Genesis 1:1-5
January 11, 2015
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
While we are on the 11th day of 2015, it still feels like a New Year. Our lesson today is from the beginning of the Bible, the beginning of creation. It is also fitting that these creation verses read this morning are also on the Sunday that we traditionally celebrate Jesus’ baptism. For Christians, baptism is the ordinance that symbolizes the beginning of the Christian life.
Today we are connecting the story of Jesus with that of the story of creation. When the story of Jesus begins in the waters of baptism, it’s just like the beginning of a whole new world.
The Earth is the Lord’s
The Psalmist in Psalm 24 said, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” Right off, the Bible tells us that this earth home of ours is the “Lord’s,” which implies that the world is not ours. The world is not our possession, our tool to use as we please. This world is God’s—a gift entrusted to our safe keeping. And right there, at the beginning of the Bible, we come to a collision with how most of the world looks upon the world.
Genesis, the book of beginnings, the first book of the Bible, opens with the stirring words, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Notice that the story begins with God before it turns to us. In fact, God doesn’t turn to us until verse 26! God is creator; we are creatures. We don’t create ourselves, our existence, or our world. God does. The world was not something we thought up or produced. It is a gift of God and we are stewards, not its owners.
From this vast, primal truth of what creation is, we get some implications for who we ought to be. As creatures, we make sense only in relationship to the creator and God’s purposes for us in the world. As Paul put it, “We do not live to ourselves” (Rom. 14:7) but rather for the purposes of the creator who created us.
“Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture” (Ps. 100:3). This affirmation goes against just about everything we have been taught about ourselves in the modern world. The world urges to be self-creators, fabricating our lives through our courageous choices and decisions.
Our son-in-law, Daniel is a very humble man and a very religious disciple as well. But his company that makes high-end guitar bags has labels on all his products that say: “Designed in California. Manufactured in China.” This is necessary to sell quality products just like how iPhones are designed in California and manufactured in China. But I know that Daniel believes that he may have drawn the designs onto the paper that eventually led to the making of the bags but it was God who first gave the design ideas in his head.
When we see ourselves as self-creators, fabricating our lives through our courageous choices and decisions, we begin to believe that we are the sum of our own acts of creation. But our Christian faith particularly highlighted in Genesis 1 is that we are not only the sum of our own acts of creation, but we are the result of God’s continuing creation with us.
Continuing Creation
The church has always called baptism a kind of birth. Just as you did nothing to contribute to your own birth, so your baptism, your birth in Christ, is something that is done to you and not by you.
I confess that there have been times when I have led you to believe that too much of modern religion focuses on us. Too much of modern faith treats us as creators, rather than creatures. We put emphasis on quality Christian education, good preaching, effective administration, sacrificial giving, well-run church home, on and on. Church becomes another way that we think that we are choosing and deciding, creating our lives for ourselves, by ourselves.
Today’s lesson bids us to look at things differently. Just as baptism is the beginning rather than the end of Christian life, Genesis says that creation isn’t finished. God is still creating. God didn’t create the world and then retired. Creation is a work in progress. It’s not like a painter who finishes a painting and then hangs it on the wall for all to see. God continues to paint and make new masterpieces.
This truth gives us hope, propels us into the future, gives us something to do—here and now. This is different from the notion of God that Deists believe which is a God who once created but has stopped creating, stopped forming, stopped intervening and intruding, gone silent, and withdrawn from the world. Too many contemporary Christians are, for all intents and purposes, are people who believe in this Deist God, a God who has stopped creating.
The first words of Genesis ought not be in the passive tenses, It’s more accurate to say, “In the beginning, as God began creating” than creation as something that has been done, fixed, and finished.
Christians who are Deist, believing in a God who has finished creating and has left the scene are the ones who end up having little or no moral conscience in the way we are stewards of the earth. They don’t believe there’s any judgment to their actions because there is no God to hold them accountable. The ecological crisis in creation that we are experiencing right now despoiling natural resources, rivers and steams polluted and killed, and the air we breathe that makes us ill health are evidence of believing in a God who has stopped creating and so it’s “every person for himself or herself!” Look at what China has been doing when there is the prevalent belief that there is no God.
Leaning Toward the Future
If we believe in this Deist God when everything is static and all that we see is all there is to see then there is no hope in the future. To desperately cling to the past, to refuse to move forward, to refuse to launch out, to have no hope in the future, to stop cooperating with God in creation is a refusal to believe in living God who is still creating.
But Christians believe that something is happening, and that something is someone—a creative God. Creation continues. Therefore, Christians, before we ask, “What should I do?” ask questions like “What is going on? What is God up to in the world? Where is God working now, and by implication, where can I join God?”
This God seems constantly to lean toward the future. The disciples of Jesus assumed that the death of Jesus on the cross mean the end, the dead-end completion of his work. And yet, the angel at the tomb told them, “He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him” (Mk. 16:7).
God isn’t stumped by our sin of believing that there is no more creating happening in the world. God keeps creating, and that is the core meaning of resurrection. Jesus lives, goes ahead of us. There is no place we can journey where he has not been before us, where he does not wait for us and meet us.
In this New Year, our church is also learning toward the future with Christ because we believe God is inviting us to join him to do his work in the world. In 1880, when Dr. Jesse Hartwell saw that there were many Chinese men in San Francisco who have not heard about Jesus, he started the Chinese Baptist Mission. We continue to affirm our “Mission in Chinatown” to still be necessary. And it is only with a creating God who is going before us that we are able to do this mission.
We have faith that there would be a servant of Christ who will come forward to become our Community Outreach Minister to gather men and women from our neighborhood to serve as the core in the launching of a new worship service for our community people. We believe the creating God wants us to start a fourth service at FCBC.
Later in the year, we’ll be celebrating 135 years of faithful and sacrificial ministry as a church. Our focus won’t just be in the past but rather leaning toward the future of asking not “What should we do?” but rather “Where is God working now, and where can we join God?” Only a living God can move ahead and there in the future, Christ will meet us.
We all know that looking in the past is comforting. To believe in a God who is already finished with creating is more comforting because we know what to expect—nothing more will be happening. There won’t be any more surprises or unanticipated events. But to believe in a God who is still actively creating the world, we are less sure of what is to come.
The Psalmist says, “If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea” or say “the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” these are the heavens and the earth that God has made, and into which the Christ has come and still comes, goes ahead of us, and meets us (Ps. 139:9, 11).
Every Sunday when we pray together the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father whose kingdom has come and will come on earth as it is already in heaven. We ask God to give us bread today, forgive us for our sins that we did yesterday and today and most like will do tomorrow and that we also forgive people in our lives who may be sinning against us. We seek God to help us from being tempted to go against God’s will and to deliver us from such evil. We pray all of these things because God is creating a kingdom that is powerful and full of glory that we can see and enjoy today. Creation continues. Everything is beginning again.
Golden Repairs
Our lives can begin again in the New Year. You may have seen the Korean ceramic exhibit at Terminal 3 where United Airlines is at SFO. I have passed by these beautiful pots, jars, and plates many times. But the ones that I have been most fascinated over are the ones when an artist, Yee Sook Yung takes broken ceramics and recreated sculptures by filling the cracks with gold. She ends up with these unusual creations that suggests that from brokenness, there comes beauty.
My Mom had her baby jade bracelet in gold pieces.
In Japan, this is call, “kintsukuroi” (keen-tsoo-koo-roy). Golden repair. Japanese artists often do this when a precious piece of pottery has been broken. After mixing lacquer resin with powdered gold, they use the resin to put the broken pieces together. What they end up with is a pot with cracks in it, but the cracks are filled with gold. This restoration creates a gorgeous piece of art and makes a theological statement as well.
Kintsukuroi asserts that breakage and repair is part of the unique history of an object, rather than something to deny or disguise. For us as God’s creatures, we need more golden repair in our lives, because we so often hide our brokenness.
A friend hurts us deeply, and we retreat inside ourselves. We lose a job or suffer a pay cut, and pretend like everything is really okay. A spouse abuses us, and we never speak up. We sense that we have a drinking problem, but feel too embarrassed to ask for help. A marriage begins with intimacy and anticipation, and ends with alienation and anger.
Life breaks us, in a variety of painful ways. And unfortunately we often deny it. We would rather disguise our cracks than undergo golden repair.
But the Good News for this New Year is that the creating God is alive. God’s love for the world led to Jesus Christ born as a Child who experienced the same kind of brokenness that we are experiencing and on the cross brought forgiveness of sins and restoration making us gorgeous people once again. I can see that we have lots of gold that have sealed the cracks in our lives!
Our only assignment is joyfully to join a work in progress. Creation is a gift of a loving creator. And maybe the major work that we are to do today is to do our bit to help care for this good creation that the Creator has so lovingly entrusted to our stewardship. We can do this because we have been made whole once again by the golden repairs that have been made by Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
Let us pray.
Dear Creator God, we see your creation unfolding every day and we take this time to thank you for continuing to make this beautiful world new again. Empower us to be strong stewards of your world in which you have made for all people and creatures. And when it comes to our own renewal, Lord, reminds us once again that Jesus Christ in his Baptism and resurrection are signs that we are being renewed and restored time and time again. We know that creation will continue as long as you are the living God until that day when Christ comes to reign upon us. In this beginning of a New Year, we seek your guidance and plan for our lives as we participate with you in the recreation of the world. Amen.