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| The Creation of the World, Fernand Leger, 1923 |
Start:Stop at St Stephen Walbrook offers busy commuters in the City of London the chance to start their day by stopping to pray and reflect for ten minutes. This is my reflection for Tuesday 25th February 2020 - Shrove Tuesday. Good morning and welcome to Start:Stop. In many Eucharistic liturgies it is common to say together a ‘memorial acclamation’; “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.” The season of Lent, which begins tomorrow, is a time when we are particularly encouraged to pause in the space after that second comma; to consider how we have filled this in-between-time after Christ’s resurrection and before His second coming.
This year the Archbishops of Canterbury and York are encouraging us to spend Lent reflecting on our relationship with the planet and God’s plea for us to Care for Creation. Our reading today is taken from the story of Creation in Genesis, Chapter 1;
Bible Reading - Genesis 1.26-31
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “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.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Reflection
It is said; “If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you won’t know where you are going.” This Lent we are being asked by the Archbishops to inhabit that wisdom. As we look forward to Easter, when we celebrate God’s saving work through Christ’s death and resurrection, we are also asked to look back to the beginning – to Creation.
In ‘Saying Yes to Life’ – the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book for 2020, Ruth Valerio, who has spent her career calling on the world to care for Creation, begins by reminding us of the radical message of Genesis; taking us back to the context in which these words were written – a time when the Israelites were living in exile (or captivity) in Babylon. In those days, the prevailing creation narrative was one which saw the universe formed as a result of the misdeeds of a pantheon of warring Gods – with human beings created almost by accident, from the blood of a defeated deity and enslaved to perform tasks for the triumphant God, Marduk.
In this context, how radical our creation story seems – describing a “good” God, who reigns supreme and has created a “very good” world, making human beings to work with him in caring for it and one another not as his slaves, but as his friends.
“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”
Looking back to those words in Genesis, what better reason could there be for us to spend these ‘in-between-times’ in which we live, caring for the world around us?
But not everyone – many Christians included - shares that view.
Some see the here-and-now as the filling of a sort of biblical sandwich made of holy bread, where, ever since the fall of man we have been stuck in the brown stuff in the middle. Our only hope of getting out of the doo-doo is to be saved, through our faith in Christ, thus gain a place on the top slice - the new creation. For the faithful, there’s no point worrying about climate change, habitat depletion or plastic pollution because we’re going to be lifted up to new life before the world burns – and in any case, as we’ve just read – God gives us ‘dominion’ over his creation – so why not make brass from all this muck while we’re here?
Not a perspective that sits comfortably with me – or Ruth Valerio – who draws on texts from Isaiah and the Book of Revelation to suggest that the ‘new’ creation we anticipate is not brand-new, but a transformed creation – transformed from the here and now. Whilst careful to point out that the Bible is full of reasons why we should care for Creation, no matter what our perspective on the newness of the life to come - every action we take to look after this world shows our wish to live in anticipation of the future that Jesus’ death on the cross guarantees. We need to use the muck of our fallen world as fertiliser – for growth.
Indeed, Ruth Valerio sees human beings as the gardeners or stewards of God’s creation – and explains that being granted dominion over other creatures by God does not imply some sort of divine endorsement of ecological abuse; dominion is in itself a neutral term, as the American Rabbi David Sears has written “the divine mandate for man to dominate the natural world is a sacred trust, not a carte-blanche for destructiveness.” Our role as gardeners or stewards is, according to Old Testament Scholar Chris Wright, the reason that God created our species alone in his own image.
Remembering God’s love for all His creation and encouraging us to put our faith into action, Ruth Valerio describes how she would feel if a tapestry – a family heirloom that she cherishes - was used as a doormat – and asks us to consider what we love and how we would feel if it was abused.
According to tradition, today, Shrove Tuesday, is a time for confession of sins; both those things we have left undone as well as those things which we ought not to have done. I must confess to abusing our planet. Two years ago when I moved into my flat, I tried to switch to a green energy supplier, but put off by the bureaucracy involved in getting my landlord to sort out the complicated electrics in my building, I gave up. Since then I have generated 3 tonnes of CO2 each year through my use of heat, light and power. In the past twelve months I have flown over 25,000 air miles that, depending on which website I use for the calculation, generated up to 5 tonnes of CO2.
That’s eight tonnes of CO2 generated by me in one year – which according to some scientists will have melted up to 24 square metres of arctic ice – and that’s not counting the impact of all the plastic I have thrown away or the effect on the ecology of the planet as a result of my diet as possibly the world’s largest consumer of beef sausages.
What have I done to redress this balance? Started using cotton instead of plastic bags and buying an aluminium water bottle. That is all! I will probably go home tonight and make pancakes with eggs cooked from battery hens, milk from cows responsible for increased water use and methane generation and flour produced by one of the worlds top five grain producers who between them are responsible for considerable habitat depletion through intensive farming methods.
I am abusing our planet by the lifestyle choices I make. In confessing to this abuse I ask for God’s forgiveness and the strength and courage to change – to grow to become a better steward of His creation.
This Lent, the Church of England, which has just committed to become Carbon Neutral by 2030, is offering advice on how we can change our lifestyle to better care for Creation, with daily email reflections and booklets for adults and children. If your lifestyle is anything like mine, perhaps you might consider signing up too.
A few moments of silence before we pray.
Prayers
In our prayers the response to : Creator God, you made us in your image is : Help us to love the earth as you love us;
Creator God, you made us in your image
Help us to love the earth as you love us
God of Life,
Open our eyes to the marvels of your handiwork;
the diversity of species, the intricate cycles which bind us all into relationship with you.
You value every element of your creation;
You made the whole world and saw that it was very good.
Creator God, you made us in your image
Help us to love the earth as you love us
Lord, in the beginning you gave us your blessing and commanded us to be stewards of your creation;
But we confess that we are abusing it;
Damaging the climate;
Destroying habitats and
Polluting the world with plastic
Creator God, you made us in your image
Help us to love the earth as you love us
God our Saviour,
Whose son Jesus Christ died and rose again to restore your relationship with us,
Help us to turn away from our selfish consumption and live in harmony with the earth;
So that we might grow to become effective gardeners of your new creation.
Creator God, you made us in your image
Help us to love the earth as you love us
Blessing
And may the blessing of God the Creator,
Christ the Redeemer
and the Spirit, the Sustainer of all
be with us, and with all life on earth,
now and always.
Christ the Redeemer
and the Spirit, the Sustainer of all
be with us, and with all life on earth,
now and always.
Amen
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