Making Peace with the Earth
Friday, September 26, 2025
It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.
—Martin Luther King Jr., “I See the Promised Land”
Theologian Grace Ji-Sun Kim posits efforts for peace on a cosmic scale:
On a Galilean hillside, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). To make peace on Earth, the World Council of Churches (WCC) reminds us that we need to make peace with the earth. Dominant cultures in our human family have said that we are the center of creation, positioning the earth and its creatures to be objects for our domination and exploitation. Atop our fictional pinnacle of creation, we are destroying our world’s wealth of gifts faster than the earth can replenish itself. From such human destructiveness we have entered a period of time some are calling the Anthropocene, the era of Earth’s life that is marked by abuse, violence, and destruction caused by humans. The alienation between humanity and creation has been a violent separation, and we must work toward peace in order to heal this divide. [1]
Longtime nonviolent activist Father John Dear describes his own awakening to the connection between violence in the world and violence against the earth:
Over the decades, I have witnessed the destruction we humans have done to Mother Earth and her creatures…. I grieve for Mother Earth and the creatures who die because of our systemic greed, violence, and destructive habits. But I never made or felt the connection between my vision of nonviolence and the ongoing destruction of Mother Earth. Until now.
One day, while sitting in my house studying the Sermon on the Mount, I saw it right there in front of me. “Blessed are the meek,” Jesus says in the Beatitudes. Thomas Merton wrote that “meekness” is the biblical word for nonviolence. “Blessed are the nonviolent,” Jesus is saying, as if he were an ancient Gandhi, an ancient Dorothy Day, an ancient Martin Luther King Jr. “They will inherit the earth.” There it is. Blessed are the meek, the gentle, the nonviolent—they will inherit the earth. A life of nonviolence leads to oneness with creation and her creatures.
A life of violence, of course, leads to an abrupt discord with creation. In a time of permanent warfare, nuclear weapons, and catastrophic climate change, the message couldn’t be clearer. The God of peace, the nonviolent Jesus, and his Holy Spirit call us to practice nonviolence. In that way, we’ll renounce and stop our environmental destruction, tend our Garden of Eden together, and restore creation to its rightful peace….
It’s that vision of peace, nonviolence, and the new creation, the vision of the promised land before us, the practice of proactive nonviolence, that offers a way out of environmental destruction, as well as permanent war, corporate greed, systemic racism, and extreme poverty.
All we have to do is open our eyes to the reality of creation before us, to be present to it, to take it in and honor it, and welcome its gift of peace—and do so within the boundaries of nonviolence. [2]
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John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.“
– Saul of Tarsus in Colossians 3:11
There are days when I feel as though we barely understand Christianity. There are specific passages that I believe are completely overlooked because they challenge our conventional understanding of things…
This is one of them.
“Christ is all, and is in all.”
We are all already the body of Christ?
Christ is already in all of us?
The Gentile?
The Jew?
The circumcised?
The uncircumcised?
The barbarian?
The Scythian?
The slave?
The free?
Yep.
“Christ is all, and is in all.”
2.
“To choose the world is to choose to do the work I am capable of doing, in collaboration with my brother, to make the world better, more free, more just, more livable, more human.”
– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk
To live and breathe and find our being in God and the life of faith does not mean a retreat, shrinking back, escape, or hiding from the world.
Instead, we are called deeper into it. Not to be a part of it, but to help transform it, to make it better, to be co-redeemers of it, and to say that despite all of its issues, it is still worth valuing and still worth fighting for.
3.
“The issue really is Germanism or Christianity.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a 1933 Letter to his Grandmother
Several months ago, the family of Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a public letter that included the names of scholars and preachers from around the world who stood against how people were misinterpreting Bonhoeffer, as if to say that he was in favor of Christian nationalism.
Obviously, he was not.
He witnessed the German Lutheran Church of his day shake hands with political leadership to the extent that it led him to become a vocal opponent of the merger of church and state.
Why?
Because when the church becomes too intertwined with politicians, it loses its prophetic voice, it fails to notice those that the government is crushing, and begins to sacrifice its integrity for some misguided belief that the government will always protect it. When all of these things happen, there are fewer prophets of the kingdom of God and more chaplains who endorse the empire.
In Bonhoeffer’s own lifetime, he recognized the distinction between being a Christian and being consumed by the false ideology of German exceptionalism. Germany, despite being overwhelmingly Christian, was not, nor ever will be, the kingdom of God.
And, although I am writing about a Lutheran pastor’s theology and his struggles with being a Christian in a particular nation, I am confident that you can have a profound conversation with your friends and family about the same themes today.
4.
“He who seeks a language in which to utter his deepest concern, to pray, will find it in the Bible.”
– Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish Philosopher
Once upon a time, I did a youth Bible study during the summer/early fall of 2020. If you recall, it was still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we had to maintain at least 6 feet of distance while outside.
We made the best of it.
Everyone showed up with their favorite camp chair and brought food with them. It was actually not too bad!
Over the course of 5 weeks, we read through the book of Lamentations, which consists of 5 chapters. Some were skeptical, but it was impressive to see how well the teenagers quickly dove into a conversation about the stages of grief expressed in that short book about the siege and burning of Jerusalem. We talked about the profound importance of emotional honesty, our (in)ability to articulate what is happening with us internally, and how refreshing it was to see rage, fury, bartering, indignation, and other things in “Scripture.”
The Bible is a profoundly human book, not to say that it is not also inspired, but instead that when we read it, we find people who wrestled deeply with the themes of what it means to be human.
5.
“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian Author
All idols want flattery. They all want to be addressed as something larger or more than what they actually are. Idols demand conformity and will do anything necessary to maintain their position as a false god. Idols will also use language that makes you feel as though they are on your side and that they are working for your best interests. Ultimately, idols operate the most out of falsehood and deception. No idol wants to be addressed as what it is: an idol.
And it is for these very reasons that it is difficult to speak truthfully.
Truth does not allow an idol to have the flattery it wants. Truth demands that we call out the limitations, inconsistencies, and false piety that surround idols. Truth knocks over idols, no matter how pious or innocuous they seem. Truth requires us to evaluate if the ethics of the idol aren’t actually divisive, discompassionate, scapegoating, and destructive. In the words of Augustine, “Truth is like a lion. You do not need to defend it. Just let it loose, it can take care of itself.”
God is not a fan of idols, and it is always better for us to smash our idols before God has to do it for us.
