15.6.14
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth
when they were created.
It’s just a rounding-off phrase, almost a throw-away line, a short summation of all that has gone
before, one that hardly gets a mention in biblical commentaries, but it seems to me that it’s a phrase
that gives a little insight into how we are to understand the mystery at the heart of our existence.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth
when they were created.
The writers of the first section of Genesis, which finishes with this phrase, were saying not that
creation was a series of unrelated acts, but that creation is the process of one generation succeeding
another. Each generation grows out of, and depends upon, what has come before. Creation is a
cumulative, step-by-step, progression, in which God creates by means of what one generation gives
to, bequeaths to, the next. If we were to come up with a word to describe this biblical
understanding of how our creator God acts, perhaps we might coin a term something like
‘evolution’.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth
when they were created.
But there is something else in there as well. It’s something that can sometimes be obscured if we
reduce our thinking about creation to a creator whose creation is completed in a single act, or even
a series of acts. And that is that what is being described right at the beginning of the bible is right
from the start to be understood in terms of relationship. Each stage of what is laid out for us is
related to what has gone before, and to what comes after – and God is related to it all, to them all,
to us all. God is not just the maker, but the father, the mother – not concerned simply to bring
something or someone into being, but concerned to sustain the life that has been made.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth
when they were created.
And humanity has always found that hard to comprehend. We began our service this morning with
the words of the psalmist:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Historically, humanity has found this whole idea of relationship difficult to get its collective head
around, and has also found it at times a bit restricting. It’s an idea that has a tendency to get in the
way, to put limits on what we can justify. It does, after all, relate our freedom to that of other
people; it relates our ‘progress’ to the cost it imposes on the world we live in, on the creatures with
which we share that world, on the environment that we and they share and depend on.
Generations are related, and the relationships involved cannot be undone or wished away; they are
part of who we are: part, literally, of our DNA. You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose
your family – you’re stuck with your family, and we’re stuck with the fact that we are made of,
related intimately to, the dust of the earth – from which we come, and to which we shall return.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth
when they were created.
But the mystery of our relationship to God, and to the rest of God’s creation – and our attempts to
get our heads and our lives around that mystery – have led us to try to get our heads around the
mystery of God. We have begun to realise that if creation, including us, is all about relationship,
then maybe the source of that creation is also about relationship.
And over the years and the centuries – and the generations – the thought began to emerge that, at
the very heart of all that is, relationship might hold sway – and might be the key to the mystery that
is God. And so we went back to look at how our ancestors in the faith had understood God and
God’s actions and God’s ways, and we noticed this:
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.
The word for wind, ‘ruach’, is also the Hebrew word for ‘spirit’, so in a sense those who wish to
translate are making their own decision about which word to use – but, whichever word you use,
there is here the thought that there is more than one facet, or understanding, of God. So bear that
in mind while we take on board another thought – and that is that this whole passage at the
beginning of Genesis is an attack on the thought, common at the time it was written, that there are
many gods. This passage was a proclamation – the proclamation – that God is one.
There were many ideas around the ancient world: of how many gods battled with each other, or
made love to one another, or vied with one another, and this is how the world came into being. The
passage we are looking at this morning, placed before everything else in the bible, is there to say
that there is one God – the creator, the sustainer, the stirrer, the carer, the father, the mother. Use
what description you want, there is only one reality behind it all.
But that reality creates relationship, and therefore must itself be relationship.
Why does all this matter? It matters because of what we think might be passed from one generation
to the next. On Trinity Sunday, on Fathers’ Day, on the day when we baptise Max, it is important to
realise and to remember that each new generation is the recipient of the love of God; each new
generation is the bearer of the image of God; each new generation is a seeker after the mystery of
God.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth
when they were created.
For many, and for a long time, what is passed from one generation to another has been understood,
following Augustine, as being nothing but human sinfulness. It is a view that leaves us both helpless
and hopeless – but also, in a strange kind of way, blameless. If we get things wrong, if we do things
wrong, it is then possible to say that that’s just the way we are – there’s nothing we can do about it.
But, while there is undeniably a tendency in humanity to get it wrong (we are, we say, only human
after all), that tendency is far from being the end of the story – indeed it wasn’t even the beginning
of the story.
The beginning of the story is the unfolding of a divine creation, generation by generation, step by
step, wonder by wonder. The beginning of the story is of a loving God who creates in the Spirit and
calls a people to be a relationship of love for that creation. The new beginning of the story is of a
loving God who re-creates in the Son, and who calls all people to live, in relationship, the love of his
way. And, generation by generation, the love and the call are recovered and renewed.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth
when they were created.
Today, as we celebrate with Max’s family, the generation of a new creation, we do not summon a
divine love into his life that has not been there before. We celebrate a divine love in which he was
created, in which he is forever held, by which he is daily commissioned. Max is today set at the
centre of our gathering because in him is gathered all the mystery and glory that is God and the
people of God; in him we wonder with the psalmist how it is that God cares for us; in him we
acknowledge with the psalmist that we carry that care wherever we go.
With him, with his new generation, we offer what previous generations – and we – have been
offered: that relationship of love that God has set in us and in all creation, that relationship of love
that we seek to live and to show, that relationship of love which is the will of the God whose very
existence is relationship – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.