The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan

I’d like to start with a story.

The first home John and I ever owned was a townhouse in Stamford, Connecticut. It was tall and narrow, with a shady, damp little yard in the back. The kitchen and living room were on the second floor, and one of my favorite things about the house was that it had a balcony off the kitchen. We could sit there and look out over a row of trees that separated our driveway from the empty lot next door while we sipped our morning coffee or grilled burgers for dinner. Spending time on that balcony felt a little like hanging out in a tree house, with all that greenery right there at eye level. It was lovely.

Inevitably, the empty property next door, the one we couldn’t see because of the trees, began to be developed for more housing. That was fine, until I came home one day after my commute from Manhattan and discovered that all of the trees had been cut down. All of them. Dozens of tall, mature, perfectly healthy trees—gone in a day. Just like that.

I remember getting a little hysterical about the whole thing, crying a lot, trying to understand how that could have happened without even a word of warning. I also remember a friend of mine eventually suggesting that I was possibly overreacting, maybe taking it all a little too personally. She reminded me that the trees were on the other side of the property line—they weren’t ours, we didn’t own them. No laws had been broken. And after all, I was acting as if someone had died. I was chastened by her words, and tried my best to just let it go. We put some potted plants on our balcony and tried to make the best of it.

This memory came back to me when I was thinking about what it means to love our neighbor. To be clear, when the condos were built next door we became friends with a couple who moved in. They were our neighbors, obviously, and they weren’t at fault for the removal of the trees. Even the developers, who remained a faceless corporate entity to me, weren’t evil people intent on destroying my view. They must have had good reason to do what they did, at least in terms of the bottom line.

No, the real neighbors I’m thinking of here are the trees themselves. The trees that had been there for decades, maybe longer. The trees that provided shelter and food to birds and squirrels and a host of other creatures. The trees that I could hear and smell and see from our balcony, that made me feel welcome, that told me I was home.

Looking back, I can see that those trees were my neighbors, too. No wonder I so upset when they were cut down. I loved them, and they were gone.

Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two easiest commandments to memorize and yet they seem to take a lifetime to learn—especially the “love your neighbor” part. Aren’t we all a little like that expert in the law who shows up in the Gospel of Luke and asks Jesus, “So, who is my neighbor?”

At some point in our lives we might take the command to love our neighbor quite literally, thinking that it mostly means people we know, our family and friends and those in close proximity. We are taught, over time, to expand that circle, to realize that we are one human family and that everyone is connected to everyone else. And today, I believe we are at a point in human history, perhaps human evolution, where we need to expand the circle and make it even bigger. We need to learn, or to relearn, that all of life on earth is included in that circle of connection.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a native American writer and botanist, asks the question, “How in our modern world can we learn to understand the earth as a gift again?” In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, she seeks to use the wisdom of her Potawatomi heritage and her scientific training to help her readers become more open to that way of understanding the world around us. And by the way, seeing the earth as a gift, everything on it freely and generously given for the well-being of all, is entirely consistent with a Christian worldview.

We say in the Nicene Creed that God created everything that is, seen and unseen. That means, in ways we can hardly begin to comprehend, that everything belongs to God. Everything. The fact that we depend on it all for life—for the air we breathe, the water we drink, for food, for clothing, for transportation, for commerce, and on and on—doesn’t make it ours, at that deepest level. At that deepest level, it is all God’s, and it is only because God gives it to us freely, as a gift, that we are able to exist at all.

When we realize that we are being called to love and care for the earth and all its inhabitants, from the tiniest microbe to the most enormous forest ecosystem, it follows that we are being asked to love and care for something that is both ours and not ours. Regardless of the laws of the great state of Connecticut or what it says in the US Constitution, I don’t think anybody really “owned” those neighbor trees that were cut down. They were a gift, placed in our hands.

In this way, every person living on earth today is a little like Moses. We are always being asked to prepare the way for the next generation, being asked to protect and cherish and move toward a promised land we will never see. That promised land is the future of this planet. Some of us will still be alive in 20 years, or 50. But what about 200 or even a thousand years from now? We won’t be here, but what we do now will have consequences for those who come after us. Will the future inhabitants of this good earth inherit a land flowing with milk and honey? Will they praise us as prophets or curse us for our idolatries and short-sightedness? The answer lies in how well we learn to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Many of you have probably heard our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry say, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” That sounds like a pretty good summary of the law and the prophets to me! In his beautiful memoir Love is the Way, he delves deeper into what we mean by the idea of love. He makes clear that Christian love is about action, about how we behave.

Finally, Bishop Curry argues that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s selfishness. To love your neighbor means to act with their good, their well-being, their flourishing always uppermost in our mind. As he puts it, echoing Dr. King, “We have two choices before us—chaos or community. The Bible says, ‘Choose this day, who you will serve.’ I believe […] that we must choose community, the human community, in community with all of creation. […] Love—unselfish, sacrificial, unconditional, and liberating love—is the way, frankly the only way, to realize God’s dream of the Beloved Community—on earth as it is in heaven. It’s the only thing that can and that ever will make the world a better place.”

Amen.

References:

Curry, Michael. Love is the Way: Holding onto Hope in Troubled Times. 

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants.