Gospel
Reading:
John
1:1-5
In
the beginning,
God
created the heavens and the earth.
But
the earth became chaos and emptiness, and darkness came over the face
of the Deep--- yet the Spirit of God was brooding over the surface of
the waters.
Then
God said, “Light: Be!” and light was. God saw that light was
good, and God separated light from darkness. God called the light
“Day” and the darkness “night.” Evening came, and morning
followed--- the first day.
Then
God said, “Now, make and expanse between the waters! Separate water
from water!” So it was: God made the expanse and separated the
water above the expanse from the water below it. God called the
expanse “Sky.” Evening came, and morning followed--- the second
day.
Then
Gd said, “Waters under the sky: be gathered into one place! Dry
ground: appear!” So it was. God called the dry ground “Earth”
and the gathering of the waters “Sea.” And God saw that this was
good. Then God said, “Earth: produce vegetation--- plants that
scatter their own seeds and every kind of fruit tree that bears fruit
with its seed in it!” So it was, the earth brought forth every kind
of plant that bears seed, and every kind of fruit tree on earth that
bears fruit with its own seed in it. And God saw that this was good.
Evening came, and morning followed--- the third day.
Then
God said, “Now, let there be lights in the expanse of the sky!
Separate day from night! Let them mark the signs and seasons, days
and years, and serve as luminaries in the sky, shedding light on the
earth.” So it was: God made the two great lights, the greater one
to illuminate the day, and a lesser to illuminate the night. Then God
made the stars as well, placing them in the expanse of the sky, to
shed light on the earth, to govern both day and night, and separate
light from darkness. And God saw that this was good. Evening came,
and morning followed--- the fourth day.
God
then said, “Waters: swarm with an abundance of living beings!
Birds: fly above the earth in the open expanse of the sky!” And so
it was: God created the sea monsters and all sorts of swimming
creatures with which the waters are filled, and all kinds of birds.
God saw that this was good, and blessed them, saying, “Bear fruit,
increase your numbers, and fill the waters of the seas! Birds, abound
on the earth!” Evening came, and morning followed--- the fifth
day.
Then
God said, “Earth, bring forth all kinds of living soul--- cattle,
things that crawl, and wild animals of all kinds!” So it was: God
made all kinds of wild animals, and cattle, and everything that
crawls on the ground, and God saw that this was good.
Then
God said, “Let us make humankind in our image. To be like us. Let
them be stewards of the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, and
everything that crawls on the ground.”
Humankind
was created as God's reflection:
in
the divine image God created them;
female
and male, God made them.
God
blessed them and said, “Bear fruit, increase your numbers, and fill
the earth--- and be responsible for it! Watch over the fish of the
sea, the birds of the air and all the living things on the earth.”
God then told them, “Look, I give you every seed bearing plant on
the face of the earth, and every tree whose fruit carries its seed
inside itself: they will be your food; and to all the animals of the
earth and the birds of the air and things that crawl on the ground---
everything that has a living soul in it--- I give all the green
plants for food.” So it was. God looked at all of this creation,
and proclaimed it was good--- very good. Evening came, and morning
followed--- the sixth day.
Thus
the heavens and the earth and all their array were completed. On the
seventh day God had finished the work of creation, and so, on that
seventh day, God rested. God blessed the seventh day and called it
sacred, because on it God rested from all the work of creation.
These
are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were
created.
Sermon:
The Process of Revision
At
the beginning of God's creating
God told a story “that became the universe.”
This beginning was not so much a time
so much as a process,
a process that may be still going on today, as the earth continues to
change and adapt, as we change and adapt. This is a story not just
about the earth and how it came to be, but it is also a story about
us, about how we as people of faith came to be. This is not a
literal, civil-engineer certified blueprint for how to create a
world. It is a story. But it is a story that shows us the power of
Word and Spirit.
When
we translate this story from Genesis into English, it seems very
straightforward. I had Minister Jackie read from a translation called
the Inclusive Bible because it lets some of the confusion of the
verses sink in. Where we usually read “formless and void,” in
this translation we read something a little bit closer to the Hebrew:
“chaos and emptiness.” But these two things together are
confusing. My office in my house is chaotic BECAUSE it is not empty
but full of stuff I have to organize. And every other time a phrase
similar to this occurs in the bible, it signifies ruin and
desolation.
But isn't this the beginning? How could things be ruined already?
The
text nurtures our questions but does not give answers to them
specifically. Instead, we get another kind of answer. We get the
Spirit and the Word. The Spirit of God broods over the surface of the
waters, “the way a bird broods over the eggs in her
nest...represent[ing] the divine power to recreate and restore that
which has been spoiled or destroyed.”
The story doesn't end with chaos and emptiness. It begins again with
Spirit and Word; the power of God is to elicit goodness, to elicit
life in the world again. From this brooding, God speaks, and that
which God speaks becomes.
And God saw that the desolation, the chaos, was transformed into
goodness.
In
the second chapter and first verse of Genesis, we read, “Thus
the heavens and the earth and all their array were completed.”
When we read that verse, sometimes we focus too much on the word
“completed” and forget the first verses of chapter one that
hinted at the processes of revision and restoration that are
continually a part of creating.
I,
unfortunately, am not a crafty person; when I want to create
something, I use words, and used to write a lot more fiction. In an
introduction to creative writing class I took in college, I got
frustrated with my professor for denying that a story can be
“completed,” as we read here in Genesis. He said that we are
never wholly finished with a story. We do not attain perfection after
receiving feedback from colleagues and writing a certain amount of
drafts. We may get to a point where we decide that we cannot work on
the story anymore, but we never craft the perfect story.
What
made me mad about this point my professor made was that I could
theoretically come back to a published story--- not a huge problem
for me since I have not published any of my fiction, but it is the
principle of the thing--- I could come back to a published story and
find a word I wanted to change, or a paragraph I wanted to move
around, or even something like a comma that should have been a
semi-colon. I found this first hand when I stripped a novella I had
written for this class--- at least a hundred pages--- down to a
simple, one-page prose poem my senior year of college. All that work,
hours of writing, for one single page? But where I was as an
eighteen-year-old, fresh from Harford County wondering what the heck
she was getting into, was not where I was as a senior who was fluent
in another language, had lived in big cities, slept outside of train
stations, made new friends, and heard my calling. And so I saw in
revising that story how we ourselves are constantly revised.
God
is constantly at work among us, revising, restoring, recreating.
Always trying to lure us back to that goodness when things seem to
get all ruined. Just look at the story of our faith:
We're
having a good old time with God, but we eat this fruit God told us
not to, and so we have to revise our way of living away from the
garden;
we
hurt one another and creation so badly that God sends a flood to
kill everything but a small remnant to start over, but such an
action makes God so sad that God promises never to do it again;
we
get caught in the clutches of slavery, and God rescues us and gives
us the Law to help us start over;
but
still we fight and squabble and so God gives us a king to lead us;
only
the king God gave to lead us becomes inept and corrupt, and we are
sent into exile, but God sends prophets to give us words of
repentance and of hope until we return home at last.
And
those are just some of the moments in our faith story in the Old
Testament that demonstrate this process of revision and restoration.
We fall away, and God works with us to bring us back to that goodness
God proclaimed at the beginning of God's creating. And of course
then, in the New Testament, God gives us Jesus to walk among us and
teach us and show us a new way to live, helping us revise our lives
full of sin and oppression into ones of life and light. These are big
moments where God shows us how that creation process really is never
complete until the kingdom on earth Jesus preached is fully realized
on Earth.
But
there are smaller moments where God helps us to revise the story
we're writing about ourselves and our community, helps us to revise
our own stories from ones about isolation and greed, loneliness and
grief, injustice and oppression to ones about goodness, light, and
life. Maybe we had a Sunday school teacher like Miss Minnie or Miss
Ethel or Baylee who instilled a love of God in us at a young age so
deeply that we remembered that love when we were feeling at our
worst. Perhaps we heard a song that spoke the gospel to us in such a
new way we found renewed energy for life and service. Maybe a
stranger offered us kind words in a moment of need that shed light on
how we need to shed lives of busy-work for ones of intimacy. Through
people and situations, the Spirit of God broods over the chaos and
emptiness we may feel in our own lives and helping us create
something good out of it all.
Baptism
is a type of revision and recreating too. As Methodists, we often
baptize children, which can be confusing, for most of us don't view
infants as inherently sinful creatures who need to die to the chaos
and emptiness within them and be born again in the goodness of
Christ. Instead, baptism is a way that we as a community come
together to proclaim God's constant recreating and restoring work in
our lives. That's part of why we only do it once as Methodists--- if
we were baptized every time God was at work in our lives offering
goodness and redemption, we'd have to walk around with little
baptismal font Supersoakers holstered on our backs or something. And
if we chose to be baptized only after experiencing some particularly
saving event, we could accidentally forget the power in all the
events to follow in which God broods over us. Rather, baptism is a
time where we as a community enter into this story of a God who has
the power to restore and create us no matter what happens throughout
our lives.
Now,
we could live our entire lives with God brooding over us but never
crack that shell to emerge into a world of goodness. When God creates
humans in this story, God gives us co-creating responsibilities,
telling us not only to bear fruit, but to watch over the life on the
earth. We don't do this well. Sometimes we actively refuse to work
for goodness, and use our co-creating powers for destruction and
ruin. But God still reaches out to us, still demands a response that
will lead to restoration.
The
Gospel of John reminds us, that, “What
has come into being in the Word,”
both the Word God spoke at the beginning and the Word that is Jesus,
“was
life, and the life was the light of all people. The
light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Let us live into that light together, my friends, rejoicing in God's
power to recreate and restore all to goodness again.