Sermons from the Pulpit

     Up at the St. Lawrence River, from the windows of our camp, we can actually see weather changes - fronts - coming at us from Canada across the water. First, along with far-off rumbles of thunder, there's a color change, a massive area of grey-green darkness filling the sky over Brockville, Ontario. Then, a wind change. Coming from the northwest, there is this surge of power that moves across the waters, and the river takes on the color of the dark sky, its blues turning to murky tones of grey and green and black. And as the water changes color, it gets fierce and choppy. It stops looking like a river and starts looking like the ocean. At this point, we rush out onto the deck and cover the Nordic Track with a tarp and turn over the plastic chairs and bring in our towels and bathing suits. More often than not, we're too late. The front is like a sky monster - it has a discrete shape and size, and it moves so quickly that there's always a race. Before the rains and the lightening hit, those on land need to get inside, and small craft out on the river need to get to shore - fast.

     But safe inside our tight little camp, my family loves the drama of it all. Let the waters roar and foam! Let the winds rage! Cushioned by our relative affluence and bourgeois domesticity and illusions of control, we are awed but not undone by the storm's chaos.

     But once in my life I had a different experience, when I was undone, and I'll never forget it. It was October 1991- a Nor'easter, a storm that turned into something really big. Maybe you remember it. Michael suggested that we go to Hampton Beach - "to see the surf," he said, and, what the heck, I was game, and our daughter, then 10, thought it a great adventure. So we piled into the car and drove to Hampton Beach and found ourselves in the middle of a huge traffic jam caused largely by others like us who were there in their cars to check out the surf. Trying to avoid the main part of the strip, we turned to the right and ended up around a lot of dunes and not many houses. We got out of the car and started walking toward the sea. We couldn't see it yet, but we could hear it. It was deafening.

     Now, what I was expecting was a sea with its waves in the usual regular, ordered rows, only the waves would be much bigger, it being a storm and all. But what I saw shocked me. There were no discernible waves as such, but rather an enormous, beige-grey mass of churning, boiling Nothingness. No form. No boundaries. You could not tell where the sea ended and the sky began - it was all a blur, an indifferent, overwhelming blur.

     While I was standing transfixed by all this, Michael and Abby decided to get a closer look, and he took her to the top of a small rise which looked to me so perilously close to the raging sea that they were practically falling into it. My mother had died only two months before, and now, I thought, the two people who mean the most to me in all the world, my husband and daughter, are teetering on the brink of Primordial Chaos itself, about to be sucked right into it, lost. (I am nothing if not dramatic.)

     Needless to say, they were not all that close to the water, and my fresh grief over the death of my mother was of course coloring my vision. Nonetheless, at that moment I think I came pretty close to understanding in my bones the fundamental terror that human beings have of what philosophers call the "Nihil" - nothingness, the void. What the ancient Hebrew world called Tohu Wabohu. That's the title of my sermon - a transliteration of the Hebrew which the King James Version translates as "without form, and void." Both tohu and wabohu mean something like "chaotic," and the two words together literally make little sense, such as when we say "teensy-weensy". Just as "teensy-weensy" means very, very small, tohu wabohu means really, really chaotic.

     All was formless and void; it was chaotic nothingness. And then God began to create. God created from this tohu wabohu the heavens and the earth. Michael read from the King James Version because it's the only English translation in which we can see that there was a great poetic genius at work here. These are verses of pure wonder, and this wonder is achieved by words that are set forth simply and clearly - the account is so understated, it is almost bare.

     If you compare Genesis to other creation myths of the ancient world, you see right away the differences. This is the only creation story that doesn't pay any mind to where God came from. It assumes that God has always been. Nor does it get all carried away with what it was like before creation, how the various gods were born, how they fought with each other, had sex, and so on. No! Here there is only one God, and the only thing we know about this God is that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, In the beginning, God spoke, and it was so. God's word is God's deed. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.

     Maybe these lines are so familiar that we've forgotten just how stunning this is. From the beginning, God's orientation is toward creation. And creation is good! Here's where it all starts. Even though Genesis is not the earliest book of the Bible to be written, it's the one that starts the Bible off, and there's a theological significance to that. God created the world and calls it good - this is one of the great constants of all of Scripture. Everything follows from this. For all its pain and ambiguity, this creation is good, and it is the place where God does what God does. It's the place where God creates, sustains, and redeems. It's the place God wrought out of chaos for the purposes of life against death.

     Which leads us to the story of Jesus' baptism. For Christians, Jesus is taken as the supreme act of God's commitment to creation. We say that Jesus is God's own Word, God's own speech, the same speech that brought forth the creation itself, made flesh. And for this incarnate Word to be baptized, well, that says to me that God's own self is submitting to immersion in the muddy waters of the Jordan. In other words, Jesus is joining us in the muck of our human situation, our human predicament, even to the point of dying our creaturely death. It is a radical kind of solidarity. And just as God spoke pleasure over creation, so the heavens ripped open and God spoke pleasure over Jesus at his baptism. Into the murky deep and the god-forsaken death that the deep implies, the Word speaks and life begins. It is all grace.

     Life is stronger than death, existence stronger than non-existence, God stronger than chaos. As creatures, we are ever caught between these two poles, but our hope, our great and fervent hope, is that God is ultimately in charge. God's deepest yearning is for creation and all its creatures.

     The biblical record teaches us this: that for God, the world is so very good that it cannot and must not be abandoned; it must be redeemed. And so we must ask ourselves, at the start of a new century and a new millennium: what is our attitude toward this world? Shall we not work with God to mend it, with word and deed?

     Amen.