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.

The Practice of Walking the Earth - Psalm 19

Over the past few weeks at Belhelvie we’ve been thinking about how we encounter God in the ordinary things in life, and the different themes we’ve been looking at have come from a book by Barbara Taylor called ‘An Altar In The World’.

And the title of today’s chapter is ‘”The Practice of Walking the Earth”.

When we think of how we experience God in creation, we naturally go straight for the huge and the breathtaking – the staggering enormity of the sky at night, the vastness of even our own tiny planet.

The heavens are telling the glory of God, the Psalmist says. And I think he’s right. But if we’re paying attention, we don’t even need to look that far. The places we’re in hold their own wonders, if we can just learn to take the time to see them.

The thread on which I’m stringing these pearls of wisdom Sunday by Sunday is the central idea that we encounter God in our everyday lives to the degree that we learn to pay attention. That’s the core discipline of a Christian life, and for busy, fidgety folk like us it doesn’t come easily. We’d rather be getting on to the next thing. Getting there more quickly.

We focus so much on where we’re going next we don’t often slow down to enjoy where we are, and the irony is that in our modern world, with all its time saving devices, we seem to have less time to enjoy life than any previous generation.

Now and again I dip into the work of a guy called Wendell Berry, who’s a farmer in the United States, but also a poet. I think that’s a great combination! And Berry’s whole thing is about slowing down, taking time. Showing respect for nature and for the land.

He’s written a short poem called ‘How To Be A Poet’, and in the context of what I’m trying to say this morning, this stanza’s particularly relevant.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Don’t rush – he’s saying. Open yourself up to nature. Get away from your screens for a while. Put down the phone. Fill up your lungs with the fresh air. It’ll do your heart good. It might even do your soul good.

Now who has the time for that?

Well, we all do. It’s our time. Some of our choices in life are made for us, but not all of them. Is it utterly unreasonable to suggest that over the course of a week all of us should be able to find an hour or two to get out and stretch our legs and blow away the cobwebs – at least, those of us who aren’t stuck on a rig somewhere. And if you can’t find the time to do that, is it unreasonable to suggest that maybe you’re carrying too much responsibility just now and you need to find ways to shed some of it?

I read a fascinating article last week by a palliative care nurse who recorded the regrets of the people she was looking after, as they faced the last few weeks of their lives. I found these three particularly striking – “I wish I’d lived the life I wanted to live”. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” and “I wish I’d let myself be happier”.

Hear the words of the prophet Wendell Berry this morning. As much as you can - slow down. Simplify. Communicate. Savour. We weren’t made to be going at 100 miles an hour all the time, and if we try to, then we’ll miss life even as we live it.

Which brings me, in a roundabout kind of way, to walking.

Walking as a spiritual practice. How do you like that idea?

What happens when you walk places?

Lots of good things – not least the fact that you have to slow down, and you begin to notice things.

About a year ago I did a moonlight beach walk with some of the scouts and cubs. We started off at the Bridge of Don and walked all the way back up to Balmedie by a combination of Moonlight and torchlight.

And I remember having to practically jog along at the beginning to keep up with the boys they were so excited. But five miles in it was a different story! We had to encourage and cajole for the last mile or two and dangle the prospect of fish and chips in front of them to keep them going.

What did we learn? We learned that from here to the Bridge of Don in a car is a scoosh. But it’s quite a trek when you’re walking the same distance along a sandy beach. We got a sense of scale for this landscape we drive through and take for granted much of the time.

It was the same when some of us started cycling to Scouts on a Wednesday evening, and I know this is cycling, not walking, but the principle’s the same. Just 6 or 7 miles of a round trip by car. But when you’re putting in the miles yourself, you notice every hill, every pothole, every blind corner, every speeding motorist! And you notice what’s going on in the fields far more than when you’re zooming past in the car. You chat to one another and you take pleasure in the feeling you get after your body’s done some hard work.

When you slow down, you see more. You experience more. You talk more. You think more.

There’s an old joke about an American teenager who was always pestering his dad to borrow the car, even for short journeys. And one day his dad lost the rag at him and said “You kids! you don’t know what your feet are for!” and the boy said “Sure we do, dad! The right foot’s for the accelerator and the left foot’s for the brake”.

In our fast paced world, we’re in danger of thinking the same way, and among other thing, we need to thank the Scouts and Guides and Cubs and Brownies for what they do in encouraging our young people to get off their posteriors, away from the screens, and onto their feet in the different activities they do. Getting closer to creation, and by default, a little closer to the creator.

When folk think of spiritual practices, they often think of prayer, or reading the Bible and there’s no doubt that those are the foundation of the Christian life. But in our time there’s a welcome rediscovery of the truth that there are also lots of ways to encounter God in the simple practices of our everyday lives.

We all walk places – whether we’re walking the dog. or round to the shops, or to and from the school, or through the fields. Could we make that a spiritual practice? Could we take time to notice things and maybe pray about them as we go – with eyes open, of course!

Instead of always thinking about the destination, could we learn to savour the journey? Instead of seeing trees, could we notice their different kinds? Instead of hearing birds, could we learn to distinguish between them? Could these everyday wonders, feed our thankfulness towards God for the gift of creation if we gave them a little more attention?

There’s a story about a Native American Indian and his friend who were in downtown New York City, walking near Times Square in Manhattan.

It was lunchtime and the streets were filled with people. Cars were honking their horns, taxis were squealing around corners, sirens were wailing, and the sounds of the city were almost deafening. Suddenly, the Native American said, "I hear a cricket."

His friend said, "What? You must be crazy. You couldn't possibly hear a cricket in all of this noise!"

"No, I'm sure of it," the Native American said, "I heard a cricket."

"No way," said the friend.

The Native American listened carefully for a moment, and then walked across the street to a big cement pot where some shrubs were growing. He looked into the bushes, beneath the branches, and sure enough, he located a small cricket. His friend was utterly amazed.

"That's incredible," said his friend. "You must have super-human hearing!"

"No," said the Native American. "My ears are just the same as yours. It all depends on what you're listening for."

"That’s not true." said his friend. "I could never hear a cricket in all this noise."

"Yes you could” said his friend. "It all depends on what’s really important to you. Here, let me show you."

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a few coins, and dropped them discreetly onto the pavement. And despite the noise of the traffic, every head within twenty feet turned round to see who’d dropped some money.

"See what I mean?" said the Native American. "Most people can hear just fine. But they only hear what's important to them."

The heavens are telling the glory of God says the Psalmist. And so are the land and the sea, the trees and the animals, if we only have eyes to see them and ears to hear.