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Poetry for Order of Service

I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.

(Narihira, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, Kenneth Rexroth)

Call to Worship

Holy and beautiful is the custom that brings us together at the beginning of a new calendar year.
Here we have come to give our thanks, to face our ideals, to remember our loved ones, to seek that which is permanent, and to serve goodness, beauty, and the qualities of life that make it rich and whole.
Through this hour breathes the worship of all the ages, the cathedral music of all history, and blessed are the ears that hear that eternal sound.

Congregational Covenant Statement (Spoken in unison)

We are travelers. We meet for a moment in this sacred place to love, to share, to serve. Let us use compassion, curiosity, reverence, and respect while seeking our truths. In this way we will support a just and joyful community, and this moment will endure.

Responsive Reading

MINISTER: On this first Sunday of the new calendar year, we gather in our church to prepare our hearts and minds for the year before us.

CONGREGATION: We do not know what lies ahead of us in this coming year.

MINISTER: There may be challenges we have never had to face before.

CONGREGATION: There may be griefs we have never had to bear before.

MINISTER: There may be kindnesses we have never received before.

CONGREGATION: There may be joys we have never glimpsed before.

MINISTER: What lies ahead of us in this coming year belongs to the unknown.

CONGREGATION: But we have stood before the unknown in previous years and we have found our way.

MINISTER: And, now, with anticipation and wonder, fear and humility, once more we stand before the unknown, trusting that again we will find our way.

CONGREGATION: We depend upon strength and courage that may be more than we now know.

MINISTER: We depend upon resources from hidden springs to arouse and sustain us.

CONGREGATION: And we depend upon each other, for we do not walk alone in this great quest.

MINISTER: We walk together into this new year, strengthening, supporting, encouraging, and caring for each other.

CONGREGATION: One and all we commit ourselves to the unknown, seeking, searching, and ever enlarging the goodness of life and being.

Reading

My sermon this morning at the beginning of this new year will have to do with beginnings. In it I will be referring to the most well-known story of beginnings in our culture, namely, the first creation story from the book of Genesis.

As you may know, there are two very different creation stories in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. They are placed back to back. The first story, the seven-day creation account, which is found in Genesis chapter 1 through chapter 2:4a, is actually the more recent of the two accounts. It culminates in the creation of humans, created together as male and female.

The second creation story, the more ancient and primitive Garden of Eden account, found in Genesis 2:4b through the rest of the chapter, begins with the creation of the human male, then the planting of the Garden of Eden, the creation of beasts and birds, and finally the creation of woman from the rib bone of the male.

These Genesis creation stories used to give me much mental and emotional trouble when I was younger and expected to take them in literal and scientific ways. Having thankfully given up that effort, I now approach them with a fair degree of delight, seeking psychological understanding as well as historical insight into a bygone era.

Who, I wonder, created these creation stories? Who were the first persons to hear them? How were they received by their original hearers? How did they get passed along? When did they become set into a sacred text?

As I read this story, I imagine the Creator God being like a human sculptor at work, laboring over the unformed materials that are set before him or her.

I will read this first creation story, the seven-day creation account, from the oldest English translation, the King James Bible from 1611. By reading from what is now a somewhat archaic translation, the primitive flavor of the story more easily comes through and one is less tempted to try to take this as a modern scientific account of our cosmos.

Genesis 1-2:4a

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, . . .

"IN THE BEGINNING . . ."

The root of things

"In the beginning . . ."

What inviting words with which to begin a text that is to serve as an explanation and guide for a life and a religion!

The human mind is naturally drawn to beginnings. There is an urge in the mind to trace things back, and back, and back - to try to get to the root of things.

Because there's the sense that if you know the beginning of things, then you know what something is. If you are acquainted with the beginning of a thing, you have an idea of what it is about, and where it might be headed, and how you might deal with it. You have ground upon which to stand.

There's just one problem with this invitation to trace things back to the beginning: you never really get there. For you will always be able to ask yet another question of beginnings, namely, "And what preceded that beginning?"

Thus, the search for beginnings leads to an infinite regress. After proceeding a long way down the road to the beginning of our cosmos you may say, "Ah, here, finally, is where time and space began! Here is the zero point! Here is where our universe begins!"

But then the troubling question, if you allow yourself to ask it, "But what preceded that? What were the conditions out of which time and space emerged? What reality preceded our universe? What was the nature of being before the Big Bang?"

You have perhaps heard the humorous story of beginnings set in a more primitive cosmology, the cosmology in which the biblical creation story from which I read earlier is set, the cosmology in which the earth is understood to be a flat, circular disc resting on pillars. The inquiring mind naturally asks,

"Yes, but, pray tell, what are the pillars resting on?"

"Why, the pillars rest on large stones."

"I see. And upon what do the large stones rest?"

"Well, the large stones rest upon the broad backs of elephants."

"Ah, and may I then ask, upon what do the elephants stand?"

There are two endings I have heard to this line of cosmological inquiry: 1) "Look, suppose we change the subject." And 2) "It's elephants all the way down."

The mind meeting itself

Whatever your cosmology, whatever understanding you have of the nature of our cosmos and its origin, there is a point at which the curtain falls and we stand before an abyss of unknowing, staring into a mystery that will always remain a mystery, facing the elemental nature of being that will not yield to the probing of the rational mind and the investigative tools of scientific technology.

Another way of putting this is to say that in such a search for beginnings, the rational mind is shown its limits, for the rational mind cannot investigate the ground of its own being, nor can it account for the presence of being itself.

At some point the mind must simply stop before the reality of that "which always was, is, and will be." It must stop before that which is other than and prior to its own categories of cause and effect and time and space.

The probing mind that would go in search of the ultimate beginning is ultimately led back to itself and to the mystery of the presence of being itself.

The rational human mind cannot escape the net with which it itself snares reality. It cannot get beyond the structure by which and through which it grasps reality. It cannot account for its own particular "form of sensibility."

However sharp the razor's edge with which it would cut the thicket of ultimate reality, it cannot ultimately account for its own presence or the thicket that it would lay bare.

So on this Sunday where we mark beginnings, I begin with this philosophical riff on beginnings, recognizing that any beginning of which we speak is, at some point, arbitrary.

Whether we choose to begin with the birth of a year, or the birth of decade, or the birth of a century, or the birth of an age, or the birth of a life, or the birth of a species, or the birth of a planet, or the birth of a galaxy, or the birth of a universe; there is a certain arbitrariness to it, for with regard to any given birth there is always the question of a prior birth, leading ultimately to the question of how it is that there was anything at all in the first place that could give birth to anything at all.

But though we always stand humbly, as it seems to me, before this ultimate cosmological question, perhaps we can say something about the creative process itself, and in this way acquaint ourselves with the ultimate power of being out of which we all come and back into which we all return.

Elements of a creative process

What are some of the elements involved in a beginning? What are some aspects of a creative process?

I had intended this morning to speak of six different aspects of beginnings and the creative process, but I'm going to limit myself to just two - two elements that are related to the beginning of the creative process, elements that are illustrated in that "Book of Beginnings" from which I read earlier, the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew scriptures, taking that ancient story of beginnings as an archetypal story of beginnings, that is, a general formula for all beginnings, not only a story of cosmic beginnings, but a story of creation wherever creation takes place, whether without or within.

Chaos in the beginning

How does creation begin? How can we describe its beginning? How can talk about the beginning of creation since we join it in mid-stream? It is already well along the way before we become aware of it. We look back upon it. So what can we say about it?

In the first verse our the creation story from which I read earlier we find these words:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. (Genesis 1:1-2a)

There's an interesting, probably unanswerable, textual question here, namely, is this creation a creation out of nothing - creatio ex nihilo - or did the Creator God in this story have pre-existing materials with which he was working and from which the dome of the heaven above and the circular disc of the earth below were formed?

Author Robin Lane Fox writes:

To us, but probably not to the author [of Genesis], the very first verse can be taken in several ways, as the independent sentence of our Bibles ("In the beginning God created . . . ") or as an opening clause which is subordinated to the next two verses ("In the beginning of God's creating . . . the earth was waste and void"). Language alone does not decide between the alternatives, which have different implications. Did chaos exist already when God went to work or, as usually thought, did God create chaos too? What exactly does the Hebrew word for "create" mean?

(The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, pp. 15-16)

Whatever conclusion one might come to on that question, in the beginning, at the beginning of creative activity, before any creation takes place, there is no form or differentiation of any kind. There is only formless void, waste, chaos.

How that formless void, how that pregnant nothingness, how that zero point before our universe emerged came to be, we cannot say; but we can say, looking back, that in the beginning there was no ground upon which to stand, and nothing growing out of the ground.

Nor are the original waters of creation contained in any boundaries or forms. In the beginning, says the opening Genesis story, water covers everything. There is only water, but water without anything to contain it or shape it or give it form.

Water, water everywhere . . . water and darkness. No light at all. Pitch-black darkness. Cave-black darkness. Black-hole darkness.

"Darkness upon the face of the deep," says the story . . . deep, dark water.

Submerged in water; turning and twisting in amniotic fluid; unconscious, unaware.

This is how it is in the beginning, says this story of beginnings. This is how it is prior to birth, before creation, looking back upon creation.

No awareness. No consciousness. Nothing to see. Nothing to get a handle on. The paper is blank. The mind is blank. No actual thought, idea, understanding, or direction. Potential only.

And everything all mixed up together. Chaos. No recognized or recognizable form. No differentiation. This is how it is in the beginning. This, looking back, is a beginning element of a creation.

The beginning of differentiation

But, now, some movement in the creative process, for we read:

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. (Genesis 1:2b-3)

Movement in the darkness and formlessness and sleepiness. A stirring . . . a shifting . . . a breeze . . . a gentle wind beginning to blow . . . the spirit of God upon the deep . . . the spirit of creativity moving upon the face of the waters.

In other words: into your blankness, into your slumber, into your torpidness, into your state of unknowing . . . a little movement, a breath, a whiff of something, a possibility, even some light. Out of the darkness of unconsciousness, out of the womb of unknowing, out of the realm of deep sleep; some light.

And with the light the first differentiation is seen in the chaos and the darkness, the first division of things, a division of light and dark.

The first pair of opposites. A signal that creation has begun. Because creation always means division. It means separation into this and that. It means a division of the whole. The formless void is divided.

This is the beginning: the division into light and dark. And soon after that, another division, a huge and crude division, for into the watery void a divider is placed:

Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; . . . and God called the firmament Heaven.

"Firmament" is not a very familiar word to us anymore. And though I heard it often enough as a youngster in connection with this Genesis creation story, it was not until years later that I understood what it meant.

To understand "firmament" you have to put yourself back into a more ancient time with a different cosmology, a tri-partite cosmology in which the entire universe consists of "heaven above, the earth beneath, and the water under the earth." (See Exodus 20:4)

And the earth, as I indicated earlier, is understood as a flat, circular disc, and the heaven above is a dome over the earth - like a covering for a cake plate - and presumably it's a clear, solid dome in which the stars are hung as well as the sun and moon.

This firmament, this dome of heaven over the earth, is the first concrete division in our story of beginnings. Into the watery chaos comes a divider, dividing the "waters from the waters" - waters above the dome and waters under the dome. When it rains and when it pours, you are being soaked by waters that have come through the windows of the dome of heaven.

And when chaos again engulfed the creation, as in the tale of Noah, it is said that "all the fountains of the great deep [were] broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." (Genesis 7:11, King James Bible)

But that is a story for a time when all you've worked for and have created has been smashed to pieces and destroyed as if by a flood. (It is interesting to consider how an earlier age might have described and accounted for the tsunami tidal waves that have flooded and devastated the lands surrounding the Indian Ocean this past week.)

But I'm speaking this morning about the beginning of creation, not the destruction of what has been created. And here, in the beginning, you now feel yourself making your first headway in the dark, watery void. A division is taking place, a great division . . . some kind of divider rising out of the water, separating water on one side from water on the other.

Something that before was completely unconscious now becomes crudely conscious . . . waters separating before you . . . a dividing of the waters . . . a parting of the waters . . .

. . . water, a symbol for that which is unconscious . . . which is potentiality only . . . but now beginning to become actual . . . emerging from water . . . some differentiation taking place.

And then more differentiation, for we read:

Let the waters under the heaven [under the firmament, the dome of the sky] be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear:. . . And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas. (Genesis 1:9-10)

Dry land. A place to stand. And now creation can take place in earnest, with all different forms and shapes and plans, gradual and simple at first, but becoming increasingly complex.

The dome of the heaven can be hung with lights, and the disc of the earth can become green with vegetation and with creatures of all kinds. And the seas, similarly, can be filled with living things of all kinds.

This is the beginning of beginnings: First, the chaos of the formless void. Secondly, the first stages of differentiation. And then, thirdly, moving toward the more finely differentiated.

Enough, then, for the beginning of a new year.
Enough for the beginning of a new creative cycle.
Enough to know that creation does not happen instantaneously.
Enough to know that chaos is a necessary element in creation.
Enough to know that much may be going on beneath the surface and in the darkness.
Enough to know that we become aware of a creative process long after it is already under way.
Enough to know that we may some day be conscious enough to be partners with the creativity that has birthed us.
Enough to know that patience may be useful, that trust may be helpful, and that the new year may be interesting in ways we could never, ever dream.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

(T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets)

Benediction

In the time of your life, live - so that in that good time
There shall be no ugliness or death
For yourself or for any life that your life touches.

Seek goodness everywhere; when it is found
Bring it out of its hiding-place
And let it be free and unashamed.

Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption.

Encourage virtue into whatever heart
It may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow
By the shame and terror of the world.

In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time
You shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world,
But shall smile instead to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

(From the Preface to "The Time Of Your Life" by William Saroyan)

Extinguishing of Chalice

We extinguish this chalice
But not the light of truth,
The warmth of community,
Or the fire of commitment.
These we carry in our hearts
Until we are together again.

(NOTE: This is a manuscript version of the sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce A. Bode at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on January 2, 2005. The spoken sermon, available on audio cassette and CD at the Fellowship, may differ slightly in phrasing and detail from this manuscript version.)