John 1:1-18, Ephesians 1:3-14
A sermon Prepared for Cleveland Uniting Church.
I wonder if you might take a moment with me to ponder,
to contemplate, to savour these words from John’s Gospel and listen for Jesus speaking
to you, In the beginning.
What is it the beginning of? And when does the beginning even begin? What is God saying to you and me about beginnings today? And, what about the beginning that we find ourselves in right in this moment? In this moment now you and I are at the beginning of the rest of our lives.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
The opening words of stories whether fictional or non-fictional entice us and draw us in to consider the point at which find ourselves in the midst of human history, to consider who we are, and to contemplate where we are going. To think about our story.
The opening salvo of John’s gospel is no different. The idea that there is a beginning, that there can even be a new a beginning, creates an atmosphere of hope for us amid the joys and sorrows of our human journey.
John’s gospel speaks of a new beginning in the midpoint of creation as he echoes the words of Genesis Chapter one verses one and two. “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 a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2)
John re-frames this beginning of creation in the light of Jesus coming and presence in the world. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life…” your life and my life included!
Today as we listen for that eternal Word of God speaking to each of one us, I want to juxtapose this concept of beginnings in the Bible with the beginnings of a number of other stories as we explore together the open-endedness of time, the continuity of God’s creativity, the magnitude of grace and the hope of the destination or the end of all things in Christ.
So, to start with, this new beginning of Jesus’ presence in the world raises significant questions for us about time and the idea that we are always at the beginning. Graham Greene opens his novel The End of the Affair with these insightful words, “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
Spiritually, scientifically, and theologically I would take this a step beyond Greene’s words because time itself is created and not linear. So, the act of creation by God was not a moment locked in the past but is a continual dynamic unfolding of God’s creative and gracious relationship with the whole cosmos. God is always creating the creation and the Word of God is present in it all.
In the first words of his book To Change the World James Davison Hunter reminds us of the dynamic nature of the creative act when he says, “Out of nothing, ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen 1:1). This was the beginning, the primordial act, the culmination of which was the creation of human life itself, not only in manifest beauty and delight but also in its potentialities. The goodness of creation, then, was anything but inert. It was dynamic, vibrant, and full of latent promise.” (p.1)
The vibrancy of and dynamism of God’s creative act is captured in the timeless words of Lamentations in which the poet declares, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (3:22-23)
The newness of God’s mercies is a reminder that each moment in which we live is being created. The creation story is always unfolding. And the eternal Word, who is Jesus, is always present in the new beginning of each moment. Paul reminds us that Jesus presence in the world opens up the possibility of each of us becoming a new creation. In 2 Corinthians 5:17 Paul says, “The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come! Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he [or she] is a new creation.”
If we are each at the beginning of a new creative act, if God’s mercies are new every morning, then this very moment in which we exist is pregnant with the possibilities of what God might do in and through our lives and in the world around us.
As Christians we do not worship on the sabbath but on the day of resurrection, which is the first day of the week. It is the eighth day! Each time we come to worship on a Sunday we are reminded that we are living from, in and towards the new creation in which Christ is present and coming to us in the constancy of the new beginnings of our lives.
I think George Orwell in the opening words of his dystopian novel 1984 challenges us to think outside the box to be people who might consider viewing all that has gone before differently. He writes, “It was a cold bright day in April, and all the clocks were striking thirteen.” The symbolism of the clocks striking thirteen creates a tension between the truth of what has gone before and what the possibilities of what lies ahead of us.
More than that how we think about the past is as much of a mystery as is the future. L.P. Hartley opens the novel The Go-Between with these words, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” The past can feel distant and strange as we think about what has gone before.
In his book Homo Deus the historian Noah Yuval Harari suggests that the past is almost like a bad dream. The opening of his book reads, “At the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. ‘There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh, well, it was just a bad dream.’ Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary. ‘Let’s see what’s on the agenda today.’”
Whatever we might think of our own past or the history of our community the coming of Jesus into the world transforms those events and creates new possibilities grounded in forgiveness and renewal. “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”
The incarnation, and the hailing of the incarnate Son
of which we sing, are a stark reminder that our created lives are important. Salvation is more than pie in the sky when
you die, it is also about encountering the eternal Word creating each moment of
eternity in our lives now. God cares
about us, no matter how small and insignificant we think our lives might be.
In his wonderful science fiction novel Douglas Adams explores the infinite smallness of human beings in the first words of his book The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy:
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
Despite however small we might think we are and whether we primitively still think digital watches, or the latest technology, is a pretty neat idea God in Christ invites us to share in his very life, in the divine existence. John wrote that “all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” This is the gift and grace of God beyond our control as we are born from above and drawn into the constancy of the new beginning of Christ’s life with us, or as Paul writes it later to the Colossians “Our lives are hidden in Christ.” (3:3)
Like the people long ago it is easy for us to get distracted and miss the miracle of God’s loving presence in our life. As John says, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” Sometimes, we do not know Christ’s presence even when it is closer to us than breathing. We miss it and we distract ourselves so easily with our own idols and preoccupations. Norman Maclean notes our predilection for substituting other things for God in the first words of his novel A River runs through it. He writes, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”
Regardless of our own preoccupations whether it be fly-fishing, playing the stock market, gardening, golf, or googling Jesus comes to us constantly offering a new beginning, a new creative act so that we might live well in this life with God and with each other. Of course, life is not perfect in fact far from it. And, we must constantly look at the world around us through a critical eye.
One of the books that has deeply influenced my life is
Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture written by the sociologist John
Carrol. He begins with these confronting
words:
We
live amidst the ruins of the great, five-hundred-year epoch of Humanism. Around
us is that ‘colossal wreck.’ Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble. It hardly
offers shelter from mild a cosmic breeze, never mind one of those icy gales
that regularly return to rip us out of the cosy intimacy of our daily lives and
confront us with oblivion. Is it surprising that we are run down? We are desperate,
yet we don’t care much anymore. We are timid, yet we cannot be shocked. We are
inert underneath our busyness. We are destitute in our plenty. We are homeless
in our homes (p. 1).
Living in the new beginning of Christ’s presence makes us aware of the disruption of what is and what could be. It is little wonder then that the opening words of U2’s song Heaven on Earth are replete with longing:
Heaven on earth
We need it now
I'm sick of all of this
Hanging around
Every time we pray the Lord’s prayer, every time we say
“on earth as it is in heaven”, we are expressing our longing for the collapsing
of the beginning and ending of all things into the present moment in which we live. The eternal Word, Jesus, is according
Revelations 22:13 alpha and the omega, the first and the last. He is our origin, and he is our destination.
He is the destination of the whole creation expressed by Paul in our reading
from Ephesians today.
Yet this longing has a fulfilment and hope in mind. With all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
Way back in the fourth century the Bishop of the Nile Delta Sarapion of Thmuis prayed "Lord! We entreat you, make us truly alive." I wonder whether to be truly alive means to live in the beginning of the moment we are being created in which Christ is truly present and more than that to live in the moment of the gathering up of all things in Christ, encountering earth as it is in heaven.
So, here we are at the ending of the sermon but I wonder if you might take a moment again with me to ponder, to contemplate, to savour these words from John’s Gospel and listen for Jesus speaking to you, In the beginning.
In the silence, I invite you to think about the one
thing that God has laid on your heart amid these frail human words this day. What are the words God is placing on your heart
at the beginning of the next part of your story?
No comments:
Post a Comment