“ Care-takers of Creation”
Genesis 1
Pastor Deb Troester, STHPC, May 31, 2026
Last week was Pentecost, and I talked about the Holy Spirit. Much of the rest of the year, our scriptures and sermons center on Jesus, but today, Trinity Sunday, I would like to focus on God, our Creator, and on God’s Creation, especially since June 5 is celebrated as World Environmental Day.
Many cultures have Creation stories – their way of explaining how the earth, plants, animals and humans came into being. These stories tell us something about the people themselves – what they value, what is important to them. For example, the Mayan creation story tells how people were created from corn – a staple food of that society. Hawaiians believed that all life originally came from the sea, which of course, is an integral part of life on the islands.
The nations that surrounded Israel in Old Testament times also had their creation stories. For example, the Babylonians believed in many gods who fought one another for supremacy.
Finally one of them, Marduk, vanquished all the others. Then, as the tale goes “Marduk made the stars and moon and assigned the gods to various duties. He put everything in order—sky, land, plants, and animals. Among the gods he took the highest place, and from the blood of his enemies he created humanity to serve as their slaves.” So according to the ancient Babylonians, humans were made from the blood of slaughtered enemies, and were to serve as slaves to the gods. What values do you think were important to the ancient Babylonians? Domination through war and bloodshed? What was their view of humanity? Slaves to the gods.
In contrast, the ancient Hebrew creation story depicts a benevolent God who brought order to existence by creating the heavens and the earth out of chaos and darkness. This God made human beings in the likeness of God and called them “very good.” We Christians have adopted this story from Genesis as our creation story as well. This is not a narrative that tells us scientific facts – after all, it has a talking snake and humans made out of the dust of the ground;
And its literary form is poetry and folk tale, which are known for metaphor and hyperbole. Rather this Creation story was written to tell us who God is, who we are in relationship to God, and how much God loves and values all of our planet, all of life, and each one of us.
In the beautiful verses of Genesis 1, over and over again God delights in creating something new: light, darkness, the sun, moon, and stars, the oceans, the land, plants, trees, birds, fish, creeping things, and cattle. God declares all of these to be “good.” Finally, God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” And God blessed them. Genesis Chapter 1 concludes, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”
God loves this creation, and humanity, created in God’s image. As our Psalm this morning declared:
O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
4 what are humans that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
7 all sheep and oxen, …the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea…
Again, we hear that God has given humans “dominion” over all creation. What does that mean? In Genesis 1:28, the Hebrew word translated as “dominion” is radah, meaning “to rule,” or “to govern.” It implies exercising authority or stewardship. In Psalm 8:6 the word translated “dominion” is mashal which refers specifically to delegated authority – such as a king or queen might give to one of their ministers. It shows that human authority is a reflection of God’s authority. Humans rule on behalf of the Creator.
Unfortunately, that word “dominion” has often been misunderstood to mean that nature is ours to be exploited, regardless of the consequences. Richard Cartwright Austin, Presbyterian minister, theologian and environmentalist, reminds us that, sadly, “in the long history of Christian culture, some people…have read this commission as divine authorization to exploit the earth without thought for the welfare of other creatures or the landscape.” He continues, “The dominion that humans were instructed to establish was God’s; they received no authority to exhaust the earth’s life for exclusively human ends.” Rather, “God has given us the responsibility of dominion to maintain and to enhance the quality of life… If humanity is indeed created in the image of God, then we, too, must reflect God’s attributes of love and care for creation…Being created in the image of God means that we have intellect, will, and the ability to make choices. God has given us the privilege and the responsibility to make wise choices for the sake of all other living things – we have dominion in the sense that the choices we make affect all of creation. We can use this power of dominion wisely or unwisely.”
If we continue reading in Genesis 2, it becomes even clearer that humans are responsible to take care of the world God created, not to plunder and despoil it. Genesis 2:15 reads: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” The Hebrew word for “keep” is shamar, meaning “to guard” or “to watch and protect.” The word “till” or “cultivate,” is from the Hebrew word abad meaning “to serve.” So, Genesis 2:15 would better be read as: “The Lord God took the human and put the human in the garden of Eden to serve it and to guard and protect it.” Serve. Guard. Protect.
Presbyterians have a word for this: stewardship – not the kind where we give money to sustain the work of the church, although that is important – but the idea that all creation belongs to God, who has given us the responsibility of caring for it. A steward is someone “entrusted with the management of estates or affairs not his own; an administrator.” God has entrusted us with the management of the earth. We are to care for it, to administer it. If God loves and values all He has created, then we, too, must respect creation and do our best to take care of it.
Yes, the Psalm says that God has put all things under our feet, but that does not give us permission to trample on them!
Not only are we commanded to be stewards of nature, but we must recognize that the people most likely to suffer from environmental degradation are the poor, who often live in places prone to flooding, drought, or near sources of pollution. They are the ones who suffer in backbreaking labor to extract the mineral riches and other resources that we wrest from the earth. Spraying deadly pesticides on crops not only harms wildlife and pollutes streams, it also endangers the lives of agricultural workers. The burden of extracting the mineral wealth that we need to manufacture our modern devices falls on the poorest of the poor in places like the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Indonesia. God has given us a mandate in scripture to help the poor, as well as to care for the earth. Pope Leo XIV recently pointed this out in his encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. In the paragraph entitled, “Breaking the Chains of New Forms of Slavery,” he writes:
“A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities,…working under demanding conditions for minimal wages. Added to this invisible labor is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly.”
Journalist Siddharth Kara documents the misery of some of these people in his book Cobalt Red, about cobalt mining in the Congo. Cobalt is used in batteries in everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. In parts of the Congo, cobalt mining has polluted streams and rivers, and filled the air with toxic dust. Its human toll is even worse. Kara interviewed a 15-year-old boy named Muteba. He writes: “Muteba struggled into the room with the assistance of crutches.
Two mangled legs dangled from his narrow waist…” He went to work digging for cobalt after 4th grade, when his family could no longer pay his school fees. Together with some 40 other children who were too young to work in the mines, Muteba dug in surface pits. Each child was paid about a dollar a day. One day the wall of the pit collapsed on him and the other children, including his brother Beko. Someone pulled him out, but his legs were badly broken. He was the only one to survive. Now he will be an invalid the rest of his life. Kara’s book is full of well-researched stories such as Muteba’s. The price we pay for our electronics is higher than we know, not only in damage to the ecosystem, but in human lives.
Before colonization, both in the Congo and elsewhere, the chief apportioned the land. The earth was considered a common good, used for foraging, hunting, or growing food. Many ancient peoples, such as the native Americans, focused on maintaining harmony with all of life, rather than exploiting nature for the benefit of a select few.
This way of life contrasts with our modern view of the earth as an object, there for the taking, regardless of the effects on the balance of nature, or if the people living there might be harmed by so-called “progress.”
Near the conclusion of his encyclical, Pope Leo has a section entitled “We can all do our part.” He speaks of the temptation to think “that the problems are too big and we are too small, and that our choices, therefore, cannot make a difference… Certainly, not everyone has the same power to make a difference. There are those who govern, make investment decisions, lead institutions, conduct research, educate, produce or provide information, and then there are those who only seem to live their daily lives. Yet, no one is without responsibility. We all have our own areas for action, and it is precisely there — and nowhere else — that we must choose…” Will we care for the earth, and for our brothers and sisters who are being harmed by its exploitation, not to mention all the countless species endangered by our greed and rapacity? Will we be good stewards of Creation? Will we be care-takers of the earth?
Let us pray:
Almighty God, your word of creation caused the water to be filled with many kinds of living beings, the air to be filled with birds, and the land to be filled with plants and animals. We rejoice in the richness of your creation, and we pray for your wisdom for all who live on this earth, that we may wisely manage and not destroy what you have made for us and for our descendants. Help us to be care-takers of creation. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
References:
Evans, Rachel Held. Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again (p. 3). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
Kara, Siddharth. Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2023.
POPE LEO XIV, Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/ encyclicals/documents/ 20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html #Building_the_civilization, Paragraphs 173 and 212. [Retrieved May 30, 2026].
Sermon @Deborah Troester, 2026