Creator of All: A Homily for the National Indigenous Day of Prayer

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on  21 June, 2026, the Fourth Sunday After Pentecost and the National Indigenous Day of Prayer.   Readings for the NDIP:  Isaiah 40:25-31, Psalm 19, Philippians 4:4-9

John 1:1-18

 Every year the plough is obliterating the last traces of our  predecessors on this soil. Every year the axe lays low some invaluable witness to the ages which have elapsed since populous villages of another race were scattered far and wide through our now lifeless forests. We are fast forgetting that the bygone ages even of the new world were filled with living men.  

Those words were spoken in 1852 by one Captain Lefroy, who was a member of a professional and learned society, The Canadian Institute,that had been newly founded by Sir Sandford Fleming.   Lefroy’s thoughts, given almost 175 years ago, remind us that the indigenous heritage of this part of Ontario has long been known, at least through the efforts of a few, mostly amateur researchers.

Dedicated amateur researchers continue to remind us of our links with our indigenous past.  Last Sunday Joy and I were at St Luke’s for their late morning service, following which we heard a fascinating presentation by their parish historian, Dorothy Shropshire.  Dorothy and her late husband Jim have spent years studying the Petun people, who lived in the area known today as Bluewater and Clearwater Township.   Dorothy spoke knowledgeably about the various Petun sites on the hills and and riverbanks around Creemore.

You won’t find any Petun peoples nearby today.   In the 1600s the Petun nation was ravaged by disease and by proxy wars among the local tribes competing for the lucrative fur trade with the Europeans.    The surviving Petun peoples fled this area.  Today they are called the Wyandot, and they live as far away as Montreal and Kansas.

Today, which we observe in the Anglican Church of Canada as the National Indigenous Day of Prayer, is about remembering the past, but more importantly its about reconciliation in the present and new relationships in the future.   The Petun may be gone from this area, but indigenous people in their many cultures, languages, and places, are a vital part of our country and of church.

We may not have an indigenous community close by, but today gives us many opportunities to think about the First Nations people we do occasionally see on our streets and in our church.   The readings we’ve heard today from the First Nations Version of the Bible remind us of the story of Pentecost and how the Holy Spirit desires to communicate the good news of our faith to all peoples in their own languages.   Our first two readings, from isaiah and Psalm 19, help us to see with fresh eyes how the natural world is a gift from God the Creator, an insight which is a great gift of indigenous spirituality to our church.   

There are many rich themes to explore here today, but the one I think I can do best in the space of a summer sermon is found in the First Nations translation I read from just now, where we hear how John the Baptist came “Into the wilderness of the Land of Promise (Judea)”.  Promised by whom?   Now we can see what the translators and editors of the First Nations Bible were trying to do.   Renaming Judea as “Land of Promise” takes us back to the story of Genesis and the coveanant promise that God makes with Abraham.

Several Sundays ago we heard in the first reading how God says to Abraham “To your offspring I will give this land”, and Genesis mentions in passing that “At that time the Canaanites were in the land” (Gen 1.6).   One of the more unpalatable aspects of Genesis is that the Canaanites are basically an indigenous people, pagans and heathens, who have no right to their and deserve to be dispossessed by God’s people.

Fast forward to the 1500s and 1600s, the so-called Age of Exploration, and the same story of dispossession played out and became part of early Canadian history.   Those 19th century amateur scholars like Captain Godfrey were uneasily aware of “our predecessors” who were being erased.   Today we are, with the help of indigenous Canadians, rethinking this history and trying on new names, so we now think of “Indians” as “The First Nations” or “indigenous”, and we sometimes, think of ourselves as “settlers”.  And, today, we’ve heard new names for the divine, such as “Creator Sets Free” for Jesus, “Great Spirit” for the Holy Spirit, and “Creator” for God the Father.

THis week in our bible study, we asked whether it might change our spirituality as Christians if we were to think of God more often as “Creator”.  We agreed that if the term “Creator” becamse habitual, then we might think about one another differently because we are all created by the same God and created in the image of that God, and we enjoy earth, creation, as a gift given to all of us.   And if we are all created, and all given the same gifts of this earth to share, then surely that commonality as children of the Creator is greater than any of our differences?

This wonderful and mysterious relationship between difference and unity is at the heart of our Trinitarian faith, as the American monk Curtis Almquist beautifully explains:

We are distinct persons, all of us, and yet our essence is the same. We are all children of God. We all need water and food, shelter and rest, love and safety, education and encouragement, health and hope to be alive and thrive. … We must be in relationship with one another. We have been created by a God in relationship – a Trinity of Persons – who invites us all to be in personal relationship – relationship with one another and in relationship with all that God has created – because this is the essence of God, to be in a circle of  relationship with all whom God has created

Being in relationship - genuine, authentic, loving relationship - takes time, patience, and effort.  Our church has slowly learned to work on its relationship with our First Nations and Inuit fellow Anglicans as we’ve listened to their stories and made steps towards reconciliation.  Our country likewise continues to  work slowly towards better relationships with indigenous Canadians over things like land claims and resource rights.  And, when as with the 51st state talk from certain Americans, we suddenly feel a new appreciation for the First Nations and what it means to be threatened with conquest and dispossession.  Our natural reacgtion to such talk is to think "This land may be your land, this land may be my land, but it's not your land, Uncle Sam!"  But, when we we sing how this land is your land and this land is my mind, as we think about what Canada means to us today, that "us" includes French and British, First Nations and Inuit, all the various communities of newer Canadians in the sports bars and in sthe streets cheering their World Cup teams, and yes, during this Pride Month, gay and straight and trans, because my dear friends and fellow saints, this land belongs to all of us, because it was given to all of us by our Creator God.  May we learn to live together on this land.