7 Feb 2021 - Second Sunday Before Lent

Prov 8, Col 1, Jn 1

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It can seem as if there is a special event scheduled on almost every day of the year, and today, is no exception. Feb 7th is ‘Yorkshire pudding’ day and ‘Wave all your fingers at your neighbours’ day apparently. I looked it up and checked. Don’t ask me why these are to be celebrated today – there were no rational explanations!

In the church, today is the 2nd Sunday before Lent, or Sexagesima Sunday as it used to be known. It is also one of the few Sundays on which the Church of England decides to go it alone on the readings and do them differently. While today most of the rest of the church is reading Mark 2, about the call of the first disciples and the different experience of John the Baptist’s disciples, we are reading about creation. For this, there is a rational explanation. It is impossible even in a 3 year cycle to read the whole of Scripture on a Sunday morning or even just the most important passages. That is one of the reasons, you should read the Bible at other times. How about reading the whole NT or the whole Bible for Lent perhaps? Anyway, our readings today are altered to be about creation because there is no other provision to think about that outside of the Easter vigil or harvest. That said, I think the readings actually lend themselves to much wider thought than that, not least because there is one fundamental omission from this set of readings if they are meant to be about creation – there is no account from the book of Genesis.

Instead, we started with the great reading from Proverbs about wisdom. ‘Doesn’t wisdom call, doesn’t understanding raise her voice?’. ‘Ages ago I was set up at the first before the beginning of the earth.’ No need to have Genesis when you have it referenced in the other readings and here we have it all in the context of wisdom. The first point to note is that wisdom goes all the way back even before creation. Historical pedigree lent authority and authenticity, so the pedigree of wisdom was the highest it could possibly be.

Secondly in the passage, wisdom was present for creation. We don’t need to believe in 7 day creation for this, - in fact I would say that wisdom absolutely compels us not to believe in a literal 7 days. It is actually to misuse scripture. We simply to understand that there has never been a time when wisdom was not present. 

Thirdly, wisdom was not described here purely as a concept but as an individual – wisdom was actually personified and could rejoice and delight in things. It is important to note that wisdom was personified throughout this Old Testament book as feminine.

In the reading from Colossians, the focus was on Christ, as the firstborn of all creation, the visible image of the invisible God to quote the Good News Bible version. Again, the point here was to establish Christ’s historical authenticity and pedigree – that is what the ancient world valued most. Christ was clearly a person, and we were told, ‘in him all things hold together’. You can begin to see some overlaps here.

And then we come to great prologue of John’s Gospel. We are more used to hearing it at Christmas because we read it then every year. It only comes up here every three years, but this gives us a chance to listen to it differently and to delve into it from another perspective. ‘In the beginning’ clearly mirrors the opening words of the creation story from Genesis and so confronts us again with the link to the law and the prophets, but also that this was again about ultimate authenticity and pedigree. And what was in the beginning but ‘the Word’. And that ‘Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. So, the Word was pre-existing, identified as being present at creation, and identified therefore closely with wisdom. Christ was the living breathing Word of God, the personification of God’s wisdom, and the manifestation of the divine on earth.

So we see in Scripture a development of the concept of wisdom, from concept to personified, then to the word personified, and from there to Christ himself. All this is highly theological, rather more so than is usual perhaps for me, but then John’s gospel is by far the most theological gospel and perhaps of the entire New Testament. It also raises important questions about how we understand scripture and use it. This is called hermeneutics or the study of interpretation. What does it mean to say that God created the world or the Word, or any of this? And how are we meant to understand the creation accounts?

God has given us brains to use them, not to let them go flabby or let others do the thinking for us, - whether people we agree with or not, whether wearing a dog collar or not, whether preaching right now this moment or not. God gave us each a brain precisely so we could question things. So more than anything else, I would encourage you to question. Question everything and everyone. There are no un-askable questions.

So I want to talk on this creation Sunday a bit about creationism. There are clearly some people who believe that God created the world in 6 days. That is what creationism is, that belief. There are actually several different forms to it – I would call them all heresies – from young earth creationism through gap creationism to progressive creationism. Partly this is because they believe that the Bible requires them to believe things must all be taken literally. There can be no figurative interpretations only literal ones. Good Christian people can be made to think that if they are not fundamentalists and believe in 6 day creation, they are in some way deficient in faith or lacking in some way. I want to be crystal clear on this fact – that nothing could be further from the truth and I want to suggest that rather the opposite is true.

I am clear that I believe in God as the unoriginated originator and that he was the creator of everything, even that all things are sustained by him. But I do not believe, nor do I accept the need to believe, that all this was done in six days as we now understand the length of a day.  

I am happy to learn what the physical facts are from science. Science is us using those God given brains. The best understanding we have right now is the Big Bang theory that it all started from a singularity 13.8 billion years ago. I am happy to go along with that and Darwinian evolution, even though they don’t at least yet explain everything and have some gaps. These theories are currently our best scientific effort at explaining what we see, and the beauty of the scientific method is that we are always learning, always improving our understanding and without doubt we have yet more to learn so they will change.

So this hermeneutic that there is only one way to interpret the Bible, usually their way, of course, means that we would lose much of the rich tapestry of literature it contains. It certainly does not take itself literally and the number of times in which Jesus himself interprets passages figuratively should lead us to be suspicious of either limiting our understanding to one approach or of not being open to other understandings. Jesus repeatedly interpreted Bible passages in new ways and brought new ideas to people that opened their eyes positively to new possibilities. He didn’t close people’s beliefs down or limit them but rather opened them up.

We don’t need to contort Scripture or reality to fit. When we understand them properly, they are doing different but complementary things. I am not saying that science has always got everything right or that we should worship at its altar. Science cannot answer questions of meaning or purpose for instance. Rather I am saying that we should question and be prepared to look at the evidence and see what God might be trying to reveal to us through it. Better to have faith in a God who reveals steadily more and more of the wonders of this universe than a theology that only works if you ignore reality. Creationism is a corruption of truth and represents a lack of faith rather than greater faith.

As we prayed in today’s collect, our aim should be to discern God’s hand in all these things, and his likeness in all his children. If we do that, then the details of when it happened and how might be less concerning than how we are looking after the created order now; what wisdom we bring to our management of it; and what compassion we bring to bear on one another, whatever beliefs they may happen to hold. Amen.