Today we begin a four-week

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1 George A. Mason Reformation Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 28 October 2018 Generosity Emphasis Dallas, Texas A Generous Creation Genesis 1:26-28, 31 My 20-month-old grandson, Whit, discovered his shadow this week. He was visiting from his recent exile to Oklahoma, don t you know?! I was looking around the house for him and spotted him outside with his mother and grandmother in the middle of our street. The two women were dancing, or so it seemed. I was a little embarrassed for them, so I went out to see what was going on. They told me about Whit seeing his shadow and trying to step on it. He got tickled, and his adoring female guardians started doing the same, completely unself-conscious about what they were doing and how they might have looked to anyone in the neighborhood. I love that. All of it. And then it got me thinking: of all the toys inside our house, of all the balls and books we have bought for grandchildren. But watching the joy of this little boy and these giddy women celebrating together over Whit s seeing his shadow is a simple gift of creation that is both free and priceless. Today we begin a four-week emphasis on generosity that you have heard about and that we are studying together. Today we are pondering the generosity of creation, the first and foundational gift of God to us all. In the first chapter of Genesis, we are told that God made the world first, and at the climax of it, he made humankind in God s own image and likeness. This gift squares with our modern discoveries about the emergence of the universe and the earth and the development of life itself. That these ancient authors should have perceived this order of things is remarkable, and it serves to validate the theory of divine inspiration that Jews and Christians believe gave rise to these writings. Our faith doesn t tell us why God created the world any more than science can say why it came to be or philosophy can say why there is something and not nothing. We simply believe that God intended what has come to be and that it came from the will and character of God. God determined to make a world that is imbued with the very same

2 nature that God enjoys. When Genesis says that humans are made in the image and likeness of God, the first thing we should do is to consider the real thing rather than the image. We should see that if our world is beautiful and plentiful, and a generative place to live, it must be that it is the true nature of God. Not everyone has always understood God in this way. This is a wonderful contribution to the world of our biblical faiths. Prior to this view, people believed that the gods were arbitrary, self-seeking and stingy. If people wanted to get the gods on their side, they had to appeal to them in various ways to get their favor. Our biblical view is that God is generous by nature. Everything that comes to us is an act of extraordinary grace. By grace we are saved, Paul says. And not just by grace are we saved, but by grace we live at all. When we rise in the morning to start a new day, it s as if God has been up all night long waiting for us. God has seen to it that there is a world we can depend upon that is there for our delight. Instead of thinking about the world as operating according to laws of its own that make us cogs in the wheel of nature, God is the gracious maker who never ceases to continue to give and give and give. I love the way the Christian writer and intellectual G. K. Chesterton put it: Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, Do it again ; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, Do it again to the sun; and every evening, Do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that [God] has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. 1 How different would it be for us if we could develop this attitude about God and the gift of 1 Orthodoxy. 2

3 creation as one great and neverending realm of generosity in which we live? What if we could trust that that really is the way things are set up for us? How would it change our day-to-day approach to things? For one thing, I think it would transform our fear into faith. It would teach not to think of the world as a limited realm of goods that we have to strive to enjoy at the expense of others. Too often it feels that we work and vote as if there is only so much to go around, and we have to get ours or we will be left out. But if God is always there, providing a rich and abundant world for us to share in, and if we could trust God about that, how different would we be? One of my favorite stories comes from the Jewish tradition. There is an old rabbinic parable about a farmer who had two sons. As soon as they were old enough to walk, he took them to the fields, and he taught them everything that he knew about growing crops and raising animals. When he got too old to work, the two boys took over the chores of the farm, and when the father died, they had found their working together so meaningful that they decided to keep their partnership. So each brother contributed what he could, and during every harvest season, they would divide equally what they had corporately produced. Across the years the elder brother never married, staying an old bachelor. The younger brother did marry and had eight wonderful children. Some years later, when they were having a wonderful harvest, the bachelor brother thought to himself one night, "My brother has ten mouths to feed. I only have one. He really needs more of his harvest than I do, but I know he is much too fair to renegotiate. I know what I'll do. In the dead of night, when he is already asleep, I'll take some of what I have put in my barn, and I'll slip it over into his barn to help him feed his children. At the very time he was thinking down that line, the younger brother was thinking to himself, "God has given me these wonderful children. My brother hasn't been so fortunate. He really needs more of this harvest for his old age than I do, but I know him. He's much too fair. He'll never renegotiate. I know what I'll do. In the dead of night when he's asleep, I'll take some of what I've put in my barn and slip it over into his barn." And so 3

4 one night, when the moon was full, as you may have already anticipated, those two brothers came face to face, each on a mission of generosity. The old rabbi said that there wasn't a cloud in the sky, but a gentle rain began to fall. You know what it was? God was weeping for joy because two of God s children had gotten the point. Two of God s children had come to realize that generosity is the deepest characteristic of the holy and because we children are made in God's image, our generosity is the secret to our joy as well. Life is not fair, thank God! It's not fair because it's rooted in grace. 2 When we learn to think this way, we act according to our truest nature, a nature that reflects the image and likeness of God in us. This in turn teaches us to see each other not as competitors, but as equal partners in creation. Men and women alike. God created us male and female. Did you notice that in our text? We share equally in the image of God. We have equal dignity and worth. There can be no over and under about gender. We live side by side. What s more, there is no hierarchy of class. God is not reflected more in the rich than in the poor, more in white people than in people of color, more in Westerners than Easterners, more in Southerners than Northerners, more in straight people than gay or transgender, more in the powerful than in the powerless, more in the white collar than in the blue collar. Every single human being is precious to God, and we reflect that preciousness when we are generous toward one another rather than gaining advantage over one another. Generosity is the way we are made, and we are at our best when we trust in that and live out of it. Even the command to be fruitful and multiply is grounded in this truth. We do not make the world; we only join God in the continual fruitfulness of creation. The Irish priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins talked about how the whole earth is charged with God s grandeur. In one of my favorite lines in all of poetry, he says, There lives the dearest 2 4

5 freshness deep down things. I can t tell you how often I come back to that phrase when I am worrying over the world. Creation is ever renewing itself by the work of a generous God. We talk all the time, and rightly, about our fears of climate change, our concern over the world with its hurricanes and typhoons, its forest fires and other natural disasters. And yet, even in the aftermath of these terrible events, we see the power of nature to renew itself. The devastation of forest fires, for instance, leaves a landscape that once was fertile with charred remains. And yet the seeds of those fires go to work out of sight right away to bring new growth and to see new trees sprout up, renewing the earth. What once was dense forest and now is a barren-looking land is still alive and growing. Our fears over losing give way over time to new opportunities of grace. And that goes for moral disasters, too. I had hoped to go just one week without having to address a hate crime or other preventable tragedy. But we must pause today to remember the families of the 11 who were murdered in a mass shooting in a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh just yesterday. Even there, I say unto you, evil will not win out over good, or hatred over love. Out of the ruins of this sorrow, our generous God will bring new life and new hope. Since Genesis 1 is actually a poem of sorts, I have used poetry more often than usual in this sermon to express the meaning of a generous creation. And so I conclude with this from the farmer/poet, Wendell Berry, a Christian writer of immense imagination about the world that God has made. Let it be a final gift to you this morning. In The Peace of Wild Things, he says: When despair for the world grows in me/and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,/i go and lie down where the wood drake/rests in his beauty on the water,/and the great heron feeds./i come into the peace of wild things/who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief. I come into the presence of still water./and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time/i rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Amen. 5