I am hoping, that following our Children’s Time this morning you will have caught on that today marks the beginning of the Season of Creation. A six week relatively new liturgical time of the Church year (although we are only doing half the Sundays this year). It was added about 20 years ago to the list of other important “seasons” the church honours.
Like Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter, the Season of Creation is meant to draw our attention to a specific theological focus. Advent, is a time of waiting and begins in the darkest time of the year. At Christmas we welcome the Christ child and it begins in a barn. Lent is a time of deep personal reflection and spiritual growth and begins in the Wilderness. At Easter we of course celebrate The Resurrection of Jesus Christ and it begins in an empty tomb. The Season of Creation calls us to focus on the created world around us, and it begins, well, “In the Beginning”.
I am one of the many people that walk this earth who love Beginnings. I love a brand new school year, I love a new calendar. Give me a brand new blank day timer and my heart soars. All those empty lines just waiting to be filled with thoughts and events my own brain hasn’t even thought yet? Perfection. I love clean slates and fresh starts. I love new pencil crayons and new socks. I love the beginning of a new story.
Think for a moment of your favourite beginning story. My children love to hear about the day they were born. Try as they might they can’t easily resist that story. Or maybe your favourite is the one of how your parents met, or how your grandparents built their house by hand, or maybe it’s the day you and your dog found each other. All of our families have these stories, these origin stories that we tell and retell around the dinner table at Thanksgiving and birthdays, that bring peals of laughter and a sense of familiarity and belonging. They pull the past into the present and pull those long ago days into the light of memory.
The best part of these stories of course is how they of the habit of changing, growing, and adapting as the years pass. Over time they become a bit more than fact, and yet, despite the embellishments, not any less true. Like the story my friend’s family has where the youngest child in the family believes a flock of geese followed them home from the hospital landed on their frozen pond and honked for hours celebrating his birth. A slight exaggeration perhaps, and yet I have no doubt that the world rejoiced at his arrival, and the geese did come early that year. Or how when I asked about how long my parents dated and how they got engaged, I was told that they had dated for four months, and got engaged in the car while waiting for a red light with a ring that needed layers of tape wrapped around it so that it would fit her finger.
Today we have perhaps the most famous beginning story of all time. One that all of creation can lay claim to. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth the earth was a formless void and darkness covered everything…” (Genesis 1:1)
Over the centuries there have been many debates and battles waged over the Creation Story and most people tend to land in one of two camps. Agree or disagree. But while I very much believe in evolution and dinosaurs I also have this hunch that the story we are offered in Genesis has value and should be read not like an encyclopedia entry but listened to like one of our family origin stories…holding deep truth in spite of it’s historical inaccuracies.
Rachel Held Evans in her book “Inspired: Slaying Giants, walking on Water and Loving the Bible Again”… wrote about how if we take this origin story as either pure fact or choose to totally dismiss it as useless nonsense we do ourselves a disservice. For either way we “overlook one of the central themes of Scripture itself: God Stoops. From [creating light out of darkness], to walking with Adam and Eve through the Garden of Eden, to travelling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross, dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letter, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.” (“Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water and Loving the Bible Again” pg 11) God, Creator, moves in close.
So in the same way that our most cherished stories start with “Once upon a time…” or “On the day you born…” our Biblical story starts “In the beginning…” and what follows is a long, twisted, dramatic, confusing, sometimes boring, often exciting, story of our faith, that, like all the best stories, may not be all fact, and may have been changed and embellished over the centuries, and has human finger prints all over it, but that still offers us an undeniable truth.
At some point in time darkness covered everything, and out of that darkness, light burst forth. And from that light came life. And whether it took 6 days or 13.7 billion years seems rather irrelevant on the faith side of things. For when the sun rises I give thanks to God, the Creator. When the loon calls at night, I give thanks to God the Creator. When the wind moves a golden field in waves, or the ocean crashes on the shore, I give thanks to God the Creator. When my children laugh (instead of argue) I give thanks to God the Creator. When a dear one takes their last breath and they begin their new story, I give thanks to God, the Creator.
I give thanks to our God who created all of this, and who is still creating. Maybe that’s the part we need to remember more often. That God isn’t done with this creation yet. It was believed at one time that the universe was expanding in a finite fashion. That at some point it would reach its limit and then come crashing in on itself. It is now believed that the universe is expanding infinitely…that it has no expiration date.
I read this week that on average about one new star [is born], and one star dies in the Milky Way every year. Each galaxy is a bit different but it’s safe to say this is roughly the case across the board. As it is estimated that there are about 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, that would mean about 100 billion stars are born and die each year, which corresponds to about 275 million per day.” 275 million stars die every day, 275 million are born, every day. God is still moving out there, God is still moving right here.
Rachel Held Evans continues “Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty first century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then –pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.” (pg 9)
We live in what is called the Information Age. We can look up anything…can you imagine how long it would have taken me to find out how many stars are born in a day 30 years ago? At the very least I’d have to drive to the UBC Library. But today all the information of the world is quite literally at our finger tips. And it’s amazing, and wonderful, and much more time efficient. But if we are to simply rely on the facts, if we don’t allow our stories, our music, our poetry, our myths and legends and faith to influence the way we live and move and breathe in this world I fear we will lose something very important.
I fear we will forget that God isn’t done with us yet. That the Spirit is still hovering over the waters and breathing new life into us and the world around us…. Let’s not allow that to happen. Let’s claim the words “in the beginning…” as our mantra this season and hold fast to our “God who has created and who is creating”. Amen
