Hermetic Homiletics

22 May 2005: "Life-Giving Creativity"

Saturday morning, I looked at my sermon that I wrote earlier in the week for Sunday, and I decided that I didn't like it. So, I scrapped it and started over. I decided to use the Genesis passage from the lectionary, but I've supplemented it with part of the "burning bush" narrative in Exodus. I've still dealt with the order/chaos theme that I originally wrestled with, but the final draft is vastly different. Even though it is Trinity Sunday, I did nothing with that.

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"Life-Giving Creativity"

Exodus 3.1–2, 7–10
Moses was looking after the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led it to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. The angel of the LORD appeared in a flame blazing from the middle of a bush. Moses looked; there was the bush blazing, but the bush was not being burnt up… The LORD then said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying for help on account of their taskmasters. Yes, I am well aware of their sufferings. And I have come down to rescue them from the clutches of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that country, to a country rich and broad, to a country flowing with milk and honey, to the home of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Yes, indeed the Israelites’ cry for help has reached me, and I have also seen the cruel way in which the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.

Genesis 1:1-2:4a
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. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. God made the two great lights--the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night--and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky." So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

God as Chaos-Injector
The first year I was here, we walked our way through the book of Exodus. It’s a wonderful story about how the Hebrews, who were once a respected people in the land of Egypt, had been reduced to the status of slaves. They had been subject to back-breaking, crushing labor, and they cried out to God for deliverance.

God hears them. God does not ignore them. God delivers them from the malicious tyranny of Pharaoh. From this story, we find that the God of Israel is a God who will not tolerate the oppression of the weak by the strong.

Sometimes, human society can, and does, go beyond any sense of purposeful order and enter into the realm of malicious tyranny reminiscent of the reign of Pharaoh. It is a situation in which order has gone awry, and indeed become destructive to some of those who participate in it. When this happens, we enter into the world of marginalization and oppression. Something God cannot stand.

But order doesn’t just go awry in the social arena. It can become oppressive in the personal arena as well.

When I was taking a psychology class at Parkland Community College down in Champaign, I had an instructor named Lu Snyder. And she was talking about…who knows what on a particular day. Anyway, she told us a story about an eye-opening conflict she had with her teenage son. In the middle of her jumping all over him about his refusal to make his bed every morning, he asked a simple question, “Why? Why do I have to make my bed every single morning when I’m just going to mess it up every single night? It makes no sense. So, why?”

I don’t know how the particular argument ended, but it did make her think. “Why indeed?” So, she decided to try something new. She actually stopped making her bed every morning. She did make it from time to time, but not every morning. And, lo and behold, the world did not spin off of its axis. The sky did not fall. The sun actually did not explode. None of these bad things happened, despite the fact that she did not make her bed. Quite the contrary, a good thing happened: she had a little bit of extra time in the morning. And, she said, it felt really good. She felt liberated.

The bottom line is that she had imposed on herself a specific kind of order that was constraining. A little bit of chaos was injected into it, and she was free from her self-imposed bonds. You see, a rigid, self-imposed order can crush the human spirit just as quickly as any malicious, tyrannical social order gone awry.

Where there is too much order, whether it be on a social or personal scale, we find God actively working to inject chaos into the system, to bring freedom and liberation to the oppressed. This is part of what God does in this world, so we learn from the Exodus story.

God as Orderer-of-Chaos
The passage we read from Genesis gives us a very different, but complimentary, view into God. In the beginning, there is nothing but chaos. Chaos is the power of possibility and creativity, generation and fertility, individuality and self-expression. Chaos is the stuff of potential beauty, potential life, potential…period. It is the stuff of raw potential, the power of “what could be.” But, in the beginning, we also see that it is all over the board and that it cannot bring any of that possibility into being. And so God starts to work. God takes that raw power of potentiality and harnesses it. When God gets the divine hands working with what can be, we see that it becomes real.

God is a God who steps in when chaos reigns and no good can seemingly come of a situation, and makes something out of it. God is a God who brings order to chaos when chaos goes awry.

Yes, too much chaos is just as destructive as too much order. Imagine what society would be like if we didn’t have any laws. People could do anything to anybody without any repercussions. If we ever wanted an image of what social chaos would be, all we have to do is to imagine what would happen if one were to yell “fire” in a theatre. All these people running to get through these little bitty doors, everybody out for themselves, to the expense of anyone who got underfoot. Too much social chaos is truly destructive.

And then there’s the chaos of our lives. How often do we feel as though we are living on a little dinghy in the middle of a vast and stormy sea? One minute life seems to be going well, the next minute everything seems out of whack. We move from one job to another, we have new additions to families that increase responsibilities, we have losses in families that leave vacuums in our lives. We have financial crises, relational crises, health crises, spiritual crises. The storms brew, the storms rage, chaos ensues. And the world in which we once felt at home, seems suddenly unredeemable as the little dinghy of our lives feels like it’s a bout to tip.

And then there’s God. The God of the Universe becomes our anchor in the midst of the storms of life. God is a God who brings order to the chaos, not only of the creation around us, but also of our lives. It is God who works in our lives to redeem seemingly impossible situations. It is God who ultimately makes our lives meaningful.

When we find ourselves becoming swamped and know the threat of being pulled under, all we have to do is look out our windows and see the birds, trees, grass, sky, and clouds, and think “That was once chaos, too.”

A God of Life-Giving Creativity
There are those out there who like to say, “God is a God of order and that chaos is the enemy.” It is as if they are afraid of the power of chaos in this world. In their minds, it seems that the power of order is divine and the power of chaos is evil.

But when we look at these two images of God that we get from the Hebrew Scriptures, we find God can’t be identified with one or the other. Neither the power of order nor the power of chaos can be considered good or evil in and of themselves. Both can be good; both can go awry and be bad. The images that we face today defy any attempts to identify God as being either a God of order or of chaos.

But there is a certain cohesion in these images that cannot be ignored, something that is quite revealing about who God is. In the Exodus story, God injects chaos into the order and liberates the Hebrews so that…they can become a new people. In Genesis, we see God bringing order to the chaos, thus bringing into being…a new creation. In both cases, we see that the God of the Hebrews is neither a God of order nor chaos, but a God of Life-Giving Creativity, sovereign over both. Yes, the divine fingerprints left by the heavenly Potter are nothing less than a full and vital life.

May you open yourselves up more fully this day and everyday to the Life-Giving, Creative Spirit, becoming everything that you can become, to the honor and glory of a sovereign God.

posted by irreverance @ 7:01 AM