Creation Sunday: Master, Steward, Friend

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 55:10-13, Romans 8:18-25, Matthew 6:25-end

If you google “evil vicar” you will likely find a sketch by comedians Mitchell and Webb, which is uncomfortably amusing. A ‘not particularly religious’ but ‘spiritual’ Olivia Coleman drops into a church, which she’s heard has become much more inclusive and open minded, hoping to talk about “stuff” with the nice friendly lady vicar who wears a colourful jumper. The vicar she meets tells her he cares nothing for her internet assembled philosophy and the friendly lady vicar has been banished to Daventry. He then tells her that he’s back with all the incredibly twisted people who are still unaccountably vicars, standing with 2000 years of darkness, bafflement and hunger behind them, diligently harvesting the souls of a million peasants. As is evident in the comments left below the video, it’s hard to know whose side you should be on.

I’m reminded of this because Services of Thanksgiving for creation, pet blessings and the like all seem a little Vicar of Dibley. Though I should confess, that I myself have only seen 2 episodes – at the insistence of my wife. One of which was because she’s convinced we should do a Nativity Play involving taking a donkey up Putney Park Lane. 

But there’s a new scent in the air.  A little touch of sulphur to the traditional English thatched delight of the pet blessing. The more apocalyptic side of climate change – though a little way from the sleepy hamlet of Putney– makes creationtide more like Advent than Harvest. And if we are not to write off the international protest this weekend as eccentrics, students and hippies, then we face some troubling questions as Christians.

Like many areas of Christian theology, attitude to creation have shifted dramatically in the last century. For most of history, there has been the understandable view that we are to dominate nature. It is our God given resource, bequeathed in the first chapter of the Bible to Adam: ‘‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’ And in the second account of creation man names all the animals, which must have been very useful for Noah as he checked them all into the ark.

Dominate and control.

In early civilisation, nature is the enemy. Physically there are enough threats, from disease through poison to the charging hippo. And nature is always threatening to encroach back on agriculture, and of course until fairly recently all of Britain was a forest, and we all know from the fairy tales what happens when you go into the forest.

I had such a moment in Australia. I’d chosen to climb a mountain in Queensland in the bush on my own, as I couldn’t afford the SCUBA course my friend went on.  Only it took me a while to drive out and I didn’t start hiking till the afternoon. I was moving quickly though and thought I’d get to the top before dark. Shortly after starting, though, I also had the slightly uncomfortable experience of leeches. They were dropping from the trees alongside the constant rain. Because it was hot I was just wearing shorts and boots so I was soon covered in the little critters. Not knowing better I tore off the leeches and continued merrily on my way. Only leeches have this anticoagulant thing – which stops your blood clotting, and when you rip off a leech you leave part of the leech in you, and a steady trail of blood.

In short, by dusk I was halfway up a mountain, wet through, covered in blood and leeches and by this time the path had disappeared and I was following a splash of paint left every 30m up a steep slope. Frustrated, I put up my tent on a ridiculous slope across tree-roots and definitely not water-tight. Leaving everything behind, I decided to run up a couple of 100m to at least get to the top. A truly ghastly mistake. 10 minutes later I found myself above the tree line in a howling gale in darkness without a torch or any clothing. I did panic a bit, and slid down the slope back the way I came.

It may have been a miracle or blind luck but 5 minutes down I happened to look to the side and there 20m away was my tent. Predictably in the dark I’d come off the trail and not noticed and it was only a shaft of light glancing off the top of the tent which prevented me getting entirely lost in the bush. I passed a terrifying night, soaking, covered in leeches, huddled, waiting for morning.

But there’s nothing quite like waking up in a rainforest. The light made the most stunning patchwork of beams as it was filtered through the canopy. I was so inspired I decided to climb back up and realised I wasn’t even nearly at the top, which took the better part of the next day. But apart from the itching of the leeches – it turns out you need to burn off leeches – it was a glorious day.

I indulge in that story because we have mostly seen nature as dangerous and chaotic – needing to be controlled, like the queue of people ascending Everest, and so sought divine approval to dominate it. And, psychologically, nature can present us with great fear. The fear of anarchy and meaninglessness, and of vulnerability. Life without reason or control, where our stories, our thoughts, everything that civilisation has made stands for nothing; opera, even a Gesamtkunstwerk – it turns out – means nothing to greyhounds and houseplants.

More recently, Genesis has been re-read as a command for us to be good stewards of nature. We have these resources but also the responsibility to look after and manage them. Now that theology is read as colonial, and inadequate to describe the history of our exploitation or to rectify the gathering crisis.

But there has also long been within Christianity a significant thread which sought to approach creation with greater humility and saw in it a good, entirely independent of the uses and enjoyment humanity made of it. Famously the Franciscans for the last thousand years have seen all nature as our brothers and sisters, and our last hymn today uses his words to describe all nature praising God. 

And as each of the readings today show, and even from Genesis where God declares his creation good before man is even on the scene, the natural world is also concerned with glorifying God. Isaiah envisaging the mountains, the hills the trees praising God; Paul describing ‘the whole creation’ as longing for God – and you might note, it’s the whole of creation that will be ‘set free from decay’ and ‘obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’. While in the Gospel Jesus points to how God feeds the birds and clothes the flowers – that his concern is not only with man.

Unfortunately, the Middle East was very hostile to dogs and there is only one passage in the whole bible that speaks well of them: as one of the three things that ‘go well, are comely in going’ the lion, the he-goat and, you’ll be pleased to hear, the noble greyhound. But in any case, as Scripture makes clear, it is the purpose and future of all creation to worship its creation, and dogs, who embody the virtues of loyalty, discipline and fidelity will be far to the front of God’s more independently-minded animals. (Mentioning no names.)

I suppose the issue that should most concern us today is nature’s attitude to us. For we might well have moved from a theology of dominance, to stewardship, to friendship, but it seems to me that nature may well be moving in the other direction. Certainly, it is to nature that we have evolved as sentient life, able to understand and reflect on our place in the world. Creation has welcomed us as part of its family to this esteemed high place. And yet it seems more and more that nature has had to manage, to steward, this species that has got out of hand.

And it may just be that the scientists and theologians are speaking with one voice when they look to the time where creation is groaning, as it looks to set itself free; that the sufferings of the present time are only to increase and that we are yet in the time of the thorn and the brier;  as nature reasserts itself, and restores its dominance over us, as the son whose vaulting ambition has overleaped itself. But, as Jesus insists, we should not be anxious about tomorrow for today’s trouble is enough for today. Only for our world, and for the poor who are most at risk, it is today that we must act if we are not to imperil forever the world of tomorrow. 

But today we are also celebrating a baptism. Nothing draws us back to our animality like children. And nothing reminds us of our responsibility to the future like children. So as we give thanks for creation and welcome these children into the church, we work for and pray that the world they are growing into will continue to welcome us; and that we discover more and more the friendship that should exist between God and all his creatures.