Creation Sunday

Here's an interesting development in Christian liturgy and worship:

Churches worldwide are coming together to adopt a major new Christian festival: the Feast of Creation, also known as Creation Sunday.

From 2024-2025, all the major Christian denominations and networks gathered for two ecumenical councils in Assisi, Italy. Through this time of prayer, discussion and friendship, they have agreed to mark the first Sunday in September as a day to celebrate the Creator God and the mystery of creation in Christ. From Eastern Orthodox, to Pentecostals, to Roman Catholics, to Mennonites, Anglicans and more, the world’s Christian traditions are uniting around the conviction that celebrating, praying for and protecting God’s creation is essential to the Christian life.

You can read more about that here.

In the Orthodox Church 1 September has long been regarded as the beginning of the Church Year, and it begins with Vespers the evening before, during which the Church sings:

O Christ our God, Who in wisdom didst fashion all things,
and out of nothing hast brought them into being,
bless the crown of the year, and preserve our city unharmed;
and make our faithful glad by Thy power,
granting them victories over their adversaries,
through the Theotokos bestowing upon the world great mercy!

V. We shall be filled with the good things of Thy house; holy is Thy temple, wonderful in righteousness. (Ps. 64:5)

In South Africa (and other southern-hemisphere countries) 1 September is also marked as the beginning of spring which makes it seem even more appropriate for a celebrations of creation. 

But there is also an almost forgotten aspect of creation celebration, not mentioned in the linked article, that perhaps deserves to be remembers as a small part of southern African church history. The idea of Creation Sunday goes back a long way before 2024, or even 1989. In southern Africa (and possibly other places) Anglicans were observing Creation Sunday from 1969. 

Creation Sunday was observed on the Ninth Sunday before Christmas, which usually fell towards the end of October. In the 20 years or so that it was observed, it helped to shape the Christian experience and outlook of a generations of Anglican Christians at least, so it might be interesting, from a church historical point of view, to collect oral histories of the way in which people remember observing it, and reflecting on how it shaped their understanding of the Christian faith and the created world.

Since I was one of those whose Christian experience was influenced by Creation Sunday, I'll record some of my experiences of it, and invite others to do the same.

In 1969 the Anglican Church in Southern Africa introduced some alternative liturgical texts to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and with it they introduced a new lectionary. The litugrical texts were in three parts: Office 1 and Office 2, which replaced Morning and Evening Prayer. Office 1 was intended to be the main Sunday service, and could be followed by Holy Communion. Office 2 was a stand alone service. Three scripture readings were provided for Office I, and two for Office 2, in a two-year cycle, beginning with the ninth Sunday before Christmas. 

Though the compilers of the new lectionary denied that they were establishing a new liturgical season, in effect they did. Creation Sunday marked the beginning of the church year.

Each Sunday had a theme, with the scripture readings fitting that theme, and in my experience, hymns and sermons were also often chosen to fit that theme. The preacher would choose hymns, especially those preceding and following the sermon, to fit the theme of the preaching, which usually followed the Sunday theme. 

In the nine Sundays before Christmas the dominant theme was the  Old Testament reading:

9th Sunday before Christmas -- Creation
8th Sundy before Christmas -- The Fall
7th Sunday before Christmas -- The Covenant of Preservation: Noah
6th Sunday before Christmas -- The Election of God's People: Abraham
5th Sunday before Christmas -- The Promise of Redemption: Moses
4th Sunday before Christmas -- The Advent Hope

Though both years in the cycle followed the same theme during this season. there were different scripture readings for odd years and even years. For Creation Sunday the readings for the main Sunday service (the Eucharist, if celebrated) were:

Odd Year: Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-25; Rev 4:1-11; John 3:1-8
Even Year: Gen 1:1-3, 24-31a; Col 1:15-20;  John 1:1-14

And for the Offices (Office 2 before 1975):

Odd Year: Job 38:1-18; Acts 14:1-17
Even Year: Proverbs 8:1, 22-31; Rev 21:15-27

These were from the Anglican Liturgy 1975 lectionary, which had been slightly modified from the earlier 1969 version. 

I give this in some detail because no one born after about 1985 would have any memory of it at all, and it probably had no part in their Christian experience. What follows is some of my experience of celebrating Creation Sunday in that setting. 

In 1970 and 1971 I was in Namibia, and we were feeling our way with the new lectionary, and exploring its possibilities. In 1971 I introduced it to the congregation at St Michael's, Katutura, Windhoek, where the services were mainly in Kwanyama, with a little bit of Herero thrown in. The new liturgy was not yet available in those languages, so we introduced the lectionary only, and some time was spent on explaining the Sunday themes, and the relation of readings to the themes and so on.

St Johns Church, Malvern, 1972

In 1972, having been deported from Namibia, I was serving in the white English-speaking parish of Queensburgh, near Durban, South Africa. It had three small churches, which had separate services on Sunday mornings, but combined for Sunday evenings, and so we planned to have a special evening service for Creation Sunday at St John's Church, Malvern. It would normally have been Office 2, but as Office 2 could be used  in either the morning or the evening, it had no real connection with the time of day, so with the permission of the Anglican Bishop of Natal we used an evening service of our own devising, loosely based on Orthodox Vespers, which is, in a way, a daily celebration of creation.

St John's Church, Malvern

 

In the service we sang Psalm 104, as in Orthodox Vespers, followed by the Great Litany. The scripture reading we used was Job 38, and followed that by a reading of the creation of Narnia from The Magician's Nephew, by C.S. Lewis. with the singing stars. This was in turn followed by a hymn Stars of the morning so gloriously bright. We also read some paragraphs from Fr Alexander Schmemann's book For the Life of the World on the relation between Vespers and creation. 

I included some pictures of the church, which are also historical in a way, because the church was later demolished to make way for a shopping centre car park.

In another Anglican parish in the Durban area Creation Sunday was also celebrated in a special way. In the 1970s there was a movement on Durban churches called "Flowers through the Church" and church members who were skilled at flower arranging would put their work in a church, and people would be invited to come and see them. 

St Martin's Church in Durban North was planning to have such a "Flowers through the Church" event, and chose to have as a theme the Nine Sundays before Christmas, one for each of the Sundays, and ending with Christmas itself. Visitors were given a leaflet with a brief explanation, and the collect (theme prayer) for eachSunday, to pray at each one, so they went round the church beginning with Creation Sunday, in a manner similar to the Stations of the Cross.

In such ways as these, Creation Sunday became a kind of annual landmark in the lives of many Christians and parishes, and at evening services on Creation Sunday there were sometimes guest preachers who spoke on the need for care of the environment and related topics.