Today marks a wonderful moment: For the first time in my lifetime (and longer even than that!), all the major Christian communions of the world, as well as the governing bodies that oversee the Revised Common Lectionary used by many for Sunday worship, have agreed to add a brand new day to the Christian calendar: The Feast of Creation in Christ, or simply Creation Day, observed on September 1. (A website dedicated to this new feast day can be found here.)
So let’s be clear: for the world’s various Christian communions to agree on changing our shared calendar, the need must be urgent and clear, and it is. Earth is literally on fire, rivers are drying up, crops are failing, food shortages are predicted, and the rate of species extinction is currently at least 10 times the rate it ought otherwise be in the natural course of evolutionary events.
The annual Season of Creation—now observed from September 1 through October 4 (St. Francis’ Day) is not some trendy fad for sentimental nature lovers (though, honestly, why is “sentiment” always such a target for revulsion?). To the contrary, devoting a five-week liturgical season to the celebration of, care for, and commitment to the wider world of God’s creation has roots that run deep into biblical texts, historical traditions, and the inner logic of doctrinal development. (For a treasure trove of international and ecumenical resources for the Season of Creation, go here.)
All of that to say, I love the name of this new feast day: Jesus did not just do a divine “drive-by,” stepping foot for a short while on Earth and then leaping back into Heaven. The “deep incarnation” goes all the way down, as it were, joining everything created to all things divine, all the way to the sub-atomic level and deeper still. Creation is fully in Christ, from the beginning and for all time—and this wonderful new Feast Day in many ways restores and returns Earth to Heaven, as ancient Christian witness embraced.
In an ideal world, of course, it is certainly true that the whole liturgical year, from Advent and Christmas to Lent and Easter, ought to focus our attention on the divine presence throughout the material universe—a posture our Eastern Orthodox siblings would describe as “world-as-sacrament”—but the painful reality of the modern Western world is tragically the opposite. As sociologist Max Weber warned more than a century ago, the Protestant Reformation has mostly “evacuated” God from Earth, creating the conditions for exploiting this planet as merely a warehouse of stuff for us to use; Weber was sadly prescient.
The modern Christian world is dominated by a corrosive and destructive posture, the notion that Christian faith is a kind of religious escape hatch from Earth to some disembodied place called Heaven. The Season of Creation can help heal that gaping wound in our collective Christian body. In my wonderful parish along the “art coast” of Michigan, observing the Season of Creation has become nearly as important to us as Christmas and Easter! Such prominence seems more than appropriate: the incarnation of God’s creative Word in Jesus of Nazareth, together with his death and rising to new life, point us toward the divine renewal of the whole creation itself. Matter matters in all that we do as God’s people, both individually and collectively, rendering the whole world of God’s creation an epiphany, not only of God’s unfathomable creativity but also of the very presence of Divine Wisdom embedded in every aspect of God’s creative work—including though not supremely in human life and communities.
Moreover, given the shocking degradation of Earth’s ecosystems and the global crisis of climate chaos, as well as the heartbreaking onset of a mass extinction event currently underway, Christian communities must, as a matter of spiritual obligation, mobilize and act on behalf of the intricately networked systems of life on Earth, not only for the sake of humanity’s future, but also to respect the dignity of all forms of life now.
The rich ecumenical and international resources that have been developed for this season over the last twenty-five years extend a compelling invitation to pray and worship, as well as to learn and grow in ways that both renew longstanding commitments and inspire the Church to adopt fresh and innovative approaches to faithful living as Christian communities. The themes, texts, and traditions that have emerged in association with this season lend themselves especially well to a robust liturgical embrace of our commitment to an “intersectional faith.” I’m so proud of All Saints’ Parish as we continue to live more intentionally at the “intersections” of a multilayered conviction: categories of race and ethnicity always intertwine with sexuality and gender, informing our biblical desire to promote a fruitful peace with social and economic justice.
Precisely because of our intersectional posture, All Saints’ Parish also observes both Black History Month (February) and LGBTQ Pride Month (June) with liturgical and formational devotion equal to every other season. The Season of Creation in September thus becomes an occasion to appreciate and incorporate more fully in our life together the fruits of those overlapping observances. The richness of God’s creation—and the verdant grace of the Divine Presence in creation itself—only deepens when we reflect and act for the sake of racial justice and when sexually gendered inclusion is woven into the urgent call to attend carefully to ecological healing and renewal.
Steven Charleston—member of the Choctaw nation and bishop in The Episcopal Church—recently posted about these matters by quoting from one of his own books about one of his many powerful visions:
Last night they came again, the spirits of earth and sky, of wind and rain, of deep seas and tall mountains. In all shapes and sizes they came, from every tribe and nation: the deer and the elk, the bear and the wolf, broad-winged eagles and crows as black as night. They all came and stood in a solemn circle beneath the one-eyed moon and spoke with a single voice this message from the sacred: “Do not doubt what you see: the world is warming, the waters are rising, and the winds are coming stronger than before. Do not turn away, do not pretend not to see, but speak the truth and set the spirits free to heal the world, before the ice has gone, before the last tiger falls, before only the desert remembers the ones who once walked this land.”
Prayerful urgency is required of us all, an urgency that was adopted by the 2022 General Convention concerning the dire condition of this precious planet. In the words of that convention’s resolution: climate change is “an all-encompassing social crisis and moral emergency that impacts and interconnects every aspect of pastoral concern including health, poverty, employment, racism, social justice, and family life and that can only be addressed by a Great Work involving every sector of society, including the Church.”
A crisis that impacts “every aspect of pastoral concern”—observing the Season of Creation as a community of faith seems to me the very least we can and should be doing in the midst of a planetary emergency. Email me, and I’m happy to share the resources we have developed here at All Saints’ Parish. You can also find wonderful resources developed for The Episcopal Church on this website.
Meanwhile, may Creator God, through the Incarnate Word in Beloved Jesus, and with the healing and animating breath of the Abiding Spirit of Love bless us in our shared endeavors for this “fragile earth, our island home.”
