Christ in creation – a new festival
READING: John 1.1–14
With All Creation We Proclaim Your Praise
I wonder when you last really listened to creation – to the natural sounds of the earth
Perhaps it was birdsong early in the morning, before the traffic began. The wind moving through trees. Maybe it was huge waves breaking onto the shore line . Rain against a window. Or perhaps it was simply standing somewhere and becoming aware that the world around you was alive.
Hold that time in your memory for just a moment.
You see we often speak about the beauty of creation. We admire it, photograph it, walk through it and occasionally worry about what we are doing to it.
But today’s Sunday celebration is of Christ in Creation – and it invites us to go rather deeper.
It asks us not simply to look at creation, but to recognise that you and I belong within it.
And the reading from John’s Gospel that we have just heard, and perhaps we associate with Christmas carol services or midnight mass, – that beautifully evocative reading takes us right back to the beginning of creation :
“In the beginning was the Word.”
Those words deliberately echo the opening of Genesis. But John doesn’t give us another creation story. Instead, he tells us something extraordinary about the world that which we inhabit:
“All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
Everything on earth and in our universe begins in Christ.
The stars and planets.
The oceans and mountains.
The smallest insect and the greatest blue whale.
The trees, fields and hedgerows.
And you and me.
All things come into being through the Word.
Awesome!
And perhaps that amazing thought changes the way we look at the world.
Historically Christianity has sometimes spoken as though creation were primarily something God gave to us: a collection of resources for human beings to use and manage.
But in John’s gospel we are offered a much larger vision.
Creation doesn’t belong to us.
We belong to creation, and creation belongs to Christ.
That is why one of the prayers associated with this celebration asks that “with all creation we may proclaim your praise.”
Those words matter….they are so important.
They don’t say that we praise God for creation. They imagine something much more beautiful: the whole creation praising God, with humanity joining the song.
The psalms understand this instinctively.
The seas roar.
The trees clap their hands.
The hills rejoice.
The trees of the wood sing for joy.
Creation becomes a vast choir of praise.
And eight hundred years ago Francis of Assisi understood something similar.
Near the end of his life, increasingly frail and almost blind, Francis composed his Canticle of the Creatures. Remarkably, suffering did not make his world smaller. It seems to have made his sense of belonging deeper.
He sings of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brother Wind and Sister Water, Brother Fire and Sister Mother Earth.
Francis isn’t simply thanking God for these things.
He is recognising them as kin – as his family- his nearest and dearest : Brother. Sister.
He sees himself not standing above creation, but standing within a great family of created life.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts Franciscan spirituality can offer our generation.
We have become extraordinarily good at seeing the earth as a collection of commodities: land to develop, water to consume, minerals to extract, forests to harvest.
Francis invites us to rediscover relationship – our relationship with the earth.
Potentially, we treat something differently when you call it brother or sister – a member of a close knit family
But this prologue, this opening in John’s gospel , takes us even deeper.
“The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
We know those words so well that perhaps we no longer hear how astonishing they are.
John does not say that the Word became an idea.
Or a religious system.
Or a spiritual principle.
The Word became flesh.
The Greek word sarx is earthy. Bodily. Material.
In Jesus, the God through whom creation came into being becomes part of creation.
Christ breathes air.
Christ drinks water.
Christ feels earth beneath his feet.
Christ knows sunlight and darkness, hunger and tiredness, storms and stillness.
The hands that touch the leper are themselves made from the elements of the earth.
God doesn’t save creation from a safe distance.
God becomes part of it.
And perhaps that means the Incarnation , God becoming human, is even bigger than we sometimes imagine.
Christmas isn’t simply about God becoming human. It is about God entering the material world and declaring through Christ that matter matters.
Which makes our environmental crisis profoundly theological- part of who we are as people who purport faith.
We cannot worship the Word through whom all things were made on Sunday and casually destroy what has been made through that Word on Monday.
We cannot break bread and pour wine at the Eucharist without remembering that both come from the earth.
Perhaps creation care begins there.
Not with guilt.
Not even with activism.
But with wonder and awe
Wonder becomes praise.
Praise becomes relationship.
Relationship leads to repentance.
And repentance changes the way we live.
There is another striking phrase in today’s Gospel:
“In him was life.”
Not simply human life.
But the whole of Life.
John invites us to see Christ as the deep source of the extraordinary web of life in which we participate.
And that matters particularly at a time when so much of creation is groaning.
We know about rising temperatures, damaged ecosystems, polluted seas and disappearing species. We can easily become overwhelmed by the scale of it all.
But John, in his gospel prologue, refuses despair.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
That isn’t an invitation to pretend everything will somehow be alright
Christian hope is not optimism.
Hope is choosing to live as though God’s future can already be glimpsed in the present.
Every restored habitat.
Every community garden.
Every churchyard managed for wildlife.
Every meal shared rather than wasted.
Every decision to consume a little less.
Every campaign for justice for communities most affected by climate change.
Every moment when we stop seeing creation as a commodity and begin seeing it again as neighbour.
These can become small signs of the light shining in the darkness.
And perhaps for churches and individuals that have embraced the HeartEdge vision see that this has something particular to contribute here.
Because the four Cs — Compassion, Culture, Commerce and Congregation — are not separate from creation.
- Compassion asks whose lives are most affected by environmental breakdown.
- Commerce asks what kind of economy enables people and planet to flourish.
- Culture helps us imagine different ways of belonging to the world.
- And Congregation gathers us around bread and wine — gifts of the earth transformed into signs of God’s grace.
Perhaps Creation in Christ is therefore not another cause for the Church to support.
It is a way of seeing.
A way of recognising Christ in the very fabric of the world.
A way of remembering who we are.
We are creatures among creatures.
Earth from earth.
Breath sharing breath.
Life dependent upon life.
And perhaps our first calling is simply to listen again.
To Brother Wind.
Sister Water.
Brother Sun.
Sister Mother Earth.
To the birds, the trees, the oceans and the soil.
And beneath and within their song, to hear the Word through whom all things came into being.
The Word who became flesh.
The Word who still dwells among us.
Then perhaps we will discover that creation has never been silent.
It has been praising God all along.
And our vocation is not to conduct the choir.
It is simply to find our place within it –
that with all creation
we may proclaim God’s praise.
Image: Daniel Mirlea, Unsplash.com
