In the Beginning

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

John 1:1-5

               Today we have two very interesting passages that talk about the beginning of the world.  We have this story in Genesis, which tells us so much more about God and the nature of creation than it does about the hows of creation.  We learn from this story that God is creative, that this is the very nature of God to create, to make new, to shape. We also learn that God has a vision before acting, and that the very images of God begin the process of creating.  We learn that God speaks and the world is created, that it is in speaking, or moving thoughts out of ourselves through words that creation happens.  We learn that God values the passing of time and chooses to mark it with days and nights, and that God sees value in both light and dark, in days and nights.  We see that God values life and delights in huge diversity, creatures of the sea, animals that fly, creatures of the land, with so many different types and kinds.  We learn that God wanted relationship and creatures called humans who could be companions and have genuine interactions with God, ones that God would recognize as reflecting Godself.  We hear that the plan was not for killing, even for food, in the original.  Instead, to all animals and people was given the grasses and the seeds and fruit. We see that the work of creating is God’s work and is important, but that rest is also important.  And finally and most importantly, we come to see that all of this was made supremely good.  That creation, that earth, that life, that all animals and plants and stars and the moon and sun: all are very, very good.  Original blessing: something much stronger, by the way than any kind of “original sin” because it comes from God-self.  We learn therefore to appreciate and value the beautiful and wondrous creation that God has made, to not take it for granted, to not abuse it or mistreat it, but to honor it as the very creation of our good and loving and awesome God.  

                Breathe that in!  The awe, the wonder, the amazement.  It is good.  You are good.  The earth is good.  We were made good by God’s Words, by God’s WORD.  And we have been gifted by our time here; our time of work and our time of rest.  We have been blessed by the beauty of relationships and connection to God and to all living things.  We are part of this wondrous and amazing creation!  In Isaiah God said it this way, “Be glad forever and rejoice in what I create… for I create my people to be a delight.”  I invite you to just sit with that for a moment, sit in the awe and wonder of what God has created just by speaking.

               And then we come to the second scripture, the passage from John, which also talks about creation, about the beginning of everything and the vision for who God is, who we are and who we are to be together.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was with God in the beginning. Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being.  What came into being through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.”               This is such an incredible, beautiful passage.  But I want to start this section by asking you, what do you think this passage actually means?  Why “the Word”?  Just past this passage in John we learn that “the Word” is Jesus: Verse 14: The Word became flesh and made his home among us. “  But why?  How do you feel about this passage?

            As you saw during children’s time, charades, while a really fun game, can also be a really difficult or challenging game.  Especially when the phrases you are acting out include names, or places.  And what makes charades, or even games like Taboo hard is the limitation on our words, the words we can’t use, or the words we can’t say. 

           I think about Helen Keller.  She contracted scarlet fever when she was 20 months old and became both deaf and blind.  Because of this, her life became one of wildness, isolation and frustration.  When she was six, the family hired Anne Sullivan who came and began to teach Helen sign language into her hand in order to teach her how to communicate with others.  It took a long time for Helen to even understand what Anne was trying to do.  But once she understood, her life changed completely.  Through communication – through words, though not “spoken” words they were still words, she was able to earn a college degree and become a successful lecturer.  More importantly, she was able to have relationships with other people, lifelong friendships, connections.

           Communication is never easy.  We misunderstand one another so often.  We mishear, mis-interpret, misunderstand.  We misread people’s body language, or people’s intent.  We mis-speak or phrase or frame things in ways that are sometimes easy to misunderstand.  Those misunderstandings are the primary cause of human distress, conflicts, problems.  And the only solutions to those miscommunications are more words, are more communication, are intentional talking. 

           We also at times misuse our words for bad.  Words can be weapons.  While words create, they create relationships, they create dynamics, they create our world, the ways we use our words sometimes create in negative or harmful ways.  We can create relationships in need of healing, or dynamics that are negative.  We can bully each other, put each other down, destroy egos and community with our words.  We can do so much damage if we are not intentional, graceful and loving with our words. 

           Our words can also be simply confusing and unclear, especially for children.  Someone passed on to me this story, apparently from the movie, My Queen: “A visiting aunt, who is a nun, gave her little niece communion. It was basically just for fun, playing. She put the wafer on the child’s tongue and said, “Corpus Christi”. The kid asked what that meant. The aunt replied, “The Body of Christ.” Alarmed, the kid made a sour face and violently spit it out. In the next scene, though, the kid was baptizing her pet, and because she didn’t know the Latin that her aunt used, she spoke funny gibberish (shubba dubba…).”  We know this is a true story.  Our kids do not always understand our words, and frankly neither do the adults in our lives.

          And yet, despite the possibilities for errors and misunderstandings and harm of our words, still we return to this passage: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was with God in the beginning. Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being.”

      The word “WORD” in the Bible means more than language.  As one commentator said it, “logos, is a rich and nuanced word, meaning mind or rationality, but also speech or communication…. In Jesus, God speaks God’s mind.”  (Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary - Feasting on the Word – Year C, Volume 1: Advent through Transfiguration.)  The mind that God speaks is creation, is creative, is love, is grace.  All was made through the Word.  But it is more than that.  It is also revelation and reconciliation.  Revelation is a revealing, an opening, a showing us who God is.  Reconciliation is a healing, a coming to understand one another, and a coming through that understanding to love one another and heal the breaches between us.  All of this is part of “word”.  A Word that speaks truth and opens up to us what we cannot see.  And a Word that brings understanding and healing, opening us to understand that which we do not understand in one another.  All of this is encompassed in the “WORD”.

This Word existed, we are told, from the beginning.  We knew God and God knew us.  God created through words.  God SAID “let there be light” and there was.  God SAID, “Let there be a dome…and it happened that way.”  “God SAID, ‘Let the waters swarm…”  “God said, “let the earth produce…” and thus it was.  God SAID, and it happened.   The WORD that was with God and the WORD that was God created it all with words, with THE Word.  Nothing and no one existed outside the word of God.  Nothing and no-one existed outside the creative, life-giving purposes of the Word.  Nothing has existence outside of the WORD.  It is the Word that tells us who, what and when because it is the Word that created who, what and when. 

In C.S. Lewis’ book, The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan created the new world by singing.  He brought into being the world, all it’s creatures, all it’s form through singing, speaking.  But unlike what CS Lewis said, this passage from John says that the Word is Jesus and that Jesus, as the Word, is God.  So the Words made the world, but the words themselves are not the world – instead God is the Word that made the world. 

It was the Word that created.  And then it was the Word that reconciles, reveals and redeems.  With the birth into this world of the Word, our knowing God, our understanding of God is different and everything else is different too.  Jesus as the Word then is the embodiment of revelation and reconciliation.  He is the embodiment of the creative energy that makes everything new, that reveals who God is, and that reconciles us to one another.

 When I think of words, I think first and foremost about communication.  And the key aspect of communication is that it only happens in community, in relationship.  This is, again, a strong statement about God as community and relationship, God as the author of community and relationship, and relationship being central.  In the beginning was God and the Word, and yet they are one.  They are relationship, they exist in relationship, and they create through relationship, through Words, through the Word, through speaking.

  So what is the message in all of this?  First, that God created and continues to create.  God creates through Words, through the Word, through communication with us and with all of creation.  God continues to speak, to reach out to reveal and reconcile.  That is God’s nature as shown to us through the creation and through Jesus.  We are created in and for community, for connection.  And that community and connection happens as our words of love and creation happen.  We are made in God’s image, called to use words to create, to build, to reimagine, to reveal just as God used the Word for the same purpose. 

               Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Sunday's Sermon - Stewardship of the Earth AND Care for one another.

Genesis 1:1-2:2

Acts 17:24-25

Today we are celebrating earth day, and the charge we have been given to be good stewards of the earth.  This has been planned for weeks, that today we would be talking about our relationship to the rest of creation.  And yet we’ve had events in our church community that also call for our attention this week.  So I’ve found myself with the interesting and dubious task that many pastors face of how to keep with the planned program but also speak to the current reality that we are living with.

But I found, as I reflected on this, that these two things DO tie intimately together.  Today’s passages, as with all passages, tell us many things, but there are two things that we will focus on today.  The first is that what God created is good.  And that includes creation, and it includes one another, people who are diverse and different in so many ways, blessed by those differences, blessed by that diversity.  God has created it all, as we are told in Acts.  And it is GOOD.  And the second thing that we are told by these passages, especially the Genesis passage, is that we are called to take care of that creation.  The word that we often translate “dominion” is better translated “stewardship”.  It is a word in Hebrew that implies care, not over something wild and distant, but over that which we know.  It is not a word that implies we must dominate or subdue (another mistranslation – better translated “cultivate”) an enemy or something chaotic, but instead, like a parent, like someone who loves and truly sees and understands the other, we are called to care for, tend to, bring out the best in, the world that God has given us.  It is very similar to the way God works with us.  God tends to us with love, with care, always working to bring out the best in us.  We are called to do the same towards the earth that God loves.

The same is also true for how Jesus calls us to care for each other.  The question, “am I my brother’s keeper” should actually always be answered with “yes”.  We are the keepers of each other, but again, not as enemies, not as guards, but as people we are called to look after, to approach with compassion, never to judge (as Jesus said again and again), but always to love with the same unconditional love God extends to us.

We have been given the charge as people of faith to care for God’s creation, including all of God’s people, to watch over creation and each other, to love, to tend, to care for.  We have been given the charge of loving rather than using the beauty that surrounds us.  Not always an easy charge, especially because we often have very little to hold us accountable.  It is easy to use and misuse that which won’t catch up with us.  It is easy to judge and condemn and even abuse others, especially when we are in a group of like-minded folk who support and encourage our fear, anger and hatred.  Like children who don’t think what they do is wrong unless they get caught, we have, for quite some time, been in a place where we could take what we wanted from the earth, use what we wanted of the earth, and frankly from certain groups of people, without consequence and without fear of recrimination. 

But more recently this has begun to change.  In the last century, we have started to become aware that even the way we care for, or fail to care for, the earth, and for each other, has consequences for us as a people, for humanity as a whole and for each of us as individuals as well. 

            In terms of the earth, one of those wake-up calls came for Cleveland On June 22, 1969. On August 1, 1969, Time magazine wrote this about the Cuyahoga River: 

Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. "Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown," Cleveland's citizens joke grimly, "He decays".  .. . The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: "The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes." It is also -- literally -- a fire hazard.

Because of this fire, Cleveland businesses became infamous for their pollution, a legacy of the city's booming manufacturing days during the late 1800s and the early 1900s, when limited government controls existed to protect the environment. Even following World War II, Cleveland businesses, especially steel mills, routinely polluted the river. Cleveland and its residents also became the butt of jokes across the United States, despite the fact that city officials had authorized 100 million dollars to improve the Cuyahoga River's water before the fire occurred.

And this fire in 1969 was not the first on the river.  The Cuyahoga had burned as early as 1868 and over the years about 13 more fires before 1952 had caused more than $1.5 million in damage.  Humans had begun to pay for not caring for the earth.  Still, until the 1969 fire, little attention had been paid to the river or the pollution. 

The 1969 river fire was different, though.  It attracted media attention like never before.  And the results were very positive.  Cleveland began to clean up the water.  But the fire also brought attention to other environmental problems across the country, helped spur the Environmental Movement, and helped lead to the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972.

The result was that the river has been and continues to be cleaned up.  “When they checked the river at the time, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency found 10 sick gizzard chad. Period. More recently when checked they found 40 different fish species in the river, including steelhead trout, northern pike and other clean-water fish. Now, even the most polluted areas of the river generally meet aquatic life water quality standards.  There is still work to be done, but it continues to happen, thanks in large part to the fire in 1969."

What does this have to do with us, as people or as Christians?  Well, in many ways I see the fire of 1969 as a Good Friday in Cleveland’s environment, and in our care for the earth.  We had done such a poor job of looking out only for ourselves and not caring for the earth, that the earth itself was being destroyed through atrocities such as a river burning. 

But the resurrection is for all of creation.  The promise of new life and new birth is for all of creation.  Easter is for all of creation. 

And so today, as we celebrate earth day and the fifth Sunday in Easter, I want us to take some time to look at the resurrection of the earth as well.  We created Good Friday for the Cuyahoga river, just as we killed Jesus on the cross, and just as we harm our brothers and sisters with our judgments, anger and hatred.  But out of the death, we see God’s active hand, creating anew, bringing new life.

God created the resurrection.  But when it comes to the life around us, when it comes to the earth, we are invited to be part of ushering in the new era.  We are called to be part of the resurrection that is for all of creation and all people.  We are called to be part of the new creation that we celebrate at Easter.

The passages we read from Genesis and from Acts remind us that God has created everything and created it all beautiful, but has put it at our feet for us to care for, and to be stewards of. God created everything good, to be loved, to be enjoyed, to experience delight in.  When we abuse God’s creation, whether it be the earth or God’s people, we are insulting the creator, we are not honoring the God who delights in God’s creation.

We don’t actually have a lot of choice about it.  Either we are part of the new creation, or we are part of the Good Friday that precedes it.  Either we are part of destruction or we are part of creation and new life.

This applies to how we treat God’s earth, but it also applies to how we treat any of God’s people.  When we decide that any group of people are unacceptable, are expendable, are worthy of our judgment and condemnation, can be discounted and thrown off, we have failed to remember that it is only together that we are the creation God calls us to be.  When we leave people out, it is like trying to put together a puzzle with some of the pieces missing.  God calls us to be family to one another.  When we reject part of that family it is, very simply, failing to follow the call of Christ to love everyone, even your enemies, as yourself.  When we would alienate or leave out anyone, including our enemies, including those who would harm us, from love and forgiveness, we also are failing to do what God asks us to do, failing to tend to, care for, and be stewards of all of creation, which includes one another as well.

There is a story that I’m sure many of you have heard about the difference between heaven and hell.  In hell, there is a big feast spread out on the table, but the people sitting at the table have no elbows.  They desperately try to feed themselves, but are unable to get the food to their mouths because they cannot bend their arms.  In heaven the picture at first glance looks very similar.  There is a big feast spread out on the table, and again the people sitting around the table have no elbows and are still unable to feed themselves.  The difference, though, is that at the table in heaven, everyone is feeding each other. 

We cannot afford to fail to feed one another.  We cannot afford to house anger and fear and hatred in our bodies.  We cannot afford to be unloving or unkind to any of God’s people.

I am reminded of a story: 

A mouse looked through the crack in the wall

To see the farmer and his wife open a package.

"What food might this contain?"  The mouse wondered.

He was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap.  (slide)

Retreating to the farmyard,

The mouse proclaimed this warning :

"There is a mousetrap in the house!

There is a mousetrap in the house!"

The chicken clucked and scratched, (slide)

Raised her head and said, "Mr. Mouse,

I can tell this is a grave concern to you,

But it is of no consequence to me.

I cannot be bothered by it."

The mouse turned to the pig and told him, (slide)

"There is a mousetrap in the house!

There is a mousetrap in the house!"

The pig sympathized, but said,

"I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse,

But there is nothing I can do about it

But pray..

Be assured you are in my prayers."

The mouse turned to the cow and said, (slide)

"There is a mousetrap in the house!

There is a mousetrap in the house!"

The cow said, "Wow, Mr. Mouse. I'm sorry for you,

But it's no skin off my nose."

So, the mouse returned to the house,

Head down and dejected,

To face the farmer's mousetrap

. . . Alone.. . ...

That very night

A sound was heard throughout the house

-- the sound Of a mousetrap catching its prey.

The farmer's wife rushed to see what was caught.

In the darkness, she did not see it.

It was a venomous snake (slide)

Whose tail was caught in the trap.

The snake bit the farmer's wife.

The farmer rushed her to the hospital.

When she returned home she still had a fever.

Everyone knows you treat a fever

With fresh chicken soup. (slide)

So the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard

For the soup's main ingredient:

But his wife's sickness continued.

Friends and neighbors

Came to sit  with her

Around the clock.

To feed them,

The farmer butchered the pig. (slide)

But, alas,

The farmer's wife did not get well...

She died.

So many people came for her funeral

That the farmer had the cow slaughtered (slide)

To provide enough meat for all of them

For the funeral luncheon.

 And the mouse looked upon it all

From his crack in the wall

With great sadness. (slide)

So, the next time you hear

Someone is facing a problem

And you think it doesn't concern you,

Remember ---

When one of us is threatened, we are all at risk.

We are all involved in this journey called life.

We must keep an eye out for one another

And make an extra effort

To encourage one another.

I am also reminded of a quote by Anne Lemott: "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

            The bottom line is we are called to be stewards.  Stewards of creation, stewards of humanity, stewards of love and care for the earth and for each other. We walk that by caring in each moment about how are actions impact others.  We walk that by caring in each moment about who will be hurt and who will be lifted up by our actions.  We walk this by choosing to be kind to all we encounter and that includes the beautiful earth God has given us.  We walk this by living as Jesus taught us, with love, with generosity, with compassion, and with grace.  Amen.