And God Saw That It Was Good
It seems that it would be the height of understatement to say that this week has been… eventful. It’s not often that I get to a point in my life where I have to turn off the news and detach from the world, but that’s exactly where I found myself just a few days ago. It feels like we’re being lurched back and forth – every day brings a new challenge, a new injustice, a new anger, and even a new celebration. We’re seeing massive unrest, we’re seeing new spikes in the pandemic, we’re seeing people getting back to work, we’re seeing tentative ways in which our lives might resume some normalcy… and we’re seeing all of these things on a global scale.
We’re all used to being buffeted by both good news and bad news all the time in our lives. But usually the winds that blow with us or against us are much gentler breezes. Whereas the past 3 months now have felt like one constant hurricane season.
This past week a close friend of ours shared pictures of her parents’ liquor store up near Albany, which had been broken into and looted in the chaos there. She was grateful that no one was physically injured, but at the same time, her family’s ability to keep a roof over their heads and pay the bills is now in jeopardy (although she did say that at least some of the damage is covered by their insurance policy, so she’s grateful for that).
And at the same time that was all going on, I and my clergy colleagues – especially those in the Episcopal Church – were deeply upset at the use of violence against clergy and volunteers at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, to clear people out for a photo op.
And we’ve heard justifications and rationalizations of just about everything. Finger-pointing about who started it, placing blame, and there’s a zero-sum of we’re right and you’re wrong. And everybody has their own version of the truth.
For my part, I believe the people of St. John’s Church, who were there when a priest, a seminarian, and volunteers were driven out of their sacred space with tear gas. And I don’t take any comfort in US Park Police statements that it wasn’t really tear gas, because it wasn’t a specific type of tear gas.
And I believe my friend whose parents’ store was looted. Whose livelihoods are on the line because some people are just geared towards chaos and destruction. It’s a nightmare scenario for a lot of people – as we’re just starting to come through what’s hopefully the worst of the pandemic shutdowns, as businesses are just starting to open again, as huge sectors of our economy are just beginning to sputter back to life… to have that spark of hope and promise snuffed out by thieves and opportunists.
So, yeah… for my own sanity, and for the sake of my own mental health, I had to turn off the news for a little this week. Not to put my head in the sand, not because it doesn’t matter what’s going on… but because I’m already too well aware of everything that’s going on, and I do not thrive in chaos.
But chaos is what we’re given these days.
And that’s not always a bad thing.
Chaos is frightening and it’s upsetting and it makes most of us very, very uncomfortable. But as we see in Genesis, with God we can trust that out of chaos comes order. Out of the chaos of the formless void, God creates. Where there is emptiness and nothingness, God brings light and life. It’s work that God is still doing, from the vast reaches of distant space, where entire galaxies of billions and billions of stars and planets are crashing into each other, in a cosmic dance of chaos and creation. God’s work of creation is still at work on our own planet.
This isn’t to say that chaos is good for us, or that we should like it, or that we should embrace wanton destruction. But we do know that God uses chaos to create order all the time.
Out of the chaos of the void and coming into creation, God made all of us. God made people of different colors, different world-views, different skills and talents. God made some of us to be risk-takers and others to be more prudent. God made some of us to embrace new ideas and challenge old ways of doing things, and others to be defenders of tradition, to keep strong ties to our history and heritage.
And so, the question that I have, looking around at the unrest in the world today, is: Why would God create so many different kinds of people? Wouldn’t it make more sense, be more orderly, be more peaceful, if there were only a few kinds?
What would the world be like, if all of us, no matter where we were from, what our heritage was, who our parents and grandparents were… what if all people were purple? Or if we were all risk-takers, with no one to stop us from going over the cliff? Or if we were all traditionalists with no one thinking of new or better ways of doing things? God creates all of us for a reason. God needs each of our voices to be heard. Which, I admit, sounds great in theory… but in practice can be chaotic.
I want to share with you the closing chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans… Romans, chapter 16, and I’m going to paraphrase, because the list of names gets a little long, but it’s the names I want us to think about.
“I commend to you our sister, Phoebe, a deacon of the church of Cenchrae. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been a benefactor of many people, including me.
Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus… and the church that meets at their house.
Greet my dear friend, Epenetus, who was the first to convert to Christ in the province of Asia.
Greet Mary, who worked very hard for you.
Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who were in prison with me.
Greet Ampliatus. Greet Urbanus, and my dear friend Stachys.
Greet Apelles.
Greet the household of Aristobulus.
Greet Herodion, my fellow Jew.
Greet the household of Narcissus.
Greet Tryphena and Tryphosa, those women who work hard in the Lord.
Greet my dear friend, Persis.
Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother, who has also been a mother to me.
Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the other brothers and sisters with them.
Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus, and his sister, and Olympas, and all the Lord’s people who are with them.
Greet one another with a holy kiss…”
And the letter concludes with a call to watch out for those who would cause divisions, with a blessing of peace for the recipients of this letter, and that the grace of Jesus Christ may be with them.
Now. By my count, that’s 27 people that Paul goes out of his way to greet by name. Not counting the households, mothers, brothers and sisters, church members, and everyone else implied in the greeting.
And scholars have looked into the origins of those names – of the people that Paul is greeting. Some of them are the names of wealthy merchants and patrons of the church. Others are the names of well-known actors around Rome at the time. But there are names that we also wouldn’t expect. We see not just Roman names, but Greek names as well. And Hebrew names. Some names would have been associated with lower class stations and slaves. There are names from Africa and Asia Minor.
The church that Paul is writing to in Rome isn’t a monolith. It’s not a Roman temple for Romans for the glory of Rome. Or a Greek temple for Greeks for the benefit of Greece. It’s people from all over the Mediterranean world. From all stations. With all manner of talents and interests and abilities and passions. From the outside looking in, the church that Paul is writing to must seem a chaos. It’s just a mish-mash of people from all over, thrown together in small congregations all over the city, yet still one in the church of Jesus Christ.
The early Christian church… in Rome, in Jerusalem, in Ephesus and Corinth, in Ethiopia, Armenia, and everywhere it took root… was an exercise in beautiful chaos. They were cacophonies of different people and different voices, different experiences and ages. They were all different lives lived. And from that seeming disorder, God made a church to grow.
I don’t know what God is going to do with the chaos that we see in the world around us. Some people see plague and pestilence, rioting and looting. Others see people risking their lives in the midst of a global pandemic to cry out for justice. But the lens through which we see the world doesn’t matter nearly so much as what God wants to do with it.
And that’s a question that comes down to faith. I fundamentally, absolutely believe in a God who creates order out of chaos. Who brings light into darkness. Who pours love into a world governed by fear.
And I believe that God’s will is to bend his creation towards greater love, greater mercy, and greater justice.
I believe that God weeps when windows are smashed, stores are looted, and lives are upended. And that God weeps all the more when people give in to our tendencies towards anger and destruction. And when any human life is viewed as “less than.”
I do not know what God has planned to come out of the world as it is. Between pandemic and protests, struggling economies and people struggling to breathe… I don’t know what the outcome of all of this is.
But I know that I trust God.
I know that the God I trust is good.
I know that though our journey together is taking us through some valleys of dark shadow, that God will guide us through. Because this is God’s world. And we are all a part of it. We all belong in God’s creation. Each of us, made for our purpose within it. And in our creation for this world, God looked at us, and saw that it was good.
At the end of every sermon I conclude with a prayer for a blessing on the Word. This morning I thought it would be appropriate to conclude with the Prayer of St. Francis. It’s a prayer for peace often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, though it doesn’t appear in any of his writings that we know of. It’s origin is unknown, but it is still a well-known, widely-used, powerful prayer. The words are printed in the Order of Worship, and I invite you to pray them with me.
Let us pray.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offence, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
O Master, let me not seek as much to be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love,
For it is in giving one receives,
It is in self-forgetting that one finds,
It is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
It is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
Amen.
It seems that it would be the height of understatement to say that this week has been… eventful. It’s not often that I get to a point in my life where I have to turn off the news and detach from the world, but that’s exactly where I found myself just a few days ago. It feels like we’re being lurched back and forth – every day brings a new challenge, a new injustice, a new anger, and even a new celebration. We’re seeing massive unrest, we’re seeing new spikes in the pandemic, we’re seeing people getting back to work, we’re seeing tentative ways in which our lives might resume some normalcy… and we’re seeing all of these things on a global scale.
We’re all used to being buffeted by both good news and bad news all the time in our lives. But usually the winds that blow with us or against us are much gentler breezes. Whereas the past 3 months now have felt like one constant hurricane season.
This past week a close friend of ours shared pictures of her parents’ liquor store up near Albany, which had been broken into and looted in the chaos there. She was grateful that no one was physically injured, but at the same time, her family’s ability to keep a roof over their heads and pay the bills is now in jeopardy (although she did say that at least some of the damage is covered by their insurance policy, so she’s grateful for that).
And at the same time that was all going on, I and my clergy colleagues – especially those in the Episcopal Church – were deeply upset at the use of violence against clergy and volunteers at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, to clear people out for a photo op.
And we’ve heard justifications and rationalizations of just about everything. Finger-pointing about who started it, placing blame, and there’s a zero-sum of we’re right and you’re wrong. And everybody has their own version of the truth.
For my part, I believe the people of St. John’s Church, who were there when a priest, a seminarian, and volunteers were driven out of their sacred space with tear gas. And I don’t take any comfort in US Park Police statements that it wasn’t really tear gas, because it wasn’t a specific type of tear gas.
And I believe my friend whose parents’ store was looted. Whose livelihoods are on the line because some people are just geared towards chaos and destruction. It’s a nightmare scenario for a lot of people – as we’re just starting to come through what’s hopefully the worst of the pandemic shutdowns, as businesses are just starting to open again, as huge sectors of our economy are just beginning to sputter back to life… to have that spark of hope and promise snuffed out by thieves and opportunists.
So, yeah… for my own sanity, and for the sake of my own mental health, I had to turn off the news for a little this week. Not to put my head in the sand, not because it doesn’t matter what’s going on… but because I’m already too well aware of everything that’s going on, and I do not thrive in chaos.
But chaos is what we’re given these days.
And that’s not always a bad thing.
Chaos is frightening and it’s upsetting and it makes most of us very, very uncomfortable. But as we see in Genesis, with God we can trust that out of chaos comes order. Out of the chaos of the formless void, God creates. Where there is emptiness and nothingness, God brings light and life. It’s work that God is still doing, from the vast reaches of distant space, where entire galaxies of billions and billions of stars and planets are crashing into each other, in a cosmic dance of chaos and creation. God’s work of creation is still at work on our own planet.
This isn’t to say that chaos is good for us, or that we should like it, or that we should embrace wanton destruction. But we do know that God uses chaos to create order all the time.
Out of the chaos of the void and coming into creation, God made all of us. God made people of different colors, different world-views, different skills and talents. God made some of us to be risk-takers and others to be more prudent. God made some of us to embrace new ideas and challenge old ways of doing things, and others to be defenders of tradition, to keep strong ties to our history and heritage.
And so, the question that I have, looking around at the unrest in the world today, is: Why would God create so many different kinds of people? Wouldn’t it make more sense, be more orderly, be more peaceful, if there were only a few kinds?
What would the world be like, if all of us, no matter where we were from, what our heritage was, who our parents and grandparents were… what if all people were purple? Or if we were all risk-takers, with no one to stop us from going over the cliff? Or if we were all traditionalists with no one thinking of new or better ways of doing things? God creates all of us for a reason. God needs each of our voices to be heard. Which, I admit, sounds great in theory… but in practice can be chaotic.
I want to share with you the closing chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans… Romans, chapter 16, and I’m going to paraphrase, because the list of names gets a little long, but it’s the names I want us to think about.
“I commend to you our sister, Phoebe, a deacon of the church of Cenchrae. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been a benefactor of many people, including me.
Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus… and the church that meets at their house.
Greet my dear friend, Epenetus, who was the first to convert to Christ in the province of Asia.
Greet Mary, who worked very hard for you.
Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who were in prison with me.
Greet Ampliatus. Greet Urbanus, and my dear friend Stachys.
Greet Apelles.
Greet the household of Aristobulus.
Greet Herodion, my fellow Jew.
Greet the household of Narcissus.
Greet Tryphena and Tryphosa, those women who work hard in the Lord.
Greet my dear friend, Persis.
Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother, who has also been a mother to me.
Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the other brothers and sisters with them.
Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus, and his sister, and Olympas, and all the Lord’s people who are with them.
Greet one another with a holy kiss…”
And the letter concludes with a call to watch out for those who would cause divisions, with a blessing of peace for the recipients of this letter, and that the grace of Jesus Christ may be with them.
Now. By my count, that’s 27 people that Paul goes out of his way to greet by name. Not counting the households, mothers, brothers and sisters, church members, and everyone else implied in the greeting.
And scholars have looked into the origins of those names – of the people that Paul is greeting. Some of them are the names of wealthy merchants and patrons of the church. Others are the names of well-known actors around Rome at the time. But there are names that we also wouldn’t expect. We see not just Roman names, but Greek names as well. And Hebrew names. Some names would have been associated with lower class stations and slaves. There are names from Africa and Asia Minor.
The church that Paul is writing to in Rome isn’t a monolith. It’s not a Roman temple for Romans for the glory of Rome. Or a Greek temple for Greeks for the benefit of Greece. It’s people from all over the Mediterranean world. From all stations. With all manner of talents and interests and abilities and passions. From the outside looking in, the church that Paul is writing to must seem a chaos. It’s just a mish-mash of people from all over, thrown together in small congregations all over the city, yet still one in the church of Jesus Christ.
The early Christian church… in Rome, in Jerusalem, in Ephesus and Corinth, in Ethiopia, Armenia, and everywhere it took root… was an exercise in beautiful chaos. They were cacophonies of different people and different voices, different experiences and ages. They were all different lives lived. And from that seeming disorder, God made a church to grow.
I don’t know what God is going to do with the chaos that we see in the world around us. Some people see plague and pestilence, rioting and looting. Others see people risking their lives in the midst of a global pandemic to cry out for justice. But the lens through which we see the world doesn’t matter nearly so much as what God wants to do with it.
And that’s a question that comes down to faith. I fundamentally, absolutely believe in a God who creates order out of chaos. Who brings light into darkness. Who pours love into a world governed by fear.
And I believe that God’s will is to bend his creation towards greater love, greater mercy, and greater justice.
I believe that God weeps when windows are smashed, stores are looted, and lives are upended. And that God weeps all the more when people give in to our tendencies towards anger and destruction. And when any human life is viewed as “less than.”
I do not know what God has planned to come out of the world as it is. Between pandemic and protests, struggling economies and people struggling to breathe… I don’t know what the outcome of all of this is.
But I know that I trust God.
I know that the God I trust is good.
I know that though our journey together is taking us through some valleys of dark shadow, that God will guide us through. Because this is God’s world. And we are all a part of it. We all belong in God’s creation. Each of us, made for our purpose within it. And in our creation for this world, God looked at us, and saw that it was good.
At the end of every sermon I conclude with a prayer for a blessing on the Word. This morning I thought it would be appropriate to conclude with the Prayer of St. Francis. It’s a prayer for peace often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, though it doesn’t appear in any of his writings that we know of. It’s origin is unknown, but it is still a well-known, widely-used, powerful prayer. The words are printed in the Order of Worship, and I invite you to pray them with me.
Let us pray.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offence, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
O Master, let me not seek as much to be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love,
For it is in giving one receives,
It is in self-forgetting that one finds,
It is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
It is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
Amen.