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  Those of you who are my age and older will remember well the 1959 Broadway musical and especially the 1965 movie version of The Sound of Music. How many children, I wonder, (even children in more recent years) have unconsciously learned the rudiments of a musical scale from listening to Mary Martin or Julie Andrews sing to the von Trapp children? “Let’s start at the very beginning, / A very good place to start. / When you read, you begin with A - B - C; / when you sing, you begin with Do - Re - Mi . . . .” And so the introduction goes until the “governess” sings the whole scale, Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti, stops in a moment of frustration, saying “Oh, let’s see if I can make it easier,” and then launches into the memory prompters we all know so well: “Do, a deer, a female deer; Re, a drop of golden sun; Mi, a name I call myself; etc.”

If Ed wanted to define music or to tell us its story, I suspect he’d begin in a different place.  To most analytical thinkers, “the very beginning” would be rather different than Rodgers and Hammerstein packaged it for us in their sing-a-long tune.  But it’s hard to imagine a presentation that would be more immediately comprehensible or more easily related to everyday life than “Do - Re - Mi.”

And maybe the most effective thing about the tune is just this last one: that it teaches us about music in a way that relates to life.  Even if the rhymes take liberties with our spelling and pronunciation, we can all make the connections: “Fa, a long, long way to run; So, a needle pulling thread.” And even if it isn’t our own every-afternoon experience, most of us welcome the idea of “Ti, a drink with jam and bread.”

That’s where I suggest we start this morning—with the relation between learning and our own experience. This is supposed to be a message about God and Creation, and it’s the first in a summer series that Kip has entitled “We Believe.” As he has projected it, the series will take us through mid-August and will say approximately three things (isn’t that what all good sermons are supposed to say?) about eleven basic Christian beliefs.  Well, OK, if I’m preaching, you might expect that the sermons will say four or five things!  But not today, because we want to leave time for Communion.

So back to the idea of starting at the very beginning—and with what relates to us.

If someone were to ask you to describe the basic tenets of Christian faith or of United Methodist faith, where would you start?  If you had been through a nine-month Christian Believer course here, you might begin talking about our understandings of revelation (not the last book of the Bible, but “revelation” in the sense of disclosure—God’s self-disclosure to humanity). Or if you were taking a common Evangelical approach, maybe you’d say something about scripture. (That’ll be next week’s sermon topic.)  If you were following the sequence of the traditional Methodist “Articles of Religion” or of the “Confession of Faith” that comes to us from the “United” wing of our United Methodist heritage (the former Evangelical United Brethren Church), you might begin with a discussion of God as Trinity. (That could be the topic for next Sunday, since the Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday. The truth is that far too few United Methodists really know what to make of that doctrine! But while I could be wrong, I doubt that Laurinda plans to spend much time preaching on the Trinity.)

So where would you begin?

The Bible itself begins with Creation.  In a scientifically-oriented community like College Station, you might think that’s just about the deadliest place to start. On reflection, maybe that’s why Kip assigned this text to me and took off for Turkey!  But there we are. And before we all get set to hyperventilate about things like so-called “creation science” and intelligent design and evolution, let’s take a slow, deep breath. And exhale.

I want to say something slightly different about God and Creation than we normally hear.  But first, let’s read the Scripture. The first five verses of the Bible, from the New International Version:

Gen. 1:1–5 (NIV)  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ²Now, the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. ³And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. ⁵God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

If you’ve picked up the pew Bibles or are reading along in the NRSV, you may have noticed that the first two verses are translated in a way that sets the stage for an emphasis on the third verse. In fact, the introductory clause is made dependent:

“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.”

And then in verse 3 (no matter what Bible translation you use) come that simple subject and verb that will be repeated eleven times in the Bible’s first two chapters (ten times, in fact, in Genesis 1 alone): “God said.”

Do even a quick computer search, and you’ll find hundreds—even thousands—of instances in which the Bible asserts in one way or another that God, or the Lord, said or spoke something.

It’s a fundamental element of our faith, and it’s present in the Bible from beginning to end. God is revealed to us as a speaking God.

So, when God speaks, what does He say, and what’s the effect?

We don’t know much about how God speaks to Himself; we have no access to that other than in a few brief soliloquies that the Bible constructs. And we won’t get far by speculation. What we do know of God’s speech is how it relates to what is outside of God, and specifically to us. That’s what I want us to notice as we meditate on God’s creative speaking this morning.

When God speaks, what does He say, and what’s the effect?  These first verses of the Bible give an important part of the answer to that question. When God speaks, possibility and reality are born.

We could see it in Genesis alone, and that’s the place most people start in talking about Creation. But as you know, the New Testament Gospels have their own counterpart to the opening verses of Genesis. Interestingly, it doesn’t come until the last of the Gospels, the Gospel of John, but in that Gospel’s opening verses we read:

John 1:1-5  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

And then, verse 14:

“The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

When God speaks, possibility and reality are born. We think of this most naturally in relation to the world and all that is—in other words, in relation to a product (what God has created, or what God’s Word has produced), and I want to say something about that. But I especially want to say something more directly about God, the One whom we call Creator.

So first:

The World

In Ps. 33:6, we read “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.”
     Hebrews 11:3—“By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.”
     2 Peter 3:5—“. . . by God’s word the heavens existed . . . .”
     John 1:3-4, describing the “Word” that, in the beginning, was with God and was God, tells us: “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.”
     And in Genesis 1, each stage of creation is initiated by the words “God said, ‘Let there be . . . .’”

In each of these passages, the creative factor isn’t what God does but what God says. God speaks, and something happens. God’s word isn’t a reflection on what is or even a mere prelude to what is; it’s the producer of what is. God’s Word defines both the possibility and the reality.

All this, at least in its most basic outline, may seem natural enough to us as an element of biblical faith; lots of us have grown up believing that God spoke and the worlds came into being. And even if, as modern people, we understand a lot more about natural processes that have shaped our world and the species that populate it, most of us still look to God and God’s sovereign command as the reason why there is anything at all (as opposed to why there is simply nothing).  It’s still natural for us to believe that the world and everything that exists does so, ultimately, because our God decreed it.

Natural, perhaps. But it might surprise you to know that Christianity (at least in the form that we’ve come to know it) had to contend for aspects of this belief from almost the beginning. It did so for a reason: to believe in God as Creator of the world and of everything in it was to say something important about that world, namely that it is fundamentally good, that it is not illusory or something to be escaped but something to be cherished, preserved, and protected.

The nature of the world is rooted in the nature of the God who freely created it and, as we read, “saw that it was good.”

Ancient Hebrews knew creation myths of their neighbors—myths that imagined the world as originating in a struggle between opposing forces, myths that saw the tenuousness of earthly existence as reflecting the uncertainty of the spiritual world. And in that world, where each people had their own deities and where there was always another “divine mouth to feed” if you wanted rain or fertility or victory in battle, the Israelites came to insist that their God—our God—was not only supreme over all the other so-called gods but was the only God—and, as such, was responsible for everything and was over everything.

Similarly, in the environment in which early Christianity developed, there were competing philosophies that imagined the world as an inferior realm, even as the creation of a lesser god, and as a place to be rejected and escaped.

Against such religions and philosophies (some of which took “Christian” forms), biblical faith predominantly affirmed the goodness and purpose of this world.  And it did that, in part, through its belief in God as Creator.

It’s not that the biblical writers had their heads in the sand. Theirs, no less than ours, was a world full of evil—people at odds with other people, people living at a distance from God’s purposes, people enduring sickness, tragedy, death. All of it was there.  But there was more. There was also the insistent voice of God through Moses and the prophets, as through the other heroes and heroines of a living tradition, assuring people of something better, of God’s presence in their darkness, and of the reward for covenant faithfulness. And ultimately there was the voice of the Creator, not at second hand but made flesh in the person of Jesus.

As the writer to the Hebrews put it, the God who had spoken in the past was still speaking “by a Son, whom [God] appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.”  Or to go back to the words of John that we read a few minutes ago, the Word through whom all things were made came to dwell among those things. 

The creative Word became flesh. God had made the world and humanity so good that He was not ashamed to take on our form. (Theologically, that probably ought to be turned around: through the eternally begotten son, God the Father brought into existence a people after His own image and, as preparation, a cosmos fit for them and him to dwell.) Further, when we fell short of God’s glory, Jesus the Son spoke directly into our lives, taught, healed, transformed, and gave secure hope for the future.

What happened when God spoke?  The world in all its real and potential beauty came into being.  What happens when God still speaks?  The same kind of reality and possibility are born—for you and me and all people.

God’s creative provision is evident also as a sustaining. The author to the Hebrews writes that Jesus “is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word” (Heb 1:3). Colossians echoes the thought: “he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col. 1:15-17).

So God’s speech not only brings the world into being but keeps it. God’s creative speaking brings reality and possibility.

Why is that so? Ultimately because it is God who speaks. And that’s the other thing I want us to see about our confession of God as Creator.

Creator

Take a look sometime at the creeds in the back of your hymnal—creeds that we recite regularly in our worship services. You’ll note that they begin not by referring primarily to what God has done but to who God is.

That’s significant.  Normally, when people talk about creation, they talk about a past event. They say God created, and then they begin arguing about when, and how long it took, and whether evolution can be accommodated in the six-day narrative, and whether now everything has been pretty much left to run on its own. Etc. etc.  But look at how our historical creeds put it:

     The Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker (“creator” in some versions) of heaven and earth.”
     The Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”
     The Korean Creed: “We believe in one God, creator and sustainer of all things ....” (There’s the “sustaining” element we saw in Hebrews and Colossians.)
     And even though the creed of the United Church of Canada uses the language of creating rather than of a Creator, it does so in such a way as to make God’s work ongoing: “We believe in God: who has created and is creating.” A primary part of God’s identity (past and present) as we experience is as an ongoing Creator.

Let’s understand: belief in God as Creator isn’t the same as belief in a God who (happens to have) created. 

As we say that God is love, not merely that God has loved us, we also say that God is Creator, not just that God created. Of course, that doesn’t mean that God hasn’t loved or didn’t create; we’re not playing with words in order to spiritualize an otherwise historical statement.  Instead, we’re affirming that the fact of creation, like the statement that God loved someone or other, is a reflection of God’s intrinsic nature as far as we can know it. The analogy isn’t exact here, because God’s love is certainly more integral to God’s triune being, whereas God is Creator only to the extent that God has freely chosen to bring into existence sharers and objects of that love. But the point is that so far as we can know them, God’s love and creative activity aren’t random activities but, so to say, permanent reflections of who God is—and, therefore, of who we can count on God to be. Their reality doesn’t vary and doesn’t depend on some prior factors outside of God.

When God speaks in creation, He “takes of his own” and shares it with us.

To say that God created is to say quite a lot in view of the nature of the product. The majesty of the heavens and the earth and the effort to comprehend all that exists have occupied generations of humans and will undoubtedly occupy as many more generations as might live in our world.  But to say that God is Creator is to say very much more, because it involves the recognition that God’s creative speaking isn’t an incidental activity.  Like the von Trapp governess, let me see if I can make this any easier.

A few years ago, Louis Paul Kadlecek, a 21-year-old man, broke into a hangar at the Brazoria County Airport south of Houston and stole a Cessna 172.  Although he had never been in an airplane before, he managed, by trial-and-error, to get the four-seat airplane to the runway and into the air, intending to fly to Mexico.  He got about a mile, where he encountered power lines and destroyed the airplane.  Amazingly, Kadlecek climbed out and walked home, where sheriff’s deputies arrested him the next day and gave him a safe ride to jail.  He flew the plane, but did that make him a pilot? There’s a big difference!  He even walked away unhurt following a crash—something that can’t be said for a lot of people who have flown a lot more hours. So would I get in the back seat of an airplane with him at the controls? Not a chance. And neither would you.

Let’s put it another way.  Suppose I said: “I trust George, farmer or cattleman extraordinaire”?  Not George who happens to have planted or harvested some crop that I eat or to have fattened a young heifer that I hope to have butchered for a barbecue. Not George, one among many competent and incompetent workers. But George, the real Aggie. George, the guy who, so to say, “wrote the book” on farming or ranching; George, who overlooks nothing and knows how to deal with everything; George, who for himself and for his fellow farmers and ranchers is persistent and wise in addressing problems and finding solutions.  Do you see the difference? Which George would you want managing your food supply? George, the guy who happens to have done something agricultural on some past occasion, or George the true Aggie?

It’s hard for us to image this precisely, because of course we aren’t unique or, in most cases, uniquely competent. And we usually hope to be followed by others so that our accomplishment doesn’t die with us and so that when we need something, others can meet that need. But maybe the illustration helps.

God is without predecessor, peer, or successor. Not a creator, but the Creator. When He speaks, new possibility is introduced and new reality appears. Not by accident, but because of who He is.  You can rely on it.

That’s at least part of what it means to call God Creator.

Communion

Let’s make this doctrine practical for this morning.  We’re about to come to the Lord’s Table, a table of blessing, a table to which we’re bidden by Christ’s historical word, and where we hear again proclaimed the present word of forgiveness.

Is this, for you, a place where God speaks as Creator?  In our ritual, we regularly remind ourselves of what Jesus told his disciples about the bread (“this is my body, given for you”) and about the cup (“this . . . is the new covenant in my blood”). The precise words reported to us in the Gospels and by Paul vary, but the meaning we may take from them is the same: in word and deed, Christ has created a table of fellowship for us, and we are to come together to that table as often as we will to remember and to find renewal.

What does God say to us at the table? God speaks words of acceptance, restoration, and wholeness. Not for others only, but for you and me. Not for only some situations, but for all. And not as an accidental and uncertain (or merely past) event, but reliably, unchangingly, because of who God is.

Will you listen to God’s word today?  When God speaks, new possibility and reality are born for us. When God speaks, all things can become new.