*This sermon was given by CreatureKind co-Founder David Clough at the Eastertide Earth Day Service on April 22nd, 2022. You can see the full service here.
If I’m a little bleary-eyed, it’s because Aline, Karla, and I have just returned from a meeting that CreatureKind sponsored of representatives of US churches and Christian organizations. It was an exciting 48 hours and a significant step in our work towards getting animal agriculture on the agenda of US churches. The meeting was held at Airlie House in Virginia, which is where the idea of Earth Day was first announced in 1969. The grounds of the house were full of trees in pink blossom, which felt appropriate for me for the week after Easter.
I mention that, because in the Northern Hemisphere, the celebration of Easter in the spring means that images of new life in nature are an obvious reference point for talking about resurrection.
Perhaps Easter is the time in the Christian year when you’re more likely to hear the more-than-human creation mentioned in preaching.
In the Easter service I attended last Sunday, we sang the hymn “Now the green blade rises from the buried grain” inspired by Jesus’s teaching of John 12:24, which says “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
Perhaps you heard similar references in services you attended. It’s good to recognize what’s going on here. Jesus’s teaching about seeds and new life is drawing attention to how the more-than-human creation speaks to us about God. Easter imagery of eggs, spring flowers, bunny rabbits, is all doing the same thing, and we should celebrate with humility how we may learn from fellow creatures about the ways of their creator and ours.
It’s much less common, however, to think about the connection between Easter and other-than-human creatures in the opposite direction. What does God’s work in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ mean for creation beyond the human? That’s what I’d like us to reflect on for the next few minutes, with the help of two passages from scripture, Psalm 104 and Colossians 1:15–20.
Psalm 104
Let’s start with Psalm 104. It’s a central piece of creation theology in the Bible, setting out God’s provision for a diverse range of creatures, including wild animals, domesticated animals, and humans, but seeing them all together, as creaturekind, we might say. Each creature has their own place, each receives what they need to survive from God’s hand. The Psalm is an amazing vision of God’s attentive care for every kind of creature.
I think our reading of the Psalm needs to go further, informed by three different pieces of context:
First, we need to lament that human activity has failed to respect the places for God’s creatures laid out in the Psalm. The Psalm celebrates the God who makes space for all creaturely kinds, but we live in a world where humans and domesticated animals now represent 96% of the biomass of the earth’s mammals, where domesticated chickens are three times the biomass of all wild birds, and where we have depleted wild fish stocks by 90%. We have taken wild animals from their divinely assigned places, put them in cages and warehouses that prevent them from fulfilling their vocation as God’s creatures, and have reshaped their bodies to make them ever more efficient units of human production. Jungle fowl have been turned into broiler chickens and caged laying hens, unable to forage for food, roost in trees, or dustbathe, with the sensitive tips of their beaks removed to avoid them injuring others in overcrowded cages and warehouses. Wild boar have been made into intensively farmed pigs, unable to root in the earth, with their tails cut off to prevent them chewing on one another out of boredom and frustration. Salmon and trout have been prevented from making migrations of hundreds of miles and instead are kept in bare tanks and sea cages predisposing them to painful disease.
What can it mean to worship God as the one who has made a place for every creature in the knowledge that humans have taken those places away?
Second, we need to recognize that even at the time when the psalm was first composed, humans had been responsible for making other animals extinct. It seems likely that a global human population of no more than five million between around 50,000 and 3,000 years ago contributed to the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction that made around half of large land mammals extinct. So while relationships between humans and other animals are very much worse today, the Psalm was not written at a time of human innocence in relation to fellow animal creatures.
Third, it is sobering to realize that the vast majority of living creatures who have ever lived on earth were already extinct before humans arrived on the earth. Close to 99% of species had become extinct when the psalmist wrote this psalm. What does it mean to affirm God as the one who makes a place for every creature in the knowledge that most of those habitats and creatures are gone?
It seems to me that reflecting on Psalm 104 in relation to these three contexts means we cannot read it merely as a celebration of God’s creation and providence. We must read it instead as a vision of the fulfillment of God’s will for creatures, just as we read in Isaiah’s vision of peace between creatures, seen in Isaiah 11 and 65 and in Paul’s vision of a creation set free from bondage in Romans 8. Psalm 104 affirms that God’s will is for each creature to have a place suitable for their flourishing and to receive all that they need. That is not the case today. It was not even the case when the psalm was written. But our scriptures affirm it is God’s will for creatures.
Col. 1:15–20
That brings us to our second reading, Colossians 1:15-20, which is one of the earliest reflections on the significance of God’s work in Jesus Christ. The passage identifies Jesus as the firstborn of all creation, before all things, in whom all things were created, in whom all things hold together, the firstborn from the dead, in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through whom God was pleased to reconcile to Godself all things in earth and heaven, making peace through the blood of the cross.
This passage makes absolutely clear that God’s work in Jesus Christ matters not just for human beings, but for all things in heaven and earth. The passage leaves no doubt about the cosmic implications of what took place on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. “All things,” ta panta in the Greek, is repeated five times in this short passage just to make sure there’s no possibility of misunderstanding. God’s work of reconciliation in Jesus Christ makes peace between all things in heaven and earth. If we take Colossians seriously, we can’t avoid recognizing that the message of Easter is nothing less than cosmic in scope.
Of course, Colossians is no outlier in its understanding of the cosmic scope of God’s graciousness towards creatures. Genesis 1 and 2 celebrate God’s creation of all creatures and God’s declaration of them as good in themselves. Psalm 104 is just one example of where God’s concern for all kinds of creatures is affirmed in the wisdom literature, echoed in other psalms and notably in the closing chapters of the Book of Job. Other prophets alongside Isaiah affirm a time of peace for humans and other creatures. John’s gospel tells us that the reason for the incarnation was that God so loved the world, the cosmos in Greek. And Revelation 5 shares the vision in Romans 8 of the participation of other-than-human creatures in God’s redemption — picturing every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them — singing praises to the lamb.
Given all this, it is mystifying to me that Christians could ever have come to the conclusion that God was only interested in one of the myriad creaturely kinds on earth, or that God’s work in Jesus Christ, celebrated at Easter, was of relevance only to members of the single Homo sapiens. The scriptures passed down to us affirm the inclusion of all creatures as recipients of God’s grace in creation, reconciliation, and redemption. Easter is Earth Day: the affirmation of God’s will for all earth’s creatures. Praise God!
The task before us
Let’s make sure to take time during this Easter season to recognize and celebrate the meaning of Easter for all God’s creatures. It’s a time to dwell in the gladness of the cosmic implications of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
For those who see this deep truth there is also a task, a responsibility, and a vocation before us. It’s the task, responsibility, and vocation that drives the whole of CreatureKind’s work. Many people haven’t heard the good news for creation that Easter brings. That includes people outside the church, many of whom have decided that the church has nothing to say about care for animals or the wider creation. But it also includes many within the church, who have been taught a Christianity that is woefully neglectful of the meaning of Easter faith for all God’s creatures. That means it’s no surprise that many Christians consume without thinking about the products of industrial animal agriculture that bring such devastating impacts on farmed animals, wild animals, racially and economically oppressed humans, and our shared environment. They give no thought to their complicity with industrial animal agriculture because they have not heard Easter preached except as something that matters only for humans like them.
So as those who see the implications of Easter for all God’s creatures, let’s recommit ourselves to sharing that good news, reaching out to those we meet within and beyond our churches with the vision of God’s redemption of creation and its practical implications for our responsibility to live more peaceably here and now among our fellow creatures.
Amen!
