1) I love our Creation Care worship each month because it is a totally different way of worship and church. We are greeted by an altar full of treasures of the earth from the season. We share in prayer that puts us deeper into our body and the presence of God there – this echoes into my week as my meditations on the season and Creation are brought into church on Sunday – and then our worship resonates into the week and days wherever I am. I pay more attention to my relationship to the earth and other people. We share in the joy of Creation Care (and creation’s care of us!) as well as challenging or heartbreaking histories like our service centered on Indigenous histories and wisdom. For a lot of our older members who aren’t able to work as much on the farms or be out on the trails bringing Creation deeper into our worship one Sunday a month is a delight for the memory and senses. The grant from the Conference has been a big support and helped inspire new ideas like this.
2) When Pastor John Helt guest preached at our Creation Care worship, what stands out for me is John’s “We” poem. That us humans and all the human stuff we do are all part of creation too, even though a lot of the stuff we humans do doesn’t feel very natural sometimes. We are part of creation too along with the tree frogs, blue birds, and foxes.
And of course the 5 senses prayer that I help lead for our congregation – – for this seasonal senses prayer there were fall colorful leaves to look at and hear crinkling and crunching, milkweed pods filled with the seeds and fluff to feel, smelling prairie plants – mountain mint and Bergamot (Bee Balm), tasting crab apple.
3) In the world of Christianity, it seems that people are more comfortable leaning into the notion that “the world is passing away” than into the notion that we are to be good stewards of God’s creation. I believe that the latter notion is the correct interpretation of what the Bible means when it says we have been given dominion over the earth. I was inspired by John’s sermon because I am happy to be a part of a denomination that counts itself among the stewards. We have become too human-centric in our view of the world, and we need to get to a paradigm that the sanctity of ecological life is on par with the sanctity of human life (because really, it’s all the same, right?). Aldo Leopold knew this truth well when he espoused his “Land Ethic”—that we humans have a moral responsibility to care for the natural world.