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Foundry United Rev. |
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“We Confuse the Sun for the Light” Sunday, January 25,
2009 |
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Genesis 1: 1-5
Rev.
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Next
week we are beginning a sermon series on “Christianity Without Easy Answers.”
I want to try to talk about what I believe Christianity is and isn’t and the
misapprehensions I think some others have about what we who go to church
think and do. They will be sermons
that you may want to share with your non-churched friends. (Our staff has
made a commitment to have an audio version of them on the web the same day so
that you can email a link to a friend you think might be interested in
hearing it.) I hope you also find these sermons helpful or at least thought
provoking. But I
wanted to talk today about the Epiphany image of light, and I want to focus
on the first creation story in the book of Genesis. We confuse the sun for
the light. Let us pause for a moment of prayer: Help us to walk, O
Creator God, as children of the light. Illuminate the dark places of our
minds, the shadowy places within our souls, the gloomy places within our
spirits. Shine your light on us, we pray. Amen. For
many years scholars have noted an anomaly in the first creation account in
Genesis. The anomaly is this: God creates light on the first day, and
separates light from darkness, and only on day four does God create the sun
and the moon and the stars…the luminaries that give light to the earth. There
are a number of theories about why the writers of this particular creation
account would have God create light before God created the sun and moon and
stars. One
theory is that the ancients who wrote this creation account never made the
connection between the sun and light, but I think this is very unlikely. I
don’t think the writers of this creation account were ignorant of the
connection between the sun and light. A
second theory is that the writers of this creation account were trying to
make a theological point. In a
world and a time when many cultures and religions worshiped the sun, perhaps
the writers of Genesis 1 were making the theological point that the sun is
not the real source of light. God is the source of the light, the sun and the
moon and the stars have no real power. They are only tools that God uses to
achieve God’s goal of helping to spread the light. They
wrote this creation account, remember, in a time when most of world believed
in astrology. Astrology was the leading science of the time. Even hundreds of
years later when Jesus was born, most of the world still believed in
astrology. The wise men were astrologers from the East who had seen Jesus’
birth in their astrological charts of the stars and the planets. The
assumption of astrology is that the stars and the planets and the sun and the
moon control our fate. Have you noticed that the Washington Post, one of the
greatest newspapers in the world, still prints a daily horoscope? The Post
has done away with “The Three Wise Guys” who were one of the highlights of my
weekend, but they use up column inches to print a daily horoscope. I assume
the editors of the Post print horoscopes because readers read them. And I
assume readers read them because part of us believes that the sun and the
stars and the moon have power to shape our fate. If you
believe in astrology, by the way, I don’t want to argue with you. There are
days in my life when my stars seem drastically out of alignment. But the
ancients writing the Genesis 1 creation story were trying to say that the
light comes from a creator God rather than from impersonal forces in the
universe. The great Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad said that
biblically, “The stars [including the sun] in no way create light but are
merely intermediary bearers of a light which existed without them and before
them.”[i] The creation account has light being created
before the sun and the moon and the stars in order to give the power to God
and not to the forces of nature alone. That’s at least one theory as to why
the creation account is written the way it is. I want
to suggest this morning a third theory, one that is consistent with von Rad
and others, but which takes their thought a bit further. I think
that there is throughout the Bible, repeated often, a way of thinking that
challenges our normal assumptions about cause and effect and means and ends.
We, most of us, find it hard or even impossible to believe deeply in an end
unless we can conceptualize the means of getting there. We can not give
ourselves fully to an end unless we can grasp the cause that will result in
that effect. We can
not imagine light without a source for the light like the sun or the moon or
the stars or an electric bulb. I think
the Bible again and again suggests that for God the means are secondary and
pretty much irrelevant. The end is what God focuses on. God
says “Let there be light and there was light, and God saw that the light was
beautiful” (which is the literal translation of the Hebrew). The sun and the moon and the stars are
afterthoughts. Light is the point. Maybe even beauty is the point. The
theological and philosophical and practical implication of this is that we,
too, need to stay focused on the end, and if we stay focused on the end, the
means will manifest themselves. Stay focused on the means and we may well
miss the end. There
is a story in the Bible almost nobody likes, except maybe Soren Kierkegaard.
It’s a story I don’t like. It is the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham
and Sarah have no children. God promises Abraham and Sarah that they will be
the parents of many people and a blessing to all nations. They get very old
and still have no children. How can they be the parents of many people when
they have no child? Then when Abraham was 99 years old and Sarah was 90 years
old, she becomes pregnant. They have a son, Isaac. According
to Genesis 22, God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and Abraham obeys
until at the last minute God provides a ram to be sacrificed instead. Sociologists
say that child sacrifice was the norm at that time in Semitic society and
what is significant in that story is not Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice
Isaac but God’s decision to stop him. Nonetheless,
I don’t like the story, the very idea of it, but I think the deeper point of
the story is this: that Abraham could not be the father of many nations and a
blessing to all humanity if his vision was dependent upon having a physical
child. If he could not envision the greater end but only one means to get
there, a biological child…he was not the kind of person who could do what God
wanted him to do. This
was the disciples’ problem. They had in their minds a specific idea of
messiah – what a messiah should do and accomplish…an idea of messiah Jesus
did not fulfill. The disciples expected Jesus to lead a political revolution,
not to die on a cross. That was the only way to the reign of God that the
disciples could imagine. It took the miracle of a resurrection to get the
disciples to open their minds to the end God had in mind rather than the
means they were locked into. I think
there must not have been a single African-American in Do you
know who did expect it? Martin Luther King Jr. Did you see the clip of an
interview they found with Dr. King before his death? An interviewer asked him
how soon he thought a Black person could be elected president of the The
reason for this is that Dr. King believed in the end even when he could not
see the means. This is why he could consistently remain non-violent, I think.
He believed in the end when the means to get there were not clear or
convincing to others. We
often lose our way in the movement toward justice, inclusion and peace
because we can’t see the means to get there. We settle for less because we
assume it will be impossible to get there. If
proposition 8 passes we assume the struggle for justice has been lost. If
General Council votes the wrong way we assume the We just
need to remain open to the path that will get us there. I
wonder if we can also believe this in our own lives – you and me? A friend
who is reading resumes for the new administration tells me that there are
apparently thousands of people whose lives will have no meaning whatsoever
unless they work in the new administration. [By the way, an extra piece of
advice for no extra charge: if you apply for a job it might be better to
emphasize what you have to offer rather than how badly you want the job. They
are more likely to hire you because you can contribute than because you
really, really want the job.] How
often do we get a job or a kind of job in our heads and think that it is the
only way to meaning in our lives. Have you heard of the book by Michael Gates
Gill? It is entitled How Starbucks
Saved My Life. The subtitle is A
Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else. Gill, a
child of affluent and powerful parents, was a very successful advertising
executive until his business failed and his life seemed to fall apart. His
life was in shambles when one day, sitting in Starbucks, a 28-year old
Starbucks manager asked him if he wanted a job and he surprised himself by
telling her yes. He says he learned from Starbucks and the 28-year-old
manager he worked with a sense of self-worth and happiness he had never known
before. Starbucks, he says, has turned out to be the best job he ever had. How
often do we confuse the sun for the light in our personal lives? How often do
we confuse the job for the work? How often do we confuse, say, finding the
life partner of our dreams for the joy of love and commitment? How often do
we confuse health for wholeness? There
is a Buddhist saying: “When the disciple is ready, the teacher will appear.”
The teacher appears because when the disciple is ready, the world is full of
teachers. This
biblical way of thinking, hard to believe, says: The world is full of
meaning. The world is full of happiness. The world is full of love. When we
are ready, it will appear. … Oh, one
more thing: Students of the Big Bang tell us that light actually emerged long
before the first star…millions of years before the sun and the moon and the
stars there was light. There really was light before the sun and the moon and
the stars, and it was beautiful.[ii] www.foundryumc.org |
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