Colossians 1:15-20 – Grits and Grains

Today sees the debut of the Festival of Creation in Christ, on the first Sunday of September. A few words for a new festival: about words we have lost, the Word that was there in the beginning, and the grace of the world that sustains us. Scripture for the day is Colossians 1:15-20 and John 1:1-14.

Creation in Christ

Here’s a question.

When did the Word first become flesh?

Was it just at the birth of Jesus,
as John the Evangelist writes?

Was it in our very beginning,
with the creation of human life?

Or was it that great fifth day
when God created the great sea monsters
and every living creature that moves
of every kind,
with which the sea waters swarm,
and every winged bird of every kind?

Was it that day?

When God saw that it was good.
So good that he blessed them,
saying,

Be fruitful and multiply.

Was it that day,

that day,
with those four first days all leading up to it,

the creation of Day and Sky,
the gathering of the waters
to make the earth,
the earth producing vegetation,
and then those two great lights,

Sister Sun
and Brother Moon,

Was it that day
that the word of creation
became flesh?

And what was that word?
The Word in the very beginning.

And what did that word mean
when the Word was first spoken?

We do well to wonder
in the world of today,

with the earth as it is,
broken,
Stolen
abused
by greed and exploitation,

and repaired
protected
and cherished
by those who love it.

Today we celebrate
the Festival of Christ in Creation.

This is a new festival.
It is making its debut TODAY
of all days
and comes with the backing
of all the major denominations of the Church.

Think about that.
We are here for the very beginning
of a festival we are going to celebrate
the first Sunday of September every year.

So, here we are,
at the beginning of something new,
being invited to look again
at something very old,
as old as time itself.

Creation.
Christ.
The Word.
Flesh.

And perhaps we are going to need
some new words
to help us see it again
in these trying times of climate change,
when we’ve lost words,
the names of species who’ve disappeared
or we hardly see,
when so many of our youngsters despair
at the inactivity of governments,
and the carelessness of institutions,
with the rise of climate protest,
sometimes violent and desperate,
and the obstinacy of climate-change deniers.

How are we going to navigate this change?
How are we going to get through this valley
without voices to guide us?

Voices that live with
the problems and challenges.
Voices that won’t run away.
Voices that will help us find new words
and new ways of seeing.

We praise Christ in creation
in the hymn called The Servant King.
There is that wonderfully poetic line
about the hands of Christ:
Hands that flung stars into space.

I thought I’d mention a few of those stars,
stars flung into our space
by the hands of Christ,
the Word who was there
at the very beginning.

This is a constellation of poets, artists and theologians.
Stars to help us see.

I don’t have the whole constellation.
There are so many stars to discover.
You will have some stars of your own.
But here are a few stars
who have helped me to see differently.
I want to point them out to you.

Two old stars, both Davids.

First, there’s David Attenborough
who seems to have spent his life
dropping his voice
to let other species speak,
warning us of the dangers they face
as he witnesses the wonders of creation.

Then there’s David Hockney,
who spent his life helping us see
the joy and diversity of changing landscapes
in his paintings of Yorkshire, California and France.

There’s Robin Wall Kimmerer.

She is a scientist and a Native American,
a botanist exploring indigenous wisdom
and the teaching of plants.

She explores the ways in which
the earth loves us and cares for us.

She taught her daughters to garden,
so that they would always have a mother to love them,
long after she was gone.
She writes about ther native Potawatomi language
where the word for plants
can be translated as
“Those who take care of us.”

Think about that.
Plants.
Those who take care of us.

And then there’s Andy Goldsworthy,
the sculptor who takes us out walking
to see what can be made
of earth and dust,
tree and stone
and leaves us in wonder
with his standing figures
taking in the view
of far horizons.

And Robert MacFarlane
with his beautiful books
recovering lost words
and broadening our vocabulary
to describe the wonder and scope
of the natural world,
working with ancient, indigenous wisdom
to argue for the right to life
of all that has been brought to life,
including the earth and her rivers.

He is helping us recover a way of paying attention
and find some of the words we have lost for creation.

And there there is Michael, showing my grandaughter that not all tomatoes are red.
Photo by Dwight Sipler

And then there is Michael,
an 80 year old gardener
who has an allotment across the road from mine,

who went out of his way
who thrilled my 3 year old granddaughter
by showing her
that some tomatoes are yellow
and not just red.

And there are the poets,
so many of them.
I single out two.

Mary Oliver.
She had a difficult home life,
and was “saved by the beauty of the world”.
Her poetry comes from the margin of things,
focused on the quiet of nature,
reminding us of our place “in the family of things”,
as in her most famous poem Wild Geese
where she acknowledges loneliness and despair
and the belonging we find in nature:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

And Wendell Berry,
a farmer and poet from Kentucky
who died just this last week (monday).
He knew despair
and what to do when it grows.
He wrote in
The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in the beauty of the water, and the great
heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Something rather strange has happened
in this sermon
for the first Festival of Christ in Creation.

It’s as if we’ve started a theological experiment,
hearing voices we may never heard before
in our preaching and teaching –

the voices of poets, and artists,
scientists and botanists,

voices from ancient wisdom,
native, indigenous voices
so often drowned out by progress,

the sound of still waters,
the earth and rivers,

the cry of the geese,
the rest of the wood drake

the mountains, hills and trees

and the despair of our children.

And perhaps that is what a theological experiment does.
It makes us hear the familiar differently.

So we bring all those voices
back to the two voices
with which we began:
John and Colossians.

And suddenly,
“All things”
sounds different.

All things came into being through him.
All things were created through him
and for him.
All things hold together in him.

The Word was there
when the stars were flung into space.
The Word was there
when the earth was formed,
when the rivers ran,
when the trees took root,
when the geese first lifted their wings.

And then,
astonishingly,
the Word became flesh.

Not just flesh in the beginning,
but flesh now.
Flesh that walks among us,
flesh that knows our despair,
flesh that asks us to look again,
to listen again,
to wonder again,
to love again.

Because this is the good news
at the heart of Christ in Creation:

the world is not simply there for us.
It is through Christ,
and for Christ,
and held together in Christ.

And if Christ has not abandoned
anything he has made,
then neither can we.

Think about that.

Perhaps that is why
we have gathered here today,
at the very beginning
of this new festival:

to see the stars again,
to hear the voices again,
and to discover,
perhaps,
that the grace of the world
has been here all along.

A sermon for the 2nd Sunday before Lent. Both epistle and gospel of the day are about beginnings and the meaning of life. This sermon was for a church in rural Warwickshire.

In the beginning. In the beginning – such a lovely phrase. In the beginning – such a good place to start.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. That’s how John prefaces his gospel.

Our scriptures open at the beginning. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth

Some of you will remember Maureen Lipman’s British Telecom adverts. In one she rings her grandson to see how he got on in his exams. He goes through all the exams he failed. She asks, “did you pass anything?”. “I got pottery” – to which grandma says “that’s good, people will always need plates”. “And I got Sociology”. To which Grandma says, “you got an ology and you said you failed!”.

In the beginning was the Word. I’ve not got much in the way of an ology, but I’ve got enough of an “ology” to know that the Greek words for the Word is o-logos. O logos. It is from those two Greek words that we get all our ologies – whether sociology, psychology, geology, astrology, criminology – anyone awarded an ology can claim the credit of beginning to understand the meaning of an aspect of life.

Putting aside any clever, clever ologies we may have we could all say that we have an OLOGY because the Word became flesh and dwells amongst us, with us always, to the end of time. That’s an ology that God has gifted us. He has gifted us his Word, o logos, made flesh, embodying the meaning of God from the beginning. If we want to know the meaning and purpose of God we have to look no further than Jesus.

The Word means meaning. O logos, the ology given to us, means meaning and purpose. From the beginning life has meaning and purpose. This is the viewpoint of faith, hope and trust.

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. That is such a beautiful opening for our scriptures.

Our generations, with all our ologies, have tended to scoff at this creation story. “It can’t have happened like that” we say, as if the inspired authors of this literature ever believed it happened like that. We are not looking at God’s first diary and to-do list. Inspired fiction sits alongside inspired history in our scriptures – what matters is not what happened, but what is true. In the beginnings described by the first chapter of Genesis, the openings of John’s gospel and our reading from Colossians – in all of them we have inspired theology that conveys truth.

I am ever more conscious that our scriptures are the scriptures of the Jewish people, so frequently overpowered, conquered, enslaved, exiled, occupied, persecuted, oppressed, impoverished and hated, as well as being so often disobedient and misled (just like the rest of us). They become our scriptures as long as we open our hearts and minds to join those who suffer, redirecting the power and wealth we have for their sake, becoming poor in spirit.

When we read scripture we are always looking through the eyes of a people (like Paul writing to the Colossians from prison) who suffered so much and yet dared to wonderfully imagine that from the very beginning God is working his purpose out, that there is meaning even in the midst of tragedy.

The beginnings described in Genesis and in John’s gospel and in our reading from Colossians are profound theological reflections on the meaning of life in the midst of chaos, surrounded by so much diversity and difference, a wealth of creation – and the part we are called to play.

The “beginnings” of Genesis and John are not the start of things. It’s not a blank page. In the beginning described by John there was stuff going on. There was darkness, and the Word became the light of the world that darkness has never been able to overcome. There was darkness going on, and on and on.

Likewise in Genesis, there was stuff going on. There was formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. In other words, it was chaos – and the creation story imagines what God does with chaos, ordering it and making so much of it for our delight.

The beginnings described by Genesis, John and Paul are all of them in the midst of things. There is always something going on. These scriptures belong to people who are in the midst of things, and passed on to those going through so much. There has been so much love gone into them – their meaning is to inspire faith, hope and love – in us, in the midst of things.

Sometimes life doesn’t seem to have any meaning – particularly when bad things overwhelm us. Sometimes that is about discovering that life doesn’t mean what we thought and that there is a new meaning we have not yet discovered. As we lose sight of the meaning of life we can often forget the meaning of God. We may have been misled into thinking of God in a way he just isn’t.

When we lose that sense of meaning for our lives, when we’re burnt out and exhausted by excessive busyness, or responsibility, or trauma, when we’ve lost our way in the forest, then we do need to retrace our steps, unwind to the beginning to the time when there was always meaning.

When we lose sight of the meaning of life we need to follow the sound of music and start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, the beginning when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – a down to earth meaning, embodied in our lives, in our times and in all we try to do.

The meaning of God is the meaning of life. In our first reading, the letter to the Colossians, we have the phrase He is the beginning. Christ is the beginning for God.

The letter continues: “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”.

This is the meaning of God and the meaning of life.

We are all “in the beginning” – we are part of the body of Christ who is the beginning. He is the beginning of the work of reconciliation ………. He is the beginning of the repair of broken and exploitative relationships. That is his work, his meaning and purpose. We are all “in the beginning”, in the beginning of a new creation, in the beginning of something new, in the beginning of something better as long as we listen to his word and love his meaning.

In the midst of things, a lot of which we’d rather not be in the midst of, in the midst of things we have the beginnings of life, its meaning and purpose, and the beginnings of God, his meaning and purpose – to find our way where we might lose our way. In our beginning is the Word to inspire our faith, hope and love, the ology which means the world to us.

Colossians 1:15-20

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

John 1:1-14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Tag: Colossians 1:15-20

Creation in Christ

Beginnings and the meaning of life