Genesis 1:1-5
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
2 Corinthians 4:6
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
We are now into the season of Lent, that period between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, which both remembers Jesus' time in the wilderness and prepares us to commemorate his death and celebrate his resurrection.
Over the last couple of months, we have been taking a big picture view of the Bible, asking what kind of book it is. For the next six weeks of Lent, we will be taking a close look at the first chapter of the Bible, journeying through the six days of creation alongside Ruth Valerio’s book ‘Saying Yes to Life', although I will be using her material fairly loosely.
Given what I've been saying about scripture over the last little while, it probably won't surprise you to hear that I don't read Genesis literally. I don't think it was ever meant to be a scientific account of creation, but a poetic affirmation of God's creative power, as the rhythm of the six days gives a sense of God bringing order out of chaos.
First there is separation - of light and dark, and of sea and sky, and of water and land - although I don't think we should see these separations as creating absolute binaries. After all, dawn and dusk still exist between night and day.
Next God fills these newly created spaces with abundance, and the pattern of the first three days is repeated. Day one gave us night and day, and day four gives us the sun and moon and stars. Day two gave us sea and sky, and day five gives us fish and birds. Day three gave us land and vegetation, and day six gives us animals and ourselves.
We are left in no doubt that God is the creative force behind all things, except that force doesn't feel like quite the right word, because what we have here is a very peaceful and hopeful depiction of creation, especially in comparison with other ancient creation myths such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish, in which the world is fashioned from the dismembered body of a defeated god, and its inhabitants are created to serve the gods who remain.
How very different are the opening verses of Genesis! God does not create the world in violence or for power, but in wonder for the sheer joy of it. I have thought a lot this week about the verb “let”, which appears in each of the phrases through which God speaks the world into being. “Let there be light...let the waters be separated...let the land produce vegetation...let there be lights in the sky...let the waters and skies teem with life...let the land produce living creatures...”.
God does not command creation into existence so much as allow it into existence, and the Hebrew word has a sense of becoming. It is as though God makes space for something other than Godself to exist, and it is clear from the beginning that this creation will have agency of its own.
What does it mean for God to make space for us? What does it mean for God to allow the world to become what it is? What does it mean for us to have agency? I'm not going to directly answer those questions, but I hope they will continue to hover in the background, Iike the Spirit hovering over the waters of the deep, particularly that last question, as we reflect on what our agency means for our stewardship of this good earth.
Perhaps that seems an odd focus for Lent, when we might expect to turn our attention towards the climax of scripture rather than its beginning, but there is something fitting about holding together themes of creation and redemption. Jesus entered into creation in order to bring about redemption, and redemption will encompass the whole of creation. The two are woven together, and if we forget that it is to the detriment of all things.
In ‘Saying Yes to Life', Ruth Valerio quotes the ninth century Celtic theologian Eriugena, who said “it was to bring human nature back to [the vision of a good world teeming with life] that the incarnate Word of God descended”, and also Paul's letter to the Colossians, in which he writes that Christ died “to reconcile himself to all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven”. And so she reminds us that “the redemption we eagerly anticipate as we go through Lent is not one that takes us away from creation but one that will root us more deeply in it”.
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In the beginning, all was dark and without form. And then God spoke, and there was light. And this light was good, but it did not replace the darkness for that too was good in its own way. Instead the two were separated, and the light was called day while the dark was called night. In their difference they made shape and pattern, and so creation began.
Light is used as a positive metaphor throughout scripture. In Exodus 10:23 we are told that even when the plague of darkness fell over the land of Egypt, the Israelites had light in all the places they lived, presumably as a sign of God's presence with them. The psalmist describes God as their light and their salvation in Psalm 27:1, and God's word as a light for their feet in Psalm 119:105. The motif of light is particularly strong in the Johannine writings - the prologue to John's gospel speaks of Jesus as a light in the darkness which the darkness has not overcome, Jesus describes himself as the light of the world in John 8:12, and 1 John 1:5 declares “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”. We have already heard Paul say that God “made his light shine in our hearts”, and Ephesians 5:9 exhorts its readers to “live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth)”.
I'm sure we can see where the association between light and goodness comes from. Light is the means by which we can see, and so it brings knowledge and safety. Sources of light are often also sources of warmth, which are necessary for survival. We need it for Vitamin D to keep our bodies healthy, plants need it for photosynthesis to produce food, and certain animals use ultraviolet light and bioluminescence to navigate and hunt. With the development of solar power, we are increasingly using it to sustain our infrastructure. No wonder God saw that it was good.
So why then does God not banish darkness, which is conversely used throughout scripture as a metaphor for fear and ignorance? I think it is because darkness serves a purpose too. Plants grow in the dark of the soil, we rest in the dark of the night, photographs are created with light but must be developed in the dark... Perhaps most importantly, it is the interplay of dark and light that gives us days and seasons and years, without which our entire lives would be as confusing as the week between Christmas and New Year, when no one knows what day it is and all rules about what makes for acceptable breakfast food go out of the window.
The scriptural metaphors around light and darkness are too ingrained for us to shrug them off completely, and they are useful as shorthand for big ideas, but I think the first day of creation reminds us that there is normally space for a little more nuance. Fear and ignorance have no place in God's good creation, but the nurturing and creative quiet of the dark is a part of God's wonderful design.
And if we need to reclaim some of the importance of darkness, then perhaps we also need to recognise some of the problems of light. Electricity has revolutionised the way we live, not least the ability to produce light at the flick of a switch. There is only so much that can be done by firelight or candlelight, and so when that was all we had, the rhythm of our lives was far more closely aligned with the rhythm of the natural world. Now our society can run twenty fours a day, and I think it is exhausting us. What should have been a gift has hidden a curse. And it's not just us that has felt the impact. Our increased reliance on artificial light has meant an increased need for power, and that has burned through our resources and is burning through our planet.
And yet for all that, 840 million people worldwide are still without access to electricity. Light is not equally shared across the planet, something that becomes startlingly evident when you look at satellite photos of the earth at night, Western Europe and North America lit up like beacons. We have treated light just like any other resource, and just like any other resource, some use too much while others do not have enough.
We need to think again about light and dark, about our need for the rhythm they play out together, about the areas of our lives and world that need more of one or the other, about how we create and use them in ways that do not harm each other or the earth. There are lots of ways we can do that - we might begin by researching the environmental impact of our current ways of living, then taking action to minimise those impacts, and campaigning for systemic changes in government and business.
But before all of that more serious stuff, I want to encourage you to have fun with light. Stand outside and take the time to feel the sun on your skin. Take a stick of chalk and mark where your shadow is, and keep doing that throughout the day to create your own sundial. Make a glow in the dark picture. Take up candle making. Try shadow drawing. Creation care is deeply important and absolutely necessary, but I would love for it to be rooted in the joy of the natural world, not driven only by the fear of losing it.
This prayer is written by Morgan Lee, and ends the first chapter of ‘Saying Yes to Life’: To the one who surges into the fissures that cannot be accessed, to the one who floods into the crevices that cannot be reached, to the one whose presence exposes, clarifies, restores, and cultivates...we bask, we thrive, we harbour no secrets, we hold onto no heaviness we fear makes us unloved. You are the first ingredient for life. The universe, not to mention our hearts, would wither away without you, Light of the world. Amen.
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