SunJan82012
Scripture - GENESIS 1:1-5
Think back to the first day. The first day of anything. The first day of school, and your butterflies and the fact that you didn’t know anyone. The first day of a new job, and you had no idea where it would lead you, or where the supplies were kept or what the boss was like in the morning. The first day of marriage and the uncertainty of where the new relationship might go. The first day of widowhood and the sorrow and loneliness and tears that crashed up onto the shore of your life. The first day of the empty nest and the strange silence of the house that had only hours before buzzed with energy and yearning. The first day of sobriety and the mix of elation and fear that washed over you minute by minute.
First days are huge. They can be distressing or terrifying or gripping or full of possibility. Years ago, the comedian Steven Wright said: “When I was a baby, I kept a diary. Recently I was rereading it. It said, ‘Day 1—still tired from the move. Day 2—everybody talks to me like I’m an idiot.’” What a great image for the first day: still tired from the move! All those memorable first days are moves of a sort. They open new doors. They bring us into new worlds.
So imagine for a moment what it might have been like for God on that proverbial first day. It doesn’t have to be a serious picture. The current issue of The New Yorker has a playful take-off on this scene:
“On the first day, God created the heavens and the earth.
“‘Let there be light,’ [God] said, and there was light. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the first night.
“On the second day, God separated the oceans from the sky. ‘Let there be a horizon,’ [God] said. And lo: a horizon appeared and God saw that it was good. And there was evening—the second night.
“On the third day, God’s girlfriend came over and said that [God] had been acting distant lately.
“‘I’m sorry,’ God said. ‘Things have been crazy this week at work.’
“[God] smiled at her, but she did not smile back. And God saw that it was not good. . .
“And there was evening—a tense night” (Jan. 9, 2012, p. 29).
And on the story goes. We don’t need to take the account from Genesis literally—and in fact we mustn’t take it literally—for it to have its own unique and insistent power. If we took it literally, we would rob it of its poetry and wisdom. This is not primarily a scientific account of the origins of the earth, after all. It’s more a lyrical evocation of the place of God in the ongoing life of the world.
So let’s imagine this story from the angle of church people seeking wisdom and guidance. The God who was and is and always will be surveys the primordial soup and says, ‘This doesn’t seem right. It’s way too chaotic. Everywhere, all the eye can see is “wild and waste” (1:2, The Schocken Bible: The Five Books of Moses). It’s empty and formless, a random mess of stuff with no order or meaning, like a muddy puddle filled with random stones and trash, or a Fibber McGee and Molly closet stuffed full of junk. There must be something better.’
But because there has never been anything but this chaos, God isn’t at all sure what should come next. What would you do if, in every direction, all you saw was clutter and you had never known anything but that endless disorder? And if everything were pitch dark to boot, what would you do? If you’re an artist or a writer or a cook, maybe you know something of this feeling: you look at a canvas or computer monitor or pantry or fridge and you have no idea what’s to come. In an hour, or a day, something will be there that you could not have conceived before you started.
So God does what any artist or writer or free-form cook has to do: trust the wind to inspire something, at least a beginning. Many weeks, when I sit down to prepare a sermon, all I see ahead of me is some version of that chaos: “wild and waste.” I don’t really know where it’s going to go. Some weeks, all I do is put down the first words that come to me and see where they lead. (Some weeks I wish had waited for some other first words!)
You may have had the same experience of not knowing what to do next in any number of arenas of your life: your marriage is teetering or you’re about to have a first date or graduation looms or your job is torturous or your child is besieged by depression. When you wake up in the morning, you don’t know what the day will bring, and all you can do is take the first step. There’s something both frightening and exhilarating about the whole thing. All we can do is see what comes.
That’s a little like what God does in this scene. We probably think God had this detailed plan and knew exactly what creation was going to look like before anything was made, but that’s not what the story says. The story says that after God had taken this first step in creating, “God saw that [it] was good” (1:4). It’s the same words we hear after all six days of creation. In other words, God didn’t know beforehand what this first step in creation would be like: would it be a little disappointing, a tad boring, not quite what the Holy One had in mind, or maybe stunningly fabulous? God didn’t know until the risk had been taken.
That’s true for us, too. Will the weird work idea we have produce horrible results, or will it be immensely productive? Will the story we tell the teenager struggling with loneliness resonate in a healing way or just make things worse? Will the first words we say to the person in the corner who sets our heart aflutter be a bomb or the best pickup line ever? We just don’t know, do we, and all we can do is take a chance and create.
One of the greatest gifts we can receive from this story is that every day of life is a huge unknown, and that to really live it is a risk. All we can do is jump in with both feet, and give ourselves to the process, and trust that something good will happen.
So, not really knowing what to do with the chaos, the first thing God does, the first risk God takes, is to make this thing called light. From our vantage point, it may seem obvious that creating light would be a good thing. But light isn’t always a slam-dunk benefit. It has its negative side. When you shine light into a dark room, you may see rats, after all. Or cobwebs. In a well-lit bathroom, light may show pockmarks and scars and wrinkles and eyes that are sadder than we knew. And it may be that the first light God created showed a fair amount of awful things—the ugliness and distrust and violence that are so prevalent. It’s likely that was at least some of what God saw.
But God took that risk anyway, and that light showed something else, as well. It showed a new-fallen snow glimmering in the sun’s rays. It showed a little boy bringing his mother his new crayon drawing. It showed a girl texting her bereaved friend. It showed a woman sitting patiently with her dying husband. It showed a man forgiving his boss for a poorly-considered decision that proved deeply hurtful. The light God shined showed beauty and hope and vitality and courage. It showed forgiveness and resilience. It showed justice and mercy. It showed peace-making and care for the entire created order.
And it’s what that light continues to show. All around us, signs of mercy and peace and care for the earth continue to shine. Again and again, life’s shadowy underbelly can be, and is, transformed by deeds of love and mercy.
It’s nearly impossible to read the biblical stories of creation—and there are two of them in Genesis—without being moved to a profound respect for the gift of this earth. This morning we heard only the account of the first day. On subsequent days, the earth and sky, the dry land and waters, the sun and moon, the fish and birds, the wild animals and cattle are all created before the culminating creation of human beings. And what’s abundantly clear in the telling of this story is that, if God is that invested in all this stuff that gets made, then we’re to be just as invested in it.
Sandra Steingraber is a scientist who works on environmental issues and particularly on the effects of toxins. She herself developed bladder cancer at the age of twenty and her ten-year-old son suffers from asthma induced primarily by air pollution. So her work is to alert people to the dangers, and to help them find ways to combat the toxic habits our culture has come to depend on. When asked what her religious convictions are on the subject, she says, “We . . . are called to seek out the sacred within the fellowship of ordinary life. I believe that in any given moment we humans enjoy an exquisite communion with creation, as molecules of our environment stream through us, break apart, rearrange themselves and become our bodies and our blood. Our children are made of air, water and food. The plankton stocks that make us oxygen, the bedrock that holds ground-water, the pollinating bees that make fruit: these are blessings. Chemical poisons should not trespass here” (Christian Century, Dec. 27, 2011, p. 25). This is the deep truth of the Genesis story of creation: God loves every bit of this exceedingly good universe, and so there is light in all the ways people strive for environmental integrity.
Locally, we can see that light in Clay McMullen, a senior at West Geauga High School, who was featured in a recent Plain Dealer series on local heroes, and who has, since he was eleven, won nearly fifty grants totaling $180,000 to work on environmental issues. He’s built nesting landings for osprey; started nature clubs in the district’s two elementary schools; planted vegetable gardens and courtyards at his middle school and high school; and gotten emission-control devices installed on nearly two dozen buses in the school district. He also got the school board to adopt a “West G Is Idle Free” policy that prohibits idling in the parking lot for more than thirty seconds. And for those who wonder what parents waiting in their cars are to do to stay warm on cold winter days, he helped secure a grant last year to buy green micro-fleece blankets to distribute to people waiting in cold cars (Plain Dealer, Dec. 30, 2011, pp. 1, 10). Clay McMullen is one of the illuminated gifts God would see when gazing at the newly-lit earth. He and others call us to a similar passion for doing what’s right.
Epiphany, the season that follows Christmas, is all about “manifestation”—the manifestation of Christ in the world. Christ is the light (Jn. 1:4) who reveals the heart and center of God. This is the light sent to the world and all its people. And as that light shines on us, we ourselves become the “light of the world” (Mt. 5:14-16). We’re to be something like the moon that God makes on the fourth day (1:16)—beacons who reflect a holy beam and make our own light—to brighten the world and deepen its joy. [Here at A360, we will be spending the whole season of Epiphany exploring how that light shines in places all over the world. I hope you will join us for that.] So let’s take our light and let it shine. For this is the first day.