Sorry this one is a little old. Preached at the end of May but between then and now I've been a bit busy!
A reading from Proverbs 8
Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding
raise her voice?
she cries out:
“To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
The Lord created me at the
beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
When there were no depths
I was brought forth,
when there were no springs
abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
Over the course of this year, I’m sure it has become exceedingly clear that nature is one of my sources of inspiration. Another is fantasy and fiction, but I’ll get to that later… I have had the pleasure to preach on many of these stories over this year. Stories of a God who calls from the deep water, of God becoming clear in a sunset, of the calm mornings of silence filled with the anticipation of divine peace. So this morning, it comes as no surprise that I would choose to use the piece of lectionary focusing on the MOMENT of creation.
Well, to be honest, maybe it choose me. Proverbs 8 was my first exegetical assignment in seminary. Now two years in to seminary and at the very end of my internship. Lady Wisdom calls to me again. The Hebrew word for Wisdom is Hokmah. It appears first in Exodus, and is usually a trait, like that of a wise man. But most notably it is found in Proverbs, taking on her own personification. Here, in our text this morning, she makes a stand and gives her resume to the people, asking them to listen to her, to follow her path. Wisdom calls herself a master worker at the side of the Divine who is creating a universe. I’m beginning to wonder if it is more than coincidence, but a moment of divine providence, my own moment of Hokmah that returns me again and again to the stories of the natural world in triumph, and delight.
But of course, Wisdom’s account of creation is not the only version we have. In the Bible alone, there are multiple interpretations of this moment. Genesis provides us two, God as creator in 7 days, and God the potter who build man from dust. Job also gives us a glimpse of God as architect when God speaks from the whirlwind. And then of course there is John’s vision of the Word of God made flesh, the divine Logos. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him.” In each of these, the story of creation is told slightly different, even contradictorily so. They each fill in gaps in other stories and leave even more gaps for us to fill in on our own. Throughout the biblical cannon, creation is at the forefront for material. And maybe we can see why. Each moment of engagement in creation contains the possibility of awakening to that greater divine vision, and certainly the authors of these texts saw that.
Modern fiction has that same potential to show us visions of creation to bring us to a greater awareness of God. In Proverbs, we try to answer a question we didn’t know we needed to ask, What would it be like to be with God at the moment of creation? CS Lewis, the 20th century author and theologian thought to answer that same question. CS Lewis tells us this tale in the Magician’s Nephew. In it, a group of travelers appear in Narnia, the moment BEFORE it had become anything. Please reflect on our second reading this morning…
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And really it was uncommonly like nothing. There were no stars. It was so dark they couldn’t see one another at all and it made no difference whether you kept your eyes shut or opened. Under their feet there was a cool, flat something which might have been earth, and was certainly not grass or wood. In the darkness, something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away, and Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes it was coming out of the earth beneath them. The lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise one had ever heard. It was so beautiful you could hardly bear it.
Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a Summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations and planets
The Eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose! You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. The earth was of many colors; they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer itself, and then you forgot everything else. …
The lion ( for in Narnia, God is incarnate in the lion Aslan) was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the lion like a pool. It ran up the side soft of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could be heard ruffling the grass. Soon there were other things besides grass. The higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley. …
When you listened to his song, you heard the things he was making up; when you looked round you, you saw them.
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In Lewis’s vision we can hear the many voices of biblical tradition. The Logos of John and the voice in Genesis that spoke the world into existence is encountered in this vision of creation. But Lewis was not just a biblical scholar, he was also a man of his time, and aware of all the stories his society created about creation as well, the scientific explanations and his own observations of the created world. Today, in our infinite scientific experimentation, we have created a new model of worldly creation. We might say that creation started with the Big Bang, with primordial ooze, but even this is an inaccurate model of a time outside our understanding.
The truth is we just can’t know. As a species, we were not present when the Earth was new. There are some mysteries that we can never truly understand. We can come REALLY close, we might even think we have the answer, but if we are brutally honest, we just don’t know. And that’s a hard place to stay in eternally. So instead of leaving that space blank, we fill it. We create to fill that space. We tell stories and write out hypotheses, we create myths, and we pass these on to new generations of people to help them try to understand the mysteries in life, the mystery of time beyond our knowledge, of creation. We explore what it would look like, smell like, and feel like to see a planet populated with life. We explore what divine power would look like, and create images of that power in our own image. We try to solve the mysteries of that which is beyond knowing. The un-openable mystery box.
JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost, spoke about the allure of solving mystery at the TED convention a few years ago. If any of you have seen or heard about Lost, you will know that it is really all about attempting to connect the dots of mystery, so it shouldn’t surprise that he has a fascination with the mystery box. In fact, he has a box in the office that he has never opened in 20 years. He says, he has kept the mystery box in honor of his Grandfather who opened so many mysteries for him, giving him the tools and interest to investigate the deep mysteries. Abrams, has been impacted by his ancestors and their visions of mystery. His grandfather allowed him to open and take apart telephones, boxes and more, and that experience has shaped Abrams life. His mystery box, in honor of his grandfather stays closed, but on the other hand, through his gifts for film, television and special effects he opens mystery boxes for all of us. Like all of us, Abrams is the sum of his ancestor’s stories and myths, and those stories, those little peeks into the mystery box are what shape what we expect to see in the world.
Even our future plans and technological advancements are impacted by our stories. Have any of you watched any of the multitudes of Star Trek shows over the last several decades? (And I promise this is the last fantasy reference in this sermon). Maybe you remember the communicators? Think about it, in the 1960s when Star Trek was just a dream it was a story that you could talk with people on a handheld device, about the size of a grapefruit, and now… Well, this is my much smaller than a grapefruit hand held device on which I can do much more than call up my shipmates! Our future dreams inform what we do in the present, and our past dreams have shaped our future plans. But all of these unending stories are just that, our ways of understanding that which is inside that un-openable mystery box of time.
What are the mystery boxes in your life? What tools can you use to better understand it? What are the stories in your life that inform who you are? What would creation have to tell you in a moment of awareness?
And so we can learn from the stories of past generations, from Star Trek, and CS Lewis and even the tragedy in the Gulf, as we have learned from so many other tragedies over our existence. We can look deeply and see the web that holds creation together, and see our own place in it. We can be the web spinners of new stories that shed light on the importance of all that is and will be. And we can tell future generations about these new stories, building up our future with our hopes and dreams, the ideas of our mystery boxes. Allowing the memory of our inspirational ancestors, friends and family to be remembered in life giving ways.
May it be so.
