Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity / Creation Care 2025

In the first of a creation care series, James reflects on the doctrine of creation — not Gaia as a self-sustaining system, but a world held moment by moment in the hands of a personal, loving God who calls us to be its careful stewards.

Transcript

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So, Heavenly Father, as we come now to reflect on your words to us through the Scriptures, would you send your Holy Spirit that we might see and be transformed into the image of your Son. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Please do take a seat. So we're delighted to be hosting the uh exhibition by Luke Geram called Gaia. We have this beautiful globe hanging in our nave. And so we're taking the next six weeks to reflect on the scriptures through the particular lens of climate, creation care, and consideration for God's world and God's nature. I was thinking about that phrase they so often say about Mozart, that he's too easy for beginners and too hard for professionals. And how there are certain things we take for granted as children that when we hear them again as adults, they uh take on a new sense of profundity. We hear again a phrase like he's got the whole world in his hands, something I'm sure many of us have been singing since primary school. And to think about that with the globe in our midst takes on a whole new set of meanings. So we've got six Sundays where we'll have the globe here with us, and we're going to use this as a time to reflect on uh creation care, thinking about the Sundays that we have. So we've got some really interesting Sundays coming up. Remembrance Sunday will take place with the Globe in our midst. Safeguarding Sunday, we've got a baptism. So I wonder what does the globe here, how does those services make us think differently about these things that we reflect on year after year? And we've developed some uh prayer materials to go with it. We have these prayer cards, one for each week. Um, I'm really proud of these. They were designed in-house by our communications director, Daniel, who's just done a fantastic job with the images. You'll see those images on the front of your orders of service each week. And we've got little prayers on the back of them, which we've again written in-house. And the idea is that as we welcome hundreds, hopefully thousands of people from across Lancashire into the cathedral over the next six weeks, they might be sparked to say a prayer, and these cards are there for them to do that. That's a kind of piece of evangelism that we're hoping to do during this exhibition. But please do take the cards home and pray them in your personal devotionals as well. I hope you find them helpful. You'll see them scattered around the place. In this opening sermon for this series, um, I want us to reflect on a Christian instinct towards creation care. Unfortunately, the conversation around climate change, caring for creation, our relationship with the natural world has become more and more controversial in recent years. So I'm not sure it's possible for us to think in the abstract about a theology of creation care, what the scriptures say about it, without first acknowledging that there is a debate raging in the world outside. And when I listen to the public conversation around climate change, I hear two voices in particular that I want to bring into the room. We're going to name those voices, and hopefully you will recognize them as I'm describing them. And then, with those voices in the back of our minds, we'll then turn afresh to the scriptures and see what they have to say to us. The first voice is what I call the pessimism mindset, and it's focused on the seeming scarcity of the world. This voice in culture rightly insists that climate change is real, that it's serious, and that it's urgent. It says that the planet is fragile, that our ecosystems are breaking down, that the atmosphere is warming, and there is a kind of looming disaster which gives this voice a moral call to change. We must cut emissions, we must reduce consumption, we must live more lightly. This voice has a kind of prophetic edge to it. It recognizes the damage that is being done and the responsibility that we carry. The strength of this voice in culture is the moral seriousness with which it takes climate disaster. But its weakness, I suggest, is an anxiety about the situation that implies that everything relies on human reaction to the situation. It can sound like the entire future of the world rests on human shoulders alone. And the mood is kind of apocalyptic. We have 12 years to save the planet. It calls for repentance, but it doesn't always see what a future of redemption would look like. That's the pessimism mindset, one side of the cultural debate that we find ourselves in. The other side is what I'm calling the optimism mindset. And the optimism mindset focuses on the seeming abundance of the world. This voice recognizes climate change is a problem, but it speaks with a kind of calm reassurance. This says humans beings have always found a way through. Technology, the markets, innovation will help us to adapt. The earth is resilient. Progress will deliver us. The strength of this voice is its confidence and its kind of practical know-how. We can act without living in despair. But its weakness, I suggest, is a kind of pride that everything will be okay and the planet will tough it out. It risks assuming that the nature in which we live is just like the economy in which we live. It will self-correct and stay on course, it will always be fine. And there's faith here, not in God, but in human ingenuity. One group says, Don't you see how bad everything is getting? And the other group says, calm down, don't be so shrill, we'll all be fine. And I imagine most of us sit somewhere in the middle watching these two sides of the debate go back and forth playing political tennis. I wonder if you recognize those two voices in culture and in the world around us. I want us to hold them in the back of our minds as we turn afresh to Matthew chapter 6 and to Revelation chapter 2, our two readings for today. The anxious voice of scarcity and the optimistic voice that can be sometimes complacent. These voices hang in the air. And Jesus in Matthew chapter 6 stands on a hillside and he speaks to ordinary people. These people in the first century in Judea were subsistence farmers under Roman occupation, being taxed and having the small income that they could scratch out of the ground, taken from them at every opportunity. And he says to them this do not be anxious about your life. And you think, hold on a second, Jesus, do you not appreciate just how difficult our lives are? It's extremely uncertain if we will have food next year, Jesus. We have no idea how we're going to afford the clothes on our back, Jesus. And Jesus says, do not be anxious about your life. Well, it's not quite what he says. He goes on at the end of the passage to say, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. If you look in Matthew 6, that's almost the very first thing Jesus says, and almost the very last thing he says. And those kind of top and tail, everything that happens in the middle. Do not be anxious, but seek first the kingdom. And that's important because telling someone who is anxious not to be anxious is not a particularly helpful thing to say. It's like saying to someone, don't think about an elephant. I can guarantee all of us are now thinking about elephants because I've planted the seed in your mind. And Jesus isn't saying, don't be anxious, he's saying point your attention to something else. Point your attention towards God and towards his kingdom. The solution to anxiety is not to remain in that anxious space, but to find ways to think about other things. As St. Paul says, think on what is good and hopeful and godly. So that's the framing of Jesus' instruction to us this morning. Don't be anxious. It's an extraordinary thing to say in the first century. It's still an extraordinary thing to say in the 21st century. Don't be anxious, but seek first the kingdom. And then in the middle, Jesus paints a picture of a series of relationships. The relationship between God and the natural world. The relationship between God and humankind, and then the relationship between humankind and the world. So let's take them in order. God and the natural world. We see Jesus say this: consider the lilies, consider the birds of the air. Does God not clothe them? Does God not care for them? The picture is of a relationship between God the Creator and God his creation, actually beautifully encapsulated in this space for us today. Because when Christians think about the natural order, when we think about creation, we don't think about it in the abstract. We think about it oriented towards the creator. And so in this space, we have theology happening right now. The altar where we will lift bread and wine and declare this is Christ's body and this is Christ's blood, stands in front of and in relationship with this image of creation. And creation is not just there in the abstract, it is standing in awe and in worship of its creator. And so Jesus reminds us, does the creator not love his creation? Does he not care for the lilies and clothe the birds of the air? And does the creation, in its multitudinous fruitfulness, reflect and worship the glory of God? And then again, in Revelation 22, we see not only does the Father create and sustain creation, but at the end of time he will renew creation. Creation is not discarded but healed. Creation is not replaced but renewed. And so we see this image of the river of life flowing from the throne room of grace, going out into all the world, filling it with goodness. We live in an abundant world, not because the world itself is abundant, but because we live, we worship a God of abundance who sustains and renews all things. So that's God's relationship with humankind, with uh creation, the creator's relationship to the creation. But what more can we say about God's relationship to humanity? Because of course, we are part of creation. So everything that we have just said applies to us. We are called to worship the creator and to reflect his glory back to him. But Jesus goes on to say this how much more valuable are you than the lilies? How much more valuable are you than the birds? Must I not love you more? So humanity is raised just slightly higher than creation, just slightly lower than the angels, as the psalmist says. We are given a special place in creation, but we are also given a special responsibility. Because now when we turn to consider the relationship between humankind and the natural world, we see that while humankind is simultaneously part of creation, it is also responsible to love and care for the world around us just as God does. And so to borrow a phrase from Genesis 1 and 2, we are invited to tend and keep the world around us, to steward the garden, not to abandon or to exploit it. So I think a picture of a Christian instinct towards creation care would sound something like this: God is generous, and so we do not need to be anxious, and God loves his world, and so we cannot be careless with it. I hope you can see that what I'm trying to describe does not fit neatly into either of the stories that we heard before. We cannot fall into the anxiety of a scarcity mindset because we believe that the world is still held by its creator. And we cannot share in the hubris of the optimism mindset because we are called to steward this world and take an active participation in its flourishing and its goodness. The Christian vision of creation care is both hopeful and humble. It's rooted in worship, and it's from that worship that our responsibility as stewards flows. We care for the earth because it's the Lord's. It is not ours. And so we are responsible for this world because God has given it to us as a gift, and it is his, it is not ours. Now, that's all kind of high-faluting, interesting uh theology and uh has some interesting things to say about the world out there. What about you and I here in Blackburn today? It is easy to feel. Maybe rightly we feel, like some of these big global questions are just quite frankly too big for us. Maybe actually, right now, you cannot think about the whole world and whether it's on fire or not, because your own world feels so fragile, feels like it's burning in its own way. Maybe your own family situation or your health or your work situation leaves you unable to worry about all of that stuff going on out there. Jesus' words to us today remain the same. Look at the birds of the air, consider the lilies of the field. Are you not more valuable than they? Must I not love you more than they? A measure of the care of the creator's love for his creation is seen in the cross. That the creator would sank would subject himself to his creation and be crucified by his creation for the sake of his creation. And as the hymn beautifully says, hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrenders. That is how much our creator loves his creation. It's how much God loves you. Hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails, surrendered. I think that's what Jesus means when he says, don't be anxious, but seek first the kingdom. There are lots of things to be anxious about in the world broadly and in your life and in my life. Plenty of things. We have an opportunity now, as we turn to the Eucharist, to reflect on the Creator's hands that were subjected to cruel nails of his own creation for our sake, for the world's sake. And when we know that, we can act without panic and without pride to do little or medium or big things to fulfill our responsibility as stewards of the world that God has created and that He sustains and that He invites us as a steward.