When there was nothing but God

Wilderness is a potent symbol in the telling of God's story.

In the beginning, when God began creating, there was nothing; thus the primal wilderness.  In this space, God was - moving with power, calling into being, distinguishing and separating - a pure experience of divine power, imagination, and creativity.  It set the stage for what wilderness could be, a time and place where the Divine Creator was at work, shaping new paths, bringing light to new visions.

When the people of Israel landed in the Sinai wilderness, it would have been helpful if they had remembered this.  But it is hard.  It is hard to lean into the future when the world you have known disappears.  It is hard to trust that something life-giving will be revealed when your heart is weighted down with grief over what has been lost.  It is hard to put one foot in front of the other when there is no destination in sight and worry fills the wee hours of the morning. Faithfulness to God's calling and trusting in God's powerful presence frequently looks like foolishness and folly.

In those spaces, at those times, we need the God who brings life out of nothing more than some star dust and love.  Thank God that is exactly the God who has come to us and claimed us as 'beloved children' both in the garden and in the wilderness, in life and in death.

An original sin........

For most of us, sin isn't particularly original.  Nor can most of us remember what our original sin was.  However,  I want to talk about the original sin.  You know, Adam and Eve and the apple (which wasn't necessarily an apple, just a piece of fruit, but why argue with all those Renaissance paintings?).

Or maybe you don't know.  Maybe you are one of those folks for whom religious symbols or biblical terms are so archaic as to be incomprehensible.  Fair enough.  No point in discussing original sin if you don't know the first thing about it.

A quick synopsis.  Before things went haywire, before people were casually unkind and intentionally evil.......when everything was well, and good, and beautiful and life-giving.......there was no sin.  We are fairly sure that there must have been a time when things weren't as bad as they are today. (Although I do not mean 'the good old days' which may be fondly remembered by the geriatric crowd but which, in fact, were just as broken and dangerous as today but with uglier fashions)

Furthermore, when I use the highly charged religious term 'sin' I want you to think 'broken' 'forsaken' 'warped' 'skewed'.  Let's use the word 'sin' to talk about the distortion of our shared life that causes pain and sorrow - too often deliberately, but often unintentionally or unavoidably.

People of every nation and culture have pondered about the possibility of a paradise - a time and place where everyone simply got along with everyone else, kindness and compassion prevailed, life was truly good.  The great storytellers of each of these cultures have woven tales of what it was like  when it was wonderful; Christians (and others) call this paradise Eden and it was a garden where animals cooperated, the vegetation was lush and suitable for eating, and the people were so sympatico that it was as if they came from one whole cloth.

But since we know that the world we inherited is not any version of paradise, how did we get from those wonderful imaginings to the mess we have today?  Somehow, it all broke and became so shattered that all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put it back together again.  What started this cascade of disaster?

Well, there are lots of stories about that as well.  For Christians, this is where Adam and Eve come into play.  They are the original human creatures, and on one hot afternoon (I made that up) when they were walking through the magnificent garden God had created and given to them as home, they encountered a tree called 'The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil".  (Remember, this is a story, not a travel guide).  It seemed like a good thing to be able to know good from evil, and the fruit of the tree was very appealing.  So they ate.

Here's the rub.  God had given them only one thing to remember in their garden, and you can guess what it was:  stay away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  One thing!  They took the first bite of that 'apple' and the rest is human history. God called out Adam, Adam threw Eve under the bus, and Eve blamed the wily serpent.  With finger pointing all around, Paradise ended.  Adam and Eve were evicted, they began to know the pain that comes from power-over relationships and the act of creation.  They lost their close connection with the Creator, and work became a four letter word. The essential relationship between Creator and Beloved Creature is forever broken.  We know it as sin.

From a single act comes generations of broken relationships.  It is a pestilence upon the human race perpetrated by the human race.  It is from these dreams of paradise, and stories about a desire that led folks astray, to the reality of our broken world that we get the idea (and, in the Church, doctrine) of  'original sin.'

So to bring us full circle, once again I assert, few of us are original in our sin, nor can we point to our very first 'original sin.'  We ask  Who is to blame?  Is there a way to fix it?  How did sex get involved?  Keep an eye out for more sin talk.

In the beginning..........

In the beginning...........that is how the story starts for us.  In the beginning when God began creating....God said, "Let there be light" and there was light.

Lately, it has been fairly difficult to hold on to this image of God's created light, the first movement of this God of life.  We are surrounded by a creeping darkness that threatens the great enlightenment of God's outstretched arm.  Our 24 hour news cycle which brings all that is happening around the world to our fingertips in a flash is now bombarding us with images of violence and protests, leaving us raw with too much information and too few ideas about how to move forward.  Certainly this is not the first time that this world has been threatened by descending darkness.  One epoch of our history was even named the Dark Ages.  There have been tyrants and pyschopaths, barbarians and fanatics throughout recorded history.

When I was serving St. Johns-St Marks Lutheran Church in Canajoharie, NY I listened as one of the elders spoke of the dark days of the second World War.  Canajoharie is a small town filled with folks whose roots go back generations.  They know each other; they knew each other's parents and grandparents.  Evelyn said that each Sunday the names of all who were serving overseas were kept in prayer.....not just those who were members at St. Johns-St Marks, but all those known by those members who gathered.  An entire village of soldiers were prayed for in the village churches each week.  Death was ever present; life was precious.

Each time the bread and wine of communion was shared the gift of life in Jesus, a promise made out of love and in the pouring out of his life, was ever more poignant.  Those hours on a Sunday morning were crucial - they renewed hope, provided strength and sustained in times of loss.  They cemented community.

Our faith is grounded in this story of life out of death, of life beyond life, of death defeated by the Creator God.  In those dark days of combat, there was no where else to cling but to this promise, this Christ, this God. With their men far away and in danger, resurrection was no longer abstract.

Each Sunday they experienced that deep darkness into which God spoke these words "Let there be light" and for a moment or two they could hold onto that image of God's divine light.

In these times of great darkness, when we are challenged to confront our role in creating the darkness and sustaining systems which keep others captive in the dark, let us pray for God's light to shine into our hearts and show us our own shadows, and then lead us again to Jesus, who is the light of the world.

Come to the table......

That's what my Mom would call when dinner was ready.  "Come to the table."  It was both invitation and command for children who  are apt to want to linger with whatever seems more important than the hot meal that waits.

Adam and Eve, on the other hand, should have lingered a little longer.  Their appetite had all kinds of consequences, the majority of which they could have never imagined.  When they saw that the fruit was pleasant to the eyes and good to eat, they said, "Why not?" and the results of that have played out through the ages.

Our appetites are still getting us into trouble because appetites are immediate and life is long. God had warned the first humans that eating of that fruit would have disastrous consequences but they chose to trust the serpent, the craftiest of all the animals God had made.  Interestingly enough, many Bible commentators when analyzing this story point out that the serpent was right, Adam and Eve did not die............not right away at least.  Instead they died a thousand deaths as they wrestled with the dark side of this creation and their lost connection with the Creator God.  'Why can't it be like it was?'  Don't we ask similar questions, seeking a gentler, kinder time to which to return?  You know, the good old days.

We fool ourselves if we think that there was no suffering in the 'good old days'.  We delude ourselves if we truly believe that life was easier, people were nicer, and neighbor helped neighbor.  Some did, some didn't.  Folks then knew their own kind of hard work, short lives, fragile health, unpredictable growing seasons and economies.  Folks knew what a destitute old age meant and most had buried at least one child from diseases that are now preventable.Their suffering might have been different, but it was suffering just the same.  Even their children lingered when Mom cried out, "Come to the table."

Jesus calls out the same invitation to us and it is primarily invitation but a little bit of command as well.  Come, it will nourish you.  Come, lay down whatever task is at hand.  Come, eat.  Eat with your brothers and sisters.  Eat with your neighbors and strangers.  Come and discover the human family again.

I will feed you.  I will place in your hands a bit of bread, the staff of life, the stuff of life and it will sustain you for a while.  I will place in your hands a bit of wine, to ease your thirst and clear your throat and prepare you for the tasks ahead.  Come to the table....that's where you will find everything to satisfy your appetites and focus your life.

At this table you will come back into yourself, find your humanity, find peace for your spirit....find the Creator God you continue to seek.  Come to the table and be made whole.

Objection or Avoidance?

Not on the Sabbath!  That was the objection they raised.  Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath!  I have no trouble imagining these folks huddled in the parking lot saying to one another, "There is no healing on the Sabbath!"  (Can you hear the echoes from A League of Their Own  There is no crying in baseball"?)

 

The Law supported their position.  Tradition supported their tradition.  The solid, observant, faithful members of the congregation supported their position.

God didn't.  God's desire is for wholeness and each and every agent of God is called to bring forth healing and wholeness and life whenever possible.  That means Jesus, God in the flesh, and that means you and me and everyone else touched by the resurrection power of Jesus.  Bring life, wherever and whenever we can.

It was a HUGE leap of faith to trust that Jesus was acting in accordance with God's desires - even when the old rules and the old ways of doing things were turned upside down.  It required first, that believers focused on God's central activity of giving life and second, that they join an unfolding, unclear and scary future.

Having God's power on the loose through Jesus.....and through you and me....is a whole lot harder to 'nail down' than a Jesus we keep confined by rules and traditions.  So, was it an objection....or simply avoidance of a reality they could not handle?






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Where love and hurt abounds

It is time for us to [attempt] to listen with open hearts to 'the divorce text.'  We are treading on dangerous ground, a veritable mine field of emotions, for marriage and divorce are places where both love and hurt abound.

Genesis sets the tone for us this week.  We look at the Genesis 2 rendering of the creation of man and woman: co-partners in God's work.  Man is ish and Woman is ishshah (in the Hebrew) and the words alone tell us something of the relationship between these two. 

At the first glimpse of Woman, Man cries out,  "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!"  There is rejoicing.  There is fellowship.  There is a partnership forged to care for one another and all of God's creation.

By the time we get to the gospel of Mark, the bloom is off the rose and the Pharisees are trying to back Jesus into a corner.    Focused on a legal system that had developed through the centuries, the Pharisees want Jesus to confirm or deny a man's superior rights and minimal obligations when the wedding of two turns into two households, two individuals.

Jesus is unwilling to play that game.  He goes all the way back to Genesis and points out what God's intent was for creation - no one is to be left powerless, vulnerable.  Every person bears consequences for his/her own actions, and God's kingdom of God has a special line for the nameless ones at the bottom of the heap. 

It will be hard for folks to hear the nuances of these lessons because, as we all know, marriage and its unwelcome relative: divorce, are places where both great love and great hurt abound.  Pray for those who are hurt when they hear this lesson; pray they will hear Jesus' call of love to them.

Water, water everywhere

We are going to stop by and visit Noah this week in the Sunday readings.  Within the Noah story are two stories and several important themes.

First we have the story of the large boat and animals marching two by two into the ark.  Thousands of chldren's books have illustrated this story with giraffes necks sticking through the roof and water everywhere.  It ends with a dove finding a roosting place and a rainbow in the sky.

Before that story, however, is the story of the spiraling demise of humanity (here a word about 'going to hell in handbasket' is appropriate).  Humanity is corrupt; its corruption has led to violence throughout all creation....and....God regrets that God had created humankind. Gen. 6.5-7

Pretty powerful stuff here.  In that same verse, God's heart is grieved.  There is something very, very sad about this story of the ark.  Humankind, which was the crowning accomplishment of God's creation in Genesis 1, is now one of God's great regrets.  Only Noah finds favor in the sight of God.

What does God decide to do about it?  God takes creation apart.  The water which God had pressed back into boundaries in the sky and in the seas is allowed to come free, and the world is flooded.  Animals, birds, plants....and people....are drowned as the water consumes the dry land. (Drowning people are a stark contrast to the happy rainbow). 

A new creation is possible because God's breath goes out over the water and dries the land so Noah and the animals can disembark. Can you hear the echoes of the creation story where God's spirit hovers over the water?   Only a few continue to live so to populate the new land, the new creation.

Yes, the story ends with the great covenant of the rainbow.  But where we see a pretty picture suitable for children to color, the rainbow is a symbol of the warrior's bow.  God is promising to 'hang up his bow,' to bring to an end that part of himself that brought about the flood.  God asks nothing from the people: no promises, no changes of behavior.  God simply acts out of the depth of who God is.  This is a God who regrets, grieves, and corrects but who never walks away from God's people and who commits to eternally seeking life for them. 

So, this story can be happy giraffes and elephants and a rainbow in the sky.  Or, (maybe it should be 'and') this is a story about a powerful, creating God who commits himself to seek life for the people God created. 

Now it is easy to see the connection to the gospel lesson about Jesus, the ultimate gift from God for the sake of God's people.

**You might want to take 15 minutes and read through the entire story Genesis 6-9.  You will notice that God gives conflicting commands.  Once God says to bring 2 of every animal; in the next section God says to bring 7 of each clean animal.  Biblical scholars believe that there were two versions of the Noah story circulating when the Bible was codified, and instead of choosing between them, they wove them together.  Sometimes it makes for confusing reading.