The RMS Office of the Bishop in partnership with leaders across the synod has created a community discussion guide to engage challenging topics as people of faith. Each week we will share a personal reflection on that week's featured social statement.
The Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice social statement explains the ELCA’s teachings on ecology and the environment, grounded in a biblical vision of God's intention for the healing and wholeness of creation. This statement provides a Christian understanding of the human role to serve in creation, and a hope rooted in God’s faithfulness to the creation from which humans emerge and depend upon for sustaining life. It provides a framework for understanding the human role in creation, the problem of sin and the current environmental crisis.Caring for Creation expresses a call to pursue justice for creation through active participation, solidarity, sufficiency and sustainability, and states the commitments of the ELCA for pursuing wholeness for creation — commitments expressed through individual and community action, worship, learning, moral deliberation and advocacy. [credit: elca.org]
Caring for Creation: Vision, Hope, and Justice
The Rev. Wes Aardahl
This social statement was the topic of conversation at a recent meeting of the re-formed RMS Caring for Creation committee. Participants agreed that the authors of the document were remarkably far-sighted. Few weaknesses are evident after nearly 27 years of exposure. It’s not surprising that an ecological social statement released in 1993 should include topsoil erosion, acid rain, ozone depletion, and loss of species in its list of ills. It is surprising to see global warming attributed to humankind and addressed with such urgency. How sobering to look back at this document and read this warning: ‘Action to counter degradation, especially within this decade [ending in 2003!] is essential to the future of our children and our children’s children. Time is very short!'
Caring for Creation decries ‘humanity’s separation from God and from the rest of creation’. It extols a sense of ‘human kinship with other creatures’ and actions that are ‘in solidarity with creation.’Caring for Creation is also strikingly anthropocentric. It casts humans as ‘creation’s caregivers’ and ‘God’s stewards of the earth’, and contends that these grand roles are grounded in a singular biblical vision. One might wonder if such elevation of humankind feeds the very separations that are elsewhere lamented. Caring for Creation is more consistent in advocating solidarity among humans, especially between privileged humans and the more vulnerable humans who are disproportionately victimized by environmental degradation. It helpfully calls attention to the importance of pastoral care for the victimized.
The authors of this enduring social statement are to be commended for making bold commitments on the part of the whole ELCA (e.g. environmental tithing and audits, liturgical creativity, mediation, and advocacy), for commending global church collaboration, and for reminding us of both the despair that so commonly afflicts us and the surpassing hope that is our inheritance.
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