How our story begins

Genesis 1-3 (we're using a paraphrase from The Peace Table story bible)

Episode 1: The Beginning

On a walk to the park this week with the 12^th graders from my daughter's school, the German foreign exchange started excitedly pointing and laughing at a row of yellow school busses parked together. She whipped out her phone and snapped photos to show her friends. How American! 

What is “American” culture? High school proms and hot dogs? Hollywood? Infighting? As Americans, are we connected to a shared history or cultural identity that we feel comfortable naming or claiming or can even agree on? (To be fair, our nation isn’t even 250 years old). 

 

Even if you are someone with a strong connection to your particular heritage and cultural identity—like Joyce and Norm and their the Czech Hall, where in two weeks we could all go eat kolaches that Joyce will help make, and hear Czech songs and watch Czech and Slovak dancing—as modern people, more tuned in to our newsfeeds than our neighbors, it's easy to feel these days like we are rootless. How many of us know stories about our grandparents’ parents (or even their names)? In this day and age, each one of us, it seems, is now carving out a life for our own selves from the endless buffet of options. To navigate this super confusing and overwhelming life, we turn to WebMD, YouTube how-to videos, Amazon reviews, and political commentators. 

How do we really know who we are? Where do we turn to remember whose we are?

 

Today I want to remind you that no matter what else is true about who each of us is, we are all people of a deeper story that extends beyond time. We belong to a tradition, ancient and broad, spanning the whole globe and stretching thousands of years into human history. Like all family trees there have been rotten branches, tragedies and trials, happiness, healing and hope.  Among our shared ancestors are villains and heroes, poets and prophets, but mostly ordinary women, men and children whose lives and choices became part of our legacy. 

 

And this is the book of our story. The Story. The biggie. The story of our faith, our ancestors, the tradition that holds us and the God who came in to share this life with us. 

 

This book is messy and it’s confusing, because it is super ancient, and we have so little in common with people who lived so long ago. We don’t even understand how they tell stories, or why, so sometimes we read this book like it’s trying to make us do something, or think something, or coach us on earning God’s approval or avoiding God’s condemnation. 

 

But really, this is a family scrapbook. In this book a whole bunch of different people, in different places and different times, experience in different ways, who this God is and what God is up to in their lives. So, in this way, we also have lots in common with the people in this book. Because we get scared too, and we don’t like feeling weak or vulnerable either, and we tend to think we are not worthy of love, and we compare ourselves to others, and we turn our backs on people who need us, and we wonder what a good life is and how to live it, and we forget whose we are and who we are all the time, just like they did.

Our ancestors told the stories, and shared the poems, and recounted the battles, and prayed the prayers, and sang the songs that made it into this book, because doing these things reconnects us to whose we are and who we are.  

 

But this is also more than a book. It’s a glimpse into a story that’s still going on right now. Christ has risen and lives in and through us, so this book helps us ask who God is and what God is up to here. And we trust that when we read it, the Holy Spirit speaks to us, and helps us hear and see the God of our ancestors right now.

 

And, like any story, the beginning tells us right away whose story this actually is. It all begins with God.  

From nothing, emptiness and impossibility, in the dark, God creates.

God doesn’t paint a still-life and hang it on the Almighty wall. God sets in motion an interconnected eco-system of energy and synergy, plants and animals, days and nights, tides and seasons, creeping things and flying things, microscopic and cosmic geometry and color, joyful peace and noisy harmony. 

And every time God makes more, God looks at it all and calls it good. Ooh! That’s good, and that’s good, and that’s good too! This life is good! Goodness is the beginning and the reason for it all. Our tradition gives us the word Shalom – wholeness, peace, in the complete belonging of all things to God and each other. 

 

When God finishes making everything and calling it good, God rests, and calls the rest good too.  In Shalom, God hangs out with creation and just enjoys watching life be itself.

 

So the first thing we know is that the story of us begins with God. And this world is good and life is for enjoying goodness with God. 

 

Our Peace Table story bible does a great job giving us the gist. But if you decide to read along in the Bible you will see in that in these three chapters we’re looking at today, Genesis actually has two different stories of creation. 

 

The first one we just saw: God creates, God calls it good, night and morning then another day, makes more stuff and calls that good too. In this one, human beings are the pinnacle of creation, made last, and made in God’s image to share in God’s care for all the rest of it. Humans are invited into the work of God and also the rest of God, as agents of shalom.

 

In the second version of the beginning, human beings don’t come last. The human creature comes before the rest, held in God’s very arms with life breathed into its nostrils from God’s own breath.  And this earth creature is there to watch God finish creating, gets to see the plants and trees grow right up out of the ground. God places the creature in a beautiful garden - here is the home I made for you, for you to live in and care for.

 

Then God chooses to be vulnerable. The uncreated Creator loves the earth creature and invites the human to love God in return. But in order for a yes to really be yes, there has to be a no as well. Is it love if there is no other option?  So, among all the fruit trees of the garden, God puts one tree the human must not eat from.This is the boundary I set up; here you do not cross. 

 

And then God notices it doesn’t work for there to be just one human. There needs to be another, a partner, “a helper” it says, the way God is a helper (same verb in the Hebrew).  For there to be the image of God there needs to relationship, like there is relationship in the Trinity itself, so God begins creating animals from the dust, forming them and bringing them one by one to the earth creature– what about this one?

And whatever the human names the animal, that is what it becomes. Side by side, God and human, creating and naming. And as much joy as there is watching the rest of life come alive, there is not another creature that can be a fit for the human. 

 

So God causes the lone earth creature, literally this adam, from the earth, adamah, to sleep. Then, instead of from the dust, God takes from the material of the creature itself and forms another – like it, but different. And now there is male and female, sameness and difference, together reflecting the image of God that couldn’t be reflected in one solitary earth creature. The old creature has ended, and the new creature awakens to belonging, and they are named Adam and Eve. They are both naked and not ashamed. They are fully themselves with God and each other, with no desire to be anything other than who they are, no fear or mistrust, and no reason to hide. They’re together in shalom, in the goodness and belonging of God.

 

Now we return to the part of this story where fear comes in and mistrust begins, when the snake convinces the humans that God can’t be trusted, and suggests, why not be in charge like God instead of living as creatures who belong to God and each other? So they cross the boundary of God’s care and do the one thing God told them not to do.

 

Now they really do know it all: all the potential for things to go wrong as well as right, all the places for pain and lies, all the ways we are different and could hurt each other. And they get scared, and sad, and worried, and jealous, and suspicious. Trust is broken. Filled with shame and fear, and they hide from God. 

 

But God never lets go. God never gives up.  God even has compassion for our shame. God meets us where we are and gives us what we need. So, God calls them from their hiding and clothes them. Like a parent dressing a child in jammies before bed, God wraps them up in love and takes care of them.

From the very beginning, and no matter what, we are God’s beloved. And in all of our beginnings and no matter how we might turn away from God or try to be God, God keeps taking care of us and God’s story of Shalom keeps going. 

 

When we go to school and to work, when we stop working or finish school, when we are young and when we are old, when we feel secure and when we feel lost, when we feel connected and when we’re ashamed of what we’ve done, when we care for others and when we break trust, when we remember and practice our belonging, and when we let fear tell us who we are and whose we are and we hide from God and each other, no matter what and always, God holds us in love. 

 

Our story starts and ends with the real, living, present God. 

You and I are people of Shalom, meant to share in God’s care for the world. We belong to a God who takes emptiness and impossibility and brings life out of nothingness and light into darkness, and invites us to rest in the goodness of God. This reality is our root system, our culture, our shared language, and the lens that shapes how we see the world. Let’s keep telling each other our story.

Amen.

In our humanness, Hope.

ADVENT 1 (Grace Embodied, Part 1)

Genesis 1:26-2:9, 2:15-25, (and some of Genesis 3)

There are things we can’t control.  Like this crappy weather.  Or the calendar.  We are carried along on the current of life and here we are, once again bumping up against the time of year most fraught with expectations, and staring down the last page of 2018 with all the millions of things that get jammed into December.

It’s Advent.  Advent is the beginning of the church year, and the church version of the countdown to Christmas.  As the world around us comes to the end of a year, we have come to the beginning.  We’re returning to the silence, the darkness over the face of the deep before the Creator says “Let there be Light” and life begins.

  

Every year the Church cycles through this pattern of seasons of worship that help us understand our story inside God’s story. In Advent we use the color deep blue to signify the darkest night just before the dawn starts breaking in, and we see it as a time of hushed waiting, of longing for God inside the promise of Christmas, that God is with us.  

Come, Lord Jesus.

This first week of Advent the theme is Hope.  Hope is anticipation. Hope trusts that it will be so: the promise will be fulfilled. All wrongs will be made right. There is something beyond us that is pulling us forward into a new thing, and it cannot be stopped. This is the message of hope.

Before God spoke life into being, there was nothingness, and the Spirit hovered over the waters of the deep. And there was hope.

Because first there was God. God is a relationship of giving and receiving, one in three persons in freedom bound to each other in generosity and self-emptying love.

And because our scriptures hold two different stories of the beginning, we know some very important things about God. The first is that God is a speaking God. God speaks from nothing and something comes to be. God declares and it is so. And then God calls it good.  

This is a God who brings forth life with a word. Then God rests.

Just before God rests, God makes human beings, male and female in God’s image, and God tells them to take care of the world, and brings them into relationship and rest with God. Connected uniquely to God in all creation, they are invited into dialogue with God, drawn into a conversation already taking place within the Trinity.  That’s the first Creation story.  From nothingness to being, from speaking, creation, culminating in human relationship with the God who speaks, creates and rests.

The second story of the beginning is a love story, intimate and risky.  In it God is vulnerable, by choice.  Humans don’t come last in this story, they come before everything else, held in God’s hands and breathed into life by God’s own breath.  Made from the dust of the earth, Adamah, is this creature of the earth, Adam.  When the earth creature, the Adam awakens, all that is true is what is true – being completely known and loved by God, the source of being, the source of all life. Fully known. Fully loved. Fully in dialogue with God, connected and whole, Created and cared for. This is reality and it has never yet been otherwise.

And this creature gets to witness and share in God’s act of creation. God opens the process to this special creature, inviting the human creature also to speak, to name the other creatures.  And whatever the earth creature calls them, that is what they are. 

We’ve been talking this year about grace and the first grace the human ever knows is to be embodied. It is our creatureliness itself. It is that we need God, we are made by and cared for by God.  We are not God, we are not God’s equal, we are not angels or transcendent beings. We are, literally, earth creatures. Creatures connected to, from and returning to, the earth, living inside bodies that are trapped inside the confines of time and space.

We are embodied, and we meet God’s grace from within these earthly bodies.

Let us consider for a moment our bodies -  our persistently beating hearts and insatiably curious and malleable minds, our limbs that work in coordination with each other most of the time, and our senses designed to help us most fully experience and interact this world from within this body we are given, with all its limits and all its possibilities – that we could mix and heat things from the earth and create and taste such things as curry and caramel and coffee! That we could run races! And build airplanes! And teach other humans how to walk and talk! Our bodies are astounding and marvelous.  They are also limited. 

We are made of the stuff of dust, the stuff of stars, yes, but the stuff of dust too.  We stink.  And we get sick. And we get tired. And have allergies, and parts of our bodies that don’t work like they should.  And we get old.  And we start out super weak and dependent – we are really only mostly able-bodied for a very short time of our time here on earth, actually, always coming into and out of different abilities.  We are not invincible, and not unlimited; each of us comes with an expiration date. 

Human beings are finite, dependent creatures. 

And this is grace.  

We need God.  

And so God ministers to us. God provides for us. God loves and cares for us, and we are designed to receive that. To be loved. To trust our maker.  To know our place alongside other earth creatures. To care for the other creatures upon it that we are so bound to on this earth we can’t escape. To live on it, and in it, and from inside our own creatureliness, to  speak and listen to God.

But we can’t do this alone. We are not alone, solo, individual creatures.  For just a short time God tried this out, and it didn’t work.  To be made in the image of a relational God, whose love Father, Son and Spirit spilled out into creation to be shared and spread, the human needs also to be in relationship, we need also to belong to other than just ourselves, and even other than just God.  The conversation requires discussion partners.

So God makes the first earth creature sleep, and takes from it bodily tissue with which to fashion a corresponding partner – a helper, which is the same Hebrew word used for God as our Helper, a rescuer.  And when this earth creature awakens and sees one like itself but different, it is rescued from what it was to now be what it is meant to be.  Once there is female, now there is for the first time male, once there is an other, a you, there is now also a self, a me, and now the image of God can be reflected in a relationship of dialogue, a vulnerability of knowing and being known, a mutual conversation, a community. 

Now there is belonging. Belonging to God is complete even as we belong to each other. Belonging to each other is part of our belonging to God. And they walked in the cool of the garden and conversed with God, and it was good.  And this too is grace.

  

But to be so creaturely! How risky and weak it feels!  How strong and safe it must feel to be God! Not to be bound by the constraints of time and space, or life and death, or bodies and needs! To know all; to be invulnerable!  

So they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the one boundary God set up and said, Do not do this, is the thing they do.  And when they cross this boundary their eyes are opened, and they see they are naked and are ashamed.  Their vulnerability becomes a deficit, a danger; their nakedness transparency. Self-protection, competition and blame roar up within them and between them, and they hide from God.

We earth creatures try to be more than we are, to transcend our limits. 

We now know what is happening at every moment in virtually every corner of the earth.  

We extend our reach to digitally become enemies with those we don’t know and friends with those we’ve never met. 

We keep the lights on and the screens lit to work around the clock, always available and always responsive. 

We eat everything we feel like, and drink till we stop feeling. 

We hold in front of ourselves false images of fake bodies and then contort ourselves around diets and drugs and gurus and equipment to become something we are not. 

We ignore our responsibility for the earth, and its creatures, pursuing our own invincibility instead. We resent and punish others human beings for their weakness or need.  

We, in so very many ways, suppress our creatureliness, ignore our vulnerability, disregard our interdependence, and deny our need for a minister, (that is, for others to care for us).  And so we become disconnected. We disintegrate.  We lose our very selves, our primary identity and belonging, and we hide.   We hide from ourselves, from others, and most futilely, from God.

This conversation God has begun, this dialogue, this relationship, means God, in freedom, has chosen to be bound to this creature, has chosen to love, and therefore also to have the possibility of being rejected.  To give this creature a Yes means it might also say No.  To give it capacity to speak means it might also be silent. Or use words to hurt. To love this creature means God might also be scorned by it. 

My beloved creatures, where are you?  God asks, coming to the conversation and finding nothingness, as though they have uncreated themselves. Why are you hiding from me?

At first they don’t answer, they are hiding behind leaves from the Source of all life. 

Because now shame feels more powerful than trust, and weakness seems more dangerous than disconnection.  

So when God’s voice speaks to them they do not answer back.

But God’s love comes first and last and all throughout. No matter what and always they, and we, belong to God. So when God finds them, and they confess their nakedness, their shame, their weakness, God sees their agony and clothes them, not because they need clothes, but because they need a minister.  Human beings need a minister, even when we think we don’t – maybe especially then - and God will always minister to us. When we turn our backs on God, God will drape over us a warm, protective garment, and help us face our own humanity.

At the very most core of us we are from God, and for God, and the parts deep beneath our knowing know - body, heart, mind and soul - what it is to be known and loved by God.  

And at the core everything, before and after and apart from and throughout the cosmos, is this God who is love, who gives God’s very self for us. 

This is grace. God’s self-emptying, self-giving, ministering love that doesn’t need to, but does it all anyway. 

This relationship is not up for grabs.

But here’s how this works- we are creature, and God is creator. 

We are human and God is divine. 

We are dependent, and God is independent, but chooses out of love and grace to share God’s own self with the world.  God decides to get tangled up in this conversation with us from here on out. 

In fact, in a few weeks, we are going to celebrate that God forfeits independence and invincibility and becomes dependent too – taking on the earth creatureliness that we are bound in, and becoming bound to us and alive alongside us.  Christmas is God taking on the limits of a human body with an expiration date, to keep this conversation going.

My beloved ones, where are you? God asks, as we hide in shame and see our vulnerable,  

soft bodies and tender hearts and questioning minds as ugly, weak, shameful and in need of changing.

But Advent is about noticing and trusting and watching for God.  

So let's begin Advent in the grace of our own creatureliness. 

Let’s feel our moving bodies and our aching hearts and our messy thoughts and gross humanity. 

Let’s take in the smells around us, and wiggle our fingers and toes, and gaze on something or someone lovely and complex. 

Let’s listen to music and words, and feel how we need other people to know us and we need to know ourselves alongside them, and notice how if we’re honest we crave something a little bit more perfect than we ever actually experience. 

Let’s observe our limits, witness our new abilities and new disabilities - the ones we’ve made peace with and the ones we’re just uncovering.  

Let’s recognize our dependence on each other and God, and respond to our needs, like sleep when we are tired, food when are hungry, tears when we are sad, laughter when we’re happy, and connection for the continually reloading need for listening, speaking, touching. 

We are not God. We don’t have unlimited power. We can’t know the divine mystery, but neither can we screw up the divine plan. So this Advent, from our embodied place as creatures, let’s look to our Creator.  Let’s enter into the ongoing conversation with the limitless, transcendent God, who improbably answers our vulnerability and need by coming vulnerable and needy.

Let’s listen to the God who speaks, and see the world as God sees it – deeply interconnected, beautiful and complex, and call it good. 

Let’s see ourselves as God sees us – part of the glorious whole, each one gorgeous and intricate, each one not meant to be isolated and alone.  

No matter what we do or don't do, we can’t stop ourselves from dying. But neither can we stop love from redeeming the whole world. 

Inside our creatureliness, inside our inability to be more than we are, there is our grace. It is the place God speaks to us. It is where the conversation happens.  It’s where hope begins.

Amen.

What that "something from nothing" God did

At LNPC this morning, we kicked off Fall with our "Lessons and Carols of Creation."  We are entering a season of storytelling, recalling the old stories of our faith and exploring our own stories for God's presence and activitiy.  We began this week with Creation and will continue forward from here, using different methods to dig into The Story of which we are all part.  Below is the reflection that followed our Lessons and Carols of Creation.

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

And the Story begins. 

The beginning of a story always sets the trajectory. The opening lines give you a taste of what’s to come.  What’s it going to be about? What’s the dominating tone of this story? What questions is it exploring? Who are the major players?

Will I hang on past the first page to see what happens next?

In the beginning

when God created

the heavens and the earth,

²the earth was a formless void

and darkness covered

the face of the deep,

while a wind from God

swept over the face of the waters.

 ³Then God said,

‘Let there be light’;

and there was light.

⁴And God saw

that the light was good;

and God separated

the light from the darkness.

⁵God called

the light Day,

and the darkness he called Night.

And there was evening and there was morning,

the first day.

Talk about an opener! The first day of what? What else is this startling and confident character going to do? A formless void?  Light out of nowhere? Corralling darkness?  Naming day and night?  Where is this story going to take us?

The story begins with God. 

Before time and space and you and me and our capacity to grasp or explore or explain any of it, this story invites us to set down scientific debates and questions of origin and expectations of proof or details 

and to meet this astounding protagonist, 

who speaks into the silence and the darkness,

this voice, this intention.

Out of nothing, out of the void and the emptiness and the impossibility,

out of the places where there is nothing and no chance of anything

ever, God creates.

In delight, in revelry in joy, God brings life out of nothing.

God brings hope out of nothing. God brings breath and future and possibility out of nothing. from chaos, order, from darkness, light, and this complex and captivating figure, this mysterious and compelling God is just getting started.

Talk about a debut. 

But the stage gets shared.

Objects become subjects alongside our main character, there are others, now, participants. God doesn’t paint a still-life, but ignites a whole self-sustaining, interdependent eco-system – plants and animals, days and nights, tides and seasons, creeping things and flying things and God looks at what God does and says it is good. It is so very good.

Blessing creation God says to it: live, thrive, love, grow! God celebrates and enjoys what God does, all is woven together in harmony: interdependent, interconnected. 

And then the story takes an even more intriguing turn. 

Human beings, oh! Humankind! In God’s own image! 

Male and Female, different but the same, mutual, connected, related, together reflecting the image of God that cannot be captured in one alone solitary creature,

conscious recipients of the gift – directly invited to get involved.

The Psalmist in Psalm 8 says, When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
 the moon and the stars that you have established; 
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
 mortals that you care for them?


Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
   and crowned them with glory and honour. 
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
   you have put all things under their feet, 
all sheep and oxen,
   and also the beasts of the field, 
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
   whatever passes along the paths of the seas. 
O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

This something from nothing Creating God has entrusted the joy of God’s heart to us, the very art from God’s hands. Look what I made!  Isn’t it fantastic?  Wont you join me in it? God blesses human beings and opens up a relationship of trust, of shared delight and wonder, inviting us to connect with God’s joy, to care with God for all of this creation even as we exist within it.

And when God is finished with what God made, God rests.

As part of the creating process itself, one of the generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created, the final stage in creation, God Rests.

But not to adjust or critique, to improve or continue the work.

God simply smiles and enjoys it. Steps back and sits down and rests. 

And God digs that resting so much that the third blessing here God gives is of the rest itself.  Setting-aside time. Finishing time. Sacred, holy time, to rest from the work. To appreciate the whole.  To delight in the project, to rest.

We are invited into the rest of God.

Karl Barth calls us "seventh day creatures." Unlike the rest of creation that exists as created, we are invited into the seventh day, we become co-creators, working and resting and communing with God, alongside God, invited to view creation as God does, joining God in caring for creation, in nurturing one another, and in contented resting.

So, if this is how the story starts, where will it go from here?

Well, given this opening, I expect we’ll be seeing more of this God bringing something out of nothing. That seems to be a very pleasing mode of operation for this character.  Perhaps it will be the most significant and prevalent way this God will act as the story unfolds.

And the story of this whole thing – this earth, this experiment of interconnected life, this thing set in motion - that interdependence and the celebration of life seem important.  The way we all need each other and the world seems set up to function cooperatively.  That’ll come up again, I predict.

And finally, I bet we’re going to see more of these humans, for sure.  And maybe they’ll get themselves into some trouble; that’s an awful risky thing God does, putting so much confidence in these creatures God barely knows.  Though I suppose, God does know them somewhat, being that they are made in God’s own image.  But we’ve yet to truly see what they are like, and there’s potential there for some interesting dynamics in the relationship between God and them. I bet we’re about to see something happen. I bet God wont be resting forever…

In the meantime, we pause on the very threshold of the story and hear its  invitation to linger here and rest.  To look back on the wonder of the whole thing, and the beckoning within it to dive in and be a part of it, and to look for God’s same creative hand at work in our world today and in our lives.

In the meantime we pause on the very threshold of the story and hear its invitation to celebrate.  And to observe, that despite all the pain and sorrow that certainly lies ahead in this story, which we ourselves can attest to, the brokenness in store for creation and these humans, there is an incredible protagonist here, the very author of life, who has done and continues to do astonishing and unfathomable things.

As we look upon the heavens, and the works of your fingers, Oh God, our souls well up in amazement and gratitude, and we can’t wait to find out what happens next.