September 1st is Creation Day – the first day of the Season of Creation which ends on October 4th, the Feast of St Francis of Assisi. Genesis 1 was the reading chosen for the creation Day liturgy at church in the heart of Warwickshire countryside.
September 1st 2024
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139:14)
Who would want to deny that? Even at the extremes of suffering, even when human nature goes grievously wrong there is a sense that, even then, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
And not just us. The fish of the sea, the birds of the air, even the crawling insects and the tiny seeds – all of them fearfully and wonderfully made.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made
say the people of God
in words that have reverberated
down the centuries
from the faith of the Psalmist
who echoed the words
of all those who see God
in their beginning
in one generation after another.
We are fearfully and wonderfully made
say the people of God
in words that reach
across the ages
from the very beginning
of all who see God
in the end
even in the bad times,
the mad times, the mean time.
Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. You can’t get more “beginning” than that. Genesis – the start of everything. Page 1 in our Bibles (even though this opening page of our scripture is far from the first to be written). There in the beginning is our sense of wonder, how everything came into being. This is no scientific account – how bored we would be by that. This is us – finding some order for the awesomeness of the world around us, and accounting for our wonder by putting God at the heart of everything there is.
This is the sensing by those fearfully and wonderfully made that God is the making of us. So fearfully and wonderfully made are we that nothing else can account for just how fearfully and wonderfully made we are.
There is a universal wonder in creation. We wonder “why?”, we wonder “how?” and we wonder “who?”. All people of goodwill share this sense of wonder. You have to be very insensitive, selfishly egotistical and cruel not to. And the people of God put God at the beginning seeing creation and creativity as wonderfully divine. We see God in our beginning, in a love that is never ending. We see God in the beginning – and we see God in the end, with his love in us and for us through all the time from beginning to end, in the time we call the “mean time” and the hard times.
Even in the meantime, in the darkest times we discover new things about life on earth – as we dig the garden, as we watch Life on Earth through the lens of David Attenborough and Chris Packham. We can never know enough. We are always learning, intrigued by the play of light and darkness, the stars, by the birds and the bees, all creatures, seeds, plants – and forever challenged with the sense of responsibility
The wonder we have is the beginning of faith and hope, the genesis of faith and hope, the generation of faith and hope which takes us through all our days, from the very first day of creation to the last when, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all will be well and all manner of things shall be well”, when there will be peace beyond our understanding (Philippians 4:7), when mountains and hills will burst into song and the trees will clap their hands (Isaiah 55), when God’s kingdom comes on earth – as it is in heaven.
These verses from Genesis are pearls of wisdom and love, strung together by wonderful imagination. They put us at the heart of God’s creation, seeing us as the image of God. It was the sixth day of his work and the finishing touch of his creation. There was nothing more for God to do other than delight in his work. The next day he rested having put his work into the hands of his very image.
In his image he made us – male and female he made us to be just like him in his love of creation and in his care for everything that is, subduing the forces of nature just as he had done in these 6 days of creation.
Today, September 1st, is being celebrated as Creation Day – a world day of prayer for creation. It’s been part of the Christian calendar for the last 35 years Patriarch Demetrios issued the first encyclical inviting all people of good will to dedicate September 1st as a special day of prayer for the preservation of the natural environment. The call was first taken up by Orthodox Christians. Then the World Council of Churches, the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion joined to develop an ecumenical initiative for a Season of Creation taking us from today (September 1st) to the Feast of St Francis of Assisi (October 4th).
These days, our love for creation has to take a new turn. Creation groans and demands the compassion which is the very likeness and image of God’s compassion. The seas are rising, coastlands eroding, communities are flooded and people are fleeing. The earth is burning fire while prosperous industrial nations choke the atmosphere with smoke. Species are becoming extinct as scientists fight for their lives. What we once saw we no longer see – and these were supposed to be the friends we loved and cared for.
Creation groans after decades of neglect, exploitation and abuse. It’s time we said sorry. It’s time we begged life on earth for forgiveness. It’s time we sought reconciliation. It’s time to start loving again. The whole of life was committed to the men and women God created in his likeness. None of all that life could do wrong. It was only us who could go wrong through our greed, self-interest and negligence. This Season of Creation is time for us to pray, to confess, to commit to what has been committed to us, and to reimagine the wonders of creation with God in all our beginnings.
Grits and Grains 