A sermon for the Feast of Creation in Christ by Nathan Nettleton, 1 September 2026
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
Today’s Feast of Creation in Christ is a brand new addition to the calendar. The Eastern Orthodox churches have long celebrated 1st of September as the Creation of the World, and in 1989 their Ecumenical Patriarch, Dimitrios I, invited “the entire Christian world to offer every year on this day prayers and supplications to the Maker of all, both as thanksgiving for the great gift of Creation and as petitions for its protection and salvation.”
That invitation led to a World Council of Churches process which culminated in recent consultations in Assisi reaching a consensus to create this new Feast. Our friend Aksel Lund from Norway who preached for us a couple of months ago was one of the eco-theologians at the Assisi consultations. I asked him if he would preach for us tonight, and he would have loved to, but in a more personal celebration of creation, he and his wife are expecting the birth of a child today! Maybe next year.
For the Orthodox, this day celebrated God’s act of creating the world. The new ecumenical Feast is intended to include that but to expand on it, inviting us to contemplate the mystery of creation being “in Christ” and a part of the whole story of the Triune God’s sacramental relationship to the earth and all that lives in it. The name comes from Paul’s letter to the Colossians (1:16) where he says, “in Christ all things were created.”
A few minutes ago, we read the opening verses of John’s gospel, and they said some similar things. Referring to Christ as “the Word”, it says “All things came into being through him. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness.”
For a church that calls itself “Open Icon”, these words really resonate with what we are on about and who we are seeking to be. An icon is a window through which the light of God’s life shines and becomes visible. It is open in both directions: the light of God shines through it into the world, and it draws our gaze back through it to see more deeply into the inner life and love of the Triune God. So John is suggesting that all creation has that quality of an icon – what has come into being in Christ is shining a light into the darkness, inviting us to see and know and participate.
It’s often said that an artwork reveals something of the artist who made it, and the Bible repeatedly makes this same point about God’s artistry in creation. The first verse of Psalm 19, which we pray at Matins each Monday, affirms that the sky tells the glory of God. In Romans (1:20) Paul says that “ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature have been understood and seen through the things God has made.” And the book of Wisdom (13:5) says that “through the greatness and beauty of created things we may contemplate their Creator.”
You might wonder then whether icons are even relevant. If all creation is an icon, shining with the light of God’s love, what’s the point of the little icons we use in prayer? It’s a fair question, but the two go hand in hand. You know the saying about not being able to see the wood for the trees. Sometimes when everything is an icon, we become oblivious to anything being an icon. So our little icons can be like training wheels, helping open our eyes to God’s light in one place so that we might learn to see it in all places.
The same is true of sacraments that tangibly reveal God’s presence. Today’s feast reminds us that all the world, all the universe, is a sacrament of God’s loving presence, but we might need to begin with learning to perceive what God is doing in bread and wine and water before we are capable of recognising the active presence of God in everything.
One can get overly romantic about this though. Many people wax lyrical about the beauty and harmony of the natural world until the first time they witness a pack of orcas tearing apart a baby humpback, or even my dog running down a possum that dares set foot in his backyard. My love of alpine scenery does not extend to wanting to be an eyewitness to the power of nature in that alpine valley in Nepal last week.
Contemplating these harsh and terrifying aspects of the natural world raises difficult questions. Disasters like the glacier collapse in Nepal are becoming more frequent and more intense because of global warming which has been caused by human greed. But even without climate change, they still happened sometimes, and if you were in the way of one, it wouldn’t matter how rare it was.
So what does the terror of nature tell us about creation and its Creator? You could write books and still not do justice to that question, so let me just offer you one little image. We often make the mistake of thinking of the universe as a machine that God built and operates. But it is not a machine; it is a living organism. So are you. God did not create you as a machine, a pre-programmed robot that can do nothing but mindlessly respond to whatever its operator decides. God created both you and the whole universe as living organisms, immensely complex and constantly evolving and changing. God is no more dictating the feeding of orcas or the breaking of the glaciers than dictating how you respond to the next person who offends you.
But to that terrifying freedom we have to add the horrifying truth that climate change is being driven by human greed and that we have torn up majestic forests and filled the oceans with toxic plastics and poisoned the air and the waterways with noxious effluent.
The creation, the natural world, is horribly wounded. So this feast day and the season that follows it are not only a time for thanksgiving, but also for lament. We weep for the deep wounds that are bringing the planet to its knees. We cry out in the frustration of knowing that our race is inflicting those wounds, but not knowing how to turn enough of us around to do anything about it.
We pray regularly “that we might rise up in solidarity with the earth before it burns up for lack of nurture and care,” but we watch on helplessly as widespread disillusionment drives more and more people to vote for so called disrupters who want to wind back environmental protections and revert to burning more coal and oil.
Creation as an icon has become a cracked and clouded window. With all the damage we have done, it is getting harder and harder to see the light of God’s love shine through. Or is it?
One of the intriguing things about the way that churches have valued and honoured icons over the centuries is that again and again we see that aged and damaged icons are venerated at least as much and perhaps even more than bright new ones. And I don’t think that that’s just nostalgia. I think it is that the damage itself becomes revelatory. A scarred and disfigured icon might sometimes be a better window into the broken heart of God than a fresh pristine one.
So perhaps the woundedness and sickness of the planet might actually be revealing with terrible clarity the devastation we have inflicted on the God who is embodied in creation.
If we read on a few more verses in this passage from John’s gospel, it would have told us that this same Word in whom all things were created became flesh and lived among us, the Creator of all putting himself at the mercy of his creation. And then at the other end of the gospel, John tells us that after we tortured our Creator to death and disfigured him beyond imagination, he came back, more alive than ever and more full of love and mercy than ever.
But John clearly depicts him coming back with wounded hands and side. As one of our Easter prayers says, he embraces us with wounded hands. Don’t listen to those who would tell you that we have to try to turn back the clock and return to the pristine garden where we were created. We are not backtracking to the garden. We are following the risen Jesus, and the risen Jesus is taking his wounds with him, the deep wounds of creation. In the life to come, the wounds are redeemed, not erased.
We are going to sing and pray for the earth now, and then in a few minutes, we will come to the table, the Lord’s Table, the Table of Creation. And there at the table, fruits of the earth, bread and wine, will be broken and poured out. And as we encounter the presence of our Creator in that brokenness, the full mystery of this new feast will be making itself known in that broken icon placed into your wounded hands.