When reflecting on today's story from Matthew's Gospel, we typically focus on the part about feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, and visiting the sick. The other part of the story--the judgment part--is the part we like to quickly pass without giving it much thought. Yet, that other part is a big part of what the story is about--judgment. In the end time, Christ will judge humanity. Christ will bless those who pass judgment and welcome them into the kingdom, and he will curse those who don't pass judgment and send them to the eternal fire. Whether one feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and welcomes the stranger are criteria by which Christ will judge people, but the story includes the act of judgment itself.
    There are a number of parables, including this one, that when read literally and taken at face value, portray God and Christ as stern, uncompromising, and harsh judges who pass judgment on humanity based on strict criteria, offer no leeway, wiggle room, or excuses, have no patience for those who don't pass muster, and quite willingly cast the guilty into the eternal fire, the outer darkness, or my favorite image, that place where sinners gnash their teeth. And as David Ross reminded us again last week, if you don't have teeth, teeth will be provided.
    Now this is a somewhat problematic image of God for many of us as we like to think of God as more compassionate and forgiving. Indeed, the Bible itself contradicts the image of God as a stern and harsh judge by providing other images portraying God as compassionate and forgiving. Yet we can't just ignore all those places in the Bible where God is wrathful or that portray God striking people with violent punishments for violating God's commands. Flooding the earth--killing everything and everyone that won't fit on a boat--is pretty extreme. So is afflicting Egypt with ten plagues and forcibly exiling the population of Jerusalem into Babylon.
    The Bible sends us mixed messages about God--sometimes wrathful and punishing, sometimes compassionate and forgiving. Some folks try to reconcile these mixed messages by claiming the God of the Old Testament is a judging, wrathful, punishing God while the God of the New Testament is a loving, compassionate, forgiving God. According to this view, sometime around the year 4 AD, God was converted and became a Christian. But that argument doesn't really hold water because there are plenty of expressions of God's love, compassion, and forgiveness in the Old Testament, and as we read today, portrayals of God as harsh, judgmental, and punitive in the New Testament.
    So what are we to make of this? Is God loving, compassionate, and forgiving? Or is God harsh, judging, and punitive? Is God sometimes one and sometimes the other, depending on the circumstances or God's mood? Did God wake up on the wrong side of the bed one day and decide to flood the earth, and wake up in a better mood some weeks later and decide to send earth a rainbow? Is God schizophrenic?
    Or do we simply get to choose the type of God we want to believe in and ignore those other portrayals of God that we don't like? After all, if we want to believe in the harsh, judging, punitive God, the Bible will confirm that belief. And if we want to believe in the loving, compassionate, forgiving God, the Bible will confirm that belief.
    I think this is actually the strategy most folks adopt. For many liberal Christians, it's the loving, compassionate, forgiving God they want, so they just ignore or reject the images of that stricter, meaner, nastier God. We'll let the Irish Catholics and some of those hard-core fundamentalists fear that harsh, judgmental, punitive God.
    This is the strategy I adopted for many years. I'll take the "nice" God and ignore the other one. But it's a strategy that I've been rethinking for some time now. Not rethinking in the sense that I'm beginning to think maybe those Biblical portrayals of the harsh, judgmental, punitive God are really true after all. I certainly don't think that. I don't believe God sits on a judgment seat and sorts people into two groups, blessing those who feed the hungry and casting those who don't into hell. I don't believe God flooded the earth, killed Egyptian boys, and sent the Jews into exile in Babylon.
    No, I'm revisiting the whole issue of judgment in the sense that I'm thinking divine judgment plays a more important role in God's creation than I have till now realized.
    I'm thinking there is a manner of divine judgment at work within the very fabric of God's creation, a manner of judgment that involves suffering when people ignore and transgress a very fundamental reality that is inherent within God's creation.
    I'm thinking God's creation is judging us right now, and some harsh suffering is in store for humanity in the not too distant future as a result of human attitudes and human actions within God's creation.
    I'd like to share with you this morning how my thinking has evolved and why I'm taking the issue of divine judgment far more seriously. It all begins with my experience of separation.
    For many years I thought of God as being separate from God's creation. God is other than, outside of, and above creation. The created world is an object that God created--an object of great value--but an object nevertheless. God is related to our planet, God loves our planet, God may even act upon or within our planet, but God is nevertheless other than our planet, other than creation.
    Even though I harbored some panentheist beliefs that God is in creation and creation is in God, these beliefs remained at the conceptual level of my intellect, and until more recently, I never experienced a strong, visceral feeling that creation, and the source of creation, were really all one reality. That has changed for me.
    I am seeing more clearly that creation, and the source of creation, though distinct and differentiated, are not two separate realities. There is no absolute boundary separating the source of creation from creation itself. God and creation constitute one single reality, and whatever we do to creation, we do to God. Realizing this blows my mind. When I abuse or exploit the earth, I don't simply abuse or exploit some object that God loves, I abuse and exploit that one single reality that includes both God and creation, God and planet earth.
    Seeing God as separate from creation, I also saw myself being separate from God's creation in the sense that I saw humanity as separate from the natural world. There's humanity and there's nature. Two separate realms. Humanity may live in nature and be dependent on nature and even love nature, but we ourselves are not nature. We are above nature. We master nature to meet our needs. Animals are part of the natural world but we are not animals. We are humans. Animals are natural. We are civilized.
    Our civilization reinforces this attitude whenever we discuss the economy and the environment. The two are typically seen as two separate realms, with the needs of the human economy most often trumping the needs of the natural environment. On one level, we all know this is a ridiculous way of thinking. Yet, I found myself falling into it constantly.
    Our religious beliefs also reinforce this attitude. We see humanity holding some uniquely privileged role within creation. God created everything else as a prelude to creating humans--in God's image--and then handed creation over to us to subdue it and rule over it. We tend to see the rest of creation as a backdrop for humanity, a mere setting for humanity to act out the plot of its own separate drama rather than seeing all of creation itself as the drama, with humanity playing but a role within it.
    Many of us talk about our desire "to get back to nature," and I felt this desire myself. But that very desire is itself indicative of the experience that we are separate from nature in our daily living. After all, where are we when we're not getting back to nature? Away from it, outside of it, removed from it? It often seems as if we are.
    That too has changed for me. I now see more clearly that my experience of separation from nature is really an illusion. I am nature.
    Much in the same way that I saw God separate from creation, and myself separate from creation, I saw myself separate from God. I thought of God as other than me, outside of me, and above me. God may love me, and may even act upon me or within me, but ultimately God is separate from me. There is some boundary between God's divine existence and my human existence. God is wholly and radically other than me.
    But I have, more recently, begun to experience things quite differently. I have come to realize there is no separation between the source of life and my life.
    Certainly I experience God as differentiated and distinct from me--infinitely greater than me--yet I am realizing there is no hard and fast boundary or unbridgeable chasm that separates my life from the God of life, the creator and sustainer of life. My particular manifestation of life and the Spirit of all life are intimately connected.
    Finally, one of the most powerful and prevalent experiences of separation I have felt in my life is the experience of separation from other people--the experience that I am a separate self and that everyone else is a separate self, the experience that a physical, psychic, emotional boundary surrounds me, and that this boundary is hard and fast and real, that it separates me from all other people, all of whom live encased within their own physical, psychic and emotional boundaries. I may be in relationship with other people, I may be close to other people, but that felt sense of a bounded separate self that separates me from all others, no matter how close we are, is always there.
    These feelings of separateness have always been especially intense when I've been around other people who seem different from me, especially other people who make me feel uncomfortable. And I must admit, people who are strangers, who are poor, who are hungry, who are sick, and who are imprisoned can make me feel uncomfortable.
    Clearly, I am differentiated from all other people in personality, temperament, psychological and emotional make-up, life-experience, and physical appearance. We are all differentiated from one another and distinct in our own way. And yet, I'm seeing like never before that below the surface of those conditions that differentiate us, there is an essential unity through which all people are related and united.
    I'm seeing like never before that there is an unbounded spiritual energy, a life-force to which all life forms are connected, a life-force through which all life forms exist within a single living fabric of life or web of life. At this most essential and fundamental level, there is no separation. There are no boundaries. Everything that exists--God and all of creation--make up one single sacred reality.
    I truly understand now what spiritual masters in our Christian spiritual tradition, and spiritual masters in other traditions, have been saying for a long time: it is our experience of seeing God separate from creation, and seeing ourselves separate from God, separate from creation, and separate from other people that wreaks so much havoc and causes so much suffering in our lives. The culprit is that basic, fundamental, pervasive experience of essential separateness.
    It is our penchant for focusing on the surface differentiations and distinctions, rather than looking deeper below the surface and seeing the essential relatedness of all that exists, that moves us to see the earth and other people as objects, that moves us to treat the earth and other people as objects, that enables us to abuse and exploit the earth and other people without really, deeply knowing in our heart of hearts that we are abusing and exploiting the very fabric of sacred reality itself.
    It is our feeling of separateness from God and our separateness from other people that enables us to look at another person and not see the divine spirit of life within that person, and not see that person as the human face of the divine spirit of life.
What are the consequences of seeing God as separate from the earth, and seeing the earth as an object that is not inherently sacred, as an object for us to master, exploit, buy, sell, and consume?
    Let's take just one consequence--species extinction.
Species extinction is hard to quantify but there is widespread agreement that species extinction is occurring at an alarming pace and at an accelerating pace. According to the International Union of Conservation, 16,000 species on planet earth are currently threatened with extinction:

• one in three amphibians.
• one in eight birds.
• one in four mammals.
• seventy percent of plants.

    Species extinction is due in large part to habitat destruction, brought on in large part by human induced climate change, pollution, population growth, and over hunting and fishing.
    If this trend continues--human induced climate change and human induced species extinction on a massive scale--the human race will face some very harsh realities in the not too distant future. Very harsh realities. All because we are abusing and exploiting a part of reality that we see existing separately and independently of God and us.
    Is God judging us for this? Is God going to punish us for this? I don't like using that language. It reinforces the image that God is up there watching us, getting mad at us for being naughty, and deciding on the best way to hurt us. I want to get past that image. I prefer to say, creation itself is judging us. And creation is sacred. In that sense, that which is sacred is judging us. And as I said earlier, we are an integral part of sacred reality. So when we transgress creation, when we transgress the sacred, we bring judgment and suffering upon ourselves. We hurt ourselves.
    In my view, the antidote for this is what Christians call atonement. Atonement means
at-one-ment.
    For me, atonement has nothing to do with believing that Jesus died on the cross to pay for my sins and that Jesus will come back on some future Judgment Day to judge between those who fed the hungry and those who didn't. No, for me atonement--at-one-ment--is all about dying to my own self-centered attitude, to my feeling of essential separateness from God, creation, and other people, and then experiencing true, authentic at-one-ment with God, creation, and other people. I believe this what Jesus was all about--opening people's hearts and minds in a way that dissolved all of the walls of separation, including and especially those cultural, psychological, and emotional walls that separated his followers from the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the outcast.
    When you feed the hungry, you feed me. There is no separation.
    The experience of non-separation, of at-one-ment, not the intellectual belief in atonement, but the actual experience of at-one-ment with God, God's creation, and other people--how do we experience this? Does it just happen on its own? Maybe for some it does. It didn't for me. And I don't think it does for most folks.
    I think it is an experience we must truly desire and cultivate. We have to work on it, pray for it, meditate on it, practice it, practice it, practice it. Finding a mentor who can help us on this journey is exceedingly helpful. We have to devout every fiber of our lives to it. Think of the words, "love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself with all your heart, mind, soul and strength." With all you our heart, mind soul, and strength. That's what it takes. Nothing less.
    I believe this is the only hope for this world. And I'm not sure how hopeful I am. There are consequences for our attitudes and our actions. God's creation is judging us. Sacred reality is judging us. The consequences for our attitudes and actions will be harsh. And it is our children, and their children, and their children who will really face them. I just pray to God that they will be part of a community that can sustain them through the difficult challenges they will face, difficult challenges created by the life we ourselves are living today.

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