Few people do greater violence Scripture than those who argue that the first chapter of the Bible, our first lesson this evening, is a historically descriptive account of what actually happened at the moment of creation. That kind of scientific reporting is totally alien to the period in which this text was written. Its genre is not description but lyric, not argumentation but poetry, liturgy even. It is a liturgical invitation to confess and affirm that all creation exists by God’s Word. The rhythms of the text and its formulaic, repeated phrases are an invitation into the rhythms of prayer and meditation on the meaning of the world and our place within it.
But if a scientific approach has distorted this text, so too has the much more long-standing philosophical approach which, in its emphasis on the perceived need for God to be one who creates “something out of nothing”, has overlooked what’s actually going on in these opening verses. It is not so much a matter of creation of the world out of nothing, so much as the bringing of order out of chaos. The Earth, we are told, was a formless void and the Spirit of God moved over the face of these chaotic waters. Over the course of the chapter, God brings about a kind of solidifying of things. Things are demarcated and labelled. Things are put in their right order, and humankind, woman and man are set at the centre of that order, not detached from it but the ones who have responsibility for the meaning and preservation of that order, because they, more than any other creature, reflect the image and likeness of the Creator.
So before we can draw any conclusions from this text about the nature of the world, we are told something very important about God. God brings order out of chaos. God put things in their proper pattern and rhythms. And perhaps something of the divine image which we human beings bear, is our own vocation to reflect that ordering and shaping of chaos into something coherent and meaningful, not least in the words that we speak, in our use of language to generate order in every aspect of life, individual and shared.
In the Christian Gospel, that Ordering Word that is spoken by God is manifest in human form, Jesus Christ. He too brings order to chaotic waters and points us towards a pattern of living that is appropriately shaped for all people to flourish. That continues to be vocation of the Church, the Body of Christ on earth, who has been empowered at Pentecost with that same Ordering Spirit who moved over the waters of chaos at the beginning of creation.
And much of the description of the life of the Church that we find in the New Testament letters is about the ordering of a community such that all people’s gifts may be received, that people may live generously, forgiving one another, and that the whole community might be built-up in mutual, tangible love. When we hear the words of Jesus in our New Testament reading, “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness”, we are being called (as individual Christians and as the church) to the bringing about of order that leads to flourishing.
This mission is as pressing as ever, indeed it may be more urgent than it has ever been. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described how our present age has the character of dissolving much that has been solid and ordered. It’s what he describes as “liquid modernity”, the age of the virtual in which nothing retains solid shape for long, and social forms are constantly changing at great speed. Everything in the world today is more fluid than in former generations, from the nature of someone’s career and the structure of a corporation to community groups and family life. This generates a world of far greater uncertainty and anxiety. And when capital moves around the world with such fluidity as it does today, we have seen over the last couple of years what uncertainty that can bring economically, politically and socially.
Of course, we might want to argue that some of the de-solidifying that has happened in recent decades is no bad thing, liberating fluidity, less restrictive and bringing much more opportunity for many who were not favoured by the former patterns. And we might add that a lot of the more rigid order that the church had sought to impose in previous generations was far from leading to universal human flourishing.
But the misguided nature of previous attempts to bring order does not absolve us from that calling now when a chaotic world is in need of the kinds of order that will enrich human experience. Some within the church are calling for us to embrace precisely this culture of fluidity, adopting less prescriptive patterns of ministry and sitting light to traditional creeds, liturgies and structures of authority. And clearly we need fresh thinking about relevant and appropriate kinds of order. But it is my conviction that traditional patters in renewed form still hold much wisdom. In particular it seems to me that the majority of communities can still benefit greatly from the kind of order provided by a parish church, where a diverse group of people encounter and befriend one another, sharing their gifts and building one another up in the place they inhabit, gathering around the table to share the gifts of God. Capitulating too much to the liquidizing tendencies of late modernity will not enable the Church to be redemptive of the ways in which that fluidity becomes a destructive chaos.
One such destructive element of liquid modernity is the fluidity of working patterns and the pervasiveness of communication which has made it very difficult for people to demarcate their worktime from their leisure. The immediacy of email and the fact that we all have laptops, Blackberries and iphones within our reach at all times has meant that the order of work time and family time, public life and private life has been eroded and our recreation and our time for contemplation and reflection have suffered greatly. We are becoming wearied by constant (and frequently ineffectual) activity and undernourished by our low-level interaction with face-less people. In our patterns of work we have lost the order that helped us to flourish
I think it’s no coincidence that this account of Creation ends with a clearly ordered and demarcated period of rest. God did not “work from home” on the seventh day. God did not leave his phone on to arrange the delivery of some late-arriving animals. God hallowed the seventh day, for on it he rested from all the work he had done. I’m convinced that increasingly the church needs to be able to teach people what it means to work hard and then to rest completely, to waste time in prayer and worship, and also in fun and frivolity. It’s all part of the order that helps us to flourish.
So we as a church need to reflect on what kinds of order will be redemptive to the chaos of our world, just as governments over recent months have reflected again on what kind of order or regulation might be needed to restrain the fluidity of capital flows for the greater good. The great temptation for the church is to over-solidify things again (just as the literal interpretation of Genesis is a kind of defensive solidification of the doctrine of Creation) – over-solidify the family without reflecting on what really causes family life to flourish, over-solidify liturgy without seeking to make the order of liturgy one that is relevant to contemporary culture.
To find the kind of order we need today – to “seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness” – we will need new forms of order as well as renewal of traditional patterns. We will need to resist the temptation to go along with wider-worlds patterns of life and interaction. To do that we will need to think hard and we will need, first and foremost, to attend to that ordering Spirit of God. We need to get ourselves into the rhythms of prayer and praise, the rhythms of Bible-study and holy living, so that the rhythms of our bodies and our lives might be shaped into the kind of un-constrictive order that will allow us to flourish.
Come Holy Spirit and bring your sweet ordering to our chaos.