Last
week I preached on the end, so where better to start with this week than the
beginning (especially appropriate because this time of year is the beginning of
a lot of things: a school year, Sunday School and Confirmation, choirs, sports
seasons, you name it)? So, even as the seasons change, the harvest moves forward
and the leaves start to turn, this is still very much a time for new
beginnings. That can be good news and also bad news, because, even as we are
excited by new things, we—human beings—just happen to also be really terrible
at new beginnings. Even in the most subtly new situation we revert to our six-year-old self waiting for the bus on the first day of school. Even those of us who love going to school get nervous on the
first day; and it's the same thing with a first day on the job, first day of parenthood, first
day of retirement. For that matter, it's the same our first time driving a car;
first time on a plane; first time ziplining; first time riding a bike; first
time holding a baby. Every expert in every field had a first time, though by
the time we consider them an expert they have honed their skills and made it
look like they have been doing this forever. Of course they haven’t, and,
depending on the difficulty of their area of expertise, they were probably darn
nervous their first time. This is life.
In
Genesis we get an idea of why this is when we look at God’s creative process, and
when we do so it becomes clear that even God did not create everything all at
once--even God took God’s time moving from one element of creation to the next.
Much time has been spent by Christians debating the timeframe of creation—is a
day really a day or a billion years or what?—which happens to be almost
completely beside the point. What’s interesting is not the amount of time
between creative acts but that God took time at all. Maybe you’ve never stopped
to think about it but, if human beings are the crowning achievement and
stewards of all creation (as God says they are in giving them dominion over the
plants and animals), then why didn’t God just do it all at once: stars and
celestial bodies, day and night, water and sky, animals and plants, you and me?
Why take time at all?
All
of us understand that there is a process to creation. In fact, this is an area
where atheists and Christians, scientists (and even creationists) can agree:
The world was not simultaneously thrust into being all at once; rather, it grew
into being as a process over a course of time.
Perhaps even in
Eden God was aware of the difficulty of new beginnings.
But
there’s something else at play here, too. It isn’t just that God creates little
by little—from chaos into order—but at every step along the way God does
something that we never fail to undervalue: He calls it all “good.” We all know
the story—how Adam and Eve make a mess of things and we are sentenced to toil
upon the earth under the captivity of sin—and we know that because of this none
of us can save ourselves. But we should also remember that God did not, and
does not, take back his proclamation: when human beings were created, just like
stars and moons, animals and plants, we were created good, and on some basic level we still are. There is something in us that is still inexorably,
impossibly good.
But,
I can hear you saying “Just turn on the news!”—chemical weapons in Syria,
politicians debating long and hard about appropriate responses, killing to stop
more killing, impossible decisions brought on by an impossible situation
because, frankly, human beings are selfish and cruel. We have the capacity in
us to be terrible to one another, to do evil beyond measure. Very little in
Syria suggests a world that any loving God would ever call “good,” and as much
as we cling to the positive stories in any terrible situation the truth of the
matter is that there is no justification for evil in Syria, just as there has
never been justification for evils on the face of the earth, whether in the terror of Darfur in the early 21st century, the ghettos and
concentration camps of Poland in the 1940s, the plantations of the south in the
18th and early 19th centuries, or the villages of Europe
during the Bubonic Plague of the Middle Ages. Evil is evil, whether natural or
artificial. Worse still, even if we escape those human and environmental
tragedies we face disasters at home—car crashes and heart disease, depression
and alcoholism, Alzheimer’s and cancer. And even if we escape all of those none
of us can escape the sure and certain promise of a life that ends in death. It
is the only certainty east of Eden.
So
how can all of this ever be called “good”?
Well, maybe—just
maybe—human beings can be called good
for the same reason why we find beginnings so hard.
None
of us really know how to live. We act like it, sure. Some of us even write
self-help guides, or become life coaches, or pastors, or something equally silly. But the truth is that all of us are born with only the most basic
understanding of how to live our lives. We are born crying (a lot), completely
dependent on others to sustain us until we reach the point where we have
learned how to grab food and put it in our mouths, sip from a cup, and where is
an appropriate place to empty our bowels.
Our
mistake is in believing that we ever advanced much beyond that.
All of us are
stuck in one giant new beginning that we call life. It is only relative to our
mortality that things in our lives feel long or short. Older folks understand
this better because they have a more fragmented understanding of time; they are
forever telling us that days slip away so fast. Meanwhile, those of you who sit
in school all day are pretty certain that on some days time is not moving at
all. Albert Einstein once said, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and
it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a
minute. That’s relativity.” The truth is that all of our time is but a tiny
drop in an ocean. We know this, too. We have all sat in that classroom where
the teacher draws the timeline of creation across the span of a wall with human
beings taking up only a couple inches of the lifespan of the earth--not to
mention the comparable brevity of you and me! But what we don’t realize is that
this gives us a terrible perspective on understanding what it actually means to
be alive. This means that when we see war in Syria
it colors our view of the entirety of creation, just as Vietnam did for
my father’s generation, and World War II for my grandfather’s. We are a people
perpetually at war with things beyond us that feed us this idea that, because
human beings are capable of awful things, creation itself is not just broken but
irreparably bad.
This is just untrue. We are just terrible at seeing beyond ourselves to the truth that, at
our core, we are not only capable of doing good; in fact we still are good.
Tyrants can’t see it because they are too busy making a name for themselves,
seeking the ever-elusive thing we call “power.” The rest of us can’t see it
because we buy into the idea ourselves that the greatest power is a
destructive, right-hand force rather than self-sacrificial love.
This is no
justification for terror, no minimization of the trials that millions have
faced and still face today. The people of Syria
killed and maimed by terrible actions need to be remembered, just as those
killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz need to
be remembered; in fact, even more than they need to be remembered they need to
be vindicated. But—and here’s the part that’s difficult for us to
understand—they are vindicated already. Every person who stands up to evil,
even if they are cut down, is vindicated by the God who created them “good.”
This is what happened on the cross. It happened to Jesus, but it is reenacted
time and again in our lives whenever those who are innocent are subjected to the
right-handed power of the corrupt.
This is life down
here on earth. We are all of us sinners, cast out from Eden for taking the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, and saints—created good and redeemed in spite of our faults. More than that, we are
only in our infancy. This life that we live is not the sum of our parts; it’s
only the smallest sliver. You are much, much closer to that slimy baby that
came out of your mother than you are a finished product.
New beginnings are
rough. We’re each living proof of that. But beyond this new beginning is a
person—and a people—created and called “good.” We may never see it fully in
this life, but that is why we cling in hope for something better; that is why
Jesus came and died for you and for me.
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