The Story - Part 1 - Creation

The Jewish Novelist Chaim Potok tells us that as a young man, his well-meaning mother did everything she could to talk him out of becoming a writer. She didn’t see any future in it for him,

She’d listen to his reasons for wanting to write, and then she’d say – “Son – you should forget that.  You should be a brain surgeon. You’ll make a lot of money. You’ll stop a lot of people from dying”.

This went on and on. Every time he came home from college he got the same things: “Chaim - You should be a brain surgeon. You’ll make a lot of money. You’ll stop a lot of people from dying”.

As the years progressed, the exchanges became more and more tense until one day Potok exploded at her when she trotted out her usual line: “Mama, I don’t want to keep people from dying! I want to show them how to live!”.

I want to show them how to live.

I wonder if part of the reason we turn up here, Sunday by Sunday, many of us, is because deep down, we all want to learn how to live.

Nobody hands you that script when you’re born. You take on board what you can from family and culture and that can take you a good long way in life. All the way from the cradle to the grave, if you like.

But if you slow the pace enough to listen to your own heart, you’ll hear a voice telling you that there’s more to discover. That whatever your abilities or achievements in life, your real work is in learning to live well and wisely with yourself, the people around you and your God. Deep down, that’s what our hearts are really longing for.

God has made us for himself, said St Augustine, and our hearts are restless til they find their rest in him.

This story we’re about to embark on is a record of men and women through the ages who tried and failed and tried again to find their rest in God. They’re separated from us in time and space and culture, but don’t let that fool you. In many ways they were just like us – they had families, homes and responsibilities. They loved, they quarrelled, they dreamed, they worried, they wondered. As we travel with them, we’re going to see ourselves reflected in their actions time and time again.

But more than that, we’ll realise that the God they dealt with, and who we see through the lens of their understanding, is the same God that we deal with. The God whose story is still unfolding all around us in the everyday detail of your life and mine. The God whose purposes for the world are helped or hindered by the choices we make about how we are going to live.

Right at the beginning I want to make it clear that this is not a history lesson! This is here and this is now. God’s story is ongoing – and you and I have a part to play in it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.  Let’s begin at the beginning.

But where is the beginning? Where do we start? Well – we could go right back to Genesis 1:1 which says “In the beginning, God…..”. But somebody, somewhere, had to write those words down. And where did those words come from anyway? According to Genesis 1 there were no eyewitnesses to the creation other than the angels!

The scholars reckon that the Bible actually begins with the events of the Exodus. It was the Exodus from Egypt which formed the nation of Israel. God led them from slavery into freedom, as we’ll see in a few weeks’ time, and it was that nation – once formed - which put down its ancient stories and customs and laws in writing in what we now know as the Old Testament.

You can imagine them, sitting round campfires in the evenings, and the children looking up at the stars and saying to the elders – ‘how did all of this get here?’.  And the elders would pass on the story as they themselves had received it. “In the beginning” they’d say - God created the heavens and the earth”.

And the beauty of how they told the story isn’t in its scientific precision. They don’t know anything about Higgs Fields or Quarks or antimatter or big bangs, although the story’s open enough to accommodate all of those elements should we wish to.

When modern folk criticise Genesis for not being a science book, they miss the point. It was never meant to be that. Who would have understood it if it were!?

No - the beauty of the story’s in its understanding of the human condition and the divine initiative – our love of beauty, our need for companionship, our desire to know more and have more, the estrangement from God that breeds a kind of homesickness within us. An emptiness we try to fill in all kinds of ways.

And throughout it all, the shining thread that’s woven through the entire story from Genesis to Revelation- God’s desire to be with us. It’s the most frequent promise in the whole of the Bible – I will be with you.

It would be easy to go into the scientific arguments with you today and mount a defence against the sceptics who write faith off on the basis of these early chapters of Genesis, and I’ve done that before.

But the more I think about it, the more I think those sceptics are missing the point anyway. The point of Rabbie Burns saying his love is like a red red rose isn’t to suggest that she’s got petals and thorns and lives at the bottom of his garden. Curse your scientific imprecision, Rabbie! No - he’s telling us how he feels about her.

The creation story is telling us how God feels about us.

How do you feel about the things that you create? Some of you bake cakes or cook meals; some compose words or music, or images. Some of you can fashion things with your hands; many of you have carried new life within yourselves, or helped to nurture that life when it was pushed out into the world.

When we create something we’re bound to it, for good or ill. We watch eagerly as the guest bites the cake, or listens to the poem, or tours the house that we’ve built. We care.  At a much deeper level, we care about the child we’ve brought into the world, or raised within our family. We want nothing for the best for them and it breaks our hearts when things don’t go as planned.

Genesis tells us that in God’s eyes, humanity is the pinnacle of his creation. Supernovas, parakeets and blue whales are something else; a good day at the office. But only human beings are made in God’s image.

We’ve been given the gift of consciousness to a degree that nothing else in our universe possesses – at least to the best of our knowledge. And God gave us that gift because he wanted the companionship of creatures who could know and love him of their own free will, and find their fulfilment and joy in being with him.

And over the millennia of human existence, nothing has changed. That’s still the plan. That’s still what God wants for you and for me – for us to be together.

And though the apple changed everything, in some senses it changed nothing. Sin gets in the way, it spoils the plan, it grieves God’s heart but it doesn’t change his intent one iota.

And that’s a key thing to grasp right at the start of this journey. As we read the Bible there are really two stories we’re reading – the lower story of humanity with all its twists and turns and triumphs and disasters. Things happen in this story which break God’s heart and which he never intended to happen. But above and beyond that story is the Upper Story of God’s overarching plan for humanity, which might get deviated at times, but will never be derailed.

Within a few short verses of Genesis 1:1, the Lower Story becomes a mess. Paradise is lost. Adam and Eve go their own way rather than God’s, and story of their sons Cain and Abel teaches that the problem of sin, which is basically the problem of putting yourself where God should be, now affects every one of us. No apple required.

And the story of Noah shows us that even if God were to start all over again with one righteous man and his family, it wouldn’t be long before things were back in a mess again. When we tell that story we always end up with the rainbow and the animals coming out two by two. But read on in Genesis and you’ll discover that Noah’s story does not have a happy ending. It ends in disgrace for him and his family.

We learn that if there’s going to be a solution to this problem, it’s not going to come through us – no matter how good we might be. Ctrl Alt Delete doesn’t successfully reboot the system. We need a saviour to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves.

But that’s a story for another day.

For now, let me leave you with an image to take away from this time together – it's Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam which is painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

What I especially want you to notice is the intent on God’s part. Look how he's leaning in; straining to bring Adam to life.

Note also that I’ve left Adam out of the picture – and that's a deliberate choice.

 

The thought I want to leave you with today is that God, with the same intent, is reaching out to you and me today to bring us into life and fellowship with him.

He wants to be with us – that’s what this Story has always been about.

God's Questions - "Where Are You"

(Last week I'd invited the congregation to write down the one question they'd ask God if they were given the chance. These were then presented back to them prior to today's sermon in what was a very moving powerpoint presentation)

Like Job in our sermon last Sunday, we stack up our questions – these are the ones we wrote down last week when I asked you what you'd like to ask God if you were given the chance.

If you were here, you’ll remember I argued that contrary to what we might have been brought up to believe, it’s good to ask questions of God, because our questions create a space where our relationship with him can mature and grow.

But I ended with a reminder that in that same space, God has questions he wants to ask of us; and today we begin a series of sermons where we look at some of those questions which we find scattered throughout the Bible. And it’s my hope that by the time we’ve finished, we’ll be able to see some of our own questions in a slightly different light.

We start this morning in Genesis chapter 3 with the story of Adam and Eve. And reading Genesis Chapter 3 always brings a particular story to mind.

It's the story of the minister who tried visiting the house of a parishoner, and though he saw movement behind the frosted glass there was no response when he kept knocking. Finally, he took out a card and wrote "Revelation 3: 20" on it - a verse which says: “Behold! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me”.

That Sunday, an embarrassed looking lady handed him a slip of paper on the way out of church and on it was another Bible reference: "Genesis 3: 10". When the minister looked it up he had a good laugh because the verse says: “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid”!

In a way it’s good that we’re beginning at the beginning this morning, and the question we’re going to look at is one of the ones we asked of God last week; one of the ones that’s just appeared on the screen.

But this morning that very same question is found on the lips of God as he surveys a suspiciously quiet Garden of Eden. “Where are you?” he calls out. And he’s been asking that same question of us ever since. “Where are you?”

Why does he have to ask that question in Genesis 3? Well, up until this point we’ve had nothing but harmony and unity in the story. God, Adam and Eve have lived in complete joy and ease with one another: they’re unselfconscious, mutually loving, and utterly open. The authors of Genesis give us this lovely image of God walking with the man and the woman in the cool of the day.

And then – well, you know the story. Some day it would be worth going in to all the nuances of that first temptation: the serpent’s subtle undermining of God’s command; the way the apple appeals to Eve’s senses – the way she was captivated by the look and the smell and touch of it.

But the real heart of the fall is the sowing of a lie in the human soul. The lie which says. in a thousand different ways. that life will be far better if you go your own way and forget about God.

“Just eat that apple, Eve. Things will be so much better than they are now”. Intoxicated by that marvellous idea, she ate.

Poor Eve – she’s been castigated for that decision ever since, and to the church’s shame this story’s even been used in the past to keep women subordinate – as though Adam wouldn’t have made the same mistake if he’d been the one the serpent had come to first. Adam was made of sterner stuff. Adam wasn’t nearly so gullible; Adam knew how to apply the offside rule – he wouldn’t have made that mistake. Somehow I doubt it!

But anyway - they ate. And their eyes were opened, we’re told. But the brave new world they were promised didn’t materialise.

Instead they lost innocence. They lost bliss. They lost paradise.

From being carefree they became uncomfortably self-aware. They discovered fear and shame and the overwhelming response to all of this was to hide. Hide yourself. Hide from God. It’s the only thing to do. Grab some fig leaves and head for the bushes….. that’s where our story’s going to be played out from now on.

And indeed it has been, right up ‘til the present day. We’re still hiding, in so many ways.

We hide from one another.

“Fit like” – “Chavvin awa”! (How are you? - I'm getting on fine! in the Doric tongue!)

My right leg might be hanging on by a thread, but I’m chavvin awa!

Can’t talk to that stranger. They might think I’m being nosey. Or they might ask me things I don’t want to talk about.

Can’t talk to anybody about what’s really going on just now. I’ll just have to put a smile on and try to keep going.

Can’t let any emotion show – that’d be giving away too much. Have to keep a lid on it.

We hide. The most eloquent visual metaphor I can give you for that is a London Underground Carriage – a hundred people crammed together like sardines, and they’re all trying to hide. Drowning out the world with their iPods. Taking an unnatural interest in the advertising hoardings or their own shoes rather than look anyone in the eye.

Hiding.

But of course, we can’t hide everything. To a degree, we’re always on show. We live surrounded by other people. People whose approval and respect we crave because when we’ve hidden from God we have no-one else to tell us who we are! And so, like our illustrious biblical parents, we gather fig-leaves to preserve our modesty and present an image. Whatever fig leaves our time and our culture tell us are in vogue.

Ideas, possessions, attitudes, experiences, theologies – we’ll try on just about anything to cover-up our basic nakedness and earn the approval of the rest of the herd.

Because if they don’t give us their approval, we’ve nowhere left to turn. We’re hiding from God.

And though my comments so far are about society in general, we in the church can be just as guilty of hiding. Churches can be great places to hide from God. There are plenty of folk who kid themselves that if they keep their noses clean and their theology shiny and they’re seen with a degree of regularity in the place of worship they won’t really have to do business with God. At least, not the kind of business that involves a sacrifice of time, talents or money. Not the kind that means killing off a few sacred cows now and again.

God’s first question comes to all of us: to every bush-rustling semi-hidden native of our fallen world.

“Where are You?” he says.

I wonder if any of you have picked up the irony in those words yet.

Christian theology holds that God is omniscient and omnipresent, which means he knows everything and he is everywhere,

So at the point of asking this question, not only does he know exactly where Adam and Eve are, he’s right there in the bushes with them!

So why does he bother to ask at all?

The answer, I think, is that he’s asking more for their sake than for his own. This question is their way back.

Having three perfect children, you’ll understand that this next illustration doesn’t apply to me, but many of you will be familiar with the scenario where a child stomps off to his or her room in high dudgeon because of some perceived injustice.

An adult will be duly dispatched to said room after what’s deemed to be a reasonable amount of time, and on occasion, depending on the mood and temperament of said child, the adult will enter the room only to find it empty and conclude that the child is attempting to hide.

Now any child’s bedroom has a limited number of hiding places. The prospects of the child rendering him or herself well or permanently hidden are vanishingly small. A brief search should unearth all but the most persistent and imaginative child, and the adult knows this. But the rules of the game do not involve making such a search.

The adult is there to offer an olive branch, and what is customary in those circumstances is that he or she, in a firm but caring tone, should say “Come on out. I know you’re in here”.

With this verbal cue, the child realises two very important things

1) Escape is impossible and
2) Despite what’s happened, the lines of communication are still open.

That’s our story from Genesis in a nutshell.

“Where are you?” says God to his hiding children.

Does he really need that information?

No. He already knows where they are and what they’ve done. What he’s doing here is offering them a way back into his presence. An invitation to stop hiding.

I wish we could hear how he says those three little words.

We’re in the realm of speculation, but given what I’ve said this morning I’m pretty sure they’re not barked out in anger.

I think we’d hear compassion, disappointment, judgment and love in his tone, and read them in his eyes, if we could bear to meet them.

“You’ve set the world on a hard road”, he might say. “You don’t know how much it will cost me to make this right. But I will be with you. No more going your own way, though. No more hiding.”.

“Where are you” says God? What I want you to realise this morning is that he only asks the question because he wants us back. He wants to find our way back.

The verses after this morning’s catalogue the consequences of the fall – strife, struggle, pain and separation from God. But even as he packs them off from Eden, do you know what God does for the folk who’ve messed up the whole enterprise? He makes them some clothes to wear. It’s there in verse 21 of chapter 3 if you don’t believe me.

It’s a lovely wee detail we could easily miss. But it’s exactly the kind of thing your mum would do when you were a kid. She’d lay into you for half an hour about something you’d done and five minutes later she’d be giving you a glass of milk and a biscuit. Why? Because despite what you’ve done, she still loves you.

Why does God send Adam and Eve away with clothes? Because he hasn’t given up on them. And he hasn’t given up on us either. He wants us back too.

“Where are you”? God asks,

And our reflection on those words leaves us with two questions to ponder this morning

Firstly - where are you hiding from God?

In your work? In your pleasures? In your pursuit of the fig-leaves of material prosperity? In your addictions? In the routines of your day, or even the routines of a religion where you readily take God’s name on your lips, but bar him from changing your heart?

Maybe you’ve knocked up a hiding place from bits of past bitterness and disappointment. Maybe you’ve holed up in an igloo, fashioned from your cool reserve.

You alone know. But we all do it. Where do you go when you want to keep God at bay? That’s where you’re hiding.

But secondly, and probably more importantly, why are you hiding?

When you lift your head towards him, do you assume that all you’ll see is judgment and disappointment in his eyes, and forget about his love and compassion?

Do you worry that you might end up giving him everything you are, and end up getting nothing in return?

Are you wedded to the age old lie that Eve fell for? That life will be far far better if you go your own way and forget about God?

Are you afraid that somehow you’re not good enough for God, and you never will be?

Again. You alone know.

But know this also.

The God who brought the universe into being is wandering the world looking for you. He is calling you by name. Calling you out of your hiding places, not so he can condemn, but so he can mend and redeem.

He said he would walk this hard road with us, and he has done – his feet are dirty from the journey, and his hands are scarred. For the path we chose in Eden led all the way to the valley of the shadow of death and to a rough wooden cross. And on that cross, God made good the fall of the first Adam through the death of a second Adam, Jesus Christ.

“For God so loved he world” John tells us, “he sent his only Son”.

Sent him to undo the mess, so that you and I, and every son of Adam and Daughter of Eve, could come blinking out of the bushes and back into the light of God again.

We don’t need to hide any more.

Thanks be to God.