For a number of years I have been a fan of Rachel Held Evan’s books. I just completed reading Wholehearted Faith. This is the book Evans was working on prior to her untimely death in 2019. I am so glad this book still got published as it beautifully highlights God’s unconditional love for us and shows how this unconditional love challenges a number of questionable doctrines. In a chapter called “Beginning Again With Love” Evans talks about God’s love for creation and says “Embracing God’s love for creation isn’t some trite form of positive self-talk; it’s not a wave of the hand that says, ‘Everything’s good,’ or ‘We’re all fine.’ It’s the complicated, challenging, and unwavering conviction that every single person is created in the image of God and loved by God, even your enemies, and even you.” She goes on to say, “Operating from that conviction is no walk in the Edenic park, let me tell you. In my experience, centering my worldview and ethics around the inherent worth and belovedness of all creation makes me even more attuned to the seriousness of doing harm to God’s beloved. It makes me even more aware of my own capacity for destruction and desecration. Centering our conversations about sin around God’s love rather than our depravity raises the stakes, for it means that salvation isn’t just about managing your own personal sins; it’s also about restoring health and wholeness to all of creation.”
I believe Rachel Held Evans is on to something here. When we focus on God’s love for us and Creation rather than God’s condemnation, it changes how we look at ourselves, at others, and even at the world around us. God truly does love us. That has been made clear in more ways than we could count. In faith we must accept God’s love for us. This is, however, easier said than done. Many people find it hard to believe that God loves them but it is true. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. We may not feel worthy of God’s love but our feelings do not get the final word. God does. You are worthy. God says so.
God loves you and every other person on earth. This truth challenges the way most of us live our lives, especially how we see others. We often judge certain people to be unworthy of God’s love and treat them accordingly. This has created great strife throughout the course of history. It is the source of so many of our problems. God’s love of others challenges us to love and respect all people. We are to view people through God’s eyes, not our own tainted vision. What a difference it would make if we seriously attempted to do this. A “wholehearted faith” will lead us to do so.
Evans also points to the biblical affirmation of the goodness of Creation and God’s love for it. Here, too, we must learn to view the world through God’s eyes. Unfortunately, we are far more likely to view Creation through anthropocentric eyes. The many environmental crises we face today offers proof of this. Air and water pollution, climate change, deforestation, elimination of species, and many other issues have arisen from failure to see and love the Creation as the Creator does. In our arrogance and pride we have failed to remember that this is God’s Creation (not ours) and if God loves and cares for it, so must we. The true value and worth of Creation comes from its Maker, not what we think.
Jesus taught us that one aspect of “the greatest commandment” is that we “love our neighbor as ourselves.” May God enable us all to love ourselves, love everyone else, and love this wonderful world we live in. Doing this while loving God first and foremost surely is what it means to have a “wholehearted faith.” I long for just such a faith. Do you?
A couple of years ago Rob and I spent some time photographing at Great Basin National Park in Nevada. As we got to the end of our time there he asked if I minded if we stopped at the Pando forest in Utah on the way back. I had never heard of it. He told me of reading about it in one of Jane Goodall’s recent books and how it is a clonal colony of quacking aspens. Some researchers believe that it is the earth’s oldest living thing, some 80,000 years old. Intrigued by this we drove to Fish Lake, Utah, and found the forest. I say “forest” but in reality it is a single tree with a massive underground root system that has produced what appears to be some 47,000 trees springing from that system. Standing in the midst of Pando it was hard to comprehend how all we saw was part of one thing.
Yesterday I was reading Rachel Held Evans new book, Searching For Sunday, and came across a chapter where she, too, talks about the Pando forest. She shares the same basic information above but also indicates that a name has been given to this ancient tree, Trembling Giant. Rachel then goes on to draw some interesting and pertinent analogies between the Pando and the church. She notes, “At last count, there are nearly as many denominations in Christianity as there are trees growing from Pando. Each one looks different—beautiful and broken in its own way—but we all share the same DNA.” She concludes the chapter with these words: “Our differences matter, but ultimately, the boundaries we build between one another are but accidental fences in the endless continuum of God’s grace. We are both a forest and a single tree—one big Trembling Giant, stirred by an invisible force.”
I really like Evan’s comparison of the Pando and the church. It makes sense. The apostle Paul uses a different analogy than Evans in his Corinthian correspondence to make the same point: “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” (1 Cor. 12:12-13)
The main reason I’m writing about this today is I am very concerned about how polarized things are in Christianity these days. The way many Christians attack one another you would think we were in the midst of a civil war. Some Christian groups believe that they have a monopoly on truth and that all others are either not Christians or sub-Christian. The sources of contention are innumerable but include things like how one views the inspiration of Scripture, the age of the earth, the Second Coming, the sacraments, women in ministry, etc. If you do not agree with some Christians about any of these, or other matters, you are deemed a heretic or worse.
What is so crazy about this is we are all one Body. We’re like the trees Rob and I saw at the Pando forest. What we saw with our eyes appeared to be a bunch of different trees but in reality was one living organism. There’s no way the various churches or denominations in the world are going to agree on everything. I’m not even sure they should. I’m convinced our diversity should be honored and celebrated. God is bigger than all of us combined so how could any one group get it all right?
I wish somehow, someway, we would quit focusing on what separates us as Christians and concentrate on what we have in common. As the New Testament boldly affirms “there is one body and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” (Ephesians 4:6) Just hours before he was crucified Jesus prayed earnestly that his followers “might be one.” (John 17:21) I don’t believe he expected us to all be or think exactly alike but we are to live our lives cognizant of the fact that in him we are all one. Another thing Jesus sought to make clear before his death was that his followers should be known first and foremost by their love for one another. He said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13: 35) My hope and prayer is that followers of Christ will learn to set aside their differences, focus on what they have in common, and actually present a unified witness to the world that is characterized by love. Is that too much to ask? Jesus didn’t think so.
–Chuck
(I took the pictures shown here at the Pando forest in Utah.)
