Creationtide I: The Gift of Creation

Lessons: Psalm 33; Romans 8:18-27; Matthew 5:1-12

Today marks a change in the life of the Church.

We have completed the season of Metanoia. During those weeks, we were reminded of our need to repent. Not merely to feel guilty, but to keep turning our lives toward Christ.

Now we enter Creationtide.

This season has deep roots in the Eastern Church. In 1989, Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios established September 1 as a day of prayer for the protection of creation. Since then, Christians across traditions have begun setting aside this time to remember God as Creator and to consider our place within creation.

At first, this might seem unnecessary.

Of course God is the Creator. We say so in the Creed. We hear the creation stories in Scripture. The truth seems so familiar that we rarely stop to consider what it means.

What does it mean to confess that God created the universe?

What does it mean to live as created beings?

Why did God give us this world?

Creationtide gives us space to sit with those questions. The theme for this first Sunday is the Gift of Creation.

Creation Is Good

The first truth we must remember is simple.

Creation is good.

Genesis repeats this truth throughout its opening chapter. God speaks light into being and calls it good. God separates the waters, raises the land, fills the world with plants and animals, and calls it good. Humanity is created within this living community. When God looks upon the whole of creation, God declares it very good.

This does not always match our experience.

Life in a human body brings illness, exhaustion, grief, stress, and pain. We work. We pay bills. We lose people we love. Some days, life does not feel like a gift.

Something has gone wrong within creation. Scripture does not deny this. The story of humanity is marked by alienation, violence, and death. Yet our brokenness does not erase the goodness God placed within creation.

The Christian tradition has repeatedly struggled with a temptation called dualism. Dualism divides reality into two parts. The spiritual world is treated as good while the material world is treated as corrupt or inferior.

Scripture does not permit us to make such an easy division.

God created the material world and called it good. Christ took on human flesh. In the Eucharist, ordinary bread and wine become the means through which we receive the life of Christ. Jesus rose from the dead in a body that Thomas could touch. Saint Paul teaches that our mortal bodies will also be transformed.

Christian hope is not about escaping creation. It is about creation being healed.

Our bodies are not mistakes. Food, companionship, pleasure, love, and the beauty of the earth are not barriers separating us from God. They belong to the good world God made.

The problem is not creation. The problem is what we have done within creation.

This distinction also helps us understand ancestral sin. We are born into a world shaped by the failures of those who came before us. Families pass down wounds. Communities carry histories of poverty, violence, prejudice, and neglect. Those conditions shape us, but they do not mean humanity is evil at its core.

We were created in the image of God.

The work of salvation is the healing of this image within us. Through theosis, we grow into the likeness of Christ. Grace does not destroy our humanity. Grace restores it.

Creation Is Grace

Creation is also grace.

Grace is one of those church words we use so often that we sometimes forget what it means. Grace is a gift. It is something received rather than earned.

God did not create the universe out of need.

God is complete. God lacks nothing. Creation exists because divine love overflows. An ancient Christian hymn calls Christ the “creative Wisdom” of God. Through this Wisdom, everything came into being.

God creates because God gives.

We might think of an artist who creates because something within must be shared. We might think of parents who welcome a child because they wish to share their love, their lives, and their home.

Creation is God making room for life.

The Garden of Eden expresses this beautifully. A garden exists to nurture life. It must be tended. It changes through the seasons. Seeds are planted, fruit is gathered, and life begins again.

Creation is not only an event buried in the distant past. God’s creative grace continues to move through the world.

We see it when the earth passes from one season to another. We see it when seeds become plants and plants produce new seeds. We see it whenever life survives, changes, and begins again.

We also see it in the Resurrection.

The body of Christ was tortured and killed. Yet death did not speak the final word. Christ rose in a body transformed by life.

Resurrection is new creation.

The Church Must Remain Open to New Creation

God’s creative work also continues within the Church.

The Church has lost its way many times. It has become rigid, comfortable, and protective of its institutions. It has confused familiar customs with the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Then renewal comes.

God sends prophets. Reformers speak. Communities rise from places the established Church ignored. People return to Scripture, recover neglected traditions, and make room for the Spirit to move.

Our own Convergent Catholic tradition was born from this work of renewal.

The early leaders of the Convergence Movement looked across the Christian family and saw gifts separated from one another. Some churches treasured Scripture but had lost contact with much of the historic tradition. Some made room for the gifts of the Spirit but lacked roots and structure. Others preserved rich sacramental worship but became rigid or closed to renewal.

The Convergence Movement sought to bring these streams together.

We need Scripture.

We need the sacraments.

We need the living movement of the Holy Spirit.

This is not innovation for its own sake. It is a form of new creation. It is the Church remembering its fullness.

The development of affirming Christian communities offers another example. Many churches failed LGBTQIA+ people. They rejected people created in the image of God and treated their lives as problems to be solved. The Spirit raised new communities where people once pushed away were welcomed, loved, and called into ministry.

Something new had to grow because established structures had failed to bear good fruit.

This is part of God’s creative work. The Holy Spirit did not disappear after Pentecost. The Spirit continues to breathe life into the Church and call us toward greater faithfulness.

Receive the Gift Without Taking Possession

If creation is a gift, then we must learn to receive it with gratitude.

This includes the physical world around us.

We have polluted waterways, stripped forests, exhausted the soil, and treated the earth as though it were disposable. Consumerism teaches us to take without asking what our appetite costs. War destroys people, animals, communities, and ecosystems. We behave as though the material world does not matter.

Yet this world belongs to God.

God entrusted creation to us, not so we could dominate and consume it, but so we could tend and cherish it.

The story of Adam and Eve is, in part, a story about receiving and taking. They were already living in paradise. They already enjoyed communion with God. Still, they became convinced that what they had received was not enough.

They reached out and took.

That act of taking damaged their communion with God, one another, and the earth.

The same temptation lives within us. We struggle to receive life as a gift. We want to possess it. We take more than we need. We grasp for control. We treat people, communities, and the natural world as objects placed here for our use.

Creationtide calls us back to gratitude.

Gratitude changes how we live. When we recognize something as a gift, we treat it differently. We become more careful. We become less wasteful. We begin to understand stewardship as an act of love.

Live as People of the New Creation

We must also remember that we already live within God’s new creation.

Through baptism, we have been joined to Christ. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is at work within us. We are being changed, healed, and remade.

This means our lives should not remain as they were.

We should leave worship a little more loving than when we entered. We should become more patient, more generous, and more attentive to our neighbors. Change may come slowly, but the life of Christ should become visible within us.

The Church must also remain willing to change.

When I joined this parish in 2021, its worship was broadly Anglo-Catholic. Our embrace of the Byzantine Rite brought a major change. The transition was not always easy. We made mistakes. We became uncomfortable. At times, we even stepped on one another’s toes around the altar.

New creation is often messy.

Childbirth is painful and exhausting. Gardens require dirt, pruning, and patience. Resurrection itself comes through the wound of the cross.

Messiness does not mean God is absent. Sometimes it means something is being born.

There are still places where our church must grow. There are habits we need to reconsider. There are people we have not yet reached. There are ways the Holy Spirit is calling us to become more faithful.

We should not fear this work.

We are a people of the new creation. We follow the risen Christ. We trust the Spirit who continues to renew the Church and the world.

Creation is good.

Creation is grace.

Creation is a gift placed in our care.

Our calling is to receive this gift with gratitude, protect it with love, and join God in the work of healing what has been wounded.

We are here to remind the world that God created it, God loves it, and God will redeem it.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.