Who cares about Creation Care? - Rev Allister Lane
READINGS: GENESIS 2:15-49 AND ISAIAH 65:19-24
How do you feel when you hear we have a sermon about ‘Creation Care’?
I suspect there are few sermons these days with stronger tones of moralism than a sermon on Creation Care. You’ll be relieved I’m not going to use this sermon time to preach about the need to curb global warming and the importance of recycling. You know all that.
And it’s not inspiring to be told what to do – you ought to do better. Trying harder is not at the heart of the Gospel – which is (at its heart) about God’s grace.
A sermon about ‘trying harder to care for creation’ is also unlikely to shift us out of our collective denial and political paralysis.
Instead, to approach the important issue of creation care, I want to talk about a vision of human work – of vocation.
I will offer a vision of vocation; what activity gives us true purpose
Some mistaken understandings of vocation that harm creation
And how the Gospel calls us into a vocation shared with God, on behalf of creation.
The word ‘vocation’ is associated with our work. And I hope you also have a sense that ‘vocation’ evokes the sense of ‘purpose’ and ‘meaning’ of work. Work that is not just toil; not drudgery.
We hear in the reading from Isaiah the vision of building and planting; work that is not seen as struggle and frustration, but satisfying and fulfilling. It’s a vision reminiscent of Genesis, with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Genesis story gives us a foundation of purpose in human activity God-given fulfilment in our work.
The Pressie preacher Timothy Keller offers an image for human work that gives us a vision for our vocation: gardening. Gardening is taking materials and working them to be fruitful. This can (of course) be literal gardening, but ‘taking materials and working them to be fruitful’ is true for all sorts of work:
farming
construction
cleaning
cooking
medicine
…even banking and investment.
So here we have a vision for our vocation: taking materials and working them to be fruitful. But we mistake our vocation if we treat creation as a machine.
The metaphor of creation as a machine has led to regrettable failures in creation care. Colin Gunton describes this mistake:
If we cease to see the world as God’s creation, we shall treat it not as a project in which we are invited to share, but as an absolute possession to be exploited as we will. (p155, Cambridge Companion to Christian Theology)
A second way we can misunderstand our vocation is when we work only to serve ourselves. If you locate yourself at the centre of the universe and view yourself as the ruler (instead of God the Creator), then you will feel entitled to serve yourself as the rightful beneficiary of all that the creation has to offer.
The persistent exploitation, careless abuse and greedy consumption of the earth’s precious resources are all manifestations of this misunderstanding of our vocation. The neglect to care for creation results from rebellion against God and God’s purposes for all creation.
Do you remember the story in the Bible of the building of the Tower of Babel…?The people said:
Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens (v4)
Why did the people want to build the tower? They said:
let us make a name for ourselves
It wasn’t for Gods glory; not out of generosity; not to serve others. They misunderstood their vocation; the purpose of their work.
How do you do YOUR work? Are you doing it for God’s – or your own – glory? Are you doing it to serve others? Are you doing it to improve people’s well-being and that of the community?
Maybe we need to reclaim our true sense of vocation…? How do we live in harmony with creation and God’s purposes for it all? If we are going to move past the denial and paralysis for caring for creation, we need to reclaim the narrative of relationship.
God creates with love and generosity of being in relationship... isn’t this our calling also?
Think about the naming of creatures by Adam (in our reading today). This highlights the distinctively human vocation of using language to speak of God’s gifts and celebrate them.
Living like this recognises and deepens the relationship with creation. This ‘work’ is characterised by its acknowledgement of God’s generosity, and echoes God’s generosity in the process.
This vocation is ‘liturgical’ in that we express how material things are clothed with sacred meaning and we present the world to God as a prayer. It expresses the God-related destiny of the world; that purpose toward which all things are moving, where they will be seen to clearly bear God’s glory and love.
One sign of human sin is the refusal to recognise the nature of our relationship with creation; the refusal to work liturgically within creation – to refuse to bless, give thanks and care for creation. When we dominate and absorb things around us, we fail to treat them as a gift.
The Good News is that our refusal to act liturgically and fulfil our responsibility to bless and give thanks for creation is judged and reversed by the act of Jesus. His self-giving through his incarnate identity as a sacrificial gift to the Father, is the completeness of a human response in harmony with God’s purposes.
The Good News of the Gospel is that brokenness is transformed into beauty.
Jesus leads us through self-giving death and resurrection, to heal the separation of sin, bringing us into full relationship with God, with one another, AND with all creation!
Jesus, the Lord of all creation, served US. And he calls us into the vocation of serving – this call is to all of us! By serving (as a response of generosity), we experience true relationship - with God, each other and all creation.
Can you see how such a response of serving is an act of worship? In our worship of God, we put the relationship at the centre: it is participation in the very life of God, who is Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.
And thus our vocation is to participate in serving the world to become itself through the realisation of its purpose (destiny) through Jesus Christ, the mediator of both creation and redemption.
Can you see how creation care doesn’t need to be about ‘trying harder’, but living with a sense of true vocation? By living and working in relationship – knowing we are served and we are able to respond by serving; taking materials and working them to be fruitful; speaking about God’s gifts and celebrating them.
“Our job is to take all the raw materials that are spread out in front of us, to work it, to take care of it, to rule,…to wrestle, to fight, to explore, and to take the creation project forward as an act of service and worship to the God who made us.”
(Quote from Garden City)
More about ‘looking forward’ next week… as we conclude this series on Creation by understanding the meaning for our lives of Apocalypse.