After five Sundays of Easter, what more can one expect to learn? We have followed the risen Jesus through the several encounters with his disciples, understaning along the way that  the texts provide  clues for how the community is to live in Jesus' new "presence":  comforted by his assurance of "peace," sharing in the revelatory breaking of bread, a life firmly grounded in love and obedience to Jesus' teaching.  These will be main features of their life together as the community blessed by his resurrection "presence."

Beyond these features, these texts offer conclusive assurance of their continuing community with him. They are to be blessed by the presence of the Spirit he promises to send. Additionally, especially in the text from the Book of Acts, they introduce the community's encounter with the religious culture of the Greco-Roman world.  The Apostle Paul's conversation  with  the Athenians at the shrine of the Unknown God  opens up a wholly new community of discourse.

Of particular interest to us for the Roundtable's perspective is that Paul's testimony is a summary of his faith in God as Creator, the lord of  Heaven and Earth, who gives life and breath and all things to all nations inhabiting the whole Earth, present in all times and places.The text initiates, as it were, the conversation about the relationship between God and the world, which is at the heart of our mission for the care of the Creation. The text invites a brief report on this reader's recent reading in that conversation. In what follows, I draw on two authors in particular, Larry Rasmussen in the fascinating collection of letters to his grandchildren, The Planet You Inherit,  and  Sallie McFague's excellent Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age.

 Paul speaks of an universal "search for God, even a groping for God," who is nonetheless "not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being".  This is Rasmussen's understanding of God, too, derived in acknowledged measure from reading Albert Einstein.  It is a mystical vision of the mystery of all that is, infused by a spirit "animating all." He agrees twith Einstein in knowing no more than that God is "a presence manifest behind  and in all things,  yet beyond our comprehension'  (Rasmussen, pp. 112-13). And of special significance for our enterprise, Rasmussen understands that

we do violence to that presence when we sabotage the natural world.  Human-induced degradation of Earth destroys swaths of God's presence.  Degradation and extinction diminish God, stripping God of the manyness God requires as God.  We wipe out whole patches of glory that shines everywhere (p, 114).

Correspondingly, God promises the redemption of the entire universe  As we see in Jesus, God "enters the world's broken places to bring healing from the inside out. And no matter how forbidding the experience, he never gives up on tikkun olam"(Hebrew for "repair of the world"). He  lives the recklessness of God's dream to the bitter end."   Hence, Rasmussen writes to his grandsons,

I feel awe, mystery and gratitude in the presence of all that is, seen and unseen.  These feelings bring serenity and the embrace of grace.  Thus does my tragic view of life partner with hope and a somehat unexpected love of life.  There's something rather than nothing, and it’s alive everywhere.  We belong to an uncontained God (p. 115).

Rasmussen' s view here is supported by Sallie McFagues excellent study of Models of God.  Key for her is to see the "world as God's body."  Clearly a  strictly metaphorical picture, as all descriptions of God are in her view,  the image serves as the basis for a thought experiment in which the resurrection is seen as "God's promise of permanent presence to all space and time, . . . imagined  as a worldly reality, a palpable, bodily presence". This view, she suggests, is  consonant with the Christian understanding of resurrection and sacramental practice of the eucharist, while also being credible "in view of the contemporary holistic understanding of personhood, in which embodiment is the sine’ qua non." In this essentially panentheistic view, God is indeed "at risk," writes McFague, having been placed in human care. 

The world as God's body may be poorly cared for, ravaged, and as we are becoming well aware, essentially destroyed, in spite of God's own loving attention to it, because of one creature, ourselves, who can choose or not choose to join with  God in conscious care of the world" (p. 72).

McFagues's full exploration of  this model  of God  is worthy of our full attention, but need not detain us in this brief essay. It is clear that for her God cares profoundly for the world. The world is 

to be seen as a body that must be carefully tended, that must be nurtured, protected, guided, loved, and befriended both as valuable in itself – for like us, it is an expression of God — and as necessary to the continuation of life. We meet the world as a Thou, as the body of God where God is present to us always in all times and in all places.(p. 77).

Were this understanding to become the shared understanding of humankind, "it would result in a different way of being in the world. There would be no way that we could any longer see God as worldless or the world as Godless. Nor could we  expect God to take care of everything, either through domination or through benevolence." (Ibid.) 

To bring about the understanding represented by Rasmussen and McFague is an essential  part of the Great Work of the Christian Church in this age of whole-Earth violence and degradation.  Nothing less will do justice  to the reality of living in God's  Loving Presence.  This is what believing in the Resurection means!