The Season of Creation is a month when we think of all that God has created in the world and beyond, when we thank God for this and when we pray for help and guidance in getting back on track. It is a time to celebrate, as we look to the crops that are traditionally harvested in England and, in a rural community like Tittensor, pray for God to bless us with a fruitful time. It is a time to mourn, as we look at oceans full of plastics of all sizes, all put there by us; when we read the stories of water companies that ignore their duties to us and the planet by refusing to invest in sewage treatment plant, preferring to dump raw sewage into rivers and the seas and pay fines that are far less than the cost of that plant; it is a time to pray for guidance and help as we look upon starvation in Africa from drought, on killing heatwaves across the world and monsoon rains that have become so severe on the sub-continent that they threaten millions of lives, all caused by the rampant burning of coal, oil and gas, ignoring the warnings from experts.
Revd Noreen Russell reflected this Sunday in her sermon on two readings from the Bible that feature creation: one was from the first book, Genesis, and the other was from the opening of John's Gospel.
The Genesis story, like many others from around the world, reflects an ancient people's answers to the questions, 'Where did all this come from and who made it?' Many people have debated the stories in Genesis, from those that claim that every single word is literal truth to those that say that it is all nonsense and the there is no God, since science can answer the questions.
It's a vigorous argument and is argued between people who will not be persuaded that they are wrong in any aspect, which makes the discussion largely a waste of time. Since the Bible as we know it is an 'agreed' and much-edited collection of texts with many different, sometimes conflicting sources, talk of 'truth' must surely be qualified. There have been and will continue to be many different versions of the Bible, as scholars mull over the multiple scrolls and scraps of text that still being found and researched. It's less than two hundred years ago that an amateur researcher in the British Museum looked at baked clay tablets from the Middle East and deciphered them, only to realise that they told a version of the Flood story (remember Noah?). His problem was that the Flood story on the tablets was written centuries before the first Hebrew text appeared and clearly was written about a different culture.
Even looking at Genesis in the most commonly used English language Bibles today, you will quickly discover that there are several versions of the creation story and that the accounts conflict. That was not a problem for the Hebrew people; there are many such conflicts in their texts and they were and are quite content to have them sitting alongside one another. They regard them as being made available to help people get closer to God; they don't insist that one is true and the other untrue.
Similarly, we can look at those such as Dawkins who have made a lot of money from promoting their views that there is no God. They seek to place faith and science in opposing camps with little overlap between them; that is how one can continue to make arguments, publish books and make a fortune from promoting one's views. Of course one would continue to argue: here are three of the oldest human vices: greed, self-interest and vanity.
Clearly there is a growing body of mathematics and scientific research that explains how the universe and everything it developed and will continue to develop. It's a gigantic and fascinating field and anyone trained in science or engineering couldn't fail to be astounded at the detail to be discovered and explained, from the tiniest particles to the greatest galaxies, from the beginning of the universe to its predicted end and everything in between.
The trick that is played on us is to claim that this growing and enormous body of knowledge 'proves' that God does not exist or vice versa. Interestingly, for centuries it has been those very discoveries that made scientists believe in God and develop arguments in favour of that; the recent trend in the opposite direction is just another side of how some react to the enormity of creation.
Faith will either come or not irrespective of the state of human knowledge. If you have faith and have lots of scientific knowledge, you are just as likely to have tested and 'proved' your faith with that knowledge as someone without faith is to have used that same knowledge to 'prove' the opposite.
John's Gospel was probably written by the same John who was one of Jesus's 12 disciples; we can't be sure but the current research leans towards it. He was with Jesus at the Last Supper, he noted down the Lord's Prayer and he was at the Crucifixion. He will have been in the room where Jesus physically appeared to his disciples after his death. John is as close as we get to a witness to most of the stories we have heard of Jesus.
Yet John's Gospel is not like the other three. Several of the stories are the same but John almost certainly wrote his Gospel long after the other three were produced. He had had time to think a lot about what he had witnessed and had seen how people who had not seen Jesus alive now reacted to the story of his life. John had made time to reflect on how he now thought of Jesus and put this into his Gospel, giving us long speeches from Jesus that don't appear in the other three stories. These speeches are in great detail and we can only think of them now as 'inspired', since he had no recording device beyond his own memory by the time he wrote.
John does not hesitate when he starts his Gospel, though. Just as Mark, with the shortest Gospel, immediately makes the statement that Jesus was the Son of God, John does the same. Unlike Mark, John's beginning is rich and complex in its claims. It is such a magnificent statement of faith that we hear it read out every Christmas in churches everywhere. John says that Jesus was there at the beginning; he was with and was God. He was not created; he did the creating. John was absolutely sure; he doesn't offer up arguments. There is a certainty in John's words and I suggest that we consider them as the belief of a direct witness of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Put simply, John could think of no other explanation for what he had seen and heard through his own eyes and ears. He had to conclude that Jesus was telling the truth and that he was the Son of God.
That is what flows through all the Gospels. What they had witnessed was so stunning, so life-changing, so powerful that they could only form a single view. Not only that, but in a hostile world, where to stand up and say such things was to risk certain death, they concluded that everyone had to be told the story. It could not be kept secret for personal use but had to be made known to everyone, whatever the personal cost. They knew that cost: John and other Gospel writers had seen Jesus ritually slaughtered and had seen the first Christian martyr, Stephen, stoned to death in Jerusalem just weeks later. Yet, faced with those risks, they wrote and they told the story to everyone.
As we look at those words in John's Gospel and think of creation in its many forms, perhaps we can asked ourselves whether the argument about creation should consider these points: one 'side' can have its say and have no consequences except for getting richer and more famous; the other 'side' had witnessed events that made them believe in Jesus, in God, and they were willing to risk their lives to tell others, making no money out of it. Think it over. Amen.