Creation Sermon for Almeley– 16th February 2020 – Creation Sunday
Today is the second Sunday before Lent or Sexagesima which means approximately 60 days before Easter. Today has also been designated Creation Sunday which why the specified OT reading was one of the creation stories from Genesis. This theme fits very well with our Lent Study – Care for God’s Creation.
In my address this morning I would like to set the creation stories in their context – both historical and linguistic and in interpretation explain their relevance for us today.
So first of all the creation stories themselves. In the Bible there are two creation stories. In other cultures or religions there are also creation stories – in America there are the ‘Heart of Heaven’ stories, in China we have the story of the Giant Pangu which comes out of darkness in the form of a huge egg and in India there are many stories found in the Vegas, Brahamanas and Upanishads. In these latter stories we have a number of recurring themes – cosmic egg, primal waters and spirits coming from nothing.
However, looking at the origin of the Universe from the scientific point of view we have a very different picture. The consensus of scientists now is that the universe was formed out of a singularity – known popularly as the “Big Bang.” When I used to lecture on the relationship between religion and science I had some difficulty in explaining that the origin of the universe should not be regarded like an explosion – a concept that perhaps would follow from the idea of a big bang. I should perhaps explain that the name big bang was used as a term of disparagement by the astronomer Fred Hoyle – who had that time did not support the theory and was a firm believer in the concept of continuous creation – the idea that the universe had always existed. However, coming back to the origin of the universe, I haven’t the time this morning to go into the proof of the matter, essentially the cosmos grew out of an infinitesimally small, infinitesimally hot and infinitesimally dense point of singularity and then expanded extremely rapidly and is continuing to expand. Whilst all analogies are inadequate, one useful way of thinking about this is consider the expansion of a balloon with all the galaxies in embryo form on the surface of the balloon.
In the light of this knowledge do we now set aide all the creation stories?
Of course not because they still contain much to inspire us – and even more importantly they have an essential message to impart. If we think just of the biblical stories – there are two – the rather earthy Garden of Eden tale which follows the one we heard this morning as well as the one which has just been read to us.
To spend just a minute or so on the origin of the first five chapters of the Old Testament, these arose out of four oral and written strands of testimony – the Yahwist or Jehovist strand known as J, the Elohist strand known as E, the Priestly strand known as P, and Deuteronomic strand known as D. Each of the first five chapters contains parts of these strands and in the first two chapters of Genesis we have the Jehovist strand dated about 950 BC and the Priestly narrative dated around 500 BCE.Although the order is reversed in Genesis the Garden of Eden tale largely derived from the Jehovist tradition was the first to be written down with the Seven Creative Days version which we heard this morning coming from the Priestly strand being written down after having been refined over many years of temple worship.
This “creative days” version is a beautiful poem of creation refined over many years of use in priestly worship. In it we have the message that God created the world and created humanity to act on God’s behalf in looking after or maintaining that world. In the English language version we have the suggestion that mankind was created to have dominion over the rest of creation. This is a slightly unfortunate word because it almost suggests that we should dominate the world in a rather aggressive way. Until I studied this story in depth it used to worry me. However, if one goes back to the original Hebrew the translation of the word Radah is perhaps more correctly described as having stewardship over. The Welsh language version uses the expression which could loosely be translated as to govern. So we have the message from the first chapter of Genesis that God created the world and created mankind to look after it for Him.
In the second story which I am sure you all remember set in the Garden of Eden we have another theme. Here instead of a beautiful poem celebrating creation we have a more earthy account with mankind placed in the Garden of Eden to, as the usual translations have it, “till it and keep it.” The original Hebrew words ABAH for till and SHAMAR for keep do, I understand imply service and preservation respectively. In other words the second story is all about the nurturing role of mankind looking after the animals and other living things in the world.
In order to do this we need to understand the laws of physics and the principles of nature. Having understood them we must then apply them for the benefit of the world. In God, the reality which transcends or lies beyond, space and time we have that ultimate starting point beyond which the human mind is incapable of going. In the words of Keith Ward – God is the only reality “which relates the eternal and temporal, the conceptual and the physical…” All of our known laws of physics – be they the relatively straight forward laws discovered by Newton or the more difficult to comprehend laws of relativity discovered by Einstein – came from the mind of God.
So what about Darwin then and his theory set out in the Origin of the Species? This is really an example of mankind finding out about the laws of nature, so that they may better be applied for the benefit of maintaining God’s created world. When Darwin first presented his theory to a meeting of the Linaean Society it was accepted with great interest and would have been seen perhaps as a development of some of the ideas proposed by his predecessor Lamark. The controversy really began when there was a debate at the Oxford Union when Huxley presenting Darwin’s paper had a major argument with Bishop Wilberforce with the two finishing up just insulting each other, with Wilberforce considering that the Origin of the Species having repudiated the truth of the biblical images of creation, could then lead one to question or doubt the moral principles set out in the rest of the Bible. It is this suggestion, which I believe is an incorrect extrapolation of the Darwin theory which has given the age of Enlightenment such a bad name among those who would maintain that a literal approach to the Bible is the only approach.
Those people would nowadays be aligned with the so-called Creationists, who, in my view, have such a blinkered attitude to the Bible and Science that makes fools of themselves and provide a concept of the relationship between science and religion as one of conflict – a model always beloved of the media. The other model – that of complimentarity between the two that I would argue for does not have that dramatic element. Reduced to its simplest, we can say that scientists can increasingly answer the “how” questions but it is only theologians who can begin to grapple with the “why” questions.
Anyway let me conclude this address by highlighting just one application of the Genesis poem we heard this morning. Climate change – or more particularly man-made climate change – properly known as anthropogenic climate change. The met office has been warning of this for about 50 years but it is only in the last ten or so that the subject has caught the public’s imagination. There could be no better way of being good stewards of the world than by organising our lives both individually and nationally so as to reduce our production of gases such as CO2 to restrict the global warming to a level which enables the human population to continue to exist in this world.
In summary we can say that the first Chapter of Genesis provides us with a beautiful poem of creation which exhorts us to look after the world to the very best of our ability, of which dealing with the effects of our industrial revolution is just one example of that essential stewardship.
David Greenwood
Brislington Community News 