Re-Creation

This is a sermon preached at United Presbyterian Church in Sterling KS on Sunday, June 11, 2017, based on Genesis 1-2:4, and Ephesians 2:4-10. (Click on scriptures to read text) 

Stories about our origins are inspirational.  That’s why we like to hear people’s stories.  For instance, we ask couples, “How did you meet?”  What we’re really asking is, “How did this love begin?”

Little kids will often ask, “Where did I come from?”  There are lots of funny and imaginative ways to answer that question.  The stork, the watermelon patch…. Some kids will come up with their own ideas.  One mom says, "When my daughter asked where babies come from, I turned the question around on her. 'Where do you think babies come from?' She replied, 'When two people love each other the dad buys a pumpkin seed and gives it to the mom. Then her stomach gets big like a pumpkin!' The mom was so speechless, she just said 'That's exactly right, honey!'"[1]

One of the big questions of all time is, “Where did the world come from?”  “How did all this begin?”  There are lots of different ways to answer that question, too.  An archaeologist will tell the story one way, and a biologist will tell it a little differently. 

Today we read the theologian’s answer, Moses the prophet’s answer. The answer is a little different because, really, the question is a little different.  The Bible is the story of God’s great love for us all, so this story is the answer to the question, “Where did this love begin?” This creation story from Genesis is our story. 

As I was studying this creation story this week, I noticed something I’d never noticed before.  The first three days are all about organizing.  Maybe I recognized this because this is what we’re doing at my house. Our lives have been like the creation story.  As most of you probably know, we just moved here to Sterling a little over two weeks ago.  That first day our new place was a formless void.  It was!  An empty house.  Silent. Peaceful.

And then our stuff arrived and there was chaos – and that’s how the Living Bible describes the earth at the beginning.  The Living Bible says earth was a chaotic mass.  We had a chaotic mess at our house.  Boxes everywhere.

When your house is a chaotic mess of boxes, how do you solve that problem?  You open the boxes. When you open them, you let the light in.  That’s the beginning of organizing the chaos – turn on the light so you can see what you’re doing.  That’s what God did, too, on that first day.  He started organizing by turning on the light and separating the light from the darkness.  Separating.  I’d never noticed that word in Genesis before.  Separating is organizing.

And on day two the organizing continues.  God separated the waters below from the waters above. Organizing.  He even made labels.  He called the waters above, “sky.” 

And on day three God did some more organizing.  God separated the water from the dry land, and made two more labels, one that said “Earth” and one that said “Seas.”

That might not seem like a big deal to you, but it is to me because I have always considered myself a creative person, but for so many years it seemed like my main purpose in life was organizing.  I was the organizer at home, and at my job, and at church, too.  Bleh.  No beautiful paintings, no flowery poetry, no imaginative stories, none of the usual stuff we think of when we think about creativity.  Just file cabinets and labels and spreadsheets. 

I was disappointed in myself, because although I was pretty good at organizing, I didn’t think of that as being creative.  But here in Genesis, God the creator who created EVERYTHING, started off by spending the first three days of creation organizing.  Organizing IS creative.

What is really happening here?  When God was creating the world, God had a vision for what could be and he was making it happen.  When we are organizing, we too have a vision for the possibilities, what could be, and we are making it happen.

Another word for creativity is inspiration.  The middle part of that word, the S-P-I-R part means breath or spirit.  Inspiration is literally putting breath in, putting spirit in.  In our modern thinking, we don’t automatically think of inspiration being connected with God and the Holy Spirit any more, but this word originally meant to receive the breath of the divine.[2]  Inspiration, creativity, is the work of the Holy Spirit in us, helping us to imagine the possibilities, to be inspired.

When God gets to day 6, the day he makes humans, God says, “Let us make humankind in OUR IMAGE…”  We are made in the image of God.  We too are creative.  Our creativity is the Holy Spirit at work in us.[3]  The more we allow the Holy Spirit to work in us, the more we are able to be creative – in art, in music, in writing and poetry, but also in organizing and problem solving and in finding ways to help one another and love one another.

The Bible tells us in 2 Timothy that all scripture is inspired – some versions of the Bible say instead, “God breathed.”  The Holy Spirit works in us to guide us and help us, but we’re not always so good at listening and understanding.

One day a boy was watching his father, a pastor, write a sermon.  The boy asked, “How do you know what to say?”

 “Why, God tells me,” said the father.

 “Oh, then why do you keep crossing things out?”[4]

Problems will happen, some as a result of greed and godlessness and lack of humility, but with the help of the Holy Spirit we can solve them. (Case in point)

Listening to the Holy Spirit can be challenging.

We think of creativity and inspiration as something to do with art or music, but it can also be simple problem solving, finding new ways to do something.  Years ago, when the company Johnson & Johnson first began selling bandages, they only sold large surgical dressings.  Earle Dickson, an employee of Johnson & Johnson, was married to a woman who was accident-prone.  Whenever she had a cut, he would make a bandage by taking a piece of the surgical dressing and putting it in the middle of a piece of tape.  After awhile he got tired of the amount of time this took, so he started making them in batches and using pieces of crinoline to cover the tape until he needed to use them. Voila, a ready-to-use bandage. Earle’s boss saw him using one of these and decided to mass produce them.  He called them band-aids.[5]

Creative problem solving.  Inspired by the Holy Spirit living in us.

Creative inspiration can be challenging and difficult. We need that creative Spirit to keep on working in us because God has made us a part of creation.  In verse 26, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over…” everything.  Dominion means to reign over, to have authority.  The Bible calls someone who reigns a king.  And in Deuteronomy 17, God gives instructions for kings.  Proverbs 16:10 says that inspired decisions are on the lips of a king, and the instructions here in Deuteronomy are help us see how not to mess that up.  They say:

1. “The king will be someone whom the Lord your God will choose.”  In other words, remember that authority comes from God.  Stay humble. (17:15)
2. It also says “kings must not acquire many horses or many wives or excessive silver or gold” (v16-17 paraphrased)  In other words, don’t be greedy.  Greed is one of the big ways we get messed up. 
3. It also says to keep a copy of the law, the torah, the first five books of the Bible, for themselves and read it daily, following all the words of this law and these statutes.

We all are made in God’s image, and we are given authority over all that God has created, and that makes us like kings, and so we too need to pay attention to these instructions:

1.    Don’t be greedy

2.    Keep on reading the instructions (the Bible)

3.    Stay humble

In the beginning God created a beautiful earth and marvelous, majestic heavens and put humans in charge to help maintain….no, actually not maintain.  In the instructions in Genesis God says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill….”  That word fill also means “replenish.”  That’s more than maintaining.  That’s recreating.  We are fruitful and productive through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and our creativity helps replenish the earth. 

In the beginning it was a beautiful picture – the Garden of Eden full of all kinds of plants and animals, and Adam and Eve walking with God…and then things fell apart.  Sin came into the picture and things got messed up.  Let me read you how the message version puts it in Ephesians 2, verses 1-5:

It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ.

God’s vision for us is good.  God sees in us not only what is, but also what is possible.  Through Jesus Christ, God has created us anew, recreated us, so that we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. 

All through this story of creation God looked at what he had done each day and saw that it was good.  But on the sixth day, the biggest day, the day on which God made humankind in God’s image, verse 31 says that “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

Very good.  Humankind, made in God’s image.  Very good.  We, humankind, are God’s masterpiece.  You and I.  We are God’s magnum opus. We are God’s masterpiece, made in God’s image, which means we are also creative, whether we’re creative about organizing and making spreadsheets, or painting, or making music, or whatever we do.  And we’ve been re-created through our faith in Jesus Christ, so that we have that creative, life-giving Holy Spirit working in us, helping us to do those good things God planned.

What are those good things?  There are so many ways we could answer that.  There are lots of good things for us to do, and while we’re doing them, there are some important things for us to remember…things we find in our instructions from Deuteronomy about remembering who made us, our creator.  As we sang at the beginning of the service, we were made to worship.  The object of our worship is the one who created us and gave his son Jesus for us, gave us his Spirit to be with us always.  But we can easily slip into worshipping the creation instead of the creator.

In E.B. White’s book Charlotte’s Web’s there’s a pig named Wilbur.  One day Wilbur finds out that pigs are raised to be killed and turned into bacon and ham, and that farmer Zuckerman will probably do this with Wilbur.

So Charlotte the spider comes up with a plan to save Wilbur. First, she weaves the words “SOME PIG” in the middle of her spider web over Wilber’s stall. This makes everyone think that Wilbur is something special.

Another day, Charlotte weaves the word: “TERRIFIC.” This convinces Zuckerman that Wilbur is so terrific that he should take him to compete in the county fair.  Finally, Charlotte weaves the third word into her web: “RADIANT.” This summons the whole county to visit the Zuckerman farm to see this radiant pig.

Charlotte has definitely convinced people that Wilbur is a special little guy.  Yet once the Zuckermans get to the County Fair, the spider has one more chance to show off her friend. So Charlotte weaves her final message. This time it says: “HUMBLE.”  All the fairgoers agree: that’s one humble pig.

E.B. White adds: “Everybody who visited the pigpen had a good word to say about Wilbur. Everyone admired the web. And of course nobody noticed Charlotte … Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all.” [Italics added][6]

God has given us so much – a beautiful world to live in, and abilities and inspiration to be a part of the ongoing replenishing and re-creation of our world.  One way we keep from getting caught up in worshipping the creation – be that things or people or ourselves – is to remember to keep thanking God for those things and people and abilities we have. 

We are God’s masterpiece, created anew in Christ Jesus to do the good things he planned for us long ago. 

You and I and everyone we meet are God’s creation, a part of God’s great love story that began with those words, “In the beginning God created….”  We’re all God’s masterpieces, re-created through Jesus Christ and inspired by the Holy Spirit to be creative as we worship God with all our hearts, minds, soul and strength, and love one another with the love God made us to share.

So let’s share our inspiration.  You are God’s masterpiece.  What do you look like as God’s masterpiece?  And what good things are you doing? It could be things that you’ve already done, are currently doing, or maybe some things that you haven’t done yet.

Draw something, write something, take a picture and post it below in the comments or bring it to church and post it on our bulletin board or post it on our Facebook page.

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Here are some of the responses currently on our bulletin board:

Here is a response from one of our UPC members:

Pastor Melissa asked us to think about what our re-creation in God’s image might look like. The story of creation from Genesis in the context of continuing re-creation reminded me of the way the earth itself continues to be re-created. We see re-creation in seasonal changes, but even bigger changes occur frequently. Island building in Hawaii is a good example. The molten lava rolling up from the depths of earth moves to expand the island’s surface area. The cooled rock is not friendly to life, but over the years it also becomes transformed into lush productive land.

That re-creative process is also destructive. The lava covers highways and demolishes buildings. The same process is true for other natural geological forces. Earthquakes tear down mountains; fire destroys vegetation; tsunamis wash away beaches and all that is built or stored on and around them.

Our own re-creation also goes through periods of tearing down before the new emerges. My retirement removed the joys and responsibilities of roles I had developed over many years. That change was long-anticipated and carefully planned. But then I consider others whose times of change come suddenly—unplanned and unwelcome. Carol’s stroke took mobility and some mental fluidity from her. So we are prodded to think about the destruction that accompanies re-creation, and wait patiently for what new creation will emerge.

Carol and I talked about this yesterday, and imagined what new focus has emerged for each of us through these changes. The reflection has helped us see ourselves and each other in our new contexts more clearly.

Thank you, Pastor Melissa

Arn

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[1] https://www.care.com/c/stories/4873/where-do-babies-come-from-the-best-and-funni/

[2] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=inspiration

[3] Lots more about this here:  https://darkwoodbrew.org/12705/

[4] http://www.pastoralcareinc.com/resources/sermon-helps/jokes-for-sermons/

[5] Three Minutes a Day, Vol. 27, Christopher Books. http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/c/creativity.htm

[6] As told at http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/trinity-sunday-a/?type=old_testament_lectionary#sthash.9Q7b7ZCj.dpuf

Generous Opportunity - A Sermon on Luke 16:19-31, Ephesians 2:1-10

Read Luke 16:19-31, Ephesians 2:1-10

What comes to mind when you think about heaven? 

According to studies, about 90% of us believe there’s a heaven, and about 85% of us think we’ll go there when we die.  Here’s something that is odd to me---80% of women think they’re going to heaven, but only 69% of men do.[1]

I’m betting just about 0% of us think of heaven as going to sit in the lap of Abraham.  Am I right?  But that’s what happens to the man in this parable we just read from Luke 16.  That’s just one of the reasons this is an interesting parable.  In it, we get three different scenes – one on earth at the rich man’s house where we see Lazarus laying outside his front door, and then two scenes of the afterlife – Lazarus in heaven with Abraham, and the rich man in hell in eternal torment.

Luke gives us vivid descriptions of both the richness of the rich man and the poorness of Lazarus:

·        The rich man is clothed in purple, the color of nobility or royalty, and in fine linen.  He eats sumptuously, feasting every day on fine food.  He lives in the lap of luxury. 

·        In stark contrast, Lazarus apparently has little or no clothes.  We know this because we can see his skin that is covered with sores.  He longs to have even just the crumbs from the rich man’s feast.  His only friends are the dogs who come to lick his sores. For the rich man it’s feast and for Lazarus it’s famine.

Notice that Luke doesn’t tell us the rich man’s name, but he does tell us the poor man’s name – Lazarus, which means “God is my help.”  Lazarus is the only character in any of the parables that gets a name.

In this parable, there are two great chasms. The rich man is in agony in the flames of Hades and calls out to Abraham in heaven for some relief.  But Abraham cannot help him because of the great chasm that separates heaven from hell.  Abraham tells the rich man that this chasm is uncrossable.  There is another chasm in this story. It is between the rich man and Lazarus in life.  This one isn’t uncrossable but it might as well be because the rich man does not cross it.  Maybe he doesn’t even see it, just like he doesn’t seem to see Lazarus.

Life and afterlife. 

This has been a busy week for my DVR recording TV shows.  Maybe it has been for yours, too.  This was the week that many TV shows started their new seasons, and some new shows premiered.  One of the new shows is called “The Good Place.”  It’s on Thursday nights on NBC (or any night on my DVR) and stars Kristen Bell as a woman who has died and wakes up to find herself sitting in an office.  Ted Danson is sitting behind the desk and reassures her that she has come to “The Good Place.”  The show doesn’t use the words heaven or hell, but that’s definitely what they want us to think.  Kristen Bell’s character is surprised to find herself in the good place for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that she wasn’t a very good person in life.  In the show, she keeps trying to cuss and the words will only come out as sanitized versions.  For example, she says fork a lot!  When Ted Danson explains to her how people get to the good place, he tells her that a remarkably small percentage of people are good enough to get in there.  Admission is entirely based on good deeds.

What’s wrong with that premise?  For a TV show, nothing because it’s fiction and you can do whatever you want with fiction.  But in real life, admission to heaven is not based on good deeds.  Salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ, and even that faith is a gift from God.  That’s what our reading from Ephesians 2 is talking about.

God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. ⁹ Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. ¹⁰ For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. (Eph 2:1-10 NLT)

We might be tempted to think that the story of the rich man and Lazarus is telling us that it’s the rich man’s lack of good works that kept him out of heaven.  It’s not his actions, although his actions are certainly telling.  They reveal a man whose heart was far from God, otherwise he would have been concerned about what God’s concerned about, namely people in need, like Lazarus. 

We have to be careful not to mix this up.  Through faith, the Holy Spirit renews us and guides us and helps us to do the good things that God has planned for us. We cannot earn salvation through good works.  But we find that our faith  and our gratitude for salvation prompts us to action. 

We see this sequence in the greatest commandment as well.  The first part is to love the lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. (Luke 10:27 et al).  That’s what gets us started, and what prompts and equips us to love our neighbors as ourselves.  Without the love of God, we will not be able to sustain the love for our neighbors.  The first part provides the motivation and the strength for the second part.

We see this in another parable – the story of the sheep and the goats.  Jesus says to the goats, “Away from me.  I never knew you.”  The goats ask for explanation, and he explains that when they didn’t feed the hungry or give water to the thirsty or welcome strangers, it is as if they didn’t do these things for Jesus himself.  The point is that those who love God and are seeking to do God’s will would have loved these people.  Our good works are the outflow or symptom of our faith.[2]

It’s like taking your computer in for repair.  For the technician to be able to figure out what’s going on in the computer, you have to give him access to it – the password to get in.  Otherwise he won’t be able to do anything at all and it’ll just stay like it was.  If you give him access, he’ll get into it and clean things up and get them running right again.  And it’ll run great for awhile and do lots of good things, but every now and then you’ll need to take it back for more clean up.  It’s like that for us, too.  For God to work in our lives we have to give him access – use the gift of the faith that he’s given us to accept the grace and forgiveness being offered, and accept the new life Jesus brings us.  And he’ll get inside and clean some things up and get us back on track and running right and doing good things, and the more we give him access, the more he can do in us.

When we let God have access, we get a generous opportunity, which is to do the will of God and to know the blessings that come with doing God’s will.  In the process God helps us change from a perspective of entitlement to one of stewardship.  We see entitlement in the rich man[3] – all this is mine and I’m entitled to enjoy it.  Instead, he could have been thankful to God for giving him all that he had and used his richness to bless others. 

God gave the rich man a generous opportunity.  God was generous to the rich man, and God generously put Lazarus right on his doorstep, a most convenient opportunity to share his blessings.

Whenever I read this story about the rich man and Lazarus, I get to thinking . . .  Who is on our doorstep?  It can be easier to be generous to different organizations, to send money off to different countries, and fail to notice the need right in front of us.

There’s a pastor who tells about a time when he was about to send away the stranger at his doorstep.  He lived in the house on the church property and a young man came to his door asking for help.  The young man turned out to be the son of one of the church families.  He struggled with alcohol and had gone away and come back so many times that his parents had given up on him.  The pastor was trying to keep up with a busy agenda that day and was feeling somewhat sorry for himself, so he wasn’t feeling very charitable.  He said to God, “Lord, I can’t take care of every drunken beggar in this town.”  In response, a voice seemed to say, “I didn’t ask you to take in every drunk—just this one.”  And so he did.[4]

What opportunities is God putting on our doorsteps to share the blessings that we’ve been given? 

·        Are we responding with cheerful gratitude or grudgingly minimal response? 

·        Or are we turning a blind eye, looking past those right before us to do something easier or more acceptable? 

·        Have we allowed a seemingly uncrossable chasm to exist between us and someone who needs our help?

One thing that is very clear in this parable – we don’t have an unlimited supply of opportunities to be generous.  The ultimate reality is that life is finite, and so are the opportunities.  Opportunity is on our doorstep, but so is death.  I don’t know if your week was like mine, but it seemed that death was in view daily.   There was a lot of it this week on my Facebook feed.  Three friends lost their mothers this week, and one her father.  We heard a lot this week about people getting shot.    Life and death is our reality.  Both are always happening. 

The juxtaposition of death and life this week got me to thinking metaphysically.  In our parable we see life and death almost overlapping, as both are in view in the telling of the story.  And I got to wondering….

 What if heaven isn't a place or a time (future) but a dimension that we only intersect with in fleeting moments in this life . . .because we are bound to this place and time and linear thought . . .but that we get glimpses of when we worship and when we touch sometimes heart and when we do something that impacts eternity?

And is so often the case, I discovered I’m not the first person to think about life this way.  You might already be thinking of some stories or movies that play with this idea.  Some ancient people had a theory about this idea.  The Celtic spiritual tradition says that heaven and earth are actually rather close together and that there are thin places where the distance between them is much smaller, where the veil between heaven and earth is quite thin.[5]  In those places it is easier to feel the presence of God and to have glimpses of heaven, and to see God’s glory.[6]

I do believe thin places exist, but I don’t think they are always static places.  There are certainly places that are special because they show us the glory of God through their beauty or because special things happen there.  But we ourselves have the ability to create thin places whenever we give God complete access to our hearts and lives.  We make thin places when we pray and sing and worship God with all our hearts.  We make thin places when we reach out to other people and touch their hearts.  We make thin places when we do the will of God.

“And the world is passing away along with its desires, but

whoever does the will of God abides forever.”

 –1 John 2:17

·        Churches can be thin places but they aren’t always. 

·        St.Vincent’s House is often a thin place for me, and for people who come there looking for hope and reassurance. 

I found a thin place this week watching the season premiere of the TV show The Voice.  This is a show where people come and sing for a panel of judges who can hear them but can’t see them.  The judges will accept or reject them based on their singing alone, and often based on some rather intangible qualities that can come through in a performance.  Many of these performers see this as their one chance to live their most deeply heartfelt dream.  Some of these performers have known incredible heartbreak and that comes through in their singing and allows their performance of that song to be a thin place.  Most of them don’t mention God, but I felt like I was hearing the heart of God through them. 

Where and when have you experienced thin places?

Sometimes a hospital room is a thin place.  There was college student doing an internship as a chaplain at a hospital.  It’s a tough internship at first because the student has very little training before they start visiting patients and their families.  In one of this chaplain’s visits, she walked into a room where a man sat beside the bed of his wife who was unconscious.  The man had just been told that his wife had very little time left.  He was angry at God and not much interested in talking to the chaplain.  He told her, “Unless you can tell me where God is in this, you can leave.”  The chaplain stood there unsure what to do or say.  She said a silent prayer.  “God, help me.”  And suddenly she was overcome by the man’s grief and she began to weep.  In that moment, through that chaplain, the man was able to see the heart of God.  God was there weeping with him.  And the chaplain stayed and sat with him for quite awhile.[7]  That was a thin place, a generous opportunity to encounter heaven on earth.

God gives us a lifetime of opportunities to know him personally, to know his generous grace, and to be a part of heaven on earth. Once we are dead, the opportunities have ended, but the most amazing thing about life is that every day, every moment is a new opportunity to have a fresh start and to find and create thin places through our heartfelt seeking of God and of sharing God’s love and grace with other people.  Sometimes it might seem like there are uncrossable chasms between us and God, and between us and other people, especially between us and people who are different from us. 

Every moment until we breath our last moment is an opportunity to cross those chasms, and to find or create thin places.

Let us thank God for all of these generous opportunities.

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[1] http://abcnews.go.com/US/Beliefs/story?id=1422658

[2] http://www.gotquestions.org/parable-sheep-goats.html

[3] Bruce Larson, The Communicator’s Commentary: Luke (Word Publishing)

[4] Bruce Larson, The Communicator’s Commentary: Luke (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1983), 236-7.

[5] http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2015-03/thin-places-week-s-readings

[6] http://www.explorefaith.org/mystery/mysteryThinPlaces.html

[7] Borrowed from Roger Nishioka who told a similar story to the Presbytery of the New Covenant at one of it’s meetings in 2015.