Faith asks us to believe that God’s saving activity in the Christ extends to more than only human beings and more than even animals and other living things. God’s saving activity in Christ reaches so deep that it saves creation itself – the oceans, the mountains, the soil that grows our food, the desert sands, and the earth itself. Christ came to save all of those things too, not just us, the people. Where, you might ask, does scripture teach this? Saint Paul writes in Romans, chapter 8: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” What St. Paul is saying here is that physical creation itself, the cosmic world, will, at the end of time, be transformed in some glorious way and enter into heaven, just as human beings do. He’s also saying that, like us, it too somehow senses its mortality and groans to be set free from its present limits. Science tells us that physical creation is mortal, that the sun is burning out, that energy is ever-so-slowly decreasing and that the earth as we know it will someday die. The earth is as mortal as we are and so if it’s to have a future it needs to be saved by Something or Someone from outside itself. That Something and Someone are revealed in the mystery of the incarnation within which God takes on physical flesh in Christ in order to save the world and what he came to save was not just us, the people living on this earth, but rather, “the world”, the planet itself, and everything on it. Jesus assured us that nothing is ever ultimately lost. No hair falls from someone’s head and no sparrow falls from the sky and simply disappears forever, as if it had never been. God created, loves, cares for, and ultimately resurrects every bit of creation for all eternity. [Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s “Deep Incarnation – Another Meaning of Christmas”]