31st August 2025
Holiday Reading & Listening:
Just Living / Saying Yes to Life - Ruth Valerio
The summer holidays are coming to an end and, as we move into September, we will be celebrating Creation season, and thinking in our services and home groups about Climate Justice and its relationship to the fifth mark of mission: to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
Ruth Valerio has spent many years considering these issues in her work for the Christian environmental charity A Rocha and, now, for Tear Fund. "Saying Yes to Life" takes the days of creation as outlined in Genesis 1, and, in each chapter ponders a different element: light, water, plants etc. "Just Living" takes a more overtly theological approach, reflecting on what theologians from St Benedict and St Francis to Thomas Aquinas have to teach us about living sustainably in the world, before moving into what a practical (and practicable) Christian response might be for the twenty-first century.
In her introduction to "Just Living", Ruth Valerio gives an account of the Christian gospel which is, in her words "what gets me out of bed in the morning". She reminds us that the story of scripture begins with a Creator God, who made a world that was "very good". For her, this is vital, because the Church has, over the centuries, built up an unhelpfully dualistic view that says that matter is bad and spirit is good. Yet, in Genesis 1 and 2, this is far from the case, because the world came from a God who is wholly good. This God put human beings, made in God's image, into his world to tend and look after it. We failed in that task early on, and have been failing ever since. And since the Fall, the relationships between humans and God, between humans and other humans, and between humans and the created world, have been spoiled. Jesus came to restore not just human beings but all creation to a right relationship with God. The famous verse, John 3:16, reads that God so loved the "kosmos" - all of creation - that he gave his only Son... As Paul says in Colossians 1, Christ's death and resurrection means that "all things, whether in heaven or upon earth" can be reconciled to God.
All of Valerio's writing, therefore, causes us to reflect on relationships. Caring for creation is about our relationship with God, the Creator, who made us in his image to represent him in the world. Caring for creation is about our relationship with our fellow humans - and especially about justice for those who are suffering from the worst effects of climate change. Caring for creation is about our relationship with the land, with the world that God has made - about how we treasure what God has given us and hand it on to generations to come.
I hope we will find this Creation season both joyful and thought-provoking as we think about how the fifth mark of mission affects us both as individuals and as Church.
