Blessing
/God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
-Genesis 1:31
This Sunday we will read the cosmic creation story of Genesis 1 - in the beginning. It’ll be read by a team of St. James parishioners during the live Sunday service with Bishop Rob. It is such a well known passage that sometimes we don’t listen to as closely anymore, because we assume that we already know what it says. So this week, I’ve made an effort to pray with Genesis 1 and listen to it with fresh ears.
I couldn’t help but pause each time it says, “And God saw that it was good.” And after God creates human beings and places them amidst the rest of creation, it says that “God saw that it was very good.” I admit I haven’t been feeling all that positive about human beings just lately. Good? I guess I’m not so sure right now… Then there was the oft cited verse about God giving humans dominion over everything that was created. God not only thought we were very good, but God trusted us to steward all of the other good things God had created. I found myself wondering this week if God had made a mistake about this. I mean, we’ve really fallen down on that stewardship job throughout history.
I kept reading. I kept listening and praying. The passage says that we are made in God’s own image. It was God’s magnificent creativity that imagined us - and everything else - into being, which is an awesome thought. Everything that is, including us, are part of an amazing piece of art. So maybe there is more to us than we usually assume. Maybe, despite our many human missteps, we carry possibilities within us that are more than we can know. Maybe God’s trust in us is based on God’s own creative confidence in a way we can’t comprehend with our human minds
God put humans on this earth with a blessing, from the very beginning. God bestowed an ‘original blessing’ upon us before we ever fell into any kind of ‘original sin’ in the garden story. This gives me hope that God’s love and blessing is what resides at our deepest core, no matter what we’ve managed to cover over that blessing over time. I was grateful to feel a glimpse of hope that goodness is still and always there, waiting to be reborn.
This awful time of trauma and stress that we’re all living through is leaving us all exhausted. Just the emotional work of this time is significant, let alone all the practical work and worries. I was therefore also comforted that in this passage, God rests on the seventh day. If our magnificent creator God needs to pause for rest, we, who are reflections of God also need to pause - to rest, regroup, get ready. God, the one who did all the creating, calls a day of rest holy.
Just last week I returned to intentionally claiming my Sabbath rest day on Fridays, which had kind of gone out the window for a few months there. I’m not going very far or doing anything exciting, but on Fridays, I remain unscheduled and away from the news, email and social media. I need time to rest and take a little quiet time to live back into God’s blessing in the midst of all the sorrow and pain of the world.
But it’s not a vacation. It’s an affirmation of God’s care for us and an essential tool of well being - the kind of well being we all need to enter back into this fallen world with love and hope still aglow in our hearts. We are called to be carriers of Christ’s flame, even when the world all around us is burning with anger and fear. When the cold wind of hatred threatens to overcome the way of love, we must know that it is only be resting in Christ that we can keep our focus on love no matter what.
Genesis 1 is echoed in the first chapter of the Gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
Amid all the many draining events and changes we’re weathering, I hope you are finding ways to rest in the foundational love and blessing of God, so that, when hear God calling us to stand up and act, we will have the clarity and the confidence to face whatever comes our way in the way of Christ.
This Sunday we won’t be having our regular Sunday video. Rather, we’ll be participating live with the bishop at 9am on Sunday morning via zoom. Coffee hour moves back an hour to 10 am. This will be the Sunday summer schedule for the foreseeable future.
