Here’s the Christmas letter we sent from Care of Creation to our mailing list recently.  If you would like to be on this list, click here to sign up, and check off any of the different newsletter’s you’d like to  receive (we mail about every six weeks or so).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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On this week of Christmas, I am very pleased to bring you greetings from all of us here at Care of Creation – from me and Susanna, from our staff and volunteers in Madison, from the Sorley family and our project staff in Kenya, and from the Ness family, preparing to launch our Tanzania project early in the new year.

Often at this time of year people ask me if I will be doing any traveling or speaking in December. Invariably my answer is, “No – people don’t want environmental talks during Christmas.”  Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining!  It’s nice to spend time closer to home.

On the other hand, Christmas can be a special time for thinking about God’s relationship to his earthly creation.  I touched on this several years ago in a chapter of my book, Our Father’s World, comparing Jesus’ incarnation with a hypothetical visit of a rock star to my own home:

This is how we need to think of Jesus, the Son of God, coming to earth.  We often think of his humiliation.  It is not a small thing for the all-powerful creator of the universe to adopt the form of a creature, but that is exactly what happened:

[Jesus,] being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross.  [Philippians 2:6-8]

Something else is just as important, though.  When he came down, he raised us up, and all of creation as well.  He lived here, in our house.  When he walked down the street and sat in the shade of a tree, his presence was honoring and exalting the dirt, the grass, the tree, the sky. If my daughter’s idol, the singer, had actually come to our house, the effect would have been purely imaginary.  Whatever fame and reputation this man has is purely ephemeral and is already fading.  He is no more worthy of praise and honor than I am – or than my daughter herself.  Not so with Jesus.  He made the dirt, the grass, the trees and the sky.  When he arrived, everything changed.

In the last chapter we saw creation as a temple – a cosmic worship space where a divine-human relationship can be pursued.  In Jesus we see God himself walking the aisles of that temple, not just standing behind the altar.  This is God as one of us: eating and drinking, laughing and playing, walking and talking, sleeping and working.  Before we heard God say that “it was good”; now we can see God himself enjoying creation.  It must be good, and it must be worth taking care of. [Our Father's World, chapter 3, IVP 2008]

There are a number of reasons we could list for why we do what we do, and you have probably heard many of them:  Tending the Garden was the first task God gave us to do; caring for creation means caring for people – it’s a true ‘pro-life issue’;  God’s redemptive plan culminates in the ‘reconciliation of all things to himself’ (Col 1:15-20).

But I like the Christmas reason as much as any:  Jesus, the Son of God, became part of Creation, and showed by his example and presence here that this is a special place and one to be valued and cared for.

And so, on this occasion when we pause to remember Jesus’ coming to earth as one of us, we thank you for your part in making our mission possible.  And we ask that you join us in recommitting to the great task of caring for this creation until the very day when Jesus returns to ‘make all things new!’

Blessings from our Care of Creation family to yours –

Ed and Susanna Brown;
Craig and Tracy Sorley with our Kenyan staff;
And Erik and Rachel Ness, bound for Tanzania.

Order Our Father’s World from our office or Amazon by clicking here;
send a donation to any of our staff or projects – or ‘buy trees for Kenya’ – by clicking here.

Related posts:

1. A most interesting and subversive Christmas Carol
2. Our Family Christmas Letter
3. An anniversary worth marking
4. Joy comes in the morning!
5. Report from the Front Lines (I): Drought, hunger & possible famine in Kenya