The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation started among the world Orthodox Christian community in 1989 with the leadership of the “green partriarch,” Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. In 2015, Pope Francis announced that the Roman Catholic Church would join the Orthodox and also recognize September 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. The National Council of Churches USA has encouraged broad ecumenical participation in this day of prayer.
The following passage by Lutheran theologian Samuel Torvend makes the connection between sacramental worship and the Christian mandate to care for creation.
[W]hen Christians forget the fields and the vineyards… they desert their baptismal and eucharistic mandate to serve as public stewards of land, air, and water. …
Consider that a person is baptized in water. It is hard to imagine that any community would allow a child or an adult to be baptized in polluted water or a basin filled with toxic chemicals. Although no hard-and-fast rule governs what water is used in baptism, it goes without saying that most if not all Christian communities intend to use fresh and clean water when they celebrate baptism. But here’s the great irony. Where I live, we are grateful for the rain, the snow, the many creeks and rivers, lakes and deep bays that surround us, yet no one wants to wash their baptismal candidates in the waters of the local bay or the river that empties into it; they are both sites viewed by the government as degraded and polluted and in immediate need of cleaning, waterways so polluted by manufacturers that it will take years before any life emerges from the muck. Drink from it? Are you kidding? …
Do Christians hold any responsibility for the streams, air, and fields that constitute human habitation? Well, probably not, if one imagines that god’s purpose, in the end, is to rescue souls from the entrapment of the body and the prison of earthly life, to whisk them away at last to a dematerialized existence in a bodiless heaven. That is, after all, one model that has wielded enormous influence in the Christian tradition. The problem with this view, however, is that it has some difficulty coming to terms with the Christian confession that God creates a good creation filled with diverse and interdependent creatures, and that God becomes embodied in the incarnation and promises the resurrection of the body, not the immortality of the soul. …
I sometimes wonder… whether Christians think about the implications of the words they speak together as bread and wine are placed on the altar: “We dedicate our lives to the care and redemption of all that you have made.” Really? Listen again: “We dedicate our lives to the care and redemption of all that you have made.” Doesn’t this promise commit the Christian assembly to serve as public stewards of the creation that, from the perspective of faith, is gift and blessing from God?
Samuel Torvend teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. His MA is from the Aquinas Institute of Theology, his MDiv is from Wartburg Seminary, and his PhD is from Saint Louis University. The excerpt is from his book Daily Bread, Holy Meal (Augsburg Fortress, 2004), 21-24.
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