Creative Faith

Genesis 1:1-5; Matthew 5:38-48

February 23, 2014

The Bible is a big book, and it’s got lots of characters. But I think it’s fair to say that God is the main character. The first lines of great books sometimes – not always – but sometimes tell us a great deal about main characters.

Think of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which begins, “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” Really, what more do you need to know?

So let’s read, again, the first few lines of the book at the center of our faith and see what they tell us about the main character.

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 God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

“Isn’t that a wonderful beginning?”

So, seriously, and in the vein of English class, what do you know about the main character from that opening paragraph?

*****

Here’s what always strikes me: God is alone. God is powerful. God is creative.

That can be a volatile mix, to be sure, and what springs forth from the mind of this singular, powerful, creative force includes a great deal of messiness in addition to boundless beauty, love and grace.

It all unfolds on a scale almost incomprehensible in its grandeur, and, honestly, far too vast for me to understand. As the prophet Isaiah will say much later on about the main character, “your ways are not our ways nor are your thoughts our thoughts; your ways are too high for me to grasp.”

To be sure, there are some things that we can and do grasp – or at least we should. We learn very early on that God creates the human creature in the image of God. Perhaps owing to that primal experience of aloneness, God sees that it is not good for us to be alone, so God creates us in and for community.

We also ought to grasp, and be grasped by, those key characteristics of God revealed in the opening of the book, and understand that we, created in God’s image, bear those same marks: we are powerful and we are creative. Therefore we carry, also, a great burden of responsibility.

Perhaps not least of all, we carry the responsibility to imagine more. We draw our circles so very small sometimes, and then we think that nothing is possible outside those small circles – especially when it comes to how we think about God.

God is so much larger than our small circles. God is vast and incomprehensible, and – and here’s one core pillar of my own Christology – in order to bring this down to human scale the chapters about Jesus are a necessary part of the unfolding story of God. Jesus reveals God on a scale we can understand. Jesus shows us what God is like, in human terms.

Jesus springs almost fully formed into the narrative of scripture. We know next to nothing about “Jesus: the early years.” We get the myth-making birth stories, followed by a long silence that stretches over several decades. Then along walks Jesus, baptized by John, calling disciples, ministering with creative abandon, and – responding to the call of a voice that speaks uniquely to him – giving voice to a vision of a future otherwise – the kingdom of God – rooted and grounded in love and justice, and extravagantly overflowing the boundaries of our limited thinking.

You have to figure that in those early formative years, Jesus learned some of the same kinds of things that most of us do: we learn about our families; our communities; about the world of work and how we might fit into it; we learn how our society functions; we learn who’s in and who’s out; we learn who has a voice and whose voices are silenced.

That’s the other thing that I failed to mention about what we can learn about God from the first few verses of Genesis: God speaks. And, as the narrative unfolds, we learn quite clearly that when God speaks it is always to call forth a response from creation. Quite specifically, God speaks to call human beings. God calls humans to serve, to create, to love, and, so very often, to raise their own voices – to speak.

The hardest part about speaking – about speaking authentically, as opposed to just making noise with your mouth – the hardest part about speaking lies in finding your own voice, and learning to speak the truth as it has been given you to speak it instead of just repeating a script provided for you by your social context.

Somewhere along about his 30^th year, Jesus found his voice. Shaped by all the learnings I just mentioned, but responding to a specific call and claim on his life, Jesus found his voice.

Our gospel reading for this morning comes from the center of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, and here Jesus has clearly found his own voice. Not only does Jesus continue and expand decisively upon the script-rewriting pattern of “you have heard it said … but I tell you” that we touched on last week, but he takes things deeper with the exhortation that ends our reading today: “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Perfection is a pretty tall order, especially when it’s the perfection of God. But the perfection that Jesus is calling forth here is not some static, Faberge egg kind of thing that you can put on a shelf to look at. The Greek that gets translated in the NRSV as “perfect” is a form of the word telos, and while “perfect” is a perfectly adequate translation, it misses the sense in the original of “completion” or “maturity.”

In other words, the call here is to a fullness of life, a “perfection,” if you will, lived into through a lifetime of following the way of Jesus. Aiming that way toward the heart of God, Jesus is calling his followers to lives that are creative and powerful.

Creativity and power come in all kinds of ways, but they can lead us so far beyond where we think we can go.

About three years ago, a friend and colleague – leaning into middle age – decided to embark on that couch-to-5k thing that lots of folks were trying. She’d never really run much at all until then. Last month she completed her first marathon. You never know what you can accomplish until you trust the gifts you’ve been given and begin to live creatively with them.

That’s what it means to live faith creatively, or, better, to live a creative faith. Faith means trust, and it begins with trusting what we have been given.

Jesus calls us to live creative, powerful lives rooted and grounded in love and justice. He knew from his own experience that such a life unfolds over many years, and that, in time, living into fullness involves finding one’s voice.

Because I am not Jesus, it took me a good deal longer than a mere 30 years to even begin to find my voice. Let me sing you a song that I wrote about 13-14 years ago.

Walking With the Wind

That song came to me following a family trip that included stops at the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham and the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery where I stood in Dr. King’s first pulpit. I wrote it down when I finished John Lewis’ brilliant movement memoir, Walking With the Wind.

That song, which came as a gift, played a subtle but important part my finding the voice to speak the truth as I had been given to understand it at regarding the great Civil Rights question on my time: justice for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons in the church and beyond its walls.

I don’t think it’s any great insight or surprise that I should find my voice in and through some creative act. I think that’s how it happens all the time for everyone, and it doesn’t matter what the creative act is. For some it’s music, for others it’s visual art, for still others it comes in cooking. Some folks find their voices through creatively reimagining work or school or space, and for others it’ll be embodied in exercise.

That friend who just ran her first marathon? She published her first book during the training, as well, and I think there’s a deep connection between pushing out beyond what we think we can do and finding our voice in the pushing.

Finding voice in living creatively we discover that we can do so much more than we thought possible. You never know what you can accomplish until you trust the gifts you’ve been given and begin to live creatively with them.

When Jesus said, “be perfect” it was a challenge and an invitation to live whole lives, complete lives, lives shaped and informed by the knowledge – and the faith – that we are created in the image of a creative and loving God.

That faith, lived creatively, enables us to do so much more than we think possible. That faith is what enabled Jesus to see beyond one eye traded for another toward the love of enemies, to see that unless we expand the circle to include even those who hate and reject us, then we’ll just remain trapped within the limited confines of our narrow vision, that faith is what allowed Jesus to see beyond the culture that shaped him to the God who created him.

Jesus calls us to see beyond the borders of our own limited perspective toward something imagined by a God who could look upon the chaos and see the created order, who could look beyond nothingness toward all that ever was or will be.

We are capable of so much more than we think we are. A bold and creative faith opens a way where there is no way. A bold and creative faith plants seeds for a great harvest. A bold and creative faith points the way toward the kingdom of God. Be bold and creative as is the God who created you!

Come! Live in the light! Shine with the joy and love of the Lord! We are called to be light for the kingdom, to live in the freedom of the city of God! Come! Live in the light! Amen.