Sermon

SKY LIGHTS

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

Trinity Sunday—May 18, 2008

Scripture: Genesis 1:1-18

And God saw that it was good. What an amazing story. I’ve read the creation narrative with new eyes this past week given the chaos that has befallen Myanmar and China. The seas have rushed in and the foundations of world have shaken. Our context always influences what we hear and what we see, and this is as true of reading the Bible as it is of everything else in life.

Do you know what hit me this time around with Genesis? We often think of God creating the world out of nothing. There’s a doctrine that encompasses this—ex nihilo—from nothing. But the writer of Genesis doesn’t really make this case about the world we live in.

Listen carefully. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the 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.” As the story begins earth and water and wind are already in place. But there’s no life, no order, no meaning. It’s a formless void—desolate. The Hebrew phrase gives this sense of things even if you know no Hebrew—tōhû wābōhû. Creation was without form and void—primordial chaos was all there was. The writer wasn’t privy to a theory about the Big Bang, nor able to take a peek through the Hubble telescope, but in a moment of profound inspiration had the same inkling we have about the origin of life on planet earth.

God enters the story as the One who pushes back against disorder and chaos. The wind, the rûach, is God’s mighty spirit bringing order and meaning into the world. We find ourselves muttering, “O yes, this is what we feel when we look up late in the day and see sky lights, the sun and moon—the greater light that rules the day and the lesser light that rules the night.”

We’ve just finished watching the evening news with its scenes of Burmese villages sucked back into the deep and schools in Chinas once filled with vibrant children and now, suddenly and cruelly, serving as formless concrete tombs. We hurry outside to catch our breath, to inhale God’s spirit, and we are stopped as short as the ancient Hebrews who have given us Genesis. Listen to the poet, Luci Shaw as she writes about “Sky Lights:”

Moon and sun balancing at the

twilight’s far ends. Eye of

silver following eye of gold.

Night and day dancing together in the sky.

Night and day hold each other at arms’

length, eye to the gleaming eye, a dialogue

of glances, and all the stars on the brink

of coming on like candles, or going out.[i]

Luci Shaw reminds me of Camp Twelve Pines, a church retreat in Central New York, where I and my fellow campers would drift away from the early evening campfire and gaze up at the big dipper and the milky way and gain an inkling of something so vast and so much bigger than ourselves that we were awestruck by it all. In later years our own children would sit with Nina and me on a little bluff on the west end of Camelot, a small island in the Canadian waters of the St. Lawrence where we would pitch our tent and watch the evening sky lights in utter amazement.

Our lesson from Genesis helps me understand why these lights are so important and so very good. The God of the Old and New Testaments is a God who pushes against chaos, who shapes meaning out of the earth and sea and sky, who brings light out of darkness. Our God is in the midst of us even now, sweeping over the face of the deep in Myanmar and the concrete slabs that once were the middle school in Juyuan, China.

What I’m suggesting is that what we read about creation in Genesis is our story right now as members of the human race who, in the words of the philosopher, John Hick, are engaged in our own “fleeting moment of consciousness on the surface of one of the planets of a minor star.” Think of it, our sun is a minor star, and our earth a mere spec in a cosmos so immense that our powers of imagination cannot fathom its width and breadth. The same God whose spirit swept over the face of the deep is still at work building a home for us in a world where chaos has not been completely subdued.

This takes back to Juyuan in China and what was a middle school. One of the great mysteries of life goes by the technical theological term, theodicy. It’s really a word that is a question. How can we reconcile our understanding of God—Theos—with dike—with justice? In other words, how can we reconcile belief in a God who is unlimited in goodness and power while living in a world marred by the chaos of the middle school in Juyuan.

Juyuan is on my mind because I happened upon a slide show while checking the news on my computer. Let me describe one of the photos that grabbed hold of me and won’t let me go. When the school collapsed in the earthquake, great slabs concrete were piled on top of each other like matchsticks. In this photo, there is a young man stretched out on one of these slabs. He was spared being annihilated by the earthquake—except that his right leg looks to have been completely crushed between two of the slabs.

Photo credit: http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/searchpopup?picId=4224378

He’s stretched out, head angled to one side, clearly conscious. Standing on a slab above his head is a man holding an IV attached to the young man’s right arm, which is being supported by a young woman attending to him. His left arm is intertwined with the arm and leg of the man who is supporting him.

It must have been the cloth draped over the young man’s head like a crown of thorns, or the angle of his head that was so like many paintings of Christ on the cross, or those attending to him like Jesus’ mother Mary or one of the other Marys—but whatever it was I saw the light of Christ in this young man’s face, God present pushing back against the raw chaos of an unfinished world. The whole scene was, for me, cruciform, depicting Christ on the cross.

We don’t have a rational answer as to why God is shaping a world in which suffering lies in wait like a lion, always ready to pounce. Other people can do us in. And nature herself is a force to be reckoned with. Just ask the Burmese and Chinese who have lost perhaps 100,000 of their respective husbands and wives and children and grandchildren and aunts and uncles. The poet John Keats, in a letter to family, summed up our lives by suggesting that rather than see the world as a vale of tears, we should accept it as a vale of soul-making, the place where our destinies are forged in the give and take of everyday life. So it is.

The saving truth that we cling to is rooted in the cross of Christ, in our conviction that the God of Genesis is the very same God who comes to us in Jesus Christ. Is this not why the cross—an instrument used for capital punishment—is in some strange and mysterious way such a comfort to us? Our hope, finally, lies in the words of the offertory anthem we’ll hear in a moment, words about the Lamb of God who pushes back the darkness of chaos and sin and grants us peace at the last.

Jesus’ death and resurrection fill us with the promise that God is never done with us, never gives us up on us as irrevocably lost. I dare to believe God is not done with the Chinese young man whose life crashed in upon him. Saying this, I can’t help but wonder what happen to his leg, to his life among us as a child of God.

My starting point today was a creation narrative that feels as if it were written for this moment in time. Chaos has erupted in our world in the form of cyclones and tornadoes and earthquakes and the intransigent sinfulness of leaders who stand in the way of relief and compassion for their own citizens. We waver, and then we are called back by the words of the psalmist who reminds us that God has created us to be partners in creation, to be responsible for God’s handiwork—as mysterious and awesome as it continues to be.

On a day such as this it is right for us to be dedicating our gifts for Camp Krislund, a place where this generation of young people can behold the heavens and stars which God has set in place, and in so doing marvel at the glory and honor showered upon them as children of God.

It is also good that we sang a hymn like we did a few minutes ago, one in which prayed for God’s mercy and committed ourselves anew to offer food and water to help our neighbors in their hour of trial. It is also good for us to stand now and join in a litany for survivors in Asia and our own country and everywhere disaster strikes. If our faith has it right, God is in the midst of the human family, pushing back against chaos and calling us into a partnership of compassion and mercy.