"The Poetry of Creation"  San Williams, UPC

Genesis 1-2:3

Introduction to summer preaching series and today’s Genesis reading.

This morning we are beginning a summer preaching series titled “The Poetry of Faith.”  The genesis of this series lies in the quote by Walter Brueggemann that’s printed at the top of your bulletin:  “The church on Sunday morning, or whenever it engages in its odd speech, may be the last place left in our society for imaginative speech that permits people to enter into new worlds of faith and to participate in joyous, obedient life.” 

So this summer we let’s experience the Bible’s odd, imaginative speech.  During the course of the summer, we’ll listen to the poetry of faith that arises from the great themes of scripture:  creation, covenant, call, lament, praise, prophetic vision and more.  Along the way, we’ll also welcome the words of some more contemporary poets who—in Brueggemann’s words—further evoke new worlds of faith and draw us deeper into joyous, obedient life.

So we begin this morning with the poetry of creation.  We invite you, first of all, to simply to hear the creation story read aloud, listen to its rhythm, its resonance. See its imagery; and allow the Spirit to sweep into us, much as the Spirit swept over the face of the waters. 

PRAYER OF ILLULMINATION

Life-giving Spirit open our minds and hearts to the wondrous mystery of the Creator God who speaks all things into existence, who brings order to chaos.  Amen.

Genesis story read using several voices.

On Christmas Eve 1968, three Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell, had seats on humanity’s first trip to orbit around the moon.  To celebrate this remarkable scientific achievement the astronauts read ten verses from the creation story: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  Those of us who were around then may remember the emotional resonance of those elegant words as people around the world watched the grainy television images and listened to the crackly radio transmission with their intermittent NASA beeps.  Planet earth never looked so beautiful, so mysterious, and so very fragile.

We don’t know the name of the Hebrew poet who wrote this poem 3,000 years ago, but we do know that it arose out of a faith community that was awe-struck with the wonder of the creation.  This poem  sets the theme and tone for the entire Bible.  It is a declaration of faith which declares that since “the beginning” the Spirit of God has hovered over all existence like a tender mother. This daring composition was inspired by the conviction that the world is infused with purpose, meaning, order and goodness.  The Bible contains many genres of various kinds—legal codes, historical remembrance, genealogy, letters and more—but the Bible begins with poetry, because only poetic speech can begin to convey this, the deepest of all mysteries: the gracious relationship that the Creator has with all creation.

 But isn’t it a shame how we Christians and others try to turn poetry into dry prose. Some try to analyze and explain.  Others get bogged down in the pre-modern cosmology and challenge the details, all of which is analogous to losing the forest for the sake of the trees.  In one of the debates before Pennsylvania’s presidential primary, the moderator asked the candidates if the world was created in six days.  See how we are forever asking the wrong questions about this text.  It’s like taking a painting of Picasso or William Blake and asking why it isn’t more “realistic.”  We get trapped into a false dichotomy that pits religious faith against science.  The astrophysicist Carl Sagan, for example, was famous for his grave intonation on his show Cosmos that the universe is all there ever has been, is, or ever will be.”  That’s a legitimate position to hold, but it’s neither scientifically verifiable nor spiritually satisfying.  By contrast, Albert Einstein affirmed that “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind

The poetry of Genesis doesn’t intend to undermine or replace scientific knowledge--indeed it undergirds and encourages scientific exploration-- but the poetry of Genesis goes beyond science in maintaining that there’s more to our world that just matter and energy. The poetry of creation prevents the universe from being reduced to chemical equations. Gerard Manley Hopkins, on the year of his ordination to the priesthood in 1877, wrote a poem his conviction that the natural world is endowed with sacramental significance.  His poem, God’s Grandeur begins:

                The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

                 It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

                 It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

                Crushed…

 It’s sad the way people, including Christians, attempt to turn the poetry of Genesis into something it was never intended to be.  It’s not about cosmology; it’s about doxology.  It’s not a scientific explanation of how creation came to be. It’s a poem of why the creation came to be--it’s about the grandeur of God whose love gave birth and meaning to the world and to our lives.

So whenever the community of faith recites the poetry of creation, as we did this morning, hope for the world is renewed. It reminds us that the creation is inherently good.  This means that all the evil--the ugly and destructive forces--that are so much a part of our experience aren’t supposed to be here.  They are unnatural invaders They don’t belong.  People whose outlook is shaped by the poetry of Genesis can’t accept a world where any person lacks the necessities of food and shelter.  Every time we encounter injustice, torture and oppression, we cry out, “This doesn’t belong in God’s good creation.”  When we see wildlife robbed of their habitat or endangered by human misuse of the environment, we know that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. The poetry of Genesis prevents us from shrugging our shoulders in the face of injustice and sighing, “that’s just the way it is.”  No, everything God created is good.  All manner of evil is aberration; it doesn’t belong.  That’s why Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “deliver us from evil.”

Friends, we’ve barely dipped into the deep well of meaning found in the poetry of creation.  But hopefully the poem has evoked in us a greater love for all that God has made.  The Genesis poem affirms that humankind is made in the image of God, which means, in part, that we are called to share in God’s delight in the creation, and to love the world the way God loves it.  “My work,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, “is loving the world…let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished….”

May the words of the poet awaken in us the wonder, the awe and “the love which from our birth over and around us lies. Lord of all to thee we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.”