Caring for Creation with Apatheia

 

Sermon. 31/08/2025. St John the Evangelist’s, Ovington

Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation [transferred from 1 September]

Wisdom 13.1-9

Colossians 1.15-20

Matthew 6.24-34

 

Happy New Year!

 

Those of you who read the Saham Saga or the Ovington Oracle will know what I am talking about, or at least you stand a chance, once I tell you that today we are pretending it is already 1 September (because this is the nearest Sunday to 1 September).

 

1 September is New Year’s Day to some. It is for the Methodist Church, and also for Orthodox Churches. That’s said, it’s not been a major festival in Orthodoxy. It is pretty much just an administrative matter. But!

I bring you a new thing under the sun!

A revolution in its way!

The context is this: apart from the addition of new saints, the Orthodox calendar changes at glacial speed, if at all.

But! But in 1989 the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, who holds a leadership role in Orthodoxy, did a new thing, a radical thing.

He did something like introduce a wholly new feast.

He declared and decreed that 1 September was to be… the Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation (the language sometimes varies).  

 

In the West, things have been a little different. Western Christians have long had a fondness for St Francis, who was committed to the simple life, and a life close to nature. You might think that St Francis was a saintly Doctor Doolittle, who talked to the animals. If he did, that’s actually a small part of his life and witness. But his lifestyle, including (let us not forget) his embrace of “Sweet Sister Poverty”, made him a natural saint for us, if we want to care for creation.

 

We can say that both these streams (East and West) came together. And, to skip over a few decades, where we are now is that we can have – if we want to; it is not compulsory – we can have a certain “Creation-tide”. And Creation-tide lasts - you will have guessed - from 1 September to 4 October. It’s been part of Churches Together since 2008. It’s not really a full “season”; it doesn’t have its own set of readings and so on. But it is a chance to focus on creation and nature in a special way.

 

You might well say: we already have that; it’s called our Harvest Festival! But at Harvest Festival the prime emphasis tends of be on thanksgiving, for “all good gifts around us are sent from heaven above”, and the other themes constellate around that. And that is good. Yes, that is good.

 

But… this is different. On the Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation the main notes of our prayers are for the needs and flourishing of the natural order.

We make our petitions to God,

and we plead with God,

plead especially for right discernment about the changes we must make,

to live simply, that others may simply live.

 

Our readings are along these lines. To take them in turn.

 

The first, from the Book of Wisdom weaves an argument that the majesty of God is to be found in creation, in the beauty of creation. That beauty – in myriad abundant forms – can lead us to God, so that we honour God in right use of the things of creation, or it can distract us. We can be distracted, and think of any created thing as a god in its own right. But… that may be only one way of getting it wrong. It may be that it is just as bad to think of them as worthless, just lifeless lumps of stuff, that we can exploit and use up as much as we want.

 

The second reading, from Colossians, enters more deeply into this mystery. It tells us unapologetically that the mystery of God within and under creation (of which Wisdom speaks) is Christ. It really is Christ himself. We may be used to thinking like that, or we may not. I know such words can flow over us. But we had better note what it means. It means we cannot claim to be a servant of Christ, or a follower of Christ, or a friend of Christ, if we do not care for nature itself. Christians are obliged to care for creation, and to nurture the beauty within it. To nurture, and not to exploit or use it up.

 

The Gospel reading emphasises a lot of this. It draws us back to the beauty. The birds of the air and the lilies of the field, no less! But we mustn’t get lost in any naïve sense that the point here is that God wants us to find nature pretty. It is not that we are supposed to imagine ourselves in some Constable painting. No. We mustn’t overlook the simpler point: “You cannot serve [both] God and wealth.”

 

So the themes of prayer for the care of creation are demanding ones.

They call for real change from us.

I very much doubt that this is a new idea to you. Indeed, I know that it is not. But the fact that we’ve heard it before doesn’t mean we can avoid the question, the question:

 

How am I going to live, in ways that exploit nature less?

How I can I exploit less, for the sake of my sisters and brothers throughout the world, in this and in future generations, and for creation’s sake itself?

Really: How?

 

For all the Feast is new, the ideas, the demands, the questions, are as old as Christian faith itself. We know that Genesis begins with God calling creation very good, and with human beings put in charge of caring for the natural world (it is more that than “subdue” nature, but that is for another time). We know that God calls us to love our neighbour, to love the stranger, to love the widow and orphan - standing for all in desperate need, and that Christ adds that we are to love our enemies too. Truly, this means: global love.

 

And I might stop there. For a church-sermon to church-people, I believe I have set out the case for a day of prayer for the care of creation more-or-less to the best of my ability. But I am going to continue! Even worse, I am going to suggest that I need to say more, on moral grounds. That has to be wrong. It is never moral for a preacher to bore their congregation! I agree. But my issue is that, given where we are, I fear that to stop here would be saying something that is true in itself, but ends up being false.

 

Because we have to say a word about how the word is struggling to hear any case for the care of creation. There are other voices, other noises, other shouts and clamours. They are loud, and they are and growing louder. They are angry and they are growing angrier. They would have us limit our care to those perceived to be in the in-group. The feeling seems to be that our care and attention can only go so far. If others are cared for, it must be at our expense.

 

We may perhaps be thinking of foreign presidents. But that won’t do either. It is not a secret that some of these voices are those of our neighbours, are those of people we rub up against, are those we care about it and should care about. So we do need to listen to the fears behind the shouts and the clamours, and, yes, behind all the flags and all the rest of it.

 

How then to proceed? There is one more thing I want to bring to the table. I want to commend to us all the monastic virtue of apatheia. I’ll say it again: apatheia. Yes, it does sound like “apathy” (and is the origin of the word). But you will already have guessed that its meaning is different. It means to think and reason and discern and reflect without passion, without passion not in the sense of not caring about things, but in the sense of not being ruled by the emotions that bubble up or explode in all of us.

 

It means noticing when we are angry, and then not acting on the anger, but letting it pass, drawing from it the part of it that is true and carries truth, freed from the passion of it.

 

It means noticing when we are resentful, and then not acting on the resentment, but letting it pass, drawing from it the part of it that is true and carries truth, freed from the passion of it.

 

It means noticing our fears, but not acting on them. And it’s the same with all the rest of the passions. All of those passions which, frankly, seem to dominate our public discussions at the moment, locally, nationally, and internationally.

 

In other words, when it comes to the anger and the fear, God forbid we fight fire with fire.

 

I did say that was my last point.

So, now my prayer is that

we will never be apathetic about our prayer for the care of creation,

but, when we reflect on how to live well and live well with others,

we will do so with all godly apatheia.

Amen.