January 11, 2009

Clay Nelson

Epiphany 1     Genesis 1:1-5     Mark 1:4-11

This week the church began the season of Epiphany. Much like explaining a joke, the church uses this season to explain to those of us who are a little thick what Christmas was all about. We will hear evidence throughout the season how beyond all reason that baby in a manger is God with us. The hope is that at some point we will bang our foreheads and exclaim, “Ah! Now I get it.”

But being a little thicker than most, this first Sunday of Epiphany muddies the waters for me. It causes me to wonder about the nature of this god. Who or what is this god who is now with us?

In Genesis we have the beginning of one of the three creation stories in the Bible. Yes, three. Creation in seven days, Adam and Eve and Noah and the Flood are all creation stories unrelated except that they have all been put in the book of Genesis. Today we heard about the first day of creation, when God made the heavens and the earth and then day and night simply with words. Not a bad day’s work.

In our Gospel reading we hear that at Jesus’ baptism God rips apart the fabric of heaven, sends down the Spirit in the guise of a dove and speaks audibly to those attending John’s baptism of Jesus. It feels much like the beginning of another creation story. By God’s word a saviour is created to remake the world.

The god in these two stories is not one you will hear much about at St Matthew’s. This is an external, objective, supernatural deity. This is a personal god that walks with us and talks to us in the cool of the evening. This god is not attached to creation but beyond it and yet able to intervene within it. This is an unknowable god beyond our reach but who still reaches down from heaven to bless or curse us at will. This god is the divine parent able to see all and know all about us and is intent on rescuing us from ourselves.

This is also a god that many of us find neither credible nor plausible. This god requires suspending our disbelief. This is a god that many in the 21st century find impossible to relate to -- too removed, too distant from their daily lives. I find it no wonder that many find this god too unbelievable. Since I think it matters what our concept of God is or is not, I need more help than this morning’s creation stories give us.

Coming to my rescue for the second week in a row is my summer reading, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. In it he tells another creation story. We have all heard of the Big Bang theory, but Bryson explains that that theory is old school. The Big Bang theory requires taking all the matter that exists in the universe and squeezing it into “a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all.” [pp 27-28] This spot is called a “singularity.” The new version only requires about an ounce of matter. But “in either case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally,” he warns, “you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it won’t be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.

“It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. There is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no around around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be.” He goes on to note “we can’t even ask how long it has been there…Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.” [p. 28]

So in this respect the authors of the seven-day creation story and physicists agree, from nothing our universe begins. However, it didn’t take seven days for there to be a creation. In the first second, the big bang “produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe was a million billion miles wide and growing fast. Ten billion degrees of heat was generated, enough to begin nuclear reactions that created…hydrogen and helium and a dash of lithium. In three minutes, [in the time it takes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich] 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever was produced. We have a universe.” [p.28] Compared to the Big Bang, the God of Genesis was a slow, laid back slacker.

Another difference is the Genesis account suggests creation was a once and for all event, forever and unchangeable after the sixth day. In 2003 most physicists agreed that the universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago, but it is not finished becoming. Creation has never stopped and will never be complete as far as we will ever know. The earth and our solar system are quite young in comparison. They didn’t come onto the scene until 4.54 billion years ago and it was only about 200,000 years ago that people like you and me showed up.

It’s difficult to wrap our minds around the complexity and magnitude of the Big Bang creation story, and yet as wondrous as it is it does beg the question where is God in the story? While there are those who feebly argue God was the first cause of it all or it all reflects the intelligent design of the creator, for many it was the final nail in God’s coffin. For passionate rationalists it was the justification to reject the whole of religion, not just the theistic god of the Bible.

For me, however, the Big Bang did not kill God, but only our concept of God. It required our concept of God to evolve. Just as science casts off old theories when new information shows them to be inadequate, we must do the same with our theories of God. The reason I can’t fully join with those who would reject religion as one long mistake in human evolution, much like Communism and Fascism were short mistakes, is that science can’t answer every question we have, partly because it doesn’t ask philosophical and theological ones. Questions like the meaning and purpose of life are not answered in the equation E=mc2.

For instance, physicists say everything is made of atoms. As they are very small it takes a quite lot of them to make most things. For instance, in one cubic centimetre of our bodies there are 45 billion billion of them. Now the interesting thing about atoms is that they are not alive. If you were to dismantle your body atom by atom (which would take awhile) at the end you would have a pile of atomic dust that is not alive even though assembled as you they make up a living, breathing organism. Another interesting thing about our atoms is that because they aren’t alive they don’t die when we do. They hang around for a very long time. Later they may reassemble as a leaf, a slug or another person. They may stick around on earth or travel to the far reaches of the universe. Scientists suggest that the probability is high that each of us has a billion atoms that used to belong to Shakespeare and another billion from Genghis Kahn. It would even seem likely that we each have some of Jesus’ atoms as well.

While scientists can do some pretty marvellous things with atoms no one, other than Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, has figured out how to assemble them from scratch into a living, breathing entity. I suspect that life itself will remain a mystery as will faith, hope love and grace. These mysteries are beyond the capacity of science to explain or create. I suspect that they are at the heart of a new theory about God. Creating that theory is our task.

So while you relax on the beach this summer or walk in the bush listen to the creation around you and ponder what image of God helps you to make sense of your place and purpose in it. Give thanks for your being a part of it, for it is no small thing that you are here at all. Trillions of ancient atoms had to drift together to make you. All your ancestors had to survive long enough to create the next generation that would eventually be you. But here you are and if you are fortunate enough to live a long life you will have about 650,000 hours to fill. How you fill them will be the most important creation story. It will be the story of you and may your god be well pleased.