence?... If I make my bed in the depths, you are there” (Ps 139:7-8). Despite our very best efforts to push God away, despite our determination to dig ourselves and other created things into graves, God does not abandon us. We are his sheep, his friends, the ones he honors with fragrance and festival. His love pursues us with a resolve I am only beginning to grasp and transforms us into what we were always made to be. The invitation to stretch our tired bodies in the warm meadow under the sun, the tender hand placed on our head, softening our skin and hair with the riches of oil, is the unending love of our Creator. This is what it means to live in the house of the Lord, where all of creation flourishes in harmony, and it is always available to us, should we choose it. Just as the Israelites had to unlearn the ways of Egypt in the wilderness though, it will require community effort, and sustained, intentional practices of seeing the way God sees, of caring for the world in the active way God cares for it; we must seek to abide deeply in this particular divine way of being. It seems we are to be taken back to the beginning of our psalm then, meditating on this affirmation and echoing it in courage: “The Lord is my Shepherd. I lack nothing.”

Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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Scripture Sunday: Touch and See

4/14/2024

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by Ashtyn Adams

Luke 24:36b-48 (NRSV)
36b While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." 37 They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38 He said to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39 Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." 40 And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. 41 While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" 42 They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43 and he took it and ate in their presence. 44 Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you--that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46 and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things.

The fact that Jesus bears scars in his resurrected body is a scandal to both our religious and cultural sensibilities. As Christians, if we remember the importance of our bodies in any posthumous existence, we often think about the materiality of resurrection as a clean-slate event, receiving a sort of heroic, able body free of any associated pain or limit of the past: what happens here has no implications for what happens later, somewhere out there. It is the kind of divorced thinking we likewise map onto the world with the language of new creation, relieving ourselves of any responsibility to current equitable environmental practices in the expectation that God will swoop in and take care of the damage. As Americans, we also inherit an impulse that would deem scars ugly and undesirable, requiring some sort of intervention or cover-up. Both of these are gnostic impulses of denial, but also understandable. We do not want death, pain, and shame to have the final say. And they don’t. However, escapism is not what transforms our wounds, it is not what will save us. Rather, as Jesus shows us, we are invited into the resurrected life by looking and touching his fleshy wounds. He does not let his disciples turn away in evasion but prompts them to engage all of their senses and enter into relationship with the memory and consequences of experienced violence and death. In the Anthropocene, as the Earth bears the wounds and will wear the scars of human-driven environmental degradation, we must resist the temptation to look away, increasing our proximity to creation and abiding in a deeper relationship with it.

This dramatic and somewhat comical scene in Luke is also depicted in John with "doubting Thomas." However, there is a reversal of sorts, where Thomas is the one who demands to touch and see the wounds of Christ as evidence of the resurrection. In Luke though, I don’t think Jesus’ invitation to touch his scars is necessarily about proof or belief, at least not solely. I have thought about my own experience with scars, I have one that stretches from the center of my head down to my right ear from brain surgery in 2014. When I was in recovery, I hated my scar being touched. Not only was it uncomfortable, but I was hyper-aware of my vulnerability. The only people I let touch it were the doctors I trusted and my mom. Even now, ten years later, there is an aspect of exposure and intimacy to it. My partner is the only one who sees it, the only one who will play with my hair and stroke my head. Thinking about my own experience is what shocks me when I think about Jesus opening himself up to his friends, to us, without reserve. God not only lays himself bare to us, but is revealed as someone who relies on an all too unnoticed web of mutuality. Jesus having the ones he loved most touch the remnants of his brokenness ultimately must have been a needed and desired moment of healing for himself too.

What we see here is an incredibly relational anthropology. The disciples attend to Jesus’ wounds and then offer him sustenance, a meal to share. This model of communion is the lens through which we must approach God’s beloved creation. The Earth is in a parallel heightened state of vulnerability, and as a created thing, it bears a trace of its Creator (the logoi of the logos). Our response to creation's woundedness cannot be different from our response to God’s woundedness– in fact, they are one and the same (Matthew 25). If we properly saw the wounds of the Earth as the wounds of Christ, we might care for the damage with softness of touch, and find a way to feed it in love. In such acts of attention, comfort, and healing, we are drawn into union with the divine, where scars are not erased, but transformed into spaces of communal shalom. May we be witnesses to this kind of life for all of creation, and search for the One who is found in the cracks and scars of hurting things.

Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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A Story of Modern-Day Psalmists

4/12/2024

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By: Rev. Sarah Macias

Is there any doubt that inspiration for the poetry, music, and psalm writing of Scripture is found in an outdoor setting? If God is still speaking in new and relevant ways, we too can hear Creation’s voice - on the hillside, in the desert, or on a farm.

It was here at Sister Grove Farm in north Texas where six songwriters gathered in the summer of 2023. Their assignment was a faith response to the desecrating and de-creating impacts of plastic pollution. This is a subject that young David’s harp may not have recognized, but the strings, keyboard, and vocals of Alyssa, John, Ken, Andra, Bryan, and Beverly certainly did while the cows, sheep, and chickens smiled approvingly on the pasture.

"What those of us at the farm witnessed as these Earth Day worship resources were unfolding before our eyes was a remarkable blending of musical talents which were guided in a theologically responsible way."

But there were two ingredients included in the mix that are not always present in such a group of artists – humility and affection. These modern-day psalmists came together and were able to be collaborative co-creators by leaving their egos at the door. Consequently, their interconnected kinship with each other and fellow members of Creation was keenly felt.

Perhaps this is the first step for all of us in our own creative responses on behalf of creation justice. Creation is not only waiting for us. Creation believes in us and knows that we are capable of doing what it will take to mend, heal, and repair this farm called Earth. One way we can do that today is by supporting Creation Justice Ministries through a financial gift. Please join me as you are able.

Rev. Sarah Macias (she/her) is a Creation Justice Ministries Board Member. She lives at Sister Grove Farm in north Texas, where she and her family restore the earth through regenerative farming practices and connect people to the sacredness of place in their own story.

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Lexington Theological Seminary, The BTS Center, Creation Justice Ministries Awarded Grant: Compelling Preaching for a Climate-Changed World

4/8/2024

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Monday, April 8
Contact:
Rev. Dr. Leah D. Schade, Lexington Theological Seminary

[email protected] • 610-420-6861

Rev. Dr. Allen Ewing-Merrill, The BTS Center

[email protected] • 207-400-6262

Avery Davis Lamb, Creation Justice Ministries

[email protected] • 785-217-6784

Lexington, Ky. – Lexington Theological Seminary (LTS) has received a $1.25 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. for their project, “Compelling Preaching for a Climate-Changed World.” LTS will partner with The BTS Center and Creation Justice Ministries on the initiative that aims to equip preachers with training, resources, support networks, and research for addressing the urgency of the climate crisis and other environmental issues.

The effort is being funded through Lilly Endowment’s Compelling Preaching Initiative. The aim of the initiative is to foster and support preaching that better inspires, encourages, and guides people to come to know and love God and to live out their Christian faith more fully.

The Compelling Preaching for a Climate-Changed World initiative builds on a pilot project in 2022-23 called the EcoPreacher Cohort which engaged more than 100 participants in a year-long program of monthly gatherings equipping preachers for spiritual leadership during this time of climate and environmental crisis. The grant will allow for building and expanding this program over the next five years through sermon coaching groups, peer networks, workshops and webinars, and an online digital resource hub with text studies, preaching helps, and model sermons. The project will also include a research component studying clergy and congregations to better understand how preachers are responding to the challenges of a climate-changed world and how the skills and resources provided by the program can be utilized throughout the church.

Program Coordinator, Leah D. Schade, associate professor of preaching and worship at Lexington, notes, “Christian communities must claim our role in addressing the climate and environmental crisis, and preaching plays a critical part in this effort. This grant will allow us to inspire more robust engagement with preachers and congregations to effectively reach and benefit increasingly diverse audiences both within and beyond congregations.”

Lexington Theological Seminary is one of 142 organizations that are receiving grants through the Compelling Preaching Initiative. Reflecting the diversity of Christianity in the United States, the organizations are affiliated with mainline Protestant, evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox Christian and Pentecostal faith communities. Many of the organizations are rooted in Black church, Hispanic and Asian Christian traditions.

Allen Ewing-Merrill, executive director of The BTS Center, explains, “Preachers need to be equipped with skills, peer support, and resources to address the challenges and opportunities of our time. Our purpose in this project is not just to help clergy preach about climate change well; rather, our purpose is to help preachers preach well in a climate-changed world.”

Avery Davis Lamb, co-executive director of Creation Justice Ministries, notes, “One of the most urgent features of our changing world is the accelerating reality of climate change, manifested ever more concretely in the form of extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, warming temperatures, and rapidly rising levels of climate anxiety, especially among younger generations, all of which disproportionately impacts vulnerable and historically marginalized communities. So, our program is designed to be scalable and sustainably supported by a network of denominational, organizational, and theological education partners.”

Lexington Theological Seminary President Charisse Gillet adds, “As churches face a critical inflection point, we are excited to support this innovative program grounded in the belief that God is inviting Christian leaders to claim a renewed sense of vocation. Thanks to the Lilly Endowment, we will be able to equip and encourage faith leaders and congregations to step into the realities of an evolving church and a changing world with curiosity and faith; to ask big questions about what it means to be the church in a climate-changed world; and to embrace the call to preach the gospel in ways that nurture spiritual and ecological imagination.”

Those interested in applying for the next EcoPreacher Cohort can visit https://www.creationjustice.org/ecopreacher.html to learn more.

About Lilly Endowment Inc.
Lilly Endowment Inc. is a private foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly Sr. and his sons Eli and J.K. Jr. through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. While those gifts remain the financial bedrock of the Endowment, it is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location. In keeping with the founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education and religion and maintains a special commitment to its hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana. A principal aim of the Endowment’s religion grantmaking is to deepen and enrich the lives of Christians in the United States, primarily by seeking out and supporting efforts that enhance the vitality of congregations and strengthen the pastoral and lay leadership of Christian communities. The Endowment also seeks to improve public understanding of diverse religious traditions by supporting fair and accurate portrayals of the role religion plays in the United States and across the globe.

About Lexington Theological Seminary
Lexington Theological Seminary is an accredited graduate theological institution of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Consistent with the Disciples’ historic commitment to Christian unity, the Seminary is intentionally ecumenical with students, faculty, staff and trustees of various denominations. The mission of Lexington Theological Seminary is to prepare faithful leaders for the church of Jesus Christ and, thus, to strengthen the church’s participation in God’s mission for the world.

About The BTS Center
The BTS Center is a 501(c)(3) private operating foundation in Portland, Maine, building on the legacy of the former Bangor Theological Seminary. Today BTS seeks to catalyze spiritual imagination, with enduring wisdom, for transformative faith leadership.

About Creation Justice Ministries
Creation Justice Ministries is a fiscally-sponsored project of Disciples Home Missions of the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ. With ecumenical roots in the National Council of Churches, CJM’s mission is to educate, equip and mobilize communions and denominations, congregations, and individuals to protect, restore, and rightly share God's creation.

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Scripture Sunday: Everything Held in Common

4/7/2024

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by Ashtyn Adams

Acts 4:32-35 (NRSV)
32 Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. 33 With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. 34 There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. 35 They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

The early church is often romanticized, but usually not for the things that made it interesting, subversive, and radically egalitarian. This week’s lectionary brings us to the very beginnings of the Christian movement as told in the book of Acts, where we hear about a community fundamentally unlike the ones we now know: private ownership was abolished, land was sold and redistributed to benefit the needy, everything was held in common so that all would have enough. These were not small acts of charity, but complete rejections of the dominant and extractive narratives of Empire. Every single aspect of life, including, most shockingly to us, the financial and economic operations, were re-oriented towards “The Way” (Acts 9:2).

At the heart of the liberative movement of the followers of “The Way,” as they were known at the time, was the affirmation of God as Creator of the good creation. Before the sharing and distribution of possessions begins, Peter and John pray with the community, “Sovereign Lord, you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them” (Acts 4:24). The land is first and foremost recognized as a gift which God alone “owns” and has given for our responsible use and enjoyment. Following this affirmation, creation, the land itself, is liberated from the bonds of private ownership to once again display the munificence of God in “what Richard Rohr refers to as ‘the eternal pattern of generosity’ — how God created the world as the ultimate act of generosity and how creation exists within the cycle of continued generosity.”

At the heart of the liberative movement of the followers of “The Way,” as they were known at the time, was the affirmation of God as Creator of the good creation.

The climate crisis is one of the many convicting pieces of evidence that those who claim the name of Christ are so often not followers of “The Way,” at least not that particular generous, Spirit-infused way. We prefer the way of American hypercapitalism, which “reinforce the illusion of scarcity and justify the extraction of maximum profits at the expense of the labor force, land, and resources.” We operate with the logic that amassing more and more is a sign of virtue for the imagined category of the “deserving,” believing that money and power will save us, and thinking that the Earth exists purely for our benefit, if we think of it at all. Our refusal to attend to Christ in the over-extracted land and the poor renders us, as Dorothy Day would say, practicing atheists.

The question thus arises, as it has for all of church history, “Is it Christian to own land? To have private possessions?” The reality is that, especially after Christianity got into bed with Rome and Constantine, the answer has been yes. It must also be said there are many avenues to serve The Way which must be contextualized and discerned. However, the early church and subsequent centuries of saints and prophets, from Saint Francis to Martin Luther King Jr., challenge us to, at the very, very least, consider how our economic practices implicate us in evil, how all we prize and possess is often stolen from some other person or part of the created order. The Book of Acts dispels the myth that we are isolated individuals, testifying to the One who created us to be responsible to one another, entering into a dance with the generous, life-giving rhythms of all of creation. As the planet cries out for relief from our harmful practices, we must realize how far our mindsets truly are from those who were closest to Christ, and perhaps be haunted by it.

The life of the early church, in some shape or form, ought to ultimately be an ideal and inspiration. For those of us trying to faithfully live into The Way in the Anthropocene, can we say our communities, churches, schools, and political bodies are spaces where “No one claimed private ownership of the Earth, but everything of the Earth was held in common”? Likely not, yet the pursuit of “all things held in common” is a worthy and holy one. After all, the early Church behaved so radically not because they “had to,” but because in the true affection for fellow creatures and creation, there is the deepest well of satisfaction, joy, and happiness to be found; as Simone Weil says, “real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

Web Articles:
https://sojo.net/magazine/november-2023/good-news-about-money
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/jesus-started-a-movement-2022-11-14/

Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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Scripture Sunday: The Lord is My Shepherd

Scripture Sunday: Touch and See

A Story of Modern-Day Psalmists

Lexington Theological Seminary, The BTS Center, Creation Justice Ministries Awarded Grant: Compelling Preaching for a Climate-Changed World

Scripture Sunday: Everything Held in Common

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