Genesis 1:1-5
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
The first chapter of Genesis gives us a story of how we came to be - how everything came to be. I don’t care if you want to talk about six days or 4.5 billion years – it makes no difference – God still created it all, and at every stage of creation, the story tells us, God looked at what had been done and pronounced that “it was good.” At the end of the entire process, at the end of the sixth day, God saw everything that had been made, and decided that indeed, it was very good.
If everything that is was initially created with so much approval, so much affirmation, how on earth have we ended up today with a world full of Christian churches focused so exclusively on evil? It makes no sense to me. How did the God who made everything with love and passion and heart-felt approval end up being the harsh judge always on the lookout for sin? Why is sin our primary focus? Why do so many of us live out our lives taking it for granted that we are doomed and damned? I have been told - flat-out - by many people over the years that they know they are going to hell because they are so bad – and I’m not sure that anything I have ever said changed anyone’s mind by even the smallest percentage point.
I suspect that many of us were trained by our past church experience to recognize sin when we saw it – in others and in ourselves. Then we were taught that Jesus died for those sins - but that doesn’t seem to have really changed things for an awful lot of folks - they still seem to see themselves as sinners, not as forgiven – never as loved and cherished anyway. None of this makes much sense to me either.
Worst of all, many of those of us who call ourselves Christians seem to take an almost gleeful joy in telling other people that they are sinners and they are doomed. Sinners, sinners everywhere and not an ounce of grace to be seen.
What difference might it have made in this world had our churches – from the beginning – actually preached and taught what scripture says so clearly in its very first chapter: God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good? Imagine if you had been taught all your life that you are very good. We know that it works the other way around – raise up a child by telling them constantly that they are no-good, worthless, useless and you almost always end up with an adult who has lived into their belief in that teaching - a no-good, worthless, broken human person.
I had the great blessing of being raised in a family that told me I was good and that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I wanted it. I wasn’t spoiled - I wasn’t allowed at all to run over other people – I just wasn’t trained to see myself as a failure from the start. I grew up thinking everyone was raised this way and it was a hard lesson to eventually learn that I was, apparently, in a minority of the world’s population. It wasn’t in my home but in the churches of my childhood that I was taught I had to watch out for the punishing God. In all honesty I’m not sure that was the intended lesson, but it is the one I learned, nonetheless.
Why have our churches not been teaching love and respect all along instead of sin? Why did they - why do they not teach the grace of being created good? How did the God who loves and forgives get to be presented to most of us as the old man with a clipboard, trying to catch us sinning so he could punish us?
How did we manage to mis-hear so much of Jesus’ message? And how do we get out of this mess? It’s as if we are constantly being offered this incredible gift of unconditional love...and we keep refusing to accept it. You do understand that unconditional means just that - no conditions - zip, zilch, nada, NO conditions. Instead of believing in that love and affirmation we just keep making more and more rules for ourselvesas if the rules will save us – I guess because it is assumed that we cannot be trusted to live like decent beings if we aren’t constantly constrained by rules. And the more rules we make, the less we believe in ourselves, because we wouldn’t have rules if we didn’t really NEED them - right?
I believe that God’s creation is good and beautiful and cherished. I do. My head know this and my heart knows it too. It’s my vision, I think, that needs to be retooled so that I don’t see a not-very-clean homeless person on the street, I see a child of God - my brother. My ears need work, too, so that when I hear someone spouting classist, racist drivel I don’t hear a hateful person to be scorned, I hear my misinformed and possibly hurting sister.
My feet need to be trained to not automatically walk away from those who are different from me, but instead, to walk with them. And my voice needs to learn to not allow hurtful, dividing words to ever come out of my mouth.
The church, which should have been teaching us all along that we are one, has been instrumental for centuries in dividing us. It isn’t going to be easy to put us back together as we always should have been – to heal us. When I was a kid little gift shops always had signs up that read something like “if you break it, you own it.” Christians – the inheritors of Christ’s message – have broken Christianity, whether wittingly or unwittingly, it is broken. We need to own that and get busy fixing it.
It won’t be easy. We need to learn to say “yes” to the affirmation. We need to believe in the love for ourselves, and then maybe we can help heal others. We will need to work every day to re-affirm the goodness and re-issue the invitation – and a little humility on our part would probably be helpful, too. It will take prayer and effort and commitment on our part - and a ton of trust and belief in a loving, life-affirming God.
Can we do it? We have to start. Please, God, let us start. Amen.
If everything that is was initially created with so much approval, so much affirmation, how on earth have we ended up today with a world full of Christian churches focused so exclusively on evil? It makes no sense to me. How did the God who made everything with love and passion and heart-felt approval end up being the harsh judge always on the lookout for sin? Why is sin our primary focus? Why do so many of us live out our lives taking it for granted that we are doomed and damned? I have been told - flat-out - by many people over the years that they know they are going to hell because they are so bad – and I’m not sure that anything I have ever said changed anyone’s mind by even the smallest percentage point.
I suspect that many of us were trained by our past church experience to recognize sin when we saw it – in others and in ourselves. Then we were taught that Jesus died for those sins - but that doesn’t seem to have really changed things for an awful lot of folks - they still seem to see themselves as sinners, not as forgiven – never as loved and cherished anyway. None of this makes much sense to me either.
Worst of all, many of those of us who call ourselves Christians seem to take an almost gleeful joy in telling other people that they are sinners and they are doomed. Sinners, sinners everywhere and not an ounce of grace to be seen.
What difference might it have made in this world had our churches – from the beginning – actually preached and taught what scripture says so clearly in its very first chapter: God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good? Imagine if you had been taught all your life that you are very good. We know that it works the other way around – raise up a child by telling them constantly that they are no-good, worthless, useless and you almost always end up with an adult who has lived into their belief in that teaching - a no-good, worthless, broken human person.
I had the great blessing of being raised in a family that told me I was good and that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I wanted it. I wasn’t spoiled - I wasn’t allowed at all to run over other people – I just wasn’t trained to see myself as a failure from the start. I grew up thinking everyone was raised this way and it was a hard lesson to eventually learn that I was, apparently, in a minority of the world’s population. It wasn’t in my home but in the churches of my childhood that I was taught I had to watch out for the punishing God. In all honesty I’m not sure that was the intended lesson, but it is the one I learned, nonetheless.
Why have our churches not been teaching love and respect all along instead of sin? Why did they - why do they not teach the grace of being created good? How did the God who loves and forgives get to be presented to most of us as the old man with a clipboard, trying to catch us sinning so he could punish us?
How did we manage to mis-hear so much of Jesus’ message? And how do we get out of this mess? It’s as if we are constantly being offered this incredible gift of unconditional love...and we keep refusing to accept it. You do understand that unconditional means just that - no conditions - zip, zilch, nada, NO conditions. Instead of believing in that love and affirmation we just keep making more and more rules for ourselvesas if the rules will save us – I guess because it is assumed that we cannot be trusted to live like decent beings if we aren’t constantly constrained by rules. And the more rules we make, the less we believe in ourselves, because we wouldn’t have rules if we didn’t really NEED them - right?
I believe that God’s creation is good and beautiful and cherished. I do. My head know this and my heart knows it too. It’s my vision, I think, that needs to be retooled so that I don’t see a not-very-clean homeless person on the street, I see a child of God - my brother. My ears need work, too, so that when I hear someone spouting classist, racist drivel I don’t hear a hateful person to be scorned, I hear my misinformed and possibly hurting sister.
My feet need to be trained to not automatically walk away from those who are different from me, but instead, to walk with them. And my voice needs to learn to not allow hurtful, dividing words to ever come out of my mouth.
The church, which should have been teaching us all along that we are one, has been instrumental for centuries in dividing us. It isn’t going to be easy to put us back together as we always should have been – to heal us. When I was a kid little gift shops always had signs up that read something like “if you break it, you own it.” Christians – the inheritors of Christ’s message – have broken Christianity, whether wittingly or unwittingly, it is broken. We need to own that and get busy fixing it.
It won’t be easy. We need to learn to say “yes” to the affirmation. We need to believe in the love for ourselves, and then maybe we can help heal others. We will need to work every day to re-affirm the goodness and re-issue the invitation – and a little humility on our part would probably be helpful, too. It will take prayer and effort and commitment on our part - and a ton of trust and belief in a loving, life-affirming God.
Can we do it? We have to start. Please, God, let us start. Amen.
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