CREATION AND CREATIVITY
SCRIPTURE: Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17
I John 3:11-14; 4:7-8
As I think most of you know, I spent most of my adult life in the Northeast, having gone to New York in the fall of 1960 to attend Union Theological Seminary. During all of those cold winters (one of which I’ve just now escaped back here from) I was puzzled by the fact that a new year should begin in the midst of winter. Now, while Las Vegas usually doesn’t have the same icy roads and potential for lots of snow like the Northeast does around New Year’s, there is still a bit of a chill – certainly, heavy winds -- and a sense of a “brrrrrrr” feeling as we approach what should be a renewing time in our lives. Would it not be more logical – and symbolically more satisfying – to mark this passage of time at, say, the spring equinox when so many signs around us point to the re-birth of life, and time itself is invested with that hope which comes when we know that God’s plans for each of our lives is about to enter a new chapter.
But, on reflection, I’ve come to feel that acknowledging that time passing at this point in our year does have a significance, and it’s a significance in terms of our understanding of God as Creator and humanity as creative. Where we can find this significance is in the juxtaposition here at the end of the year between Christmas and New Year’s: the coming of God into the world in the Christ-event, which in one sense finished God’s creation, and the marking of the passage of our lives, which points to our potential creativity – yours and mine -- and therefore our complicity in that creation.
The new year, like the phoenix rising from the ashes, is a symbol for life over-taking death. So, just as Christmas is incomplete without the resurrection event of Easter, and just as the new year is incomplete as a symbol of new life without the symbolic hope of the spring equinox, so also God’s creation is incomplete without the realization that we add to that creation through our own creativity. Now, some would have you believe that God’s creation was a once-and-for-all-time thing – that having created the heavens and the earth God, in effect, stepped back and let that creation run like a well-tuned watch. This is the philosophical position that we call “deism”.
But Christianity does not understand God this way. For one thing, to do so would be to leave us feeling rather helpless – our technological and artistic achievements become pretty irrelevant if a creation established at the beginning of time is just running along smoothly. But even more importantly, to do so would be to destroy the integrity of that relationship which Christ called us to establish with God. In Christianity the doctrine of creation does not oppose human creativity; it supports it. You know, of course, that there are two creation stories in the first chapters of Genesis – the one which begins in the second chapter being about three centuries older than the one which appears in the first chapter and is more familiar. In this older story in Chapter Two the creation of humanity is spoken of first, for it is the symbiotic association of God and the pinnacle of God’s creation, human beings, which most concerns this early writer. Men and women become living beings, even as God is the basis for life itself. Immediately after that, humans are presented with responsibilities that go along with our relationship to God, which can be summed up as: to care for this world out of our own creativity. It is when we begin to disregard this responsibility of caring for the world, which has led to our current ecological crisis in the face of global warming, that our relationship with God deteriorates. We then learn the consequences for disregarding our responsibility of caring for the world – which is what Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden symbolizes. But even in this symbolic expulsion Adam and Eve (and we) are not denied a role in creation: God sends them forth from the Garden, “to till the ground from which (they) were taken.”
Our role in creation – our creativity – is to care for this world. Over the past 30 years we’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what that “caring for” might mean. From Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” to El Nino to climate changes that, yes, even affect us here in Nevada, it is clear that there is an ecological crisis of massive proportions. It all sometimes seems quite over-whelming, but if we are to accept the responsibility of caring for this world – which God gave to us in creation – we will have to call upon all of the resources of our creativity.
The United Church of Christ’s Statement of Faith, which we read together this morning, has a phrase that helps us to see the extent of our own creativity: According to it, God “calls the worlds into being”. The verb is a dynamic one, indicating an on-going, unfinished process. The calling is continuously there, seeking our response, for it is our ability to respond that sets the course for our responsibility. God calls into being not only the physical worlds but also the different realms of life in which we live; for example: the “world of music”, or the “world of merchandising”, or the “world of retirement”. We, each of us, live in many different worlds, and we are challenged by the thought that God calls all of them into being to seek out how we can respond creatively to these creations.
Several years ago there was a story presented on an old dramatic television program called “The Eleventh Hour”, which I’ve never been able to forget. The story concerned a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy, who had the mental capacity of a three-year-old, and who had somewhat inadvertently gotten into trouble with the law. His mother did not know English well, and in trying to describe the world of her son to a rather unsympathetic judge she used this image: “He sees everything as if it was the seventh day of creation – as if each thing was newly created.” To see each part of this world we are to care for as though it came to us on “the seventh day of creation” is the prism we can use through which to release our own creative potential.
What, then, might it mean to be creative as we head into 2007 as a response to God’s creation? Author Gabriel Moran begins to give us an answer when he writes, “Creation is not a story about the past but an experience in the present..... Creative power is shared power; even God could not give unless there were someone to receive..... To open oneself to the present experience of one [another] is to be present here and now. To be present is to create.”
So, the beginning of creativity is acceptance – a true and total acceptance of all that is in this world – and to be present for one another in openness. This is what it means to have empathy – to see someone else as he or she truly is. One opposite of creativity, then, is classification. If I can classify someone whom I don’t know as one of a group – Muslim, Hispanic, conservative; if I can classify something I fear by a word -- religious right, racist, radical; if I can classify something that I really feel is someone else’s problem as a concept – pollution, poverty, pornography; if, in essence, I use words to classify instead of accepting the person or thing as being related to me and my world, then I am refusing to accept the responsibility that has been offered to me in creation.
But acceptance is only a beginning point, for we are not empty vessels who simply receive. We also share. In sharing we re-create that which has been given and point it in the direction God wants for each of us. The verb “share”, like God who “calls the worlds into being” in the UCC Statement of Faith, is an action-directing word. Our creativity calls us to be in action in this world for which we care. Bill Webber, former president of New York Theological Seminary who also started the East Harlem Protestant Parish, puts it this way: “Christians are called by God to be and to act, not endlessly to discuss.” Sharing in this active sense means that we will act upon, and not just discuss, those things that really concern us about our world. Too often do we talk about those things that concern us and then act upon lesser priorities. Hal Luccock tells this story about a meeting of the Board of Trustees in a church he was serving: “We had an enlightening and invigorating discussion: we talked about world peace, civil rights, poverty in our country...and then we voted to buy a stepladder.”
Accepting the world as it is because God created it and called it good, and sharing in our concern for the world because it is not yet what God would have it be, both lead us to the necessity of choice. The Statement of Faith, again, highlights this necessity when it says that God “sets before us the ways of life and death.” God’s creation and our creativity are constantly urging us to “Choose Life”. In order to choose for life we must recognize the freedom that God has given us in creation, for it is in the tension and interplay of our freedom and our responsibility that creativity springs forth. This is both a freedom from – from fear, from hang-ups, from obsessive self-concern – and a freedom for – for those whom God has given us to care for. German theological Dietrich Bonhoeffer defines what this freedom for means when he says, “In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being free means ‘being free for the other’, because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.”
Simply...profoundly...we are free to love one another, and this is the essence of the choice between life and death. It is all too possible to be dead-in-life, as in the familiar catch-phrase, “he (or she) was dead at 40 but buried at 80.” This is another opposite of creativity.
The author of the first letter of John affirms that through Christ, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.” To see not only things but also other persons as though it were the seventh day of creation leads us to an acceptance and a sharing that makes the choice of life a real possibility. This passage from I John also moves our loving out of the passive and into the active: “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” This is the way of loving that we affirm – that we accept and share and choose – when we come together before the communion table, as we will do next week on the first Sunday of the new year.
We must be aware, though, that if we take seriously the responsibilities given to us in creation to care for this world and to be free to love others, we will soon find that these are not modes of action that the world just graciously accepts. Such creativity can all too easily upset vested interests or the status quo. It is a frequent and powerful temptation just to maintain already existing life styles. Yet, as we have learned from the life of Jesus the Christ, to give in to this temptation is to give up both the responsibility and the freedom of creation. As we enter that period of time which human beings will call 2007, our human creativity, which flows from our understanding of God’s creation, will be desperately needed by all people everywhere who are striving to grasp what, in truth, it means to choose life.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
December 31, 2006