The Cross in the Midst of Creation: A Conversation with Rev. Sharon Delgado

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Top image: Paper Cross by Kelly Sikkema, cropped, and Bird on Maurice River by Ray Hennessy, cropped.

June 20, 2022 

June 14th was the official release date of Rev. Sharon Delgado’s latest book, The Cross in the Midst of Creation: Following Jesus, Engaging the Powers, Transforming the World, especially about Chapter 4, ‘Creation Crucified: The Passion of the Earth,’ available at Fortress Press. To celebrate the launch, Rev. Delgado came to share conversation at the Climate Cafe Multifaith and talk about her book.

The Cross in the Midst of Creation is Rev. Delgado’s third book, following Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization, now in a Second Edition, and Love in a Time of Climate Change: Honoring Creation, Establishing Justice. The books comprise a trilogy twenty years in the making. The first book rose from faith-based activism, the second expanded into an overview of climate change based on John Wesley’s (Methodism’s primary founder and theologian) teachings on Social Holiness. With this latest book, Rev. Delgado moves into the very core of Christianity, the theology of the cross.

The story of the cross is at the center this new book, and of Christian faith and belief. From the beginning, there were many Christianities, many claiming to be the ‘only’ true faith. These many traditions reflect a garden of thought, love, and faithful expression. But there are also times when interpretations gain hold in ways that are violent and destructive. Theologies of empire, starting with Emperor Constantine, have historically taken us on paths of destruction. And today, as we see life destroyed where it should be flourishing, Rev. Delgado wants to call us back to the cross to try again to understand the deep revelation rising for this moment.

Rev. Delgado spoke about her love for creation as an essential reason for writing this book. But she also writes with a sense of grief and urgency. “I think, the final thing that got me to write [The Cross in the Midst of Creation] was the way that [the theology of the cross] was being distorted—the way the story of the cross is being misused.” It is deeply troubling to Rev. Delgado that “it’s been used in that way to promote the very values that Jesus rejected, the values of status, wealth, and worldly power—the opposite values of Jesus.”

“It's as if creation itself is being crucified by powers that are very similar to the powers that crucified Jesus.”

—Rev. Sharon Delgado

Photo by Frank Albrecht, cropped.

Rev. Delgado grew up in Oroville, California, next to the Feather River. As a child she and her friends played there. The river was a place for solitary reflection, as well. It was during these more solitary times that Rev. Delgado discovered a “natural contemplative” ability, connecting her to the divine through the natural world. “I would go outside at night. I'd sit and watch the sunset. I'd walk to the river—I just watched the river go by. I would talk to the trees. And I know now that I was experiencing the divine through creation.”

Rev. Delgado was a young woman in the 1960s. She listened to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and married a Vietnam veteran. They were part of a ‘back to the land’ movement, seeking self sustainability and back-to-nature living, finding a home together in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Their first home was off grid, “we lived for about seven years in a house in the woods without electricity, raising our small family, but very close to the cycles of nature.” They still live surrounded by nature. Their one-acre property includes game trails for deer, and numerous wild creatures including, occasionally, bear.

In this video clip from The Climate Cafe Multifaith, Rev. Sharon Delgado talks about her story, her growing up years, and the influence of those years on her writing and activism.

From their off-grid home among the oaks and evergreens of Northern California, Rev. Delgado practiced Zen Buddhism, learned and practiced yoga, and contemplative prayer. “My love for creation,” says Rev. Delgado, “has nurtured me and has been a huge part of my story.” When the family moved closer to town, she and her husband returned to church, settling in with a United Methodist congregation. It was in this community Rev. Delgado was baptized, and received a call to ministry.

The wrestling she had felt in her life, of the precious and divine aspect of God revealed in nature, was nurtured in her faith community. In studying the teachings of Jesus, Rev. Delgado realized just how deeply the Word stood in contrast to the popularized empire-Christianity that undergirded wars, extraction, and disregard for earth and neighbor. Worse, this empire-Christianity is so prevalent, that we are all caught in some level of complicity in it. This impelled Rev. Delgado to teach, preach and illuminate the contrast between Jesus’s teachings and the way of empire. “We have to be open to the truth. And we have to somehow share the truth…our complicity with those forces is part of what we need to face and we are called to follow in the direction of a more hopeful future.”

“The way that the good news has been misused and turned into bad news, it's motivated me in all my writing, but in this one specifically: to share the Word of Jesus, the message of Christianity in a way that brings healing to creation, and in a way that points to both personal and social transformation. It's a book for people who consider themselves Christian, who follow Jesus and want to follow Jesus, but also for people who would just like to hear a good word from Christianity.”

—Rev. Sharon Delgado

Her theological study, direct action and revelation has been part of the imperative she felt in writing The Cross in the Midst of Creation. She dug into John Wesley’s teachings of social and personal holiness, Bonhoeffer’s treatises against Nazism, and picked up the communion chalice and the cross to meet and defeat the evils in the world as she saw them. She explains, “I'm distressed and sometimes disgusted to see how the message of Jesus, who talked about a God of love and demonstrated what that would look like in community, how that message is used to create further harm to creation—and that includes our human family because we are a part of this interrelated community of life.”

Rev. Delgado is straightforward in her life and work, offering up who she is and what she sees with forthrightness and fortitude. She pushes back against cruel, empire-Christianity assertions that the earth was created for humans to selfishly plunder, then discard, saying “cruel theologies go together with cruel policies.” She reads from Chapter 4 of her new book, “if we see the natural world as intended simply for human use and consumption, we lose sight of the interrelationships with the rest of creation that make us human and deny the Spirit of God within us and within all.”

In this conversation clip from the Climate Cafe Multifaith, Rev. Sharon Delgado addresses the topic of ecocide from her new book, The Cross in the Midst of Creation.

The destruction, the ecocide, of the creation is not theoretical. Says Rev. Delgado, “what I am getting at with this issue of ecocide, of actually the killing of life, is the killing of species, the killing of ecosystems.” In Chapter 4 (page 97) she writes, “Some have used the term ecocide to characterize the current depletion of wildlife, accelerating loss of species, destruction of ecosystems that sustain a life, and advancing climate change. Since ‘in [God] we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), this ecocide takes place within God, destroying relationship and tearing apart the fabric of life.”

As a pastor myself, I find myself very much coming alongside Rev. Delgado in her concern. The truth of what is in fact manifesting as ecocide surpasses just an existential threat, but it is a Spiritual threat, a theo-cide, if you will. As we are killing our earth and each other, we are killing ‘Life’ and ‘Love’ at every juncture, extinguishing in the forest, the ocean and ourselves, our very relationship with and deep connection to the Creator, so that Jesus himself might say, “I do not know you,” (Luke 13:27).

For Rev. Delgado, reflecting on ecocide returns her to a simple memory of standing on the banks of the Feather River. Having sprinkled the last few ashes of her mother nearby, she held a stone and reflected on the millions of years of time the earth has flourished. As she mourned her mother, she mourned the catastrophic changes of the industrial age within her lifetime, the loss of species, melting icecaps, rising seas—she asks us, “What kind of action is is proportional to the challenges that we're facing?”

“My activism actually grows out of my faith. That has been the case from the beginning, and that's still what motivates me today.”

—Rev. Sharon Delgado

Image of Rev. Delgado with fellow strikers on September 25, 2019, the week of the Global Climate Strike.

The first time Rev. Delgado was arrested for civil (and faithful) disobedience was on a Good Friday, at the Nevada nuclear test site, in the mid 1970s. Since then, “I've been involved in many different actions,” says Rev. Delgado, including the Line 3 protests, the Global Climate Strike, the Poor People’s Campaign, and with the group 1000 Grandmothers for Future Generations. A trained nonviolence practitioner, she stands with and alongside others in her hometown and across the country, including at Standing Rock where she spent 4 days in jail.

It is Rev. Delgado’s deep faith and conviction that impels her to show up in truth-telling spaces, over and over again. While congregations usually support the idea of caring for creation, it is harder to motivate people to press for the deep cultural and systemic changes that are needed to effectively engage the crisis issues of our time, such as climate change. “Sometimes I find more support in my activist circles than I do in church,” Rev. Delgado explains. Yet people of faith, who read Genesis and John Chapter 1, should be the very ones who stand up for God’s creation. “We need to have a community of people who understand what's at stake and ‘why in the world’ would we be taking actions like this.”

“The only way out of this …is through facing the reality of the damage. We have to face it. We can't be in denial. We can't soft coat it. We can't wear rose colored glasses.

—Rev. Sharon Delgado

Tasmania, Australia by Matt Palmer, cropped

Congregations can be great at responding to disasters such as earthquakes and tornados. But when it comes to deeper, systemically-driven threats, there can be misunderstandings, denial, and anxiety. It’s a big conversation, and some reluctance comes from the sheer scale of it. After all, the topic concerns a global system of corporate domination, profit and excess. Says Rev. Delgado, “Often, when I talk about it in churches, it's like, ‘Whoa, that's a big order, especially right now,’ because it's never the right time.”

The catch, however, is the imperative. The climate crisis is present, real, and urgent. In theological terms, Rev. Delgado links the destruction—the lashes against the creation—as like in suffering to the lashes against Christ. “This is the passion of the Earth, the passion for life of the earth, but it's also the passion of suffering about the earth,” Rev. Delgado explains. She reads a short excerpt from her book, “This cannot be the plan or the design of the God of love, the God of creation. Creation itself is being crucified.”

Destruction of life is not God’s plan. But dealing with institutional power can feel overwhelming. “But,” says Rev. Delgado, “keep your eye on faith.” She explains, “people are at a loss and feeling so powerless and so hopeless…but, you know, there's something that happens when there's a movement of people, and it builds. That’s when the impossible becomes possible, and that's that I'm counting on.”

In this conversation clip from the Climate Cafe Multifaith, Rev. Sharon Delgado speaks to salvation, suffering, and the love of God.

“Keep your eye on faith.”

Rev. Delgado calls us out of the destruction to consider what salvation looks like in the midst of creation and the cross. “We certainly need to be saved from this, where we have ended up with all this, but,” she reads from page 95 of her book, “‘It cannot simply mean saving individual people out of this world and leaving everyone else to live on a progressively degraded earth. Surely the God who created abundant life wants it to continue and flourish. Salvation must include release from the apathy, moral confusion and hopelessness that characterize our time. It must mean personal transformation that gives us hope and equips us for loving action in the world.’ And so that's part of what I want to say about that.”

Truly, destruction is not God’s plan. We can, then, lean forward to necessary solutions with our whole heart and every hope of resurrection. Even—especially—when the going gets hard.

In this conversation clip from the Climate Cafe Multifaith, Rev. Sharon Delgado speaks to what gives her hope.

To my thinking, hope is a bridge of faith that gives you courage to face the difficult and even tragic aspects we face in our lives and communities. Hope exists in crisis, but its rising is from the seeds of every joy—our joys, God’s joys—for God is a God of love above all things. We can do the hard work we must do to meet the crises in front of us. And we can do it joyfully, with every hope in sight. I appreciated Rev. Delgado’s faithful work to bring this message, so needed, to the world is it is, as we take action on behalf of the world to come.

Says Rev. Delgado, “I think it is important to speak the truth, speak truth to power, speak truth to the people and not try and make it seem like this is going to be an easy fix, that we are going to be able to change our personal lifestyles, it's not going to be too costly, and everything's going to turn out well.” The truth is this will be hard work. Especially as we see how the issues we must grapple with are more than just that of a changing climate.

“The issues that we're struggling with, they're all related,” says Rev. Delgado. And we can meet them.

The Cross in the Midst of Creation: Following Jesus, Engaging the Powers, Transforming the World, available at Fortress Press. along with her first two books, Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization, now in a Second Edition, and Love in a Time of Climate Change: Honoring Creation, Establishing Justice.

About the Author: The Reverend Sharon Delgado is an ordained United Methodist preacher, author, and activist who has been working on climate justice and related concerns for over 30 years. Her upcoming book, The Cross in the Midst of Creation: Following Jesus, Engaging the Powers, Transforming the World, will be available in June, 2022 from Fortress Press. She blogs at sharondelgado.org.

About the book: The Cross in the Midst of Creation: Following Jesus, Engaging the Powers, Transforming the World asserts that the crucifixion is ongoing as institutional powers diminish human life and destroy creation, and that the resurrection is ongoing as faith overcomes despair and the Spirit equips people to follow Jesus in the struggle for a transformed world. This book challenges those who seek to follow Jesus to throw off despair and complacency, exposes disempowering and hate-filled teachings that claim to be Christian, and reclaims the gospel as a force for healing, empowerment, and both personal and social transformation.  

Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is here for the friendship and conversations about climate, community, and connection. She organizes the Climate Cafe Multifaith as a co-leader of Faiths4Future. Find her in real life in Southern Oregon, working as Steward of Climate with the nonprofit Circle Faith Future. This article is republished with permission from Faiths4Future. To reproduce this article elsewhere, please email Faiths4Future.