It’s exciting to see the ELCA’s encouragement to observe the Feast of Creation in Christ this year! While every Sunday is an opportunity to explore the common lectionary texts through the lens of Creation and creation care—as this Peaching Roundtable affirms—holding a particular observance like this that is liturgically supported by the whole church has the potential to elevate the topic anew for congregational reflection and action.

Before going further, please read the two excellent essays by Ben Stewart published in Sundays and Seasons by Augsburg Fortress for Creation in Christ Sunday. One is a preaching commentary on these very texts (!), on the Preaching page. The other, “Joining the Cosmic Choir: An Introduction to a Liturgical Festival of Creation,” on the Day’s Resources page, offers a helpful overview of the observance, from its Byzantine roots to ecumenical efforts in more recent years, and, being close to the autumnal equinox, flexibility for congregations to consider timing their service between September 1 and the October 4 commemoration of Francis of Assisi. For preachers and congregations, Ben notes that the festival seeks to balance three main emphases: “God the creator, creation itself, and creation’s current need for healing.” One way to approach this festival and these texts is through each of these emphases.

God the Creator. There are contrasts in what these texts say about God that may be worth exploring and influence the choice of Genesis 1 or 2. In one, God speaks and things come into being—light, sky, waters, land, plants, birds, animals, humans. John connects with this Word that is co-eternal with God “in the beginning,” the Word through whom all things were and are made. There is rhythm to this God who brings order out of “complete chaos” (NRSVue), who pronounces all creation “good,” who creates humankind in God’s image. The older creation story in Genesis 2 seems to take place in one day and includes a brief reference to God who “made the earth and the heavens,” but focuses on an anthropomorphic Creator who forms the human being from humus, like a potter with clay, who declares something that is “not good” (that the human should be alone), and who forms and brings animals to the human to participate in naming them.

There are echoes of both creation stories in James Weldon Johnson’s wonderful poem, “The Creation,” which has beautiful cadence, action, and imagery. Consider reading it aloud in worship. A couple of brief excerpts from the poem’s beginning and end:

And God stepped out on space,

And He looked around and said,

"I'm lonely —

I'll make me a world."

            . . .

Up from the bed of the river

God scooped the clay;

And by the bank of the river

He kneeled Him down;

And there the great God Almighty

Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,

Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,

Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;

This Great God,

Like a mammy bending over her baby,

Kneeled down in the dust

Toiling over a lump of clay

Till He shaped it in His own image;

Then into it He blew the breath of life,

And man became a living soul.

Amen. Amen.

Notice here how God is the one who is “lonely.” Notice the female and infant imagery. Notice the contrast of the “great God Almighty” who made the heavens, who is bending and kneeling and toiling. What do these contrasting images say to us about the character of God in relation to us and the rest of creation? For Paul, speaking in Acts, the transcendent God who can seem beyond our reach is actually deeply immanent and involved in our lives, allotting times for our lifespans and the “boundaries of our habitations,” and “indeed is not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’” Panentheistic is a way to describe it—all creation is in God, though God is also beyond creation. In a world that is all but desacralized by extractive mindsets, what in the life of the preacher or parishioner might connect to that nearness of God’s presence permeating all that is?

            Creation itself. While these texts do highlight the creation of humanity, this feast day is an opportunity to counter our anthropocentrism and emphasize the goodness and value of other phenomena of Creation apart from their usefulness (or not) to human beings. In Genesis 1, much is created during the first handful of days before human beings, and we don’t have a creation day unto ourselves but share it with animals! Psalm 148 illustrates myriad components of creation praising the Lord—sun, moon, and shining stars; waters and sea monsters, fire and hail, snow and fog, tempestuous wind, mountains and hills, fruit trees and cedars, wild beasts and cattle, creeping things and flying birds, sovereigns and all peoples, young men and maidens, old and young together. Echoing Genesis 1, it represents an exhaustive list, again with human beings at the end—included within creation but not the main emphasis. Ben astutely suggests, “It could be that the most significant ecotheological challenge to the dominant cultures of North America isn’t first of all ethical, political, doctrinal, or economic but, rather, a matter of liturgical perception: that we humans – like latecomers to a cosmic choir rehearsal—have been called to join the unending hymn of all creation that began long before humans existed.” In scripture, nature is an active subject, praising God, shouting and clapping and teaching. It not simply an object. Neither is it a stage on which human salvation is carried out. Rather, Creation itself groaningly longs for and is a recipient of God’s redemption (Romans 8, Colossians 1).

            Creation’s need for healing. Preachers need not look far to find current illustrations of creation’s need for healing, from climate change and record heat waves to fires and droughts, from extreme weather events to biodiversity loss and species depletion. What these texts provide are biblical foundations for our role as human beings in this crucial time. Genesis 2 could not be clearer, that the first vocation of the human being whom the Lord God placed in the garden is to “till it and keep it.” I like to remember that word “keep” is the same in the Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6, that the way the Lord would bless and “keep” us would inform how we would also keep the earth. “Serve and preserve” is another helpful translation that adds more meaning to our role. Genesis 1 contains the immensely significant concept of humanity being created in God’s image, and in the same place the problematic term “dominion.”

In a 1972 Environmental Journal essay, Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler challenged the way the term has been understood to mean human domination and control.

This verse has been generally interpreted to mean that superior, arrogant, general-manager man was meant by the Creator to strut around the creation with his hat on – his extracting, refining, fabricating, gargantuanly consuming appetite running at insatiable top speed. That interpretation belies both the love of God for the infinite variety of the natural world he [sic] has made and the meaning of the tenderness with which the Scripture speaks. … In the Semitic language the verb "to have dominion over" means something quite different from what has been thought when translating from Hebrew into Latin, which was one of the earlier translations of the Bible. The proper translation would be "to exercise tender care for"—almost 180 degrees shift in meaning.

I have found agency a helpful term when preaching on this text, a word that recognizes human capacity to act. It recognizes that some humans have not enough agency for self-determination and others have far too much agency that, through self-serving policies, is detrimental to the wellbeing of our common home. What would it mean for humans to exercise agency in the image and likeness of God, for the good of all Creation?

Sittler says the environmental crisis presents preachers with two temptations that continue to have relevance. “The first temptation is to make a preaching gimmick out of depletion, pollution, and over-population and to hope, by supplying the waning influence of pulpit rhetoric with the juicy and dramatic data of catastrophe, to recover the power of the sermon.” “Disturbing the complacent” is one thing, but he warns against “beating people over the head.” The second temptation “is simply to add the environmental crisis to the already overloaded agenda of moral imperatives that confronts our generation; that is, to moralize the issue.” Religious leadership in a time of environmental crisis requires more than just discerning what we should do:

The environmental problem is, on the surface, a matter of cans and bottles and dirty air and polluted water. But under the surface, the problem is a matter of deep and damning idolatry. Martin Luther said, "That in which you really trust, in life and in death—that is your God!" What our gods really are is disclosed to us in the things we want most, feel we cannot do without—infinite growth, more and more things, a disposable Kleenex culture, a consumer's heaven.

In other words, religious leadership is about helping people to discover or recover a right relationship with God, others and the rest of Creation. It is about leading others in postures of repentance, (re)orientation, and (re)conversion to God and neighbor, including the earth, sea, and all their creatures. Hence Sittler’s correction of the usual understanding of “dominion,” and another part of the essay in which he challenges the false assumption of human “independence” from the rest of Creation.

Unpacking, wrestling with, and celebrating this deep relationality is at the heart of this Feast of Creation in Christ. That relationality can be observed molecularly and exegetically, that we humans are created from the dust of the earth and therefore connected materially to it all. It can be observed sacramentally, that God’s presence is in, with, and under not only the elements of the Eucharist but also, as Luther says, all creation: “Therefore, indeed, he must be present in every single creature in its innermost and outermost being, on all sides, through and through, below and above, before and behind, so that nothing can be more truly present and within all creatures than God himself with his power” (LW 37:58). It can also be observed salvific-ally, that “in Christ” and through Christ all things are created, are not alone in their suffering, and share in God’s promise of renewal.