As I sit in this coffee shop days before Christmas, I find myself thinking of the rhythm of the seasons or rather the degree to which we’ve lost the sense of them. We’ve worked hard to insulate ourselves from God’s creation and its rhythms in the name of convenience. I have very little ideas what fruits and vegetables come into season at what time of year, because at the cost of a massive carbon footprint, I can find the same fresh produce in stores any time of year. My home is climate controlled so that it can be practically any temperature any time of year, whatever the environmental impact of running my central heat and air to reach perfect comfort. None of these technological achievements are bad in and of themselves and can even save precious lives, as anyone who lives in a place with cold winters can tell you. (Irrigated green lawns in the desert, maybe not so much.) The fruits available at my local supermarket and indoor climate control may seem to have little theological meaning, much less a relationship to Christmas, but stick with me.
In this season, we celebrate the birth of Jesus our Savior. In Western Christianity, especially in the Evangelical Protestantism in which I grew up, we have a tendency to see Jesus’ birth as merely a precondition for his death and resurrection, but what we celebrate on Christmas – the Incarnation, God becoming a human being in the person of Jesus of Nazareth – is much more than that. The union of the human and the divine in one being undergirds all of Jesus’ ministry, His dying and rising, and the life of His people from then until all eternity, and I don’t think we reflect on this or its consequences nearly enough.
Of course, to attempt to contemplate a being both fully God and fully human, we both enter into something profound and push the limits of our human understanding and its possibilities, running up against what theologians refer to as mysteries of our faith. In The Orthodox Way, Kallistos Ware writes that,
In the Christian context, we do not mean by a “mystery” merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. The eyes are closed—but they are also opened.
Jesus’ binding us to Himself in His death and resurrection is not only to accomplish a one-time purpose of salvation, it’s both the beginning of a relationship and image of a future reality. Like in the end of the book of Revelation, God dwells with His people, joining heaven and earth together.
But in the relationship that God establishes in Christ, He not only dwells with humanity, we are also somehow joined as one in a relationship that can only be described as full of mystery. Jesus even describes this relationship between God and human beings as being like the relationship between the very persons of the Trinity.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells His disciples,
Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. (14:19b-20)
Later He prays to God the Father,
I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (17:20-23)
Likewise, according to 2 Peter 1:4, through Christ we become “partakers of the divine nature”.
Eastern Orthodox theologians think of this in terms of theosis, humans themselves becoming in some sense divine. In the second century, St Irenaeus speaks of “the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”
“You in me and I in you” is both a picture of God’s relationship with us and a picture of the indwelling of the three persons of the Trinity in one another, or perichoresis, what Richard Rohr terms “the divine dance”. In some way, the Incarnation invites us into the very life of the Trinity.
What does it mean, then, to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) or participants of the “divine dance” in relation to the natural world?
One might expect a Christian message about the environment to talk about how God made the world and gave it to us to live in and take care of and how we need to be better stewards of what He’s given us. All this is good and true, but I want to explore the picture a little differently, to reexamine some of the roots of that stewardship. Ecologically, we are part of nature, not standing apart from it at a distance, and I think the same thing is true spiritually.
And this is where Christmas intersects with ecology.
In his Catechism, St Gregory of Nyssa gives us, intentionally or not, a reflection of the Incarnation in our own selves:
Now, by a provision of the supreme Mind there is an intermixture of the intellectual with the sensible world, in order that nothing in creation may be thrown aside as worthless, as says the Apostle, or be left without its portion of the Divine fellowship. On this account it is that the commixture of the intellectual and sensible in man is effected by the Divine Being...God, taking dust of the ground, formed the man, and by an inspiration from Himself He planted life in the work of His hand, that thus the earthy might be raised up to the Divine, and so one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being mingled with the supramundane.
According to Gregory, humanity is a special point of contact and union between the natural world/matter and the divine. He has a good point, but how much more so when we are united with Christ? Through the indwelling union of “you in me and I in you,” God is present in us in like in no other creature. As the church, the Body of Christ, God works through us in the world. He inhabits His creation and cares for His creation, in part, through us. His love for creation radiates through us, and that is a thing of great holiness.
It changes how we think of our stewardship of the world around us.
We can even see an environmental component in the gospel message itself. The good news Jesus preaches in the gospel texts is not “Pray this prayer so you don’t go to hell,” it’s “Behold, the Kingdom of God is at hand!” Of course the invitation into the Kingdom through the cross and resurrection involves personal salvation, but the Kingdom itself is more than that. The Kingdom of God is the very rulership of God, His lordship over everything that results in a revolution in values and the restoration of right relationships between God and humanity and between humans and one another. If we are created to in some way mediate between God and the natural world and care for that which he loves, this too must be set right, and we can hardly ignore environmental degradation due to human selfishness, greed, and lack of urgency.
Do not mistake me. I am not saying that environmentalism is the real core of the gospel. What I am saying is that it is its corollary. If we are to “partake in the divine nature” and to live out the Kingdom of God, to some degree we are bound to care for the natural world of which we are a part. Perhaps in doing so, as Gregory writes, “one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation” and the things around us might be drawn more closely into the “divine dance.”
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