Creation Sunday (September 23)
Leviticus 25:1-7

The LORD spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the LORD. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the LORD: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. You may eat what the land yields during its sabbath—you, your male and female slaves, your hired and your bound laborers who live with you; for your livestock also, and for the wild animals in your land all its yield shall be for food.

This Sunday we will be celebrating creation—the beauty of creation, the goodness of creation, the gift of creation, and our responsibility toward creation. I don’t preach often from Leviticus (it can be rough in places), but the whole purpose of the book is to order the people’s lives in life-giving ways. We may not agree with some of the specific prescriptions to do that, but we can’t argue with the intent. In this scripture reading, a part of the life-giving order of the community is allowing for sabbath rest for the land. Human beings already have sabbath rest one day out of seven (or they are supposed to). The sabbath day is also supposed to extend to animals (beasts of burden are not supposed to work, either). And now we find the land itself gets a sabbath (once every seven years). Obviously this has a lot to tell us about the importance of rest, for us and for all creation. It also chastises us in our constant attempts to make nature “productive”—if land is not producing something, we consider it a waste of space. This text invites us to imagine that God has a relationship with the land independent of human beings; that the value of the land (and nature more generally) is not determined simply by human needs and desires. Human beings, animals, the land itself—we’re all God’s creatures, we all have value because of God’s love, we all are utterly dependent on God’s grace, we all are required to live in ways that are life-giving for all creation, we all need rest, we’re all in this together, we’re all kin.