"Wide-Open Spaces"
Why we were made.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Text: Genesis 1:1-31; 2:1-3
When you hold a child in your arms for baptism, it is as if you are holding the whole of creation. “The whole of creation:” Those were the words of a professor of mine 25 years ago, as he was preparing us to prepare others for the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. I have thought about his words many times over the years, and there have been times when I have wondered exactly what he meant. In retrospect, after years of experience, I think I know that when you hold a child, any child, at any time, in your arms, you are confronted by the mystery, the wonder, the splendour of human existence.
Think about yourself for a moment. If you do think about yourself as something wonderful and mysterious, then you do not take yourself for granted. If your creation is something awesome, beyond your own comprehension, then it is a magnificent thing. After all, at one time you did not exist. You were nothing. You were a non-being. Then, by virtue of the comings and goings of cells from male and female, you existed, and you not only existed, but you developed, and as you developed, you grew, and as you grew, you changed from being just a life, just a simple life, to being a special life, a unique life. Every creature, every human being that has ever lived on this earth is unique and different from every other single human being, even though they are part of the same species.
If that is not an awesome thing, if that is not an incredible mystery, then I don't know what is! Yet, it seems to me when I read the newspapers and listen to the radio about the philosophical debates that are taking place, that it is as if there is an argument about the value of our very being; that the mystery is somehow taken away from it all.
For example, in the Toronto Star this week, Salman Rushdie was arguing for what he calls “a new atheism,” an atheism that dismisses religion with his sense that the world was created as nothing more than an art form. That particular debate has raged for 150 years. Are we to look at life just in mechanistic terms? Are we to look at life simply as the result of various forces that are taking place genetically in the world? Or, is there somehow something more? Is there a purpose? Is there a divine hand behind this incredible created order?
Salman Rushdie, responded to a writer who I am assuming is a Muslim, Osama Ghanin. The conclusion to his response went right to my heart. He said, “Rushdie surely lacks the humility that many experience in their consciousness and perception of this marvelous, awesome universe of ours, and it is this humility that is vital to the necessary thing, to know God.”
In the presence of the mystery and the power of the universe, before the incredible nature of what we have around us, we have to be humble enough to recognize that even when we as human beings look at the world and how it was made, we look through the lens of our human experience. As human beings, we are not simply objects but subjects. We are not simply just structured mechanisms; we are people who are being influenced by ideas; we are being influenced by the sweep of history or by the country or the continent where we were born. We are influenced by the genetics of our family, and we are influenced by the decisions that we make each and every day. There needs to be in any discussion of the value and the purpose and the uniqueness of creation a sense of humility that does not reduce the awesome power of creation to simple mechanics.
Just imagine what would happen if we looked at human life mechanically at a funeral. We would wheel George down the aisle in his casket, and the minister would stand up, probably not a minister, but any person would stand up and say, “Here lies George. Unfortunately, he experienced a breakdown in his DNA. It's sad to say there was too much sugar in his system, and not enough insulin, which has affected his organs. I am also very sad to see that ultraviolet rays have done terrible things to George's skin over the years, and here today we remember a desecrated, physiologically broken-down creature. Amen.”
Can you imagine! Is that what life is? Is that what the debate about the creative order actually gets reduced to? Sometimes it does! That is why I believe that the story of creation from the Bible, the story of the Christian faith, and the story of all the great world religions for that matter, have something profound to say about the purpose, the mystery and the uniqueness of creation and of creatures and of human beings.
This morning's passage from Genesis has within it a poetic lilt. Most scholars seem to agree that it was actually written down when the people of Israel were living in exile in Babylon. Because they were concerned about the chaos that was around them, and the loss of faith amongst their people, Israel's priests and leaders transcribed parts of the Book of Genesis from an oral tradition that had been passed on throughout many hundreds of years, to describe creation.
However, the creation story is not the mechanistic, blow-by-blow description that scientists dismiss. Nor is it a simple blow-by-blow description that even theists sometimes cling to in the hope that they can argue with non-believers. The story of creation is the story of the purpose of why we were created. It is the story of the divine hand that was behind it: that there was intelligence; that there was a purpose; that there was a will for this very existence and this very being called creation.
While there are some people who debate whether the world was created at a fixed moment when matter came into being and others say that there was no fixed moment, no set time or place, the fact is we have to have the humility, even now, to recognize that creation is still a mystery. After all, for 200 years the world lived under the influence of Newtonian physics, only to have Albert Einstein come along in the 20th century and turn Newton on his head!
We need to preserve a degree of humility and mystery if we are to treat creation, and children and human beings with the awe that is their due. Look, for example, at how the story of creation unfolds. In the beginning we read that God created, and the word that is used in the Hebrew is “Bara,” which means that he began a process of creating. God began creating the world, and by God's word, by divine fiat, by divine purpose, by divine will, this creation came into existence.
If you look at the creation story very closely, you will notice that at the very beginning there is an overwhelming sense of graciousness, of openness. Now, I don't know if many of you listen to the Dixie Chicks, but they have a song that is called Wide-Open Spaces, and wide-open spaces is exactly what God created in the beginning. In the first three days of creation, there is this sense that as God created, he created space for the rest of creation to fill: There was an openness, a generosity, a wideness, an expansiveness to what he did. The moon and the stars and the oceans and the land, everything was so wide-open, ready for God to continue his creation.
This morning, many of you have brought your children to church. In many ways, these children reflect that very moment of creation themselves. A child is like a wide-open space. When she is born, she is like a sponge. He is eager to know and to learn and to experience and to grow. A child is an incredible thing, because of this openness, this willingness to receive.
The great evangelist, Dwight Moody, was once asked after conducting a meeting in England something that sounds like it is out of the TV program “Two-and-a-Half Men.” The question was: “How many were converted tonight in the meeting?”
“Two-and-a-half,” replied Moody.
“What do you mean?” asked his friend. “Were there two adults and a child?”
“No,” said the evangelist. “It was two children and one adult. The children have given their lives to Christ in their youth, at the beginning, while the adult has come with half of his life already over.”
Children are sponges! They are open like creation. But what does God do with creation?
Once he had created this expansive, gracious, magnificent place, he said, “Let us now fill it.” God was not satisfied simply by having created a vessel; he was interested in filling the vessel. He filled it again with another verb - the verb is “to make complete,” “to add to.” God added to and he created the fish in the seas and the birds of the air, and the animals of the land, and then God said at the height of creation, “We will make humanity in our image: Male and female, we will make them.” The word in Hebrew for God the Bible uses at that point is “Elohim.” Elohim means that sense of a relationship that exists already within God and that God wants to share in relationship with the world. The reason you and I were created, the reason why these babies here were created, is in order that God might have a relationship with creation. Take away a belief that there is a purpose or a reason behind creation, and you take away a fundamental relationship that sustains life. God created, and God wanted to have a relationship with that created order. So, God created us, you and me, and the children that we baptized this morning.
Unfortunately though, my friends, the sad reality is that image that God created very often gets distorted. Very often our sinfulness and forgetfulness that we were made in the image of God, that we are children of God, gets in the way. For example, just yesterday I opened up the Toronto Star, and in the very first section, there were three stories about children, all of them negative. One, a mother had passed on HIV to her child. The second one, a child in Alberta had been raped. A third one, children in Zimbabwe were being thrown out of their houses.
Three stories in just the first 15 pages of yesterday's newspaper, and you can see that we sometimes fill the lives of children with the wrong things. To those who do that, who do not see children as valuable creatures, there is a word of warning in the creation story: Children were made by God, and they were made in the image of God, and God created them in order that they might be loved. My friends, we have a stewardship of our children that is born out of the creation story, and we must never forget it.
There is one last thing that God did, and it is the reason why we are here this morning. God created and God filled, but then God rested. God said, “I have made humanity in my image; now it is time for me to put up my feet and put on my slippers and sit back and be at rest.“ God does that because he wants us to do it as well. He wants us to have a “Sabbath,” a day of rest. The purpose of that day of rest, and the purpose of this worship service, and the purpose of why we do what we do in this church is because “Sabbath,” the day of rest, was instituted so we might know our God; so we might take time for our creator; so we might take time out from being consumed with ourselves, and be filled and consumed with God.
If you take nothing else from this service today, whether you are listening on the radio or whether you are present, I want you to take this thought: Take time for God, because God created you to take that time. In a wonderful poem on the story of creation, James Weldon Johnson concludes at the height of it all, with this great testimony to the creation of humanity. I leave it with you, that it may be in your hearts:
Then God walked around,
And God looked around
on all that He had made.
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said: ”˜I'm lonely still.'Then, God sat down-
On the side of a hill, where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought: ”˜I'll make me a man!'Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the Sun and fixed it in the sky
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand,
This great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul. Amen. Amen.
Be a wide-open space, and may God fill you! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.