Quick Summary:

We human beings are really good at making life all about us—but, says Paul, it’s not all about us; the human species. The whole creation has a place in God’s plan; the whole creation is on this journey away from bondage and decay and toward wholeness and freedom and restoration. The WHOLE creation groans with the pain of one who is in labor; groans with the pain of someone waiting for new birth.

The Holocene Epoch—the period of tremendous stability and natural harmony for Earth that began roughly 11,700 years ago—is coming to an end, and we are now entering the Anthropocene Epoch—an epoch marked by massive human impacts on Earth.

In today’s Pentecost story from ACTS, the Spirit Jesus promised springs upon God’s people with gale force winds and dancing flames that signal the end of “business as usual.” Before you can say HOLY HAVOC the sacred circle expands —disrupting received tradition, crashing boundaries and pushing borders far beyond what Jesus’ disciples dared even to imagine.

In our time that circle of moral imagination to expand once again—for ALL CREATION WAITS WITH EAGER LONGING. But how? Willis Jenkins writes:
"Creating a new moral analogue for the Anthropocene may rest...with communities that...know how to drive moral creativity by reforming their own traditions to reach beyond their own work to date. These “anticipatory communities,” work is to meet the adaptive challenges of a new geological epoch.