A Creation Care Preaching Guide to Lent (A Guest Post)
Melinda Quivik holds a PhD in worship and preaching from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She has been preaching for 30 years and has taught worship and preaching at a Lutheran seminary for several years. She happily serves as a BsP mentor, edits the quarterly journal Liturgy, writes the scholar's perspective in Augsburg Fortress's "Sundays & Seasons: Preaching," and works on longer writing projects in worship and preaching.
Some people think that we need a special liturgical season to help the church pay attention to the needs of planet Earth.
A special season would, indeed, make it necessary for preachers to consider our beliefs about our planet and to confront the human conditions that lead us to exploit rather than steward this gift.
With a special season, preachers would naturally work on imagining an invitation to transformation, casting vision for an alternative reality—what our lives would be like if we cherished God’s good Earth in the way God does: “God saw that it was good.”
But Earth-keeping is found in every corner of the Bible.
Each Sunday in Lent, for example, gives us images that are windows into healthy and whole living.
Each Sunday the scripture readings feed our abilities to envision living harmoniously with the rest of creation in all its forms.
Ash Wednesday: Creation Care as a Discipline of LIfe in Christ
RCL Readings:
Joel 2:1–1, 12–17
2 Corinthians 5:20b––6:10
Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21
Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, sets up the whole season with the primary disciplines of life in Christ.
These disciplines—fasting, prayer, and almsgiving—are what we need in order to look around us and care about Earth.
Lent calls us to:
Fast from ignorance of nature’s ways and our responsibilities toward Earth and fast from greed that allows wreckless relationships with God’s creation.
Pray to deepen self-reflection, to question the values we express by our actions, to plead that God infuse our individual and communal hearts with a desire to turn toward what is good for all people and creatures.
Give our money at increased amounts to flood environmental activists and organizations with what they need for their work.
First Sunday in Lent: Discerning our Responsibilities
RCL Readings:
Genesis 2:15–17; 3:1–7
Romans 5:12–19
Matthew 4:1–11
The First Sunday in Lent offers us essential insights into what is needed for discerning our responsibilities as human beings: the origins of the knowledge of good and evil and Jesus’ response to the evil of temptations.
In Genesis, the story of taking the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil has long been presented as a fault, as if Eve’s presentation to Adam was a typically bad act on the part of a woman, and as if it is bad to be inquisitive and take chances.
What if, instead, it is a description of human ability to acknowledge reality—to recognize problems and opportunities, to take risks to solve a problem or to create something new. This story depicts Eve as seeing something delightful and moving toward her desire to be wise. Likewise, we are called to be wise in the ways we live with the things of Earth.
The Gospel story addresses the first temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness as a depiction of our own lives. My husband, a historian of technology, gives a presentation for churches that shows how it has come to be that, unlike Jesus, we do not turn down the Tempter’s first request. Instead, we live by turning stone in bread. We take fossil fuels (petroleum) to power machines that grow wheat, instead of relying on God’s gift of the sun’s radiation to grow what we need for bread. Regenerative agriculture is an answer to this fossil-fueled way of farming.
Second Sunday in Lent: Finding a New Way
RCL Readings:
Genesis 12:1–4a
Romans 4:1–5, 13–17
John 3:1–17
The Second Sunday in Lent asks us to leave what is familiar and find a new way of living.
In Genesis, the Lord sends Abram away from his homeland—to leave what is familiar, what he knows, and go to a place he does not know, where Abram and all families will be blessed.
In John, Nicodemus is called by his curiosity and questions to understand the meaning of Jesus’ teachings.
In both stories, God is a midwife, ushering people into renewed lives.
We are called in the same way to leave what is familiar and venture into a new place, finding a different way to live in community with Earth and trusting God to guide us.
Third Sunday In Lent: God provides from unlikely sources
RCL Readings:
Exodus 17:1–7
Romans 5:1–11
John 4:5–42
The Third Sunday in Lent focuses on water—from a rock and in a well.
Water is a theme in these texts: water for the Israelites in the wilderness where they journeyed on without assurance that they would have water.
And the Samaritan woman gives Jesus water—an unlikely person to have even had a conversation with him.
What nourishes life can come from places and people who are not obvious sources, yet the Lord has steadfastly provided humans and creatures and plant life with water.
In many places now, water is polluted or scarce, and drought threatens farmers because of climate chaos.
As we pray (or complain) to God about this situation, we see that God gives Moses a means by which to offer water to the people. Jesus asks the woman to give him water.
We, too, have been given the tools for healing.
Fourth Sunday in Lent: Seeing the Value of Earth
RCL Readings:
1 Samuel 16:1–13
Ephesians 5:8–14
John 9:1–41
The Fourth Sunday in Lent reminds us that God sees in a way that breaks our expectations.
While we may believe we see rightly, only God gives sight to the blind.
Samuel mistakenly believes Jesse’s older, stronger, more impressive sons should be called to be king, but he is wrong. The Lord sees the potential in the one who seems least likely: a young shepherd whose role is to care for the animals.
And while the man who was blind from birth seems to be forever consigned to begging, Jesus uses the things of Earth—the unlikely elements of mud and water—to give him sight.
They are simple healing vessels, and they begin a major controversy over whether the people can believe what they see. The perennial friction between the religious rulers and Jesus ensues. Instead of giving thanks for the mud and the pool and the healing, the self-righteous (i.e., the truly blind people) wrangle over who is to blame for disabilities, and they drive away the one who is healed.
Wherever we do not give thanks for the gifts of creation and, instead, turn against the innocent, we live as the religious rulers who disdain what Jesus does and teaches.
We argue about the cost of care for creation instead of seeing that when we live in concert with nature, we are all given better vision.
The Fifth Sunday in Lent: Resurrection is Possible
RCL Readings:
Ezekiel 37:1–14
Romans 8:6–11
John 11:1–45
The Fifth Sunday in Lent gives us the image of life returned to dry bones and to dead Lazarus.
God offers hope in desolation, raising the dead to life again. This is good news for human communities decimated by drought and war and pestilence. This is good news for the land, as well.
The reading from Romans pits flesh against spirit and could well cause us to think little of material reality—as if spirit is the only thing of value.
The spirit in each of us, however, sees beyond the conventions of the day, turns us toward new ways to abide with the living planet, and brings what is dead to life.
Jesus does not keep the living from dying but gives us the vision to resurrect what is lost. This is directly related to stewardship of Earth.