Creation in a Time of Chaos
The act of creation wasn’t just a one-time occurrence. Creation is always ongoing, opening our eyes to new life—even in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. How can we tune the ear of our heart to notice the Spirit at work in our lives? How can that awareness give us hope?
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Transcript
I’m going to do this sermon a different way than I did at the early service. What could go wrong? Then God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God said, let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.
And it was so. And God said, let the waters under the sky be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. Then God said, let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it. And it was so. And God said, let there be lights and the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night.
And it was so. And God said, let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky. And God saw that it was good. And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind, cattle and creeping things, and wild animals of the earth, of every kind.
And it was so. Then God said, let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness. So I wanted to start with this text from Genesis, to put all of what we will talk about in in a deeper context, rooted. So this text was written in the sixth century BCE, when the Jewish people had been taken into exile.
We know it was written there. It was actually written. And I hope that you caught the form by setting it up that way and taking out some of the longer parts in those texts. I hope you caught the form. We actually think that this was a chant, a chant done as people would gather to pray. Someone would do like we did with the Psalms.
Someone would chant whatever stage that this was that God had made, and then the people would chant back, and it was so. And this text was written this way for a very specific reason. And that is when the Hebrew people, when they were taken out and taken back to Babylon, they encountered a deeper meaning of what they already knew about.
And that is the deep creation myths from different parts of the world. No one during that time lived, cut off or isolated. They all knew these rich stories that just saturated the world that they lived in when they were taken over to, Babylon, they encountered first hand those Babylonian ancient myths about how the world was made.
And those Babylonian myths were all about gods fighting. Other gods and defeating other gods, especially for the Babylonians, Marduk and Tiamat. So here’s your dinner party. Trivia. Marduk was the patron god of Babylon, and as their story goes, Marduk conquered Tiamat, who was a goddess of chaos. So you can see how that goes. Marduk, the god of order, the patron god of Babylon, conquers the goddess of chaos and brings order into the world.
And the way that that that happened is that Marduk cut Tiamat body in half. Half of her body became the heavens and half of her body became the earth. And they mixed the earth with blood and created humans. That’s where humans came from. Those peculiar creatures that are not like other creatures on the earth have something else to them.
So you can see how that would have made sense. So when the Jewish people went into that space and encountered all of this, they realized that their entire worldview, the order that they had known had been totally shattered. The stories that had held them up the temple called all of this, that had held their life and grounded them, had all been shattered, and they were taken into a land that was not their own.
And they realized what’s going to ground us. This is not our story. This is not how we make sense of the world. So out of that fertile, frosty shaded place came this hymn that is Genesis one. And the difference that this hymn has is that unlike other parts of the world where the gods had to fight each other, kill each other, divide up bodies.
Did you notice what happened in this text from Genesis one? God need only speak. God need only speak. And creation is brought into being. And by framing it that way, the Jewish people re grounded themselves and oriented themselves around the power and the presence of God’s voice. That’s all that God had to do, was to speak, and the entire world was brought into being.
That, my friends, is the subtext for this text from Jobe. So if you take this text from Jobe, get it in front of you, because that is the backstory for what we see this morning with this text from the Book of Job, because job is part of what we call the wisdom literature, which are these wonderfully rich text that all in their own way, that whole genre of text all focus on these deep questions of how we make meaning, how we make meaning of who God is, how we are connected with God, what part that we have in the world, how we make sense of the world and our place in it all of those questions are the rich, fertile ground of the wisdom text. And that’s what we have in front of us this morning. Is this piece from Jobe, and it says, listen, listen to the thunder of his voice and the rumbling that comes from his mouth under the whole heaven. He lets it loose and is lightning to the corners of the earth after it.
His voice roars. He thunders with his majestic voice, and he does not restrain the lightnings when his voice is heard. So there it is. God need only speak. His voice carries his power forward, and God brings all of existence into being. Through this powerful voice that here is lightning and thunder and rumbling and all of this that comes with it, this powerful sense.
So see how that makes sense? The sense of how do we make sense of ourselves? So for the Jewish, you know, people in their time who struggled to make sense. And there’s that wonderful line, if you think back to Psalm 137, the existential crisis that they found themselves in, who are way, who are we? How do we make sense of our life?
And that wonderful line from Psalm 137 says, by the waters of Babylon we sat down, and we wept when we remembered Zion. And it goes on and says, but our captors told us to make good music. Our captors told us to sing. And then that wonderfully, beautifully beautiful and haunting line. How can we sing our song in a strange land?
So it captures for us in so many ways how they felt and the text being the text, doing what the spirit does through the text. It also captures how we feel. And that’s where I think it really comes up alive for us is because we see, we see in them and their own story, our own experiences as well, don’t we?
How do we make sense of the world? How do we stay grounded? What frames us? How do we make meaning at a time of chaos, frustration, fear? All of this that all of us are feeling? We’re not the first people to feel this. It’s just our time to feel it if we think about it that way. So we look at these texts, we look at this Genesis hymn, we look at this text from Joe, we look at the Psalms and all of these pieces, and we say, how do we make sense?
Because how many of us have felt the same way that they did, that they captured in Psalm 137? How can we sing our song? How can we sing our song in a strange land, when our own land, for so many of us feel so strange, and we may not have been packed up and carted off somewhere else. But I bet you if we did a straw poll, I bet you a good many of us would.
We would raise our hand and say we feel like in so many ways, we’re on our own time of spiritual exile. So how do we make sense of this? Why do we go back to why do we keep at our fingertips? What grounds us? So these wonderful texts invite us to do that. And that’s deep work, because what we find is that we can’t outsource, that you can’t outsource that to some other group to do this work for you.
We can’t count on somebody else going into our home, sitting down with our families and taking over our calendars and scheduling less things. No one’s going to do that for us. We own our lives. We are responsible for our lives in that sense, and we’re challenged to pay attention to the choices that we make. Things we say yes to, things we say no to, so that we can breathe, so that we can find meaning, so that we can experience hope and times when everything feels like it’s been tossed up into the air.
And the spirit still does this. That’s why we have that, that little note in there that you’ll read. It’s not so much that we read the texts, but in this powerful way, the text read us, these stories read us back, and we encounter these deeper truths about ourselves. Centuries later, as the church says, John was exiled himself to Patmos, and in his own moment of existential crisis wrote those words.
So I’d like to end with these. So if you flip to the revelation text, this is the work we’re called to do to pay attention for the movement of the spirit in our lives, to pay attention to where we feel pinch, to pay attention to what feeds us and what does not to pay attention for that yearning within us for hope and fulfillment.
And let John’s words be a prayer for us as we own and name our own deep yearning and searching. And John said, and I heard a loud voice, there it is again from the throne, saying, see, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them, and they will be God’s people, and God himself will be with them.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more. For the first things have passed away, and the one who was seated on the throne said, see, I am making all things new. And he said, write this, for these words are trustworthy and true. Amen.