Feast of Creation in Christ - Year A

Genesis 1.1-2.3; Psalm 148; Acts 17.22a, 24-28; John 1.1-5

In the name of God, Creating, Redeeming and Transforming. Amen.

We are celebrating today a new Feast in the Christian Calendar. A Feast that brings into focus, and builds on the Season of Creation that we have marked for a number of years during September. Today, the first Sunday in September, is now the Feast of Creation in Christ. We just heard the set of readings given by the Revised Common Lectionary for this year’s celebration of that new feast. We began. most appropriately, with the account, the evocation, of the act of creation itself: the beginning of the first book of our bible, the Book of Genesis. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
Here is the act of creation which, out of the formless void, brings all things into being, provides order in the midst of chaos. The Creation that God looks upon and pronounces to be ‘good…good….very good.’ The act of creation that includes us, even if we are called to exercise dominion within it. That is a word to which we shall return.
Over the last few years at the Cathedral, as we have found ways to increasingly mark and celebrate this Season of Creation, the emphasis has been on that goodness of creation, and our appropriate responses of wonder and praise. We have rediscovered in fresh, urgent ways the ancient Jewish and then Christian tradition that sees humanity’s, our, purpose and end as being the offering of praise. Praise is what we are created to be and do; we become most ourselves in acts of wonder and self-forgetting praise. It’s why music is fundamental to praise, and to this place, because in the beauty and physicality of making music - singing above all - we are enabled into that self-forgetting praise.
And yet, after the summer of heatwaves and drought and wildfires we have just had, if we didn’t know it already, our joy in Creation – our recognition. alongside God, of its inherent goodness – our praise is also suffused with anxiety, and perhaps lament. What are we doing to our planet, our common home, that gift of order arising out of chaos? I probably don’t need to labour the point, but honesty and truthfulness seems a vital task at present, so let me briefly quote from the UK Government report issued in January 2026, entitled ‘Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security: A national security assessment.’ Written even before this last summer of extreme weather, before the recent warnings about the likely impact of a growing and extreme El Nino effect in the Pacific this winter; this is a Government report that warns in stark terms of the likelihood of ecological collapse. The following three statements are offered with a high degree of confidence in the likelihood of the assessment happening:
1. Global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity.
2. Critical ecosystems that support major global food production areas and impact global climate, water and weather cycles are the most important for UK national security. Severe degradation or collapse of these would highly likely result in water insecurity, severely reduced crop yields, a global reduction in arable land, fisheries collapse, changes to global weather patterns, release of trapped carbon exacerbating climate change, novel zoonotic diseases and loss of pharmaceutical resources.
3. Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse
The evidence for climate anxiety is stark. And in the face of that, the wider societal debate about how we respond is moving from a debate about we prevent climate change, to a recognition that much change is already irreversible and the challenge is how we adapt to survive the coming storms – both literal and metaphorical. The drive is moving from efforts to reach net zero, for example, as a way to decarbonise our energy supply and reduce our contribution to climate change; to a focus on how we prevent flooding, coastal erosion; how to adapt our food growing for a warmer climate. There is a fatalism that sets in, as if the almost certain breaking of the targets set out in the Paris Accord to limit temperature rises to 1.5, means we might as well give up trying to decarbonise our way of life; and instead just make the necessary adaptions. That adaption is vital of course, but it need not be at the expense of continuing to mitigate against the excesses of climate change. This false choice illustrates one of the fundamental responses to times of scarcity, and to anxiety about the future: we are always tempted to think and act in either/or terms. It’s either mitigation, or adaption. Given the pressures caused by population movement, the desperate plight of those in climates made uninhabitable by climate change, this false choice must be resisted. Just as we can both lament and praise, so we can mitigate and adapt. In times of anxiety and scarcity, when our anxiety pushes us into false choices, the creation of us and them across a range of issues, the church’s fundamental response is to create communities of generosity: generosity that is rooted not in either/or thinking but in both/and. Both praise and lament. In political terms that means an honest debate about how to mitigate the excesses of the climate changes that our patterns of life are causing and recognise the urgency of adapting our buildings, our food production, our managing of water to ensure that we are best placed to survive together.
Today we begin our Season of Creation with the new Feast of Creation in Christ. That name for the new Feast says something fundamental about the Christian perspective on our climate emergency and our response to it. Our Gospel reading was the opening verses of John’s Gospel, written deliberately to echo the beginning of Genesis, and to assert that the Word spoken by God in the act of creation, is none other than the Word who comes to dwell among us. The gift of creation is given in Christ. The order of creation, sent into disorder by our actions, is re-ordered by the Word who dwells among us, the light that is the life of all people; the light that even the darkness of crucifixion and death could not overcome. In other words what we are marking and celebrating in this season is both the act of creation, and of redemption. We rejoice in the gift that is the world in all its beaty and fragility; and in the new creation, in the risen Christ who restores that creation in all its possibility and in the bonds of love.
In the book of Genesis, humanity is given dominion over the other creatures of creation. Dominion is related, in its Latin root to Lordship. And after the Word that made all things has dwelt among us, that Lordship is exercised after the pattern of Christ, who did not see power as something to use over others; but as something to exercise for and with others. Who at the moment of gravest danger and fear, shared not his just his possessions, but his very self; and who in the bread and wine we share today continues to do so; to create us into the new community of awe-filled praise, wise generosity, resilient hope that will help see the world through the challenges to come.
We are a community of both wonder in the gift of life, and restorative action in the power of the Risen Christ. And that is seen in the work of transformation that is the action of the Spirit upon us: God, creating, redeeming and transforming. Amen.