Sermon on May 31, 2026
“An Ecosystem of Love“
By: Rev. Pamela Dolan
When I was in middle school, I briefly took part in a confirmation class at my local Roman Catholic parish. I say “briefly,” because I’m not sure how many classes I attended, but I know that I did not go on to be confirmed with the rest of the class. I vaguely remember being told that Confirmation is an affirmation of faith, a time when we choose to make a mature commitment to the promises made on our behalf at Baptism. And I definitely remember telling my mother that I did not want to be confirmed.
In trying to explain my decision to my mom, I said with some disdain that I hadn’t learned anything in our confirmation class. There was a kernel of truth in that, although there was also a fair amount of childish bravado and stubbornness. If memory serves, it’s true that the confirmation classes didn’t include any church history, or theology, or even much opportunity for soul searching. I remember saying, probably with an eyeroll, that everything they taught us boiled down to the same thing: God is love. Well, duh! That didn’t seem like the basis for a mature affirmation of faith to me.
It should have come as no surprise to people who knew me back then that I went on to study theology at Harvard, a school known for intellectual rigor but not necessarily for helping people live out their faith in the real world. What might surprise some people is that I have reached a point where I can think of no more profound theological truth than that simple sentence, God is love. And that these days I am much more interested in humble spiritual practices like walking and gardening than in the intricacies of theological debate or abstract philosophizing.
I recently had the delightful experience of discussing the Trinity and Creation with Derrick Weston, Director of Theological Education for an organization called Creation Justice Ministries. We were talking about why the lectionary readings for Trinity Sunday have such a focus on creation, which we see in both the opening reading from Genesis and in the inclusion of Psalm 8. And then he said, in essence, “What is God, what is the Trinity, if not an ecosystem?”[i] This was a “mic drop” moment, the thing that helped me draw together some of these different strands of my thinking and experience.
Now, before I go any further with this metaphor, I have to say that I know full well that there are a lot of scientists in this room who understand ecosystems much better than I. So, please, go easy on me. I’ll start by defining my terms. Encyclopedia Britannica includes a fairly standard definition of an ecosystem as a “complex of living organisms, their physical environment, and all their interrelationships.”[ii] Other definitions focus on the inherently dynamic nature of an ecosystem, as well as the characteristic interdependence of all its components, linked by nutrient cycles and energy exchange.
Understanding that we’re talking about a metaphor, not a perfect analogy, let’s see how this fits: The Trinity, like an ecosystem, is a complex of dynamic, interdependent relationships, creating the conditions for life and growth. That sounds compelling to me. And the energy exchange that fuels it? What else could that be but love?
To move a bit past the level of abstraction here, it might be helpful to look more closely at Psalm 8, which is all about relationships, interdependence, and our role in the ecosystem of love that is God. While it easy to read this psalm as expressing a hierarchical view of creation, a kind of Great Chain of Being approach, I don’t think this is a fair or adequate reading, as I’ll parse moving forward.
The first and last verses of the Psalm are a repeated refrain proclaiming God as sovereign, ruler, or (in our translation), governor, whose name is exalted in all the world. Notice that “all”—this is not just about people, but about the whole world, whatever that might have meant to the author of this psalm. The primary and most important thing to know about God, in the worldview of the psalmist, is this: God not only made the world, but God continues to be involved in it and therefore to care about it. Basically, in some not totally specified way, God is in charge.
It follows that much of the rest of the psalm is a meditation on (A) what kind of sovereign or ruler God is and (B) what that means for our own place in creation. This is articulated beautifully in those verses in which the psalmist speaks from personal experience:
4 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,
5 What are we that you should be mindful of us?
mere mortals that you should seek us out?
These verses might seem to be in tension with the reading from Genesis, with its apparent claim that people rule over and subdue creation. That claim is echoed in the next few verses of the psalm, but not before this clear and profound confession of humility, wonder, and awe.
This context makes all the difference in how we read what comes next. Yes, we humans are made in the image and likeness of God. Yes, we are a little lower than angels. Yes, we bear God’s glory and honor. But all of that, all of it, is only ours because God gave it to us. And any sense we might have of ourselves as separate or special or in any sense “above” creation can be obliterated by simply glancing up at the night sky and realizing how tiny and fleeting our lives are, and yet how simply glorious it is to be even the smallest part of God’s grand creation.
To turn directly to the lines about mastery and having creation at our feet, let me say clearly that any “mastery” we can claim is the mastery of a craftsperson or a farmer or a shepherd, someone who has learned to tend to what they have been given with aptitude and attention, skills learned through a lifetime of careful apprenticeship. When we ask, along with the psalmist, what we are that God should be mindful of us, the answer is that we are stewards of all God has created. We are fragile, limited, finite creatures, just like all creatures, and yet God has entrusted us with the work of God’s hands If that doesn’t fill us with fear and trembling, then we clearly don’t understand the assignment.
And if all this still seems a little too abstract, just think about the topic of Pope Leo’s first encyclical, called “Magnifica Humanitas” or “Magnificent Humanity.” He writes cogently and passionately about what sets humans apart from artificial intelligence. It is not our brain power, or anything that we can produce, consume, or achieve. He writes, “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”[iii] Our bodies, our physical selves, are how we experience the love of God and everything that flows from it.
Even our weaknesses and limitations are central to what makes us human. Reporting on the encyclical, The New York Times writes, “We are increasingly inferior to the technology we have created, if we measure in only cold terms of performance. But the pope writes with great affection for humans. The text ends with a wish ‘that we may bear witness to the grandeur of humanity, in which God has made his dwelling.’”[iv]
That’s it exactly—God has made God’s dwelling in us, and in all creation. If God is an ecosystem, we are an integral part of that ecosystem, upon which we utterly depend. We cannot exist without the energy of love that is also flowing between and overflowing from the different persons of the Trinity. And it’s not just us. All creation is an integral part of this ecosystem as well. Why would the writer of Genesis go to such lengths to outline every single day of creation if this were not so?
From a Trinitarian perspective, creation can never just a backdrop or environment within which we do the important work of being human. God has structured reality around the same interdependence that characterizes the Trinity. Everything that is created, in heaven and on earth, shares in the complex of interrelationships and love that we call God. It is all good, and very good, indeed.
Finally, we return to the simple sentence, God is love. Perhaps we can now add: God is an ecosystem of love. And because God is love, and we are made in God’s image, and live and move and have our being in that ecosystem of love, we too are love. The rest, as they say, is commentary. Amen.
[i] https://www.creationjustice.org/green-lectionary-podcast.html
[ii] https://www.britannica.com/science/ecosystem
[iii] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/us/pope-leo-encyclical-highlights.html
[iv] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/us/pope-leo-encyclical-highlights.html
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