Sermon, Feast of Creation in Christ

I speak in the name of the living God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It’s not every day that the Church creates a new Feast or Festival. The last time the Church of England did this was as part of its wholesale revision of the Calendar in 1997. That was the Festival of Christ the King which, although new for us, had been celebrated for almost 75 years by our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters.

Today is the first celebration of the Festival of Creation in Christ. Its arrival in the Calendar reflects a growing movement towards wanting to set aside a time of year to celebrate the created order, and the creative work of God. Some Christian traditions keep a ‘Season of Creation’ between the beginning of September and St Francis’ Day on 4 October. The Church of England has resisted any notion of a new season, but has authorized this Festival.

Originally, it was to have been called ‘God the Creator’ but, in line with the way that our synodical processes move, this shifted, just before its final approval in July, to ‘Creation in Christ.’ Naming is significant.

Earlier this week I wrote in the Spire about a recent experience Heather and I had in church whilst on holiday this summer. The presiding minister blessed the congregation, not in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, but in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer. These are terms that have become quite common in some places in recent decades, though not (it must be said) in this Cathedral!

We might think them fairly innocuous—what’s in a name, after all—and maybe they make a pleasant change from the words we are used to hearing, but let’s pause there, because they should carry a theological health-warning. Blessing in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer suggests that God is known in three modes of operation (creation, redemption and sustenance), rather than in three persons (of Father, Son and Holy Spirit). There is more than a hint here that God the Father creates, whilst God the Son redeems and God the Spirit sustains. But to maintain this is to fall prey to the ancient heresy of modalism, which sees God acting in different modes when doing different things. Christian theology insists that it is not a single person of the Trinity who performs any particular action, but the whole Godhead. God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—is creator, redeemer and sustainer; all divine actions originate in God in all God’s fullness.

So maybe ‘God the creator’ might have been a good title for the festival after all, but discussions in the General Synod suggested otherwise. In the debate there, we were reminded about a growing ecumenical consensus around this Festival. Christian churches of differing traditions are stressing that in keeping a creation-themed festival, we are not worshipping the created order, nor are we primarily engaging in lament or penitence for the present ecological crisis. (As the Regius Professor of Divinity put it to me, today is not ‘Net Zero Sunday.’) We are anchoring our celebration in the being and action of God.

This festival sees us gather in God’s presence to give thanks for divine creation, to acknowledge the created order as God’s gift, and our responsibility to ‘safeguard its integrity’ (The fifth of the Church’s Five Marks of Mission). And importantly, the Festival is placed within the cycle of the times and seasons of the Christian Year, and therefore within a structure which expresses God’s action in Christ.

The entire Christian Year is shaped around the two great cycles of seasonal time. The Advent-Christmas-Epiphany cycle celebrates Christ’s incarnation – and all that flows from God taking human flesh. The Lent-Passiontide-Easter cycle celebrates Christ’s saving work: Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, and the gift of the Spirit. All other Feasts and Festivals relate to this Christological shape, whether these are days which celebrate Christ himself (like the Ascension or Candlemas), or the commemorations of the saints, at which we remember those men and women who have borne witness to Christ.

If creation is to feature with its own festival in the liturgical year, then it must be related to Christ, and so it is. The General Synod report puts it very well:

‘Creation must be cherished because it is created in Christ, sustained in Christ, wounded by human sin, and destined for renewal in Christ.’ (GS 2408Z, §3)

Today’s readings draw out this theme, across the Old and New Testaments. The Gospel is St John’s great prologue, better known to us as a Christmas reading – either as the Gospel at midnight, or as the final reading in the sequence of Nine Lessons and Carols – yet it’s a passage which picks up the prophetic theme of God’s Word ‘not returning empty, but accomplishing God’s purposes and succeeding in the task for which it was sent.’ (Issiah 55.11)

John begins his prologue with the words ‘in the beginning,’ and so mirrors the opening words of the book Genesis, when God’s Word was spoken and, and as the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters, the created order came into being:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. (John 1.1)

John goes on:

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. (John 1.4)

Here we are led beyond the initial act of creation to a sense that, with the gift of life, God continues to create and, in the process, holds all things in being, as an act of God’s grace. This theme is picked up in today’s second reading where, in the Letter to the Colossians, we read:

[Christ] himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1.17)

But there is still more. Having created, and continuing to create, God then develops the creative theme still further. John writes:

In the beginning was the Word... the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (1.1a, 14)

Here we are pushed forward towards the realm of the New Creation. God’s Word, taking flesh in the person of Jesus, through his incarnation shares our humanity, so that we may share his divinity; and accomplishes his saving work, so that we – and all creation – may be set free from what St Paul calls

its bondage to decay and... obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8.21)

Today’s first reading heralds that New Creation. Isaiah offers a prophetic picture of what this might look like: mountains and hills bursting into song, of trees clapping their hands, and of the cypress taking the place of the thorn, and the myrtle the briar (Isaiah 55.12-13). But all part of God’s creative work—past, present and future—which has its locus in Christ.

The Festival of Creation in Christ is a helpful and timely corrective to the idea that God’s eternal purpose is largely about us: that it has to do entirely with human beings. Yes, we are an important part of it, not least as we are made in the image of God, but God’s work is much greater. A tendency to put ourselves at the centre, rather than Christ—to look at things from a human point of view, rather than from God’s—has, in part, led to where we now find ourselves in relation to the planet.

If we are to play our part in cherishing and safeguarding the integrity of creation, we can only hope to do so if we work from the right theological starting-point, affirming, as St John’s and St Paul’s great passages do, that Christ is the one ‘through whom’ (John 1.3) and ‘for whom’ (Col 1.16) all things were made, and it is through Christ and in Christ that all things will find their fulfilment.

Yes, this will involve practical measures to steward the earth’s resources. It will involve lament and penitence for humanity’s part in bringing us to where we are today. But this will only have validity if it is grounded in our relationship to Christ. As with the rest of creation, this is where our true identity as human beings lies. We are baptized into Christ—into the new life of his resurrection—and we are continually reunited with Christ as we draw our sustenance from feeding on his body and blood in the Eucharist.

We need a Festival of Creation in Christ. Not to spur us on towards our targets of net zero, laudable though that it is. But to help us recalibrate our lives and our living in relation to the one in whom is life: the light of all people.

I began with the opening lines of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins and I end with the concluding lines of that same poem:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.