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Widening Circles

  • Feb 8
  • 7 min read

Updated: Mar 9


February 8th, 2026

Final Sunday of Epiphany

Sermon Series: Noteworthy Christians - Joanna Macy


“You (plural you – y’all) are the body of Christ and parts of each other. When one part suffers, all suffer with it.” When Paul wrote this to the followers of Christ in Corinth, he was writing to a group of diverse people. If we think we disagree on things today, let me tell you, they had less in common in Corinth than we’ll ever have in American churches. Paul had the great task of unifying the many into one – the lifelong Jews who knew the Torah by heart, the Gentiles who didn’t even know what the Torah was, the slaves and prisoners that had recently been liberated, males and females in a male dominated culture. This community couldn’t have been more opposite and yet they were called to be ONE body led by Christ.


We know they must have figured it out or we wouldn’t be here today as their descendants, but man do we still struggle to be unified. Like the first Christians, we still struggle to be one body of Christ. And we wrestle with the question of whether or not this body is only made up of believers, or if it includes the rest of the world, or even more so whether or not it includes non-human life; the created world, which scripture often depicts as also being created and loved by God, even as praising God and standing in awe of the Lord. How far can we widen our circles?


The woman I want to introduce you to today is Joanna Macy. Joanna was born and raised a Congregationalist, one of our predecessor churches. Her grandfather and generations of men before him were all Congregationalist preachers. While she did not follow in their footsteps, she went to college to get a degree in Biblical history and Theology, however this is where she lost her faith. This is where she decided she could not follow man-made creeds that were exclusionary. She still felt spiritual, but could not fall in line with what she felt were restrictions on an expansive God.


Joanna then went to France for a graduate degree in political science before marrying Francis Macy and moving to Munich, Germany. In an interview for ‘On Being,’ she recalls how this was where she walked into a bookstore, picked up a copy of Rilke’s ‘Book of Hours’ and with one poem, everything changed. The poem reads –


“I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I have been circling around God, that primordial tower.

I’ve been circling for thousands of years

and still I don’t know:

Am I a falcon,

a storm,

or a great song?”


Joanna recalled, “something immediately rearranged in the furniture of my mind. I identified completely with it, and I saw — it’s just eight lines in that poem — that it could redefine that I was on a spiritual path; that because I wasn’t on the linear road up the ladder, up Jacob’s ladder to get closer to God, that God had been there all the time, and I was orbiting around him, and that it had been happening, actually, for thousands of years.”


The trajectory of Joanna’s life from this point on could be summed up in that phrase, “I live my life in widening circles.” While her path led her closer to Buddhism, her roots remained in the same God we speak of today. She left behind the exclusionary barriers of institutional religion and dedicated her life to widening circles - widening hearts to full, complete inclusion. Like Paul, she challenged people to become aware that ALL things are connected, are ONE. While Paul called this unit the one body of Christ, Joanna spoke of the one web of life, the interconnectedness of all things. She is now known for this body of work that she left behind, rightfully named ‘The Work That Reconnects.’


If we have any hope of a future, we must find a path back to one another. We must acknowledge our interconnectedness and recognize that when one part suffers, ALL suffer with it. I know this can be hard enough to imagine within humanity, but Joanna was passionate about widening our understanding to include all the Earth. Did you know that if we were to let the ants die out the Earth would experience a catastrophic collapse? Furthermore, trees and plant life produce half the oxygen we breathe, while the other half comes from algae and tiny organisms in the ocean! When we spill massive amounts of oil in the ocean.. when we decimate the forests.. when we kill off the coral reefs.. we are cutting off our own legs. We are puncturing our own lungs. We are all ONE body and when one part suffers, all suffer with it.


Joanna made these connections and is one of the first eco-theologists the world’s been graced with, but she wasn’t just a prophet, calling out the injustices we inflict on one another and the Earth – she was an activist and visionary. She began ‘the works that reconnects’ as small group work ‘designed to foster the desire and ability to take part in the healing of our world.’ She spent her life, all the way up into her 90s, helping people around the globe find solidarity and courage to act despite rapidly worsening social and ecological conditions.


She recognized and amplified that we are all free to choose which version of reality, which story of the world, we value and want to serve. The Work That Reconnects was her way of offering people the choice to serve the creation of a life-sustaining society. She, like all of us, felt the destruction of the industrial world crumbling all around her, but instead of giving in to the anxiety of the ‘end times,’ she chose to foster an imagination of how we might rebuild a world that actually centers LIFE, abundant life for all things.. which sounds an awful lot to me like our desire for the kin-dom of God, on earth as it is in heaven.

        

She did not give in to the critics who brushed her off as utopian thinking. She was very aware that we are living in interesting times, times of change, of death and rebirth, which she called the “Great Turning” — a transition from a society shaped primarily by industrial growth to a society structured to be life-sustaining. She, in many ways, in my mind, continues the work of Christ himself – pointing out that the death-wielding structures of empire are not working and embodying for all to see a new way of being. A new life in Christ means leading a life where love is at the center – unconditional, non-exclusionary love, for humans and non-humans alike. This in itself would reorder, would reshape our world.

        

I believe this commitment to the ONE web of life she calls us into is why she loved Rilke so deeply. Rilke used images from the natural world to depict the mystery, beauty and relationship that is sacred to all life. Rilke wrote of God, “We must not portray you in king’s robes, / you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.. You are like a web.. you are like a tree.. you are a forest through which I run.. you are a herd of luminous deer, and I am forest and dark and you run through me.”

        

Joanna’s witness to the atomic bomb, the Three Mile Island catastrophe and then Chernobyl contributed to the deep despair she had to feel and to weep for the Earth and all of us who rely on it for life. She calls this dance with despair a force of great transformation within her life that she says taught her, “we are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear and that if we can be fearless to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn’t stay static. It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it. But when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face. And the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.”

        

We are all, in one form or another, in a stage of grief. All of us are holding onto one pain or another. Joanna here puts words to what I believe God does in transforming our pain into love. So many of us today are crying out to God - whether it’s personal devastation or whether we widen our circles to encompass the suffering of the other parts of the body/web of life. Joanna wisely said, “The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present. And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up; that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world, because it will not be healed without that. That was what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.” 

        

We can contribute, in fact we are called to contribute, to the healing of this world, to the building up of God’s kin-dom. It’s been said that this will only happen by convincing all humanity to verbally accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. We know, however, that this will only happen when all of humanity can look upon one another as kin, regardless of the creed they follow, and acknowledge that when one suffers, all suffer. This will only happen when we too live by ever widening circles. Amen.



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