In the beginning,
God created….and God saw that it was very good.
As a new Fall season begins
here at First United Methodist Church, I am beginning a sermon series
on six great Bible stories from the book of Genesis, the book of Beginnings
as it is called. I’m doing so in part because many of you so
loved the series on the Psalms and asked that I please do another
series this Fall.
But maybe it’s even
more important to say that I want us to share in the foundations of
our faith through these great stories. I want us to have a familiarity
with the Bible as God’s living word of life for us. I want us
to know how these stories inform how we approach a variety of current
issues—creationism, global warming, English Only, interfaith
relations, peace-making, to name a few. I want us to see that all
that we do here in ministry and in mission is grounded in these old,
old, stories. I want these stories to become our story—our story
of faithfulness, our story of purpose, our story of commitment, our
story of love.
And so we’ll be spending
some time in the very first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis
and the stories of Creation, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel,
Abraham, Joseph and his brothers, and Moses and the midwives. If you
didn’t grow up in the church, you may have a passing acquaintance
with these stories because they’re out there in the culture
beyond the purview of any particular church interpretation. Or if
you first learned these stories in Sunday School, you may have never
grown beyond those first lessons. You may have fond associations with
the animals entering the ark two-by-two or visions of destruction
as the Tower of Babel comes tumbling down. You may wonder how Abraham
can be called the father of the three major living faiths—Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. You may have seen “Joseph and the Amazing
Technicolor Dream Coat” but not know how he reconciled with
his own brothers who had sold him into slavery.
In fact, more and more
of us don’t know much about the Bible at all. Stephen Prothero,
author of the recent book Religious Literacy: What Every American
Needs to Know--And Doesn't observes that on the one hand, the Bible
is the number one bestseller in American history, and that nearly
two-thirds of Americans believe that this book holds the answers to
all or most of life's basic questions. And yet, with a little digging,
it quickly becomes apparent that Scripture is revered far more than
it is read.
Only one-third of Americans
know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Ten percent believe
that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. Prothero shares the “Biblical
Literacy Quiz” he uses with his students. I’ll just list
out the questions here—I won’t embarrass you by asking
for your answers, but, just try and answer along in your head as I
read these questions:
1. Name the four Gospels.
2. Name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.
3. According to the Bible, which man led the Israelites across the
Red Sea?
4. Who is credited with writing most of the Epistles?
5. "God helps those who help themselves." Is this in the
Bible?
6. "Blessed are the poor." Is this in the Bible?
7. According to the Bible, where was Jesus born?
8. According to the Bible, who was the first murderer?
9. President George W. Bush spoke in his first inaugural address of
the Jericho road. Which Bible story was he invoking?
10. Name the Ten Commandments. List as many as you can.
We’re talking basics
here, folks. And I can promise you that this Sermon Series will at
least help you know who led the Israelites across the Red Sea and
also reveal the truth about whether Joan of Arc really was Noah’s
wife! For answers to all the other questions, see Brad, recently ordained,
or Nate or Paul who graduated from seminary just a few months ago.
They should have all this stuff at their fingertips.
Because, let me tell you,
Bible stories are not just for kids. Like all great stories, they
appeal to kids and all the while they are teaching adults. They give
us the big framework for knowing who we are and who God is and who
God is for us. As we Methodists maintain, they contain the Word of
God. They are not, we teach, the literal word of God, but contain
the Word of God. In our baptismal covenant we are asked: “Do
you receive and profess the Christian faith as contained in the Scriptures
of the Old and New Testaments?” In part what this means is that
is our responsibility, our duty as Christians in every age, to study
and probe and learn and pray over these old, old stories until the
Holy Spirit reveals to us what they are saying to us now. We need
to work to “hear what the Spirit is saying to the church”
in and through these ancient stories.
You know, we probably have all come across people who scoff at the
Bible and faith because they look at the Bible and say: none of this
can be true if you’re supposed to believe that Noah lived to
be 800 years old. Or, if Adam and Eve were really the first people
then how did their son find a woman to marry? And all those sorts
of dismissals. They err on the side of concluding that this is grounds
for throwing out the whole kit and kaboodle. Now we can’t really
blame them, I suppose, given the widely vocal folks who insist that
unless you take every word of it literally, you don’t really
have faith. You know, the “God said it, I believe it, end of
discussion” people. Good grief. God gave us brains, big ones,
and scholars to help us unpack these ancient words and find in them
the truth for our lives, saving grace for our souls. The Bible is
the word of life.
The marvelous Lutheran
preacher of our day, Barbara Lundblad, in her newest book called Marking
Time: Preaching Biblical Stories in the Present Tense, says that the
biblical text marks our time AND our time marks the text. By this
she means that this Book is never finished. And never will be. Each
successive generation reads it in new ways and in essence creates
a new text. It’s not an ancient book, but a text contemporary
to every moment. That’s what makes it alive. That’s what
makes it fun and hard—because it’s not simple. It’s
written in languages very few of us know. From cultures we may know
absolutely nothing about. Addressing problems that may not be the
issues we face at all. But yet it is our story. It is our family album.
And as we apply our context to it, we find the text opening up ever
new meanings and insights. It is God’s living word.
In the beginning, the first
chapter of Genesis proclaims…God created…and God saw that
it was all very good. God created the world. And in it all kinds of
things, everything in the plural. God created waters and seasons.
God created one light to rule the day and another kind of light to
rule the night. God created fruit trees and trees bearing seed of
every kind. God created swarms of living creatures, every kind that
lives in the sea and every kind that flies through the sky. God created
the wild animals and the things that creep on the ground and every
kind of cattle. And then God created humankind in God’s image.
And when it was all done, God blessed the whole creation.
God creates all this wondrous
diversity and calls it “Good.” The Creation--in all its
abundance and potential. In all its glory and splendor. God blesses
it all and calls it “very good.” In fact, these opening
verses of Genesis give the feeling that God had a ball creating all
these different kinds of living things. The diversity of creation
is God’s delight. It is God’s joy. It is God’s gift.
And each and every one of us has a precious and beautiful place in
God’s magnificent creation.
This is the basis of our
ecological ethic because it is clear that in the beginning we are
kin to every part of God’s creation. This is why we care about
the environment and global warming, lest we fall short of being the
faithful stewards God has created us to be and endanger other species
or future generations.
And let me just say here
that we do not need to participate in one of the great side-shows
of our time, this debate between so-called “creationism”
and evolution. Science is science. It speaks the language of mathematical
exactitude and objectivity, of experimentation and examination of
the evidence. Its hypotheses must be confirmed by repeatable and verifiable
testing. It is the product of human intelligence and diligence and
the rigorous standards of academia. Thank God for it and for scientists.
And Scripture is scripture.
It speaks the language of story and poetry and music and history and
dreams and letters. It is the expression of poetic intuition and artistic
imagination. It is the proclamation of prophetic zeal. It is the recounting
of faith as it has been lived out by God’s people. From oral
tradition to written word, we believe that it contains the living
Word of God. Thank God for biblical scholars and theologians, and
for the church where Scripture is kept alive.
These two different languages
should not be confused or equated. Both are true. Both reveal part
of what we need to know to live. We Methodist Christians are a both/and
people on this one. Not one or the other. Both/and. Science and faith.
Let your kids learn science in school and faith in Sunday School and
talk with them about how we hold it all together. Because in the totality
of it all, God is glorified. In it all, God, the Creator, is praised.
One way to summarize this
is to say that science describes “what is” as accurately
and completely as it can. Additionally, faith gives Christians eyes
to see beyond the surface to what lies behind and beyond, to God.
We believe that God is our living Creator and all creation is the
Lord’s.
This is our faith and the
ground of our trust and hope. The God who created in the beginning
is creating still. God’s Spirit continues to hover over our
chaos and ambiguity to bring forth life. We need not be afraid. We
need not be despairing. We need never abandon hope. God is God, yesterday,
today and tomorrow. And God is creating still.
As we begin this new year
together, God is creating, in the world around us and in our souls.
God is creating, as kids go back to school, and students go off to
college. God is creating as our families shift and re-arrange. God
is creating as our plans and dreams evolve. God is creating as we
try and balance work and rest. God is creating as we sort out our
life’s priorities. God is creating as we age and our bodies
change. God is creating as marriages begin and babies are born and
new folks come into our midst. God is creating as this new year begins.
Welcome and Welcome home,
dear ones, to worship and to serve.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Notes:
Bernhard Anderson.
Creation versus Chaos. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. 1987.
Barbara K. Lundblad.
Marking Time: Preaching Biblical Stories in the Present Tense. Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 2007.
Stephen Prothero.
Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't.
Harper San Francisco, 2007.
©Patricia
Farris, 2007. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved.
The
Creation "In the beginning... it was ALL good!"