Our blood mingled with smoke

A sermon preached at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Quebec City

Readings: Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Clouds of smoke, billowing. Walls of flames, closing in.

There is no question that creation is, in St. Paul's words, groaning. And with every groan, destruction—even death.

This week I learned that smoke particles from the forest fires are so small, our bodies can absorb them, through our lungs, into our blood stream, damaging our internal organs. By breathing in the smoke, it literally becomes a part of our bodies.

We are not separate from creation. We are creation.

And as St. Paul writes:

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." (Romans 8:22-23)

We are creation. We are bodies, and our bodies are entangled in webs of relationships with the rest of creation, by virtue of being alive. By virtue of eating, by virtue of breathing, we take in these relationships that can, like a breath of fresh air, lead us to flourish, or like a breath of smoke, can lead us to harm.

But the smoke billowing from Northern Ontario to Norway is not there of its own accord. It too is bound up in relations with the rest of creation that are complex, systemic, interrelated, and that are impacted by human action. Climate-change-related drought and rising temperatures are drying out the land; the spread of tree-killing insects through international shipping is leaving forests dead and brittle in their wake. Like the production of energy, like our transportation network, like factory farming, like the building of massive AI data centers—these are collective problems that require collective action, and yet they are systems we all participate in as individual creatures.

We all eat. We all breathe. And with every bite, with every breath, we become our relations with creation. And all creation is groaning.

Commenting on our reading from Romans this morning, the biblical scholar Robert Jewett argues:

"[Paul's] basic idea is that the human refusal to accept limitation ruins the world. By acting out idolatrous desires to have unlimited dominion over the garden, the original purpose of the creation—to express divine goodness (Gen 1:31) and reflect divine glory (Ps 19:1-4)—was emptied." (Jewett, Romans, p. 513)

Creation is groaning, and with it, so are we.

Now, I don't know about you, but as an individual I find it easy to become overwhelmed by the collective action problems troubling the world. And there are all kinds of coping mechanisms we can take up as individuals. We can ignore the problems, and hope they go away. We can give up, and submit to the idolatrous systems. And we can quixotically hurl ourselves at them, and with the attention of a pharisee straining gnats, construct illusions of our own purity—illusions, which when they finally break, can leave us even more politically paralyzed then before we crafted them.

It is in the midst of this destructive sense of purity that Jesus' parable of the weeds speaks to us about the importance of patience—about moving beyond what the philosopher Alexis Shotwell has called the politics of purity.

Now Jesus is not talking about climate change here. But he is talking about discipleship, about faithfulness.

In our parable from the Gospel we have ourselves a field of action, planted with good intent. And yet, despite that good intent, weeds have grown up that make it difficult to discern which plants will end in bearing good fruit.

Now, the purist workers do not like this mixing. They know that weeds can choke out the good plants; they know it can make the harvest more labour-intensive; they know also just how unsatisfying it is to see a field overgrown with weeds. As I, with my goutweed-choked garden, can attest. In madly attempting to remove the goutweed in my garden, I accidentally ripped out the flower spikes from my irises. Maybe next year.

But the farmer doesn't want to wait till next year. He knows that even though the field has been compromised, even though it is no longer pure, it can still bear fruit. It might take more work to harvest. It might take more patience to see that harvest through. But it can still bear fruit.

And so it is with the life of discipleship, with the life of faith, and with our problems of collective action. As individual creatures, we are limited, fragile, and compromised. It's hard to live a sinless life in the midst of the sinful systems of our world. But that doesn't mean we give up. And that doesn't mean we pretend to live in purity.

It means we must live with a sense of faith and hope, grace and love, grounded in the practice of patience.

Faith and hope: that however bleak our world or our lives might seem, however damaged, however compromised, there yet remains some good seedlings, and that counts, that carries moral weight, through God's provision that bears the potentiality of new life.

Grace and love: to suspend our final judgement of others, our final judgement of ourselves. To suspend a politics of purity that would see us cultivating illusions of perfection through our condemnation of others we judge as unable to measure up.

And patience: patience to let the seedlings of our faith, of our action, grow alongside the compromising weeds, until the time of harvest—until the fruit of the good can be adequately discerned and taken up, and the bad left aside to be burned.

St. Paul writes:

"For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God." (Romans 8:19-21)

We are freed from the paralysis of purity, to pursue a perfection made possible only through patience.

We cannot forget the walls of fire closing in on so many communities. Because we too are creatures bound to this world—our blood mingled with smoke. We are all entangled by the weeds of sin and the seedlings of grace.

May God grant us the faith, the hope, the love, and the patience to let grace grow.