Creation
Lord, What are Human Beings? - Creation
Swanbourne 21.2.21 Lent 1
In the 1960s the long-term erosion of the traditional Christianity was experienced in Australia. This was similar to the same process common to most western European societies such as Australia in the same period. It is a process known to historians and sociologists as secularisation. This might be described as the loss of a sense or the importance of the sacred in life. This process of secularisation led most commentators of the time to a pessimistic forecast for religion in Australia. The most famous example is Donald Horne, whose book The Lucky Country was a best-seller when it came out in 1964. Fundamentally, Horne said, Australia in the sixties opted for what was called ‘the permissive society’. Horne meant that what was important for Australians was not the spiritual values of Christianity but a secure material standard of living supported by a secular ideology of fraternity, and equality or mateship. Australian values, except for those who were traditionally religious, was apparent in its three major festivals - Anzac Day - ‘the Festival of the Ordinary Man’; Christmas Day - ‘the Festival of the Family’; New Year's Day - ‘the Festival of the Good Time’. Australians were content with the pursuit and realisation of material sufficiency. As far as traditional religion went, Horne believed the churches ‘did not matter much to most Australians’, aside from claiming a nominal, almost tribal, adherence to one of them and using that Church for rites of passage. ‘Hell’, said Horne, ‘had been abolished as unfair to underdogs’ while all had a ‘fair-go’ of Heaven. Horne believed the1960s saw the triumph of the consumer society over the values of the Churches.
Horn’s book was written some sixty years ago, but his analysis of Australia as an essentially materialistic secular culture remains essentially accurate today. There are far more people at the beach, coffee shops, out for breakfast, walking and exercise on Sunday mornings than are in any church, mosque, synagogue or temple. Sundays are no longer a day of rest and Christian devotion but a day for work or shopping with the family or recreation. These activities are centred around self-satisfaction and the family and these values have almost completely taken over in Australian society, so that volunteer work helping others outside ourselves and the family has drastically reduced and tends to be done by older Australians where it is done at all. Universities, which used to be about the education of the mind in cultural, intellectual, and even spiritual values have turned into advanced vocational colleges where the emphasis is on getting yourself a well-paid job so that money can bring happiness. What matters to most Australians is this life, and its physical and material enjoyment.
As Horne recognised, the Christian faith stands in increasingly stark contradiction to all of this prevailing Australian understanding of human life and existence.
But why should there be anything at all, rather than just nothing? Why should there be a universe and life within it?
The first cause of the difference between ourselves as Christians and most Australians is an answer to that question. Christian faith says that life is not some biological accident or purely a scientific development to be completely explained by evolution. Life, all life not just the human species, is the creation of the good God. So life is a consequence of not only of biological and astronomical processes but fundamentally the action and purpose of a Creator who is good. A Creator who brought the universe into being, and life within it, for no other purpose than love, a love that is almost beyond our comprehension.
Once we start to think about creation as more than just us our comprehension of God as creator becomes vastly more mind-blowing. The light of our sun takes about 8 minutes to reach earth which, given the speed of light, means that our very average sun is a star about 93 million miles away. The light from our nearest star-sun take about 4 years to reach us, and the galaxy of which we are both part of contains about a hundred million such suns, the light of the furthest away from us takes about 100,000 years to cross our galaxy, and there are about one hundred billion such galaxies visible to modern telescopes. And it all began, as most cosmologist now believe, from a big bang of infinitely dense matter that we are still riding on some 15 billion years later. And in all that immensity, on our planet, over millions of years, life developed from single cells into millions of species the plant and that live on earth, and finally into human beings who are conscious and can communicate that consciousness in a multitude of ways, artistic, practical, intellectual, spiritual..
So it may seem almost meaningless to talk about creation as an act of love of the good God acting upon slow coagulations of fiery gas in the immensity of space and the minute cells of life. It requires us to accept we need a huge enlargement of our normal concept of love. This is a different love than ours; if you like, a million times bigger. As Bishop John V. Taylor wrote:
A necessary step towards realizing that the difference between God’s bigger love and ours is to recall that the essence of any love that is more than sentiment is an ardent will that the other should be and a disinterested delight in the other’s being there. . . To talk of God’s love for the universe holding it in being during the vast unfolding of its physical form is to speak of the divine self-giving that wills, and delights in, the existence of this other. [ John V. Taylor, The Christ-like God, 180]
If both the universe and life on this planet are an unfolding changing developing reality it means that this is a reflection to the Creator God. Not a static God creating a static creation, but one in which God works within it to bring forth advancing complexity, In the same wayj the first chapter of Genesis in its mythological story of creation presents God’s work as a progression from original formlessness to inanimate matter to life and finally humanity. Some scientists and many more others in our society like to reduce the universe and life simply to its physical processes so that everything from astronomy to moral decisions and mental processes can be explained in terms of physics and biochemcial processes. But quantam physics and recent biology has shown that formerly stable processes can suddenly change into new ordered patterns and different and peculiar systems. Life and the universe are not predetermined purely physical realities but full of potential and the formerly unrealised and unexpected. Had our planet not come into existence in just the right distance from the sun, rotating in nearly circular orbits so that extremes of temperature were avoided, life here could never have evolved.
So, if we follow the science and choose to read the universe and life as facts with a purpose then those facts do not refute us. That there is a Creator, lovingly involved with his creation, and having an end in view which God never abandons, such a belief is not something to be dismissed like most Australians; or to be ridiculed by aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins. It is a belief that has a large amount in justification in modern science, as well as with the faith we have inherited from our Lord Jesus Christ and the ancient Hebrew scriptures.
Our belief in a Creator and creation means that this wide diverse universe was created for a purpose. Amidst that wonder human life has come into existence also for a purpose, a purpose of its Creator. God created us for a purpose. If we as conscious human beings are not a biological random event, accident, or merely a mechanic of physical evolution, but are a species of God’s creation, a creature of God, then what does it mean to be a creature in this way?
Modern biological science can tell us a lot about human beings, and how they work, but science cannot tell us about the purpose of human life. One answer to the question of our purpose could, of course, be that, human beings have no purpose we simply exist for no reason at all. So that human beings are like the psalmist says:
For we see that the wise die also, with the foolish and ignorant they perish
And leave their riches to others.
Their tomb is their home for ever, their dwelling through all generations,
Though they call their lands after their own names.
Those who have honour , but lack understanding,
Are like the beasts that perish. (Ps.49.10-12
In contrast, our faith says that there is a God, this God created everything out of nothing, and that means that all existence, and most of all us human beings, have a purpose. There are many things we might want to say about what it means to be human part of God’s creation, particularly that we are connected to the other creatures of God’s world. However, I want to concentrate here on just one, the most important. If we follow the Genesis story of creation for its insights seeing it as some sort of scientific textbook then those ancient Hebrew writers affirmed that God’s purpose in creating us is that we should be the image of God. As Genesis affirms:‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’
There have been many ideas about that this being in the image of God means, from supposing us to bear an actual physical resemblance to God, to locating the image in what was thought to be the best part of us, our reason. But we are more than reason and God is certainly something other than physical. The best insight I know of into the meaning of how we are made in the image of God comes from the Anglican theologian John Macquarrie. Macquarrie points to the idea of true existence as openness. So he says, ‘Just as God opens himself into creation and pours out being’, and that consequently brings all things not just into being but nurtures their evolution, ‘so’, says Macqaurrie, ‘man is most truly himself and realizes his essence in the openness of an existence’ to life and to God. [John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 230] , So, perhaps to make us a species open to life, God quite intentionally created us through the slow slow process of evolution
In other words, we human beings are not truly and fully and completely ourselves, as God in his creation of us intended, unless we are both open to others and to God. Judging by the behaviour of most Australians on Sunday mornings, most people can manage the earthly part of such openness; but are blind to the most important part, the openness to God. Only if we are open to God can we fully, properly exist, because God is the creator and source of all life, indeed of all there is, and we are hardwired for such openness. If we don’t open ourselves to God we create other gods to worship - ecology, climate, anti-racism, or whatever.
Because we are the creation of God was have been created with the potential for such openness to others and to God. This is how our Creator intended us to live. We can see what this might be like in a story told by the priest of the French village of Ars, John-Marie Vianney, who became a saint through his care of this nineteenth-century rural village. The villagers were like so many people, open to each other but not to outsiders, and pretty closed to God whom they regarded with just as much suspicion as they did strangers. However, after many years of devoted ministry the grace of God began to open these rugged villagers up in wondrous wholesome ways. Of one of them St John Vianney told this story.
A few years ago there died a man of this parish who, entering the church in the morning to pray before setting out for the fields, left his how at the door and then became wholly lost in God. A neighbour who worked not far from him, and thus used to see him in the fields, wondered at his absence. On his way home be bethought himself of looking into the church, thinking that the man might be there, As a matter of fact he did find him there. ‘What are you doing here all this time?’ he asked. And the other made reply: ‘I look at the good God, and he looks at me.’ Whenever he told this anecdote - and he did so frequently and never without tears - the cure used to add: ‘He looked at the good God, and the good God looked at him. Everything I sin that, my children.’
We live as a creation of the good God amidst the wonder of a vast and also minute creation, from flaming stars to microscopic cells and virus’s. In all that existence and life, human beings were, if we follow the Genesis story, created particularly to bear the image of God in our openness to others, to other existences, and to God. Most Australians have forgotten or dismissed or are ignorant of their creation and its purpose. For that reason, if for no other, the truth of existence needs to be kept alive here, just as it is also in various little churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples where the openness to God at the heart of our created purpose is expressed and experienced in worship.
Lent Group Discussion Topics
1. Is the presentation of a secularized, material-focused Australian society accurate in your experience?
2. Is God the Creator a meaningful doctrine in your life and Christian faith?
3 How does the story of Genesis figure in your faith?
5. Is there a purpose to life? What is it and how does it connect to your Christian faith?