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  Caring for Creation Sunday Is a Form of Peacemaking and Stewardship      
             
  “God’s Covenant with creation is given as grace and peace. Peace (shalom) is the wholeness and community in which human beings are meant to live. Although all people are sinners, God continually renews the Covenant through our Lord Jesus Christ. God’s peace heals, comforts, strengthens and frees” (Commitment to Peacemaking, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)). As we are called to be peacemakers, we are called to be in right relationships with ourselves, our community, our nation, and our world. We are to be stewards and beacons of God’s peace and justice on this earth, and it is through our actions influenced by this stewardship that we reconcile the brokenness of our world. In creating us human, God gave us enormous responsibility to care, guard, and protect all of creation, for each piece of creation was born out of magnificent care and splendor. Today remember the importance that the earthly creatures—flora and fauna—have in our struggle to reconcile the brokenness, to experience right relationships. Rejoice in this wonderful Caring for Creation Sunday (also called Earth Day Sunday) on April 27, 2003, with a celebration. Remember our commitment and responsibility to care for this earth that is a gift to us.

Caring for Creation/Earth Day

  • Being stewards of creation by care in our use of resources
  • Protect and restore environment

PEACEMAKING STEWARDSHIP
(Mutual relationship: being a peacemaker,
you are a steward of justice; as a steward,
you responsibly bring justice to all)

This year’s Caring for Creation Sunday theme is concern for our water resources. Water is vital for sustaining all life on earth. In our baptism, water is the fountain of deliverance and rebirth. We are washed of our sins and all are cleansed by it. Today, this sustaining resource is experiencing unprecedented pollution and overuse. The pristine water that flowed through the waterways of the earth is now undrinkable and often uninhabitable.

For more on this story, go to the e-zine on-line.

Litany for Caring for Creation Sunday (Earth Day Sunday) Worship

 
     

 
Leader:   Let us remember the powerful reasons for engaging in the restoration of God’s creation.
     
People:   God’s works in creation are too wonderful, too ancient, too beautiful, too good to be desecrated.
     
Leader:   Restoring creation is God’s own work in our time, in which God comes both to judge and restore.
     
People:   The Creator-Redeemer calls faithful people to become engaged with God in keeping and healing the creation, human and nonhuman.
     
Leader:   Human life and well-being depend upon the flourishing of other life and the integrity of the life-supporting processes that God has ordained.
     
People:   The love of neighbor, particularly “the least” of Christ’s brothers and sisters, requires action to stop the poisoning, the erosion, the wastefulness that are causing suffering and death.
     
Leader:   The future of our children and their children and all who come after is at stake.
     
All:   In this critical time of transition to a new era, God’s new doing may be discerned as a call to earth-keeping, to justice, and to community.
     
“The Call to Restore Creation” is from the 1990 GA Policy Restoring Creation for Ecology and Justice.
     
Stewardship and the Environment

Christian stewardship is about the care, nurture, and responsible use of all creation—the earth, natural resources, and all living things. Genesis tells us that God created the world and everything in it and that this creation was good. Christian stewardship dictates that we live in ways that will maintain all that is good in creation.

Human life is part of God’s created order. We are made in God’s image and placed in relationship with all of creation. God entrusted humans with the care and management of the created world.

The following stewardship study materials are available from Presbyterian Distribution Service for the use of congregations as they explore the stewardship of the environment:

         
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