Tag: Genesis 1

Delight and service in the nature of things: more down to earth preaching for the Season of Creation

David Herbert4 Comments

September 22nd 2024

Imagine this. Whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way.

Whatever we do affects everything and everyone else. That’s what Norton Juster wrote in his children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth published in 1962. “Whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes around the world.”

This has become known as the butterfly effect – exploring the possibility that a butterfly flapping her wing might eventually cause a tornado half way round the world and weeks later. Whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. The effects caused by a butterfly’s flap of a wing might be tiny in their first instant, but then grow and grow. Of course, we don’t know, but the theory underlines the importance of cause and effect AND just how interconnected everything is.

In the garden where the trees are, in the garden of connections, Eden – there we were made. We were made for this world of connections, part of this world of connections. Formed from the dust of earth it just took a breath of God to breathe life into us. Having made one he made another from the rib of the other. Made for each other they were, forever relational we are – NOT as we may think these days, made for nuclear family life, husband, wife, children living away of their private bit of land behind locked doors – disconnected. We were not made for that. We were made for the garden where we’re all connected. 

In those first days of creation gardeners were obviously hard to find. Genesis 2:5 – “there was no one to till the ground”. The one made from dust and the one made from his rib were made to be gardeners, to till the earth, to keep it, to serve it and sustain it.

Someone asked me last Sunday whether I believed the creation stories in Genesis. I absolutely do. I don’t get the sense that we are reading God’s diary entries – you know, on this day this happened, the next day this, and you’ll never guess what happened on the sixth day. No, it’s not history we are reading when we read Genesis. Some truths are more important than historical truth and scientific facts. What is most important is the deep spiritual truth that sees God in everything. I love the poetic imagination that sees God in our beginnings, that sees us made from earth alongside everything that there is, and that sees everything made in terms of love and goodness. These are the truths to treasure. They give us an everyday sense of vocation and down to earth purpose.

There was no one to till the earth till man and woman standing side by side started helping one another in the garden. 

There are two ways of looking at this gardening job. In the first creation story (Genesis 1:26-28) God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air …..” This language of dominion has led us up the garden path into the frame of mind of domination – thinking it’s all for us, misleading us into a sense of entitlement and into behaviours which have exploited and abused those to whom we are supposed to be lovingly connected. As a result we see rivers choked, earth stripped bare, forests on fire, coastlands flooding, icecaps melting and the extinction of whole species.

The other way of looking at the job is in the language of “tilling the earth”. The Hebrew word translated as tilling is abad. The most common meaning of that verb is serve. Human beings were created to serve Earth – the whole world and all its connections rather than dominating creation and overruling all other species of creation.

We are in the liturgical Season of Creation. This is the fourth Sunday in the Season of Creation which began with a day of prayer for the preservation of the natural environment on September 1st and ends on the Feast of St Francis of Assisi on October 4th. It’s a relatively new liturgical development intended to turn the liturgical dial the crises we see all around us, and is the result of an initiative begun in the Orthodox Church and taken up by the World Council of Churches, the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.

We haven’t always taken the time to celebrate creation with all our connections and patterns of nature. We haven’t always taken the time to reflect on the consequences of our actions. What is life, if full of care, we take not time, to stop and stare at the wonder of our creation, the wonder of our nature and the awesomeness of the responsibility we have for one another. What is life if we don’t bring our wonder into our worship, our remorse into our prayer? This Season of Creation gives us time for all of this, and time for us to turn our commitment to our vocation and responsibility to till the earth, to serve and sustain all that is.

When we look into nature we see an instinct to nurture. Many of us are transfixed when we see nature programmes such as Springwatch looking through cameras at the ways bird nurture their chicks. We’re bowled over by the way commitment of emperor penguins incubating their eggs for months on end. We can scarce take it in that trees communicate with each other and care for each other through their own underground broadband fibre network in their wood-wide web.

Wherever we look in nature we see love. It’s a love that makes sacrifices, a love that nurtures new life and makes new connections. It’s a love that is divine and seems to many to be the very image of God – ourselves included. Love is the heart of creation. Whatever love does affects everything and everyone, even if only in the tiniest way.

In these times of Earth’s suffering we need our times of wild swimming, of tree bathing, of country walks. We need our times with animals, our time working the land. We need the time to witness the awesomeness of nature with all of its nurture and abundance of love. Immersing ourselves in nature refreshes us. It’s good for our mental health. And nature needs to make that connection with us for her own sake. If we don’t give her the opportunity to remind us constantly of her love then she easily gets forgotten by us who have the responsibility and calling to be her servants and sustainers.

And we need something like this Season of Creation
to refresh and inspire our wonder in our human nature,
to commit ourselves to the safekeeping of the whole of creation

and to reshape our worship of God
whose delight was and is In the beginning of all things
and whose delight is in our tilling and serving of all that is.

Creation Day

David HerbertLeave a comment

September 1st is Creation Day – the first day of the Season of Creation which ends on October 4th, the Feast of St Francis of Assisi. Genesis 1 was the reading chosen for the creation Day liturgy at church in the heart of Warwickshire countryside.

September 1st 2024

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139:14)

Who would want to deny that? Even at the extremes of suffering, even when human nature goes grievously wrong there is a sense that, even then, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

And not just us. The fish of the sea, the birds of the air, even the crawling insects and the tiny seeds – all of them fearfully and wonderfully made.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made
say the people of God
in words that have reverberated
down the centuries
from the faith of the Psalmist
who echoed the words
of all those who see God
in their beginning
in one generation after another.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made
say the people of God
in words that reach
across the ages
from the very beginning
of all who see God
in the end
even in the bad times,
the mad times, the mean time.

Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. You can’t get more “beginning” than that. Genesis – the start of everything. Page 1 in our Bibles (even though this opening page of our scripture is far from the first to be written). There in the beginning is our sense of wonder, how everything came into being. This is no scientific account – how bored we would be by that. This is us – finding some order for the awesomeness of the world around us, and accounting for our wonder by putting God at the heart of everything there is.

This is the sensing by those fearfully and wonderfully made that God is the making of us. So fearfully and wonderfully made are we that nothing else can account for just how fearfully and wonderfully made we are.

There is a universal wonder in creation. We wonder “why?”, we wonder “how?” and we wonder “who?”. All people of goodwill share this sense of wonder. You have to be very insensitive, selfishly egotistical and cruel not to. And the people of God put God at the beginning seeing creation and creativity as wonderfully divine. We see God in our beginning, in a love that is never ending. We see God in the beginning – and we see God in the end, with his love in us and for us through all the time from beginning to end, in the time we call the “mean time” and the hard times.

Even in the meantime, in the darkest times we discover new things about life on earth – as we dig the garden, as we watch Life on Earth through the lens of David Attenborough and Chris Packham. We can never know enough. We are always learning, intrigued by the play of light and darkness, the stars, by the birds and the bees, all creatures, seeds, plants – and forever challenged with the sense of responsibility

The wonder we have is the beginning of faith and hope, the genesis of faith and hope, the generation of faith and hope which takes us through all our days, from the very first day of creation to the last when, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all will be well and all manner of things shall be well”, when there will be peace beyond our understanding (Philippians 4:7), when mountains and hills will burst into song and the trees will clap their hands (Isaiah 55), when God’s kingdom comes on earth – as it is in heaven.

These verses from Genesis are pearls of wisdom and love, strung together by wonderful imagination. They put us at the heart of God’s creation, seeing us as the image of God. It was the sixth day of his work and the finishing touch of his creation. There was nothing more for God to do other than delight in his work. The next day he rested having put his work into the hands of his very image. 

In his image he made us – male and female he made us to be just like him in his love of creation and in his care for everything that is, subduing the forces of nature just as he had done in these 6 days of creation.

Today, September 1st, is being celebrated as Creation Day – a world day of prayer for creation. It’s been part of the Christian calendar for the last 35 years Patriarch Demetrios issued the first encyclical inviting all people of good will to dedicate September 1st as a special day of prayer for the preservation of the natural environment. The call was first taken up by Orthodox Christians. Then the World Council of Churches, the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion joined to develop an ecumenical initiative for a Season of Creation taking us from today (September 1st) to the Feast of St Francis of Assisi (October 4th).

These days, our love for creation has to take a new turn. Creation groans and demands the compassion which is the very likeness and image of God’s compassion. The seas are rising, coastlands eroding, communities are flooded and people are fleeing. The earth is burning fire while prosperous industrial nations choke the atmosphere with smoke. Species are becoming extinct as scientists fight for their lives. What we once saw we no longer see – and these were supposed to be the friends we loved and cared for.

Creation groans after decades of neglect, exploitation and abuse. It’s time we said sorry. It’s time we begged life on earth for forgiveness. It’s time we sought reconciliation. It’s time to start loving again. The whole of life was committed to the men and women God created in his likeness. None of all that life could do wrong. It was only us who could go wrong through our greed, self-interest and negligence. This Season of Creation is time for us to pray, to confess, to commit to what has been committed to us, and to reimagine the wonders of creation with God in all our beginnings.

We’re all at sea in our small boats

David Herbert2 Comments

This is a reflection on the sea and the troubled waters we call life for the 4th Sunday after Trinity (B).

I spotted “the other boats” in the gospel reading for the day, from Mark 4:35-end (text below). They played on my mind as we prepare for a UK election which some want to turn into an election on immigration. It made me think – “we’re all at sea” and the forecast is for more storms. This sermon comes with a health warning – it is metaphor heavy.

The first verse we see when we open our Bibles is “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 the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2) 

The last verses in our Bibles are also about water – the “river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city, feeding trees bearing fruit for all seasons and leaves for the healing of the nations”. (Revelation 22:1-2)

In the beginning of the Bible there is total darkness. In the end, there is only light – no darkness and no hiding.

The Bible begins in water and ends in water. And between the two there is all the difference in the world – as different as night and day.

The Bible begins in water. The water is chaos. The first thing God does is make light. The second thing he does is sort the waters out. He separates the waters of heaven and earth, gathered the water together and let dry land appear. That’s how it began. 

This is a theological view of life. This is how we open our Bibles. We open them with an understanding that we are all at sea. From the very beginning we have been surrounded by water, the sea, the deep. We’ve been on flood alert since the time of Noah.

Probably all of us here have had times in our lives when we have felt overwhelmed, engulfed or drowning – and used these metaphors to describe how we felt, using so many metaphors drawn from our collective experience down the ages of chaos and the sea. So much of our language reflects this. Like “we’re out of our depth”, or “we’re in it up to our neck”, or “we’re all at sea”.

The Bible begins with water and ends with water. From day one there is storm after storm. The waves crash all around us until that day when the waters become calm and do God’s bidding of giving life and healing to the whole of creation.

These are the times we live in, when there is one storm on top of another. For the time being we are between the devil and the deep blue sea. (Another popular saying.)

These are the times Jesus lived in as well. The storms he faced were different to ours. With his contemporaries he was assaulted by religious oppression and exclusion, a taxation poor which kept them in poverty and debt, and an occupation by a foreign power which robbed them of their freedom.

His attitude at times like these is captured in the snapshot we have of him in today’s gospel reading. They’re all at sea. A great gale arose, and the waves were beating the boat and swamping it. And Jesus slept. Calm as you like.

There were other boats. It’s strange how you miss details like this. I must have read this passage hundreds of times, but I’ve never seen those four words before. There were other boats. Have I never noticed these other boats because the focus has always been on Jesus’ boat? Have I only spotted these boats now because of the small boats that desperate refugees are taking to to escape to safe havens. 

(Isn’t it terrible that some people are turning the election into an election about immigration and the people in these small boats?) It is Refugee Week – and we need to spot their boats, not stop their boats. There is a growing refugee crisis – that means a crisis for a growing number of refugees. 1 in 69 of the world’s population is now displaced, largely because of conflicts around the world. It’s important we respond to their Mayday.  M’aidez. Help me! It is, after all, the refugees who have the problem – all those who have no safe routes for escape. They have enough problems without being turned into a political football.

We’re all at sea. We’re not all in the same boat. We’re not in the same boats as the refugees. We’re all in our different small boats. We’re all at the mercy of troublemakers, powers-that-be, the forces that make waves, and the sea so dangerous. 

There’s a well known fisherman’s prayer that captures our plight. It’s become known as the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer: 

Dear God,
be good to me;
the sea is so wide, and my boat is so small. 
Amen.

They’re words from a poem by Winfred Ernest Garrison.

It’s not surprising that so many make that prayer their own. The words fit the experience we call “being all at sea”.

The sea is our life with its currents and tides, its ferocity and deceptive charm constantly eroding and undermining us. The challenge of our lives is how we navigate these waters.

We are like those who, in the words of Psalm 107 “go down to the sea in ships and ply their trade in great waters”, who have seen the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. While they were at their wit’s end as they reeled and staggered like drunkards, they cried to the Lord in their trouble and he brought them out of their distress. He made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were calmed.

Our lifetime at sea is summed up in our baptism. We are soaked in deep water, and brought through water as if this is an acknowledgement of our life at sea, weathering the storms faced by us all, Jesus included. The question we’re asked in baptism is, “Do you turn to Christ?” Our response then is “I turn to Christ”. It’s stated as a promise. Perhaps it should be stated as a habit. 

In the storms of life, when you’re all at sea, when you feel you’re drowning, do you turn to Christ? The faithful ones, like the ones in the psalm, will say, “Yes, I turn to Christ. He’s the one who can sleep in the storm. He’s the non-anxious presence. We turn to him to hear him say ‘Peace! Be still!’ – and when we do, the wind dies down and we feel the calm.”

It’s easier said than done because in the midst of things it is too easy to panic.

The waves that have panicked me have been so slight compared to what others have faced. Dare I say I’ve done enough doom scrolling to sink a battleship? I am only beginning to learn to wake Jesus in my mind, to hear him in the head of the storm, to find better things to think about, to take his word as gospel. 

I know that when the sea calms for me, it calms also for all the other small boats.

Here we gather. We call this gathering place the NAVE – the Latin word for ship. We are shipmates in our small boat.

Here we are, all at sea, our metaphorical sea. The metaphorical weather is awful. Even though the long term forecast is for beautiful, calm weather, immediately, all we can expect is one storm after another. There are dark forces within us, and all around us, threatening us – driving so many from their homes, driving them to the edge, condemning them/us to their/our fate on the sea of life.

We are shipmates. We’ve been through it before. We’ve been through the waters of baptism. We’re used to turning to Christ – who in today’s gospel we see in the same boat as ourselves. In the rage of the storm he makes himself heard. We hear him call us “beloved”. The wind and the sea hear him. ‘Peace! Be still!’ they hear him say. For the moment they obey him.

Here we are, churches in the Bridges Group of Parishes – like a bridge in troubled water for all those who live in these six parishes. When we’re weary, feeling small, when times get tough, when we’re down and out, when darkness comes and pain is all around – we know the words of the one even the wind and sea obey.

Mark 4:35-end
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’