Thinking about Creation - Garrett Yates

For the next few Sunday mornings (the last being May 8th), we are exploring issues related to Creation. In particular, we are trying to think about what a story written 2500 years ago, in the first chapters of Genesis, might have to offer us today. Are the first few chapters of the Bible narrating past events, or does this text hold explicit meaning for us today? Well, I never have been one to hold my cards close to my chest, and so I’ll just say that I am convinced that this ancient text, among others, offers a fresh and critical means by which we might answer a set of very important contemporary questions.

Let me just sketch out one avenue we are exploring. Humanity, according to Genesis 1 and 2, is created to be priests of creation. God created us, and gave us the entire world as our parish. “Guard it, and look out for it,” God told us. In other words, cultivate the earth. God put a spade in our hands and asked us to nourish the gift of soil and land into fullness of life and being, and in so doing, to offer it back to God as an image of his love and provision for us.

Israel, God’s people, was to be a “nation of priests,” helping the world to see that creation was not something to be hoarded or exploited, but something to be sanctified and treated as a gift. Israel: a nation of priests pointing the world to its Creator and Lord. To condense a long and sprawling history, Christians believe that in Christ each of us have been baptized into this vocation. We have become a kingdom of priests.

The priests of all of creation. Remember Jesus commissioning us, ordaining us for ministry at the end of Matthew: (my paraphrase) “Go preach the good news of reconciling love to all of creation. Fertilize it all with good cheer and hope. Aerate it with the peace of the Holy Spirit. And when harvest rolls around, raise your green thumbs and soily hands to the Father in thanksgiving.”

What this is trying to get at, albeit only in outline, is that earth is humanity’s altar, and there she is to raise up creation, blessing and hallowing it, and saying (words you may have said in the liturgy): “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”

I take it that this offers something of an alternative to the narrative proffered by contemporary culture, one that inculcates us to be proprietors, not priests, of creation, but that is a story for a different day.

All that to say, it is this vocation, this radical vocation, that we are trying to inquire into and learn a little more about during our Adult Forum, so that in God’s grace we might, little by little, learn to be the priests of creation that we were always meant to be.