10.30am Morning Prayer, All Saints Oakham
Readings -Genesis 1.1-2.3, Romans 8.18-15, Matthew 6.25-34
As you know, the Church of England likes to give a name to every Sunday in the year. I don’t know why, but it does. But sometimes it’s a bit of a struggle to find an exciting name. Here we are in early February – it’s a rather in between time of the year, isn’t it. Christmas is done and dusted, Lent and then Easter are still some way off.
So the best the Church of England can do for today is to call it …. ‘the 2nd Sunday before Lent’. Which to be honest doesn’t sound very exciting, does it. ‘the 2nd Sunday before Lent’. But I think they’ve missed a trick. The Bible readings given to us today are all about some aspect of creation. So we are going to say this is CREATION SUNDAY. Creation Sunday. And we have set before us a wonderful rich and varied diet of Bible readings all teaching us more about how we should think of creation.
My eldest son called me the other day, but there was something wrong with his mobile phone. I said ‘hello’ but then there was silence, I could hear nothing he said, and he couldn’t hear me. So we ended the call and tried again, still nothing. So we tried again using FaceTime. So now I could see him, but I still couldn’t hear anything, and nor could he. I could see him mouthing away, and he me. We were probably talking about the same thing, but we just could not hear each other. We may as well have been using a different language, there was no communication at all between us.
And so it is, very often, when people start to talk about Genesis and creation and evolution. They just can’t hear each other, they may as well be talking about a different subject, talking in a different language.
What are we to make of Genesis 1? The wonderful sweep of its coverage. The rhythm with which our world developed with the animal kingdom arriving at the end of a long, long process, and right at the end humankind. You only get the full sense of it by reading it unabridged, as we did today.
Many people who are not Xtians are certain that Genesis is irrelevant, untrue, old hat. Genesis must be wrong, because science has proved how the world came about, and science has proved that God had nothing to do with it. All this talk in Genesis of God and of six days is obviously misguided, naïve, ignorant. People who say such things, think they are ‘following the science’ as the saying goes. Indeed they say if you claim you can be a Christian, or even merely believe in God, and also be a scientist, you are deluded. Science has disproved God.
Then there is also a minority of Christians who believe that God must have created the world in six periods of twenty-four hours, because that is what Genesis says, so it must be true. And if we say it didn’t happen like that, then we are betraying the Bible, and failing to understand God’s great creative power.
We could talk for a long time about this, but I am simply to say four things which I hope will help us understand Genesis Chapter 1 more clearly.
- Firstly, for much of Christian history people all read Genesis chapter 1 as figurative. They understood it was using figures of speech and word pictures to tell truths. As in many other parts of the Bible where there is also figurative language. The focus on six literal days of creation is a late development, it came along when the evolution debate started with the work of Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century.
- Secondly, never let anyone tell you that it is intellectually impossible to be a scientist and also be a Christian. There are many, many of us who are both. There are others in our church family as well as me. I spent nearly 40 years as a doctor and a researcher, using science – doing experiments so we could better understand kidney disease, and improve treatments. Every small new discovery I made (and they were all quite small) , every new discovery did not lead me to self-satisfaction that I was proving how the world worked, and adding to the evidence God did not exist. Rather, every small discovery I made simply increased my awe at the complexity of the created world, my awe at the greatness of the mind of God.
- Thirdly religious faith and science are not in competition; they address completely different questions. Science can tell us ‘how’ , but it cannot tell us ‘why’. Science can only tell us ‘how’ – how life and the laws of nature work, how the structure of our DNA and the behaviour of our genes enabled life on earth to evolve. Science can tell us ‘how’, but it cannot tell us ‘why’. The Bible is answering a different question, it is not trying to tell us in detail how the physical world works, how evolution and creation happened. Instead the Bible is answering the really big question ‘why’.
- Fourthly, remember that science is amoral. No – not immoral, but amoral. Science has no moral force, science can’t make value judgments. For example science developed nuclear energy but science cannot decide if nuclear energy should be used to make bombs or to run power stations. That’s for society as a whole to decide, and society will make those decisions most securely when it’s feet are firmly planted in God’s laws for the world.
The Bible, in particular the early chapters of Genesis is answering the question ‘why’ and in answering that question, I have for you another four big ideas from Scripture.
- Gen 1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning ….. God God existed before anything else did. God created space, God created matter, and as we see by the end of verse 5 God has created time there was an evening and there was morning the first day . The three things you need if a universe is to develop – space, matter, time. God made them.
- Second, as we read again and again through the Genesis 1– with each day. God saw that it was good, God saw that it was very good.
And the other two big things are not directly stated in Genesis, but are clear from the rest of the Bible.
- One is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God was there from the beginning as well, and was with God the Father – as the Creator.
And ….God and Christ the creators are not absentee landlords. They did not create the universe and then turn their backs and find something else to do. They did not as it were sit down on the seventh day for a rest in the garden with a glass of Chardonnay and say to themselves ‘job done’ now what else shall we do? In several places in the New Testament it is made clear that God the Father & Jesus the Son are actively at work sustaining creation; e.g. Hebrews 1:3 he (Jesus) sustains all things by his powerful word, or in Colossians 1:17 where we are reminded that … in him (Jesus) all things hold together.
- And the other big thing, again not directly stated in Genesis 1, but clear over and over in the Bible, is God’s supreme, generous unchanging love for all of His creation, and most especially for humankind. God’s love. As we repeated and repeated when we read Psalm 136 this morning .. his steadfast love endures for ever
The Bible asks ‘why’. It is not trying to answer the question ‘how’. The Bible is not wrong, it is simply that it is not trying to answer detailed questions about physical life, about the universe, it is a book about spiritual life. Genesis 1 provides God’s explanation for the order which characterises the world which He designed. And it explains the meaning and purpose of humankind, made in God’s image, within that order.
We reach the end of our Genesis reading with a sense of forward looking optimism. 1:31 God saw everything he had made and indeed it was very good.
But by the time we get to our second reading from Romans chapter 8, it seems as though that optimism has dissipated.
Paul now describes creation in depressing language – it is he says in v20 … subjected to futility, v21 creation is in bondage to decay, v22 groaning in labour pains.
What’s happened? What’s gone wrong? Humankind has gone wrong. We have no time today to read Genesis chapter 3, where we read of ‘the Fall’ of humankind, humankind represented by Adam and Eve deciding they don’t need God’s help thank you very much. Wanting the self-determinism of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, confident they can know best, they don’t need God’s guidance. And from that awful mistake stems the impact on creation, as man’s inhumanity to man, and man’s ill-judgment damage and begin to destroy our world.
But let’s not overstate it, It’s not all bad. Much of creation is still good, is still very good.
Geraldine and I were fortunate to have a holiday last month, and when you were all enduring the cold, grey soggy January, I have to own up to the fact that we were in a sunny 30 degrees in Africa wandering through forests and creeks and seeing wondrous bird and plant life. Even seeing ospreys enjoying the sun there before they fly back to Rutland Water to breed in the spring. Wonderful.
Much of God’s creation remains very good. But we know also of the awful damage to the physical world and to human relationships in that world.
But happily the end of the Bible take us on from the gloomy, groaning, decaying world in Romans 8. Because the promise is that there will be at the end of time a new unchanging creation fully restored, in the famous phrase of Revelation 21:1 that there will be a new heaven and a new earth.
But how can possibly get from the current mess to ‘ a new heaven and a new earth’? Who can restore creation?
One of my grandsons is at the age where he is becoming incredibly good at Lego – he has quick hands, sharp eyes, and in no time makes increasingly complicated models from the pile of plastic bits he gets when he opens a box of Lego, and pours it out on to the table.
At Christmas he put together a terrific Lego kit – a big complicated vehicle. He left it on my desk for me to find. I picked it up to admire it, walked across the room, tripped and it slipped out of my hands and hit the wooden floor, and as it did so it broke into several pieces, with bits of Lego scattered everywhere. Oh no… I so wanted to put it back together for him. But I couldn’t. I could not work out how all these bits went together again, it was too complicated. I was hopeless at it, I just couldn’t do it. But just then my grandson appeared. ‘Don’t worry Grandad I’ll fix it’. And in a few moments, it was all back together again… perfect. He know exactly where it had gone wrong, and he put it together again. Why could he fix it when I could not? Because he had made it.
Ask yourself who is able to restore creation and perfect it at the end of time. Who is going to repair the world? Will it be warlords or dictators or climate scientists or politicians or church authorities?
No…. the only person who knows how to repair the world is He who made it, God Almighty.
And God will fulfil the promise that creation will no longer groan under futility , decay, labour pains but will be restored.
Alongside that promise about restoring creation, there is also a promise for us, as Xtian believers, that we will be restored and completed as well. No longer as Paul says in v23 groaning inwardly but restored, completed for eternal life.
Paul says in v 23 that we have the first fruits of the Spirit – or to put it another way our Xtian journey is just getting going . But we know we have so much further to go in our journey of faith. It is as though our faith groaning in labour – much pain, but where is the gain. The gain comes when our salvation is completed ‘adoption, the redemption of our bodies’
So:
We have a Creator who existed before anything else. A Creator who sustains the world and loves it, a Creator who sustains us and loves us.
He has given us the gift of science so we may learn more and more of those wonders of His creation.
Despite the damage done to creation, including the damage caused by humankind’s misuse……..
We have a Creator who has made a promise for the end of time – a new heaven and a new earth for eternity, and for each of us the redemption of our bodies for eternity.
Let us praise our wonderful Creator.
Amen