I have a pet peeve, and I’ve had it for a while. It may seem odd to you, but it is my peeve after all. I’m a priest, and so my pet peeve is a theological one. It’s that Creation, the various and sundry creatures with which we share this planet, and our place in relation to them are almost never emphasized in Christian theology. Our liturgical seasons – Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost – focus upon human sin and God’s provision of redemption from it. And so, anyone might just get the impression that God was something like a hyper vigilant nanny who had an enormous bunch of the most grimy and ill-behaved children imaginable -- to clean up and straighten out.

   It reminds me of the real-life vignette that a parishioner in North Carolina once told me. He was part of a men’s Bible study group that had met every week for years. During their time together they’d gotten close enough that they could share anything with each other. So one day, in the group, one of his friends sighed and said, "I’m always on my mind." He realized that he was always only thinking about himself. It dawned on him that everything was always about him. Now, perhaps that’s a guy thing, but I suspect that it’s part of the condition. Whatever the cause, we humans seem to be almost obsessed with our selves. And we tend to lose sight of the rest of the world in the process – especially nowadays.

   If I had my way we’d change the liturgical calendar and squeeze in a four-Sunday season of Creation – between Pentecost and Advent. Then we just might be better able to appreciate God’s Creation for a short time each year.

   Don’t get me wrong -- it’s not that I don’t think we need redeeming. If any creature does, we humans do. If sin is behaving without love toward God, others – including Creation – and ourselves then we certainly need redemption. Jesus defined love as treating others the way we’d like to be treated. St. Paul defined love as patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. He said that love does not insist on its own way; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing. And so, clearly we need redeeming, but unless I’m mistaken, God saves us from our sins by pure grace -- through our faith in and commitment to Jesus Christ. It’s a gift -- simply and completely God’s gift of love to us. And, of course, whenever something comes to our minds that we ought to have done and didn’t do or ought not to have done and did, well, then, we need to bring it up with God, ask forgiveness, but then we need to walk away from it. We need to put our sins behind us and move on. As the author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote, "Let us go on, leaving behind the basic teachings about Christ, and not laying again the foundation: repentance and faith toward God."

   One of the ways we can move on, given the state of the earth in our time, is to better understand Creation and our role in relation to it. I mean, it’s not as if the Bible ignores Creation. It says that God made each and every part of it. It describes every experience and event that it records clearly within its natural setting. The psalms praise God for every aspect of Creation. The prophets use the imagery of nature to proclaim God’s Word. And the preponderance of Jesus’ parables draws upon the laws of nature. No, the theological neglect of Creation certainly isn’t a problem that the Bible has. It’s more the lense that people use when we read the Bible – that ever-present ME lense.

   Oh, I understand how it happened that we Christians tend to neglect Creation. It’s not just our inability to keep our minds off our selves & out of the spotlight. It’s also that the Christian faith began over against the backdrop of polytheism and paganism – the worship of nature. Christian preachers, teachers and apologists for the Faith wanted to differentiate the Christian Way from other ways – to wean people from their superstitions & worship of nature. But since that’s less the problem we face in our time than the problem of abusing Creation, we need to regain a biblical balance in understanding Creation.

   You see the universe wasn’t simply created by God to be a grand backdrop for our creation, sin and redemption, and neither was this planet – as so many, American Christian, now claim. It’s not merely a stage built by God on which we humans might play out the drama of falling from grace and saved for eternity. Some have said, "We weren’t created for earth. Earth was created for us." Ah, there’s that "it’s all about me" thing again – unmitigated human pride. That’s our divorce from Creation speaking. Our consciousness has been shaped by our own industry and technology. It’s a mindset manufactured by our ability to move through our days with minimal contact with our natural environment – the one that God created, because the environments that we made for our selves constantly surround us. We move from carefully controlled home environments to Detroit manufactured environments to publicly developed environments – schools, work and shopping places. God’s natural creation is too often alien to us. And so our experience shapes our mentality, and our mentality has created a god divorced from nature – from the very Creation that expresses who God is. That’s not the Creator, which, by the way, not coincidentally, we almost never hear as an alternate name for God anymore. That’s a Man projection god – a god created in our image – only for us.

   In truth the Bible reveals that God is not nature or any part of nature. But, over and over again, it does say that God – the Creator of the universe – thought it up and made it all from scratch. He loves and cherishes it. The most basic prayer that the people of the Bible said many times, every day, always began, "O Lord God, King of the universe, we thank you…" That shaped their consciousness that God wasn’t just their god – a pocket god to carry with them – but the Creator of all things in whom all things live and move and have their being. Scripture places a healthy and balanced emphasis upon nature – neither over-emphasizing it as pagan approaches did, nor underemphasizing it, as many modern-day Christians seem to do.

   Why, just today, in our readings this is what we heard: In initiating his proclamation of the Gospel to the Athenians, the Apostle Paul said, "God made the world and everything in it." He set his message in its proper context – that the God about whom He spoke was none other than the one who made everything. Therefore, each and every aspect of nature has dignity derived from its Creator, and so, everything in nature should be seen not just as a convenience for us to exploit or as an inconvenience to be removed by us -- as mere fodder for or objects of collateral damage in the fulfillment of our every appetite. Instead we should venerate the creatures alongside which we’ve been made so as to see that God made us to be interdependent upon each other.

   And, when Isaiah said this -- "I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle and the olive tree, so that all may see and know that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it." We can learn that our Creator has arranged things as He wishes, so that we should honor, thank and worship God as we observe what He has done. Venerating nature gives rise to worshipping the One who made it.

   Of course, when Jesus, in today’s Gospel reading said, "My Father is the vine grower." He used the image of a grapevine as a metaphor for our need to be integrally connected with Christ and rooted in God, and to illustrate our need to bear good fruit in our way of living. On another level, it can also show us that God is the One to whom all things belong. We humans are simply part of it – created to bring good results on God’s behalf as stewards. God has mandated that we should care for and nurture what He made – that involves pruning and using for our survival what we prune, but also tending the sources of nature.

   We humans were not meant by our Creator merely exploit things for our selves, get all we can, and then, when our actions make earth look bleak, pray to be saved from it -- to buy it up, use it up, throw it all away, and then cry out to God to take us to Heaven. God always eventually lets us experience the natural consequences of our actions. No, instead God made us to venerate – to appreciate -- nature in all its component parts, to enjoy its marvels, to worship our Creator for every aspect of it, to tend and use its prunings, to nurture its resources, to mend our abuses of it and to pray for its well being. This is as much part of our Christian spirituality as our own, personal, holiness.

   If I had my way I would add something to the basic disciplines of Christian spirituality in our time. To public worship, participation in the sacraments, Bible study, prayer, fellowship, ministry, fasting, tithing and charity, I would add that every Christian should regularly devote him or herself to gardening and caring for an animal. God speaks to us through our interaction with and tending of other creatures – something we sorely need in this highly technologized culture.

   I received a card on Friday from some parishioners. On it were printed words penned by Dante, 700 years ago, "Nature is the art of God." God wants us, as stewards of His art to restore what we’ve damaged by mistreatment and to tend it with reverence for God.