Date
Sunday, January 07, 2018
Sermon Audio
Full Service Audio
It was June 1897 and the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. London was full of excitement, and this feeling that something new was happening, while something old was being recognized. Most scholars agree that it was probably the height of the British Empire. The world had come to London to recognize the Queen, the mother Queen as many called her. Armies marched to and fro. There was pomp and circumstance, a demonstration of power and money, and religious might. Queen Victoria, sixty years the monarch, got to celebrate it all. In fact, the armies that marched were made up of nearly every colour and creed that you can imagine throughout the world; such was the scope of the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria was the one who was the head of it. But there were some, amongst whom was Rudyard Kipling, who felt that maybe the British Empire was actually coming to an end. In an incredible poem called Recessional he describes very eloquently what he sees is going on. Let me read from the first and the last stanzas and you will understand why.
God of our Fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
For heathen hearts that puts a trust
In wreaking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word –
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Kipling shook the world with these words. He saw a gradual decline in the empire. He knew it could not sustain itself, and wondered whether it could be sustained. All empires, argued Kipling, eventually end. The language he used is fascinating: at the beginning he refers to God and the Lord and people having trusted in the Lord and God for their empire, but at the end, it appeals to the Lord for his mercy on this declining power. In both cases, the Lord bookends it all – the beginning and the end – the Alpha and the Omega. It is the Lord, who as far as Kipling is concerned, can save his people. It is a brilliant poem!
Now, I agree that Kipling was a man of immense contradictions, but I think in this particular case history proves that he was prescient. He knew that the times were changing, not only the end of a century, but the end of an era as far as the British Empire was concerned. With the end, with the removal of Queen Victoria, which would be imminent, things would change quite dramatically. It is a profound story, riddled with biblical imagery that Kipling takes up about the ends of empires. It is very true, is it not, that the empires of the world come and go; they ascend and they recede. They have their moments of glory. A moment might be three hundred years, but they come and go.
We stand here at the beginning of a new year, not the beginning or the end of a particular empire, not the beginning or the end of a particular millennium. We are simply here at the beginning of a new year, but it behooves us to think about what Kipling was saying, and to ask ourselves what really constitutes our foundation, our constant of new beginnings. With the ebb and the flow of the world as we see it, what remains to trust in and provides hope? After all, we are confronting some pretty major things in the world right now.
It is no joke that we are experiencing the effects of climate change. It is fascinating that even last night on Facebook I had friends from Australia describing forty-seven degree temperatures in Sydney melting the highways. I have friends in Cape Town telling me that they have only eight days water left in that city, and could be one of the first, if not the first, major world city to run out of water. We all know what we have experienced, and I don’t even want to talk to my friends in the Maritimes and in Boston right now. We know that things are changing. We don’t know the extent of them. We have scientists that are telling us, including members of our own congregation who were on television last week describing this phenomenon. We know it’s happening, but we are uncertain what it is going to do to us, and the extremes that we are beginning to see.
I think we are also seeing the realignment of empires and powers in the world. We are seeing shifts taking place daily, and we are not quite sure where all of this is going to end, but we know old orders are diminishing and new borders are arising within the political realm. We can see that with our very own eyes happening quite quickly. We forget sometimes, because the news media often don’t cover it, that the plight of refugees is still an immense problem, with millions of people every day moving from one place to another, not knowing where they are going to live. We are in the midst of a flux; an ebb and a flow, so as Christians and as people of faith, I wanted this morning to think about what beginnings mean. My mind turns to the great passage from the Book of Genesis. Genesis is in many ways the first beginning. It is the beginning of all beginnings.
It starts out with a creed, on which so much is predicated. “In the beginning, God created.” Our reading is from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which it puts it a little differently: “In the beginning when God created the heaven and the earth.” I prefer the old version, I think it is more accurate. It becomes the predicate for everything else that is built in the whole of the Book of Genesis and beyond. It is one of the supreme creeds, along with Jesus Christ as Lord, and probably stands as one of the greatest earliest formulas of a creed that you could possibly have. That creed has been challenged over the years. The Greek philosophers challenged it, because they believed that all matter, the created world, was inherently evil, and that God could not have then created something that was evil. The Greek philosophers in Antioch in the second century and others beyond that held the conviction that the earth is evil matter; matter is evil; and therefore God could not have created it. In the Enlightenment they believed that it was inconceivable that there was a divine origin to things, that it wasn’t scientifically verifiable. You couldn’t prove that God had created the earth, therefore, you couldn’t believe it or make it a creed or a conviction. It had to be scientifically verifiable for it to be trusted.
More recently, according to Richard Dawkins, we would have to be delusional to believe that there could be a God who is behind the process of evolution. So the creed, “In the beginning God created” has been challenged, and continues to be challenged, and probably always will be challenged. Christian theologians have risen to this challenge. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and others before them used to assert the very classic Latin phrase creatio ex nihilo – that God creates out of nothing. In other words, it wasn’t something before God. That is why, even in this earliest text, heaven and Earth are formed, are created by this divine being. Augustine also argued that matter had the potential for good. It wasn’t inherently evil any more than human beings, or the planet, or animals are inherently evil. He said that they all had the capacity for good, notwithstanding the fall that was described later in The Bible. It was made good, and Augustine said, “We do not want to live in a world believing in a pernicious God, where everything that is matter is evil, because if we do that, we have a tendency ourselves to become destructive.” Augustine argues for the goodness of matter against the Greek philosophers.
Similarly the argument has been made, and is much more popular these days, for recognition of an evolutionary process. It seems to me to be almost an undeniable fact that you see the changing of species and that take place over time, and within the world there is an evolutionary process. But you can still believe in an evolutionary process without believing in the absoluteness of an evolutionary theory. In fact, a more reasonable position is to recognize that there is an unknown quality to the nature of the creative order, as well as a theory that might describe parts of it. I would subscribe to that conviction, and many Christian theologians do today as well, including Tim Keller.
Part of our problem with creation has been that we have people who take the text of the passage literally and turn it into a scientific text when we know that it wasn’t. This past week, I was talking to Dr. Hunnisett about this, and I was explaining in some detail (probably an aggravating amount of detail) my thoughts on all of this, and she just said, “Well, the Bible is about the rock of ages, not the age of rocks.” Jean, if that was original, you should join the pantheon of great philosophers! But that is the principle on which we operate, and it is the right principle because the Book of Genesis is about the theology of the creation of the world.
After all, if Moses was the writer of Genesis how could he give an account of his own creation? It was never meant to be that! Yet, there are still those who hold to it in some kind of banal form. I don’t think it helps anybody, least of all the Christian message. No, it is perfectly right today to say that God created the heavens and the earth. It is a creed that is worthy of examination and reflection but we don’t need to turn it into anything more.
On the other hand, think about the fact that might not be true, and that if those who have questioned it are right, where is the purpose, where is the sense of meaning in the universe? If there is not some sort of divine origin or purpose, are we just a mechanistic accident? And if we are a mechanistic accident, then what virtue is there in doing the right? What virtue is there for caring for the weak, who are often subjugated because of natural selection? What good is there in caring for the earth, and does it really matter to have the nature of that care? How do we even contemplate being reasonable subjects having some form of dominion over this earth, which we do, if there is not ultimately some meaning and purpose to all of it? I think the dark and turbid and horrible doctrine that there is no divine origin of the universe causes me much more fear than the notion that there is one. In fact, the notion that there is divine origin, is a great source of joy.
Genesis is more than just a simple statement that God created, it is about two other things as Fred Craddock said. It is about the formation of the world that God shaped – and it is more about formation than creation in a sense that God took from the void and the chaos and formed (created) the earth, and that the separation of things is a sign of order: the light from darkness; the day from night; the waters from the heavens; the animals from the humans. There is this sense that creation unfolded and each part of it supported and made possible the existence of other parts. There is an incredible sense of purpose in its formation, to create something that God in the end would say, “Now, that is good!” The formation of things is important.
There have been and clearly were, even before the times of the writing of The Old Testament, all manner of ideas about how the earth was formed. The Babylonians had: the Enuma Elis, a complicated system of myths and legends about different gods creating different things at different times and some had more purpose than others. I remember when I was a tutor at McGill, I was given the first assignment to give to my student, Leon Hines by The Old Testament professor. Leon was a wonderful man. I remember sitting down with him, and the Enuma Elis to study The Old Testament. I thought, “Have they lost their minds? What are we doing reading Babylonian myths?” But then it dawned on me as we progressed that understanding that kind of weird mythology actually helps us understand the power and the simplicity of the two creation narratives of the Book of Genesis. There is simplicity, not a kind of mythic legend, but just here was God forming the earth, the waters, sea and sky, light and dark, and so on. It was not a complex system, just a simple statement that God is the creator, and that in the beginning, the very beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
What is even more spectacular about all of this is that there was a purpose behind this creation that God formed. I love what Sir John Polkinghorne, the great quantum physicist from Cambridge who preached from our own pulpit here at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church a few years ago said:
The Bible and the scriptural testimony is not like the theory of gravity. The theory of gravity does not respect the context; it is just a law, a law of gravity. If you look at things in mechanistic and scientific ways, you can see that there is this law of gravity. But I like what a friend of mine once said, ‘The law of gravity might exist, but surely there needs to be something beyond the mechanistic view, because there is a difference,’ and he put it very crudely, ‘between dropping a tin off a wall and dropping a child off a wall.’ The law of gravity might exist, and that might be almost beautiful, but the purpose and how that gravity is used is profoundly different, and becomes a matter of conscience, meaning and purpose.
I think John Polkinghorne is right. You can have a description of those fields and those forces within nature, but there has to be a purpose, there has to be a reason, an ethic behind it. God formed; God shaped, and it was good!
Finally, God speaks. It is the oration, not just the formation. When God speaks, he creates. When God speaks, new worlds open up. There was an African preacher named Pastor Thelimi. I used to go and hear him on Sunday nights. I would go to boring services in the morning, and then I would go to hear Pastor Thelimi at night. That is always what I told people. Pastor Thelimi always had something very unusual to say. One Sunday, he said, “Do you realize the creation was God’s first sermon?” Think about it: “Creation was God’s first sermon. God spoke and the world was created.” Ever since, this notion of God addressing, God creating, God speaking, not in a physical sense like we have, but through his Word he makes and he creates and recreates. John 1:1 that Lori preached on Christmas Eve suggests all of that. “In the beginning, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is the oration; it is the Word of God that is the creative power, as manifested in Jesus of Nazareth. It is in our passage from Mark, Chapter One, the baptism of Jesus, again, the beginning, the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry, a new beginning and the Word came forth, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The new beginnings are found in the Word of God, and the Word of God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.
When God speaks, God acts. When God speaks, new worlds are created. When God speaks, everything changes. When we are uncertain about the world and the movement of empires and powers and sovereignties, it is good to remind ourselves of the first and new beginning. Last Sunday, Lori was talking about New Year’s resolutions and how she is going to become one of the world’s great 10K runners. I am sure you have all made resolutions, maybe you have broken it by now, but we all have resolutions. I remember seeing an elderly lady in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a sweetheart. She had a place in Eastern Passage, and I once said to her, “Have you made any New Year’s resolutions for this year?”
She said, “Yes. I always have the same one every year! Just let God be God, and leave it at that.” Is that not what Genesis is all about? Isn’t that what Rudyard Kipling would have agreed to as well? All these other things come and go. They pass. But there was One at the beginning, and as Kipling reminds us, at the end He will be there also. Amen.