Mission Yearbook: Service urges good care of Creation

Image

Photo by Emilia Morariu via Unsplash

The title and lyrics of the gentle hymn “Touch the Earth Lightly” (Glory to God #713) served as a call to action for attendees of a recent prayer service for those serving on the staff of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The hymn, which urges listeners to treat the Earth with care, helped to close a service that stressed the need to be good stewards of Creation and to care for all living creatures.

The Rev. Rebecca Barnes and Jessica Maudlin, who are both with the Presbyterian Hunger Program, and the Rev. Dr. David Gambrell, Associate for Worship in the Office of Theology & Worship, led the online gathering, which commemorated the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.

The service opened with a Call to Worship, inspired by Psalm 148, calling for all to praise the Creator’s name.

Later, Barnes and Maudlin alternated reading a Litany of Confession, adapted from Rev. Keatan King’s “Litany of the Garden,” which referenced some of the ways in which humankind has contributed to harming the environment.

“God of air, breathe new life into our dust every day as you did in the beginning,” Barnes said. “Unite all people in one rhythm in our inhaling and exhaling. We exhale hazardous substances, without regard for who will have to inhale our contamination. Teach us to extend the privilege of inhaling deeply to all neighbors. We pray for the day when air is always fresh.”

The litany also spoke of the need for people to be generous to one another and the planet by mimicking the Earth itself.

“God of Creation, we pray that we will learn to show the Earth the same love and grace which it extends to us,” Maudlin said. “Teach us the intrinsic value of every creature. Teach us to give freely and spontaneously among one another the way that the Earth gives of itself freely to us. Holy One, we have nothing that was not first given to us by your generous heart and your open hand.”

Image

storm_lightning by brandon-morgan-3qucB7U2l7I-unsplash.jpg

Later, Gambrell read Luke 8:22–25 followed by a reflection from a colleague who's part of an ecumenical group called the Consultation on Common Texts, responsible for the Revised Common Lectionary. The passage from Luke describes how the disciples became alarmed when a boat they were on with Jesus was enveloped by a fierce storm while he was sleeping.

When the disciples came to him, Jesus got up and rebuked the wind and waves, causing the storm to subside. He also asked the disciples, “Where is your faith?”

In today’s world, "people also cry out in fear as the world is ravaged by hurricanes and other natural disasters as well as war and other calamities, Gambrell noted. But "this gospel passage calls us to faith anew. ... The love of God flows through this story and through all of Scripture like a river, steady and sure."

During the benediction, Maudlin prayed that God would “inspire us to work for the end of conflict, and for the full restoration of broken relationships — with you, with the ecumenical community, with the human family, and with all Creation.”

She continued, “Prince of Peace, through your wounds, teach us to stand in solidarity with the woundedness of others, of Creation, and of the world. Through your resurrection, make us people of hope — with a vision of swords turned into ploughshares and tears transformed into joy. May we come together as one family, to labor for your peace — a shalom where all your people may dwell in safety, and rest in quiet places.”

Darla Carter, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Molly Atkinson, Senior Administrative Assistant, Financial Aid Service, Interim Unified Agency
Yesenia Ayala,  Associate, Financial Aid for Service, Interim Unified Agency

Let us pray:

Dear Lord, sustain us as we seek to sustain each other; in the beauty of your kingdom, with the beauty of your earth, amid the needs of your cities, and through the fellowship of neighbors working together. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - East Texas PC(USA) pastor celebrates Creation during solar eclipse

Synod School’s closing worship preacher wasn’t so sure he’d get to witness the rare cosmic event

October 3, 2024

The Rev. Brendan McLean, associate pastor of First Presbyterian 

Church in Tyler, Texas, preaches during closing worship at Synod 

School Friday. He displayed pictures his friends tool of the April 

8 solar eclipse. (Photo by Kim Coulter)

The Rev. Brendan McLean is associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Tyler, Texas, one of the communities shrouded in darkness for nearly two minutes during the April 8 solar eclipse.

Only just before it happened, someone forgot to urge the clouds over Tyler to go away.

“I felt like I had a front-row ticket,” said McLean, the preacher during closing worship at this year’s Synod School. “But I was watching it from the balcony behind a pillar.”

But at 1:43 p.m. Central Time, the sky grew dark like twilight, the clouds parted, “and I could see the total solar eclipse,” he said. “How incredible it was to see it with my own two eyes — with solar eclipse glasses on.”

For two minutes, McLean and millions of other North Americans “experienced a world fundamentally different than the ordinary world we experience every day, a world where we experienced the shadow of night when we virtually always experience the light of day,” he said. “It was other-worldly.”

Later, he and his friends shared pictures of what they’d seen via social media. He called the nearly two minutes “unadulterated and unfiltered communion with the cosmos,” and he preached at Synod School using Job 12:7–13 as his text.

“This passage from Job tells us the whole of Creation — every part of the universe — calls us to awe and reverence of God.”

Job’s “beautiful theological statement” is the answer to Job’s “friend,” Zophar, who’s sure Job did something wrong to justify all his suffering. “Job knows this is entirely untrue,” McLean pointed out. “Our suffering is not connected to God’s retribution.”

The wisdom of God is not something we can grasp, “and yet all of Creation — the entirety of the cosmos — has something to tell us about God,” McLean said. If we want to encounter God, “all we need to do is simply ask the cosmos, the world around us, at any given time. We are surrounded by the beauty of Creation that calls to us. … We are made and claimed as God’s children and are redeemed and resurrected in Jesus Christ.”

“Friends, all of Creation is waiting to tell us something about God,” he said. Unlike that solar eclipse, “the window of opportunity to observe something about God is as wide and big as you can imagine — and yet more.”

“All we need to do is stay curious and ask, open our ears and our eyes to see that God is good and that Christ died and rose for us, all of us,” McLean said. “The God who is more than we can ask or imagine — it is that God who loves you, who cares for you, and who wants you to flourish — not because you’ve earned anything, but because you are you, and God loves you for it. Amen.”

As part of worship, children and youth were given special sunglasses and told, “When you put them on, you can see the kingdom of God.” They and all the others in worship were the recipients of a reproduction of a two-sided watercolor signed by most of the 540 people who attended Synod School and bearing this saying: “Remember, God is able to do more than all we ask or even imagine.”

Synod School celebrated its 70th anniversary this year. It’s put on each summer by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies and held at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Learn more here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Synod School’s closing worship preacher celebrates Creation during solar eclipse

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Natalie Smith, Product Manager, General Reader Books, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation 
Stephen Smith, Security Trading & Assistant Portfolio Manager, Trust Services, Presbyterian Foundation

Let us pray

Creator God, we thank you for this day. We give thanks that each of us can reach out to those in need around us; help us to be particularly mindful to children in need. Guide us each and every day as we strive to serve you. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - It’s humanity’s job to ‘help Creation flourish in all its beautiful diversity’

Dr. William Brown goes to the psalter to help explain competing accounts of Creation

August 10, 2023

Dr. William Brown, Professor of Old Testament at Columbia 

Theological Seminary, is leading a class called Dialogue, 

Dissonance & Debate in the Bible” at the Presbyterian 

Association of Musicians’ Worship & Music Conference. 

(Photo by Rich Copley)

In the beginning, Dr. William Brown said recently, God created a dialogue.

“It has everything to do with our place and our role in Creation,” said Brown, Old Testament Professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, said during the second installment of his “Dialogue, Dissonance & Debate in the Bible” course at the Presbyterian Association of Musicians’ Worship & Music Conference  held at Montreat Conference Center.

Brown’s translation of Genesis 1:2 includes God’s breath hovering over the face of the water. “The longer you hold your breath, the greater the urge to let it out,” he said. “It’s God’s breath that drives the unfolding of Creation, every day for six days.”

In verses 26–27 we find “a unique passage for Genesis 1. Only humankind is invested with the image of God, the risk or privilege of exercising dominion,” he said. As for the “let us make humankind in our image,” Brown said the Christian tradition proposes that it’s the Trinity at work. But this writing in Genesis is of course pre-Christian. In the Jewish tradition, Wisdom is at work. In the ancient world, it’s a divine council at work, angels and other divine beings, Brown said.

When God commands plant life to appear, God says to let the Earth produce vegetation. For marine life, God says let the waters produce swarms of living creatures. For land animals, it’s “let the Earth create them.”

“I’d say with who’s involved in ‘let us make humankind in our image,’ why not the Earth and waters as well. They’ve always been involved,” Brown said. “God does not like to work alone. It’s a corporate, collaborative project — not just for humanity, but all life, created in collaboration with other agents. That’s a pretty cool account of Creation — God working with others.”

For the Priestly author of Genesis 1, language about the image of God “includes you and me. We are all made in God’s image. The Priestly author is democratizing the language of the image of God,” Brown said. “I like the image of God working democratically and collaboratively.”

Photo by Calvin Craig via Unsplash

If we’re all bearers of the royal image of God, we’re also to exercise dominion over creatures of God. “How has that worked out so far?” Brown asked. Lynn White, the son of a Presbyterian pastor, wrote a 1967 article for Science magazine called “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.” White said it’s “God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”

Brown said he believes “this is correct in the way Genesis 1 has been used for domination and exploitation. It has been received as a license to exploit, a license to kill, for products and luxury and affluence in the world. Some of our Christian siblings believe that if we use up all our resources, we can usher in the second coming. There is such a thing as dominion theology,” Brown added. “I consider that our greatest theological heresy today.”

To rescue the word “dominion,” take a look at Psalm 72, Brown suggested, a psalm he said is a job description for the king. “The king is supposed to care for the poor, champion the needy and crush the oppressor,” he said. “That gives us a whole new twist on Genesis 1. Thanks be to God for Psalm 72! You can’t read texts in isolation — even the Creation texts.”

Brown concluded his talk by showing a gif depicting three views of Creation. In one, humanity is at the top of a pyramid. The second has us in a line of many species. The third shows all the creatures in a circle, which made Brown think of Psalm 148, where “the call goes out for all Creation to give praise,” Brown said.

It’s humanity’s role to integrate the dominion model, the servant model and Psalm 104. “Creation has to be flourishing to give praise to God, and humans have to enable Creation to flourish,” he said. “It’s a journey that ends with an ecology of praise. We have a distinctive role in Creation. We have to help Creation to flourish in all its beautiful diversity.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service, Communications, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Today’s Focus: Dr. William Brown, speaking at the Presbyterian Association of Musicians’ Worship & Music Conference

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Alonzo Johnson, Coordinator, Self-Development of People, Compassion, Peace & Justice, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Carlton Johnson, Associate Director, Theology, Formation & Evangelism, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Lord our God, we thank you for calling us to be your people. We pray that we may in gratitude extend your love to the many who still need your touch. We ask that you will reveal your will for us daily and grant us the grace to yield to the prompting of your Spirit and to walk in your will. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - One farmer’s take on the Creation narrative

The director of Princeton Seminary’s Farminary Project says we ought to start by stopping

September 23, 2022

Photo by Greg Rakozy via Unsplash

The Rev. Dr. Nathan Stucky serves Princeton Theological Seminary as director of the Farminary Project, a place “where theological education is integrated with small-scale regenerative agriculture to train faith leaders who are conversant in the areas of ecology, sustainability and food justice.”

Small wonder, then, that NEXT Church would ask Stucky to preach on the Bible’s first Creation story during the gathering’s recent worship service.

Those worshiping online and in person at Montreat Conference Center weren’t the only exhausted people seeking rest, Stucky said. In his 2019 book “Wrestling with Rest: Inviting Youth to Discover the Gift of Sabbath,” Stucky talked about a “cruel irony” revealed by the 39 high school seniors he interviewed for his book: While confessing the desire to rest, they also confessed that rest created its own anxiety.

These “industrious, capable, achieving” high school students “of course longed for rest,” Stucky said. “But when you stop and rest, you find yourself thinking of all the things that aren’t getting done. What a heartbreaking reality, to long for rest and find only anxiety when you try to enter that rest.”

Those findings date back nearly 10 years, he said, before the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, before the war in Ukraine “and even more senseless gun violence.”

“Friends, our young people are exhausted. We are exhausted,” Stucky said. “Creation is exhausted. How did we get here?”

The Rev. Dr. Nathan Stucky

What, he asked, stands out in the Creation narrative? First, “over and over, God says Creation is good.” By Day 6, the “whole of Creation is very good,” Stucky said.

Smack in the middle “of this beautiful story is the command to humans to have dominion, to fill the Earth and subdue it,” Stucky said. Studying the Hebrew verb proved especially troubling for him. Possible definitions include “bring into bondage,” “violate” and “dominate.”

“I cannot explain this word away. I cannot subdue it, and I don’t think we are supposed to,” Stucky said. “Let it unsettle us. Let it mess with our assumption about what Scripture says about being in right relationship with God.”

Even though the created order is pronounced good, “there is no analogous affirmation to humans” in that first Creation story, Stucky said. “If there is goodness among humanity, it happens in relationship with the whole host of Creation.”

Humans, he said, “are supposed to reflect the relationship that God has with Creation,” which is attentive and empowering. “God’s relationship with Creation is fructifying. It’s ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’” Stucky said. “God creates a world where the whole Creation flourishes. We must ask ourselves, ‘What if God invites us to just this kind of relationship, where everyone flourishes and embraces co-Creation and shared power?”

The culmination in that first Creation account is, of course, the fact that God rests on the seventh day.

“Humanity’s starting point with God is God’s own rest,” Stucky said. “The text says, ‘Hey humans! Before anything else, stop.’ It’s the root of sabbath. Stop. Cease. Get to know God for a minute.”

Sabbath “has much to teach us about faith in an exhausted world,” Stucky said, adding there’s little hope for exhausted people — at least for those acting on their own.

“We talk about [sabbath] like it’s a chai latte we can grab from Starbucks,” he said. Rather, sabbath is “the glue that holds us together. … Sabbath in isolation cannot be our cure because isolation is our disease.”

We can “start with stopping,” Stucky said, by first abandoning the notion of the individual sabbath. That may be terrifying to some, but it’s good news, Stucky said. “Rest with God and Creation,” he suggested. “The hope resides in the community that can exist between us and God and the broader Creation.”

While we’re at it, we ought to abandon the idea of rest as a reward. Recall that during the seventh day, “humans had done no work in the story. The only work they have to reflect on is God’s and the work of the broader Creation. Stop fixating on our work and start focusing on God’s,” Stucky said to building applause. “Rest is sheer grace, a gift.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Ingerlene Frick, Director of Guest Experience & Innovation Retreat Center, Stony Point Center, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Stephanie Fritz, Coordinator, Christian Formation, Theology, Formation & Evangelism, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Gracious and loving God, encircle all of your Creation with your grace, love and peace that passes all understanding. Open our hearts to the ways you are calling us to be the body of Christ beyond the walls of our churches. Amen.

The Five Marks of Mission: Five – to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth

Green Anglicans from Southern and Central Africa

In the sixth, and final, article in our series of features looking at the Anglican Communion’s Five Marks of Mission, The Revd Canon Dr Rachel Mash, Environmental Coordinator for Green Anglicans, from the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, unpacks the fifth Mark of Mission: To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth.

---

“Elderly men lost the will to survive when they were forced to slaughter their cattle”.

In northern Namibia, many people don’t have bank accounts. Their treasured cattle are their savings for their old age.

“Please give us small tents so that we can live as families, not the huge refugee tents.”

Beira, in Mozambique, was completely devastated by climate change. Super-charged by warming oceans, Hurricane Idai dumped a year’s worth of rain in just days, forming an inland sea. Floods rushed across a land denuded by decades of deforestation.

“Climate change is loading the dice by intensifying storms and making rain patterns less predictable. Climate change is the human thumb on the scale, pushing us toward disaster. It is not a distant danger – it is already with us. As we continue to burn fossil fuels, its effects will only grow”, Archbishop Justin Welby said.

The Anglican Communion’s fifth Mark of Mission calls us to “Strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the Earth“

“Strive to safeguard the integrity of creation”

We have failed. In Genesis 2:15, God gave the care of this beautiful garden planet into our hands saying: “work the earth and look after it”.

We failed God’s call to be guardians of the Earth.

The bonds that hold nature together are unravelling due to overfishing, pollution, climate change and deforestation. In my generation, we have pushed one million species to the brink of extinction. Environmental degradation and climate change are striking hardest against the poor and vulnerable.

“Sustain and renew the life of Earth”

Having failed as guardians of Creation, we are being called now to renew the life of the Earth. How can we do so?

Firstly, this mission must impact our theology and worship: God’s love extends to all of God’s creatures, not just humans. Salvation is for the whole Earth. Jesus died on the cross for the whole of creation “in order to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:20).

Around the Communion, churches and dioceses are embracing worship, which includes our care for creation.

Churches are using Lent as a time to abstain from the damage we are doing to God’s earth. The Church of England has Green Lent, dedicating this year’s season to caring for creation. The Anglican Communion Environmental Network is encouraging people to #Fast4Earth. In other provinces, they are having a “Plastic-Free Lent”.

The Season of Creation has been embraced widely as an ecumenical movement globally, as well as by the Anglican Consultative Council as a time dedicated to learning about God the Creator, from 1 September to 4 October.

World Water Week, Earth Day and harvest festivals among others give us many opportunities to focus on God the Creator, and what the Bible teaches about our mission to renew the earth.

This mission calls us to action. It is inspiring to see how across the Communion churches are responding in challenging and prophetic ways:

• The Church of England passed a motion to go to net carbon zero by 2030. Transport and heating of buildings must be drastically reduced to meet this prophetic target
• The Church of South India has been nominated for a UNESCO prize for their inspiring Green Schools programme
• The Anglican Province of Burundi set itself the target of planting 10 million trees in five years

Installing small scale solar farms in Mozambique, water harvesting in India, organic farming in Zimbabwe, in these and countless ways churches are responding to the call to heal this planet.

We must be led now by the voices of those who have lost the most – young people. As the older generation we have failed to be guardians of the Earth, and now the young people are rising to protect their home – half of the world’s population is young. One hundred per cent of the world’s future is young.

Young Anglicans are rising up. The movement of Green Anglicans which started in Southern Africa has spread to central, east Africa and even to Portugal and Brazil.

Follow Leah Namugerwa our own 16-year-old “Greta” from Uganda on social media.  Across the globe, young people are rising in Fridays for Future and other campaigns, let us support them.

We are asking for the voices of young people to be heard at the Lambeth Conference, and are encouraging them to challenge the bishops by writing “Letters for Creation”.

We must learn to be led by the voices of indigenous communities, for their relationship with creation remains integral to their spirituality. They are guardians of some of the most vulnerable lands which are now most under threat from the extractive industries.

In the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury: “the climate emergency is the greatest challenge that we and future generations face. . . It is absolutely clear that following Jesus must include standing alongside those that are on the frontline of this unfolding catastrophe.”

Our mission is clear: “Go now and preach the good news to  the whole of creation” (Mark 16:15).