To Touch the Wounds of Creation: Learning from an Endangered Plant About the Hope of Resurrection

I spent today with a dying creature.

Michaux’s sumac (Rhus michauxii) is a small shrub endemic to the southeastern United States. I visited this friend this morning at the North Carolina Botanical Garden. It’s hard to spot among the green undergrowth—humble, unassuming, and utterly cute with soft hairs that seem to invite a loving pet.

It is also an endangered species.

Listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act since 1989, Rhus michauxii is threatened primarily by habitat loss from development, road construction, and fire suppression. It needs periodic burns to survive. Fewer than 30 natural populations remain, most of them fragmented and declining. Although it reproduces by seed and underground rhizomes, many of its populations are clonal—lacking the genetic diversity needed for long-term survival. Conservation efforts continue, but its future is uncertain.

Rhus michauxii is one among thousands of species facing disappearance in what scientists call the sixth mass extinction—an epoch not caused by natural disaster, but by human activity. Habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, and invasive species are driving an accelerated loss of biodiversity, one we are living through in real time.

To sit with an endangered plant like Rhus michauxii is to confront the spiritual and moral crisis of this age: that our choices are reshaping the web of creation. And yet, it is also to practice a kind of gritty, resurrection hope—one that touches the wounds of the world even as it longs for its restoration.

I decided to visit Rhus michauxii because, this Easter season, I want to spend time with creatures facing extinction. May 19 is Endangered Species Day—a time to remember, to bear witness, and to work for the protection of our creaturely kin who are dying, largely because of us.

So, sitting with R. michauxii is my Easter practice. It feels strangely appropriate to hold vigil with a dying species in the season of resurrection. Maybe I’m drawn to the paradox—or maybe I’m drawn to the hope that the resurrection of Christ extends not only to human bodies but to all creation.

What does the threat of extinction mean in the Easter season? I can’t answer that from a distance. It’s not a question to solve in the abstract. So I go to where Rhus michauxii lives. I sit beside it. I listen. I watch. I wonder.

My Anabaptist friends sometimes speak of the gospel of all creatures. Doug Kaufman, director of the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative, often references Hans Hut, who wrote:

“The gospel of all creatures is about nothing other than simply Christ the crucified one. But not only Christ the Head was crucified, but rather Christ in all his members. This Christ is what is preached and taught by all creatures. The whole Christ suffers in all members."

The lectionary reading for this past Sunday was the Gospel of John, chapter 20, when Jesus appears to the disciples. We learn in this passage, as Jesus invites Thomas to touch his wounds, that through the resurrection Jesus carries his wounds. His hands still bear the suffering of the cross, even as his body has been transformed.

The extinction of every creature is a nail in the hand of creation. Each vanishing species, dearly loved and divinely made, is a wound in the body of God. Even as we pray for resurrection and work for restoration in this Easter season, maybe bearing witness to the wounded hand of our endangered species is a sacred act.

It is a holy thing to witness the disappearance of life. To hold vigil with creatures, human and more-than-human, whose presence is being transformed.

So I’m walking back to sit again by my sibling Rhus michauxii. To put my fingers in the wounds of creation. To sit beside this humble prophet in leafy disguise: cute, a little fuzzy, and carrying a message the world doesn’t want to hear.

And perhaps—just perhaps—to find what it means to practice resurrection.

Avery Davis Lamb
Executive Director
​Creation Justice Ministries

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