Season of Creation – Creationtide
As we start to leave summer behind us and move into September, it's the start of a new season for a lot of things. In the church, the next few weeks are known as the Season of Creation – or Creationtide – and form about 5 weeks where we shape our worship around giving thanks for all aspects of God's creation, and paying attention to the natural world with the aim of confessing our sin towards it, repenting or changing our behaviour, and actively working towards seeing healing and wholeness come about across the whole created order.
1: Oikonome: A Just Home for All People
This year's theme for Creationtide is "Renewing the Oikos of God", and Oikos is the Greek word for 'home'. This week, to kick it all off, we will be considering what this means, and reflecting on our Bible readings to see what God is saying to us about how we treat our home, who we share it with, and what that means for the future.
Bible Readings: (Click to Read)
2: Oikologie: Wisdom from Our Home Planet
This week we are continuing our celebration of the Season of Creation, or Creationtide, where we shape our worship around giving thanks for all aspects of God's creation, and paying attention to the natural world with the aim of confessing our sin towards it, repenting or changing our behaviour, and actively working towards seeing healing and wholeness come about across the whole created order.
It's particularly significant this year as the prepares to host COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference which is being held up in Glasgow in November. This is a big meeting of world leaders who are coming together to agree actions that will move us forward towards the global target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. We are currently making progress, but not fast enough!
As we reflect on this year's theme for Creationtide "Renewing the Oikos of God", where Oikos is the Greek word for 'home', let's think about what that can look like politically as well as in our individual lives. This week we are celebrating Harvest Festival, giving thanks for God's provision and the gifts of the earth for our nourishment, and thinking about the wisdom of the natural world – what can learn about God by getting to know, and caring for, his creation?
Bible Readings: (Click to Read)
3: Oikologie: Peacemaking As Home-Building
This week we are continuing to celebrate Creationtide, by looking at “Peace-making as Home Building”. We live in a fractured world where relationships are broken between people, God and nature - but Jesus's gift to us is peace that goes beyond what the world understands. What would it look like to work towards a peace that re-integrates all such broken relationships, and how can we offer the peace of Christ to the world around us?
4: Praying for Our Home Planet & Its People
This week in our series on "Renewing a Home for All" during Creationtide, we are focusing on prayer. Praying for our home, and all who live in it. Praying for healing from the dis-order and chaos that impacts the natural world. Lamenting and confessing our part in all of this.
The symbol this year for the Season of Creation is Abraham's Tent, which signifies a commitment to safeguard a place for all who share our common home, just as Abraham did in the book of Genesis. Churches celebrating this theme for Creationtide have been encouraged to use the image of Abraham's tent in some way, during worship, or as a sign of hospitality outside their buildings. So, we will have a tent in church as part of our worship this week. There will be extra space during the service to pray, and we would encourage you to write down these prayers in some form, and leave them in the tent as an act of worship – symbolizing before God and each other that our intention as a community is to create a home for all.
5: A Home and a Hope for the Future
This week we finish up our Creationtide series on Renewing a Home for All by looking to the future. How can we have hope for a future, when the current situation is so bleak? Without hope we are left with no reason to change at all, so it is important to place our hope in something that is worthy of it – the person of Jesus Christ. Holding the tension between the hope we have in His redemption and the chaos of the environmental crisis, how can we move forward in practical, intentional ways to safeguard creation for the coming generations? Big questions to ponder once again, with no easy answers except the true hope which is at the core of our faith.