2nd Sunday before Lent

Date:15th February 2009

Preacher: Revd Hilary Barber

The Created Order

The two Sundays before Lent are given over to themes of creation and transfiguration. Both clearly are connected and bring us to Ash Wednesday, and our penitential preparation for the Festival of Easter, of Christ’s death and resurrection.

Next Sunday, Kersten England, Group Director of Community Services for Calderdale Council, member of the Bishop’s Council in Bradford Diocese, and Chair of their Church in the World Committee will be our guest preacher, as we reflect on the themes of transfiguration across our town and Calderdale.

Today, the theme of our readings is that of the created order.

This topic seems popular today, with the 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the continued publications of Richard Dawkins, both of whom concluded a rejection of the notion of God’s involvement with creation. Yet we know also that many people in the past have taken a profoundly different view: Hildegard de Bigen born in 1098 wrote a natural history compendium and medical journal; and Professor John Polkinghorn, the present Cambridge Professor of mathematical Physics, to name but two.

There has been a good academic debate that continues surrounding the Big Bang theories, which can either justify the hand of the Creator, or deny his very existence. We know that humanists do their utmost to discredit the existence of God, whilst at the other extreme perhaps, there are those creationists who maybe go the other way, ignoring the realities of scientific research and metaphysical fact. Humanities thirst for knowledge and desire for control, or dare I say to be like God, remains as strong as ever.

I am not a scientist and I do not claim to have any particular specialism in this area of theology. But what I do know is that there are scientists who can hold onto rigorous scientific controls and rules who can also hold onto a belief and faith in God that do not contradict each other, but feed into a rational explanation and thought process, that makes some kind of rational sense.

And it is to the notion of process that we can begin our reflection. Many scientists, when speaking of the creation, seem to talk of a ‘one off explosion or moment in history’. Yet I would want to suggest that in Christian theology we can speak about a process of creation that is ongoing. Creation is not something that God did 15 billion years ago, but it is something he is doing now.

Clearly thought is to be given about how the world was made, and how it came into existence and we have to ask ourselves what existed before the world? Did nothing exist, or was there something to either prompt or to constrain, a divine creative act? We might want to describe this void as the divine will as being the source of the created being. In the doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing ‘, Christians have replaced the notion of irrational accident or blind chance by the concept of contingence or perhaps we might say dependence. It is hard to think of how God existed before creation, but perhaps easier for us to think of God today as being within all creation.

Genesis maps out for us a picture of the process that took place, a theology based on a doctrine of creation out of chaos, from a place that was without form or void. Modern day Physics has given us its own version of creation, with insight into quantum mechanics and a certain gauge field theory of matter, but misses the point that theology is concerned with the Giver of those laws which are the basis of any form of physical reality.

It was St Augustine who wrote In the first instance, God made everything together without any moments of time intervening, but now He works, within the course of time, by which we see the stars move from their rising to their setting. Augustine believed that all was held in being by God’s transcendent will: the universe will pass away in the twinkling of an eye if God withdraws his ruling hand.

Clearly we cannot perform the ultimate experiment: remove the divine presence and see if the universe disappears. Belief in creation will always be a metaphysical belief, rooted in the theologically perceived necessity, that God is the sole ground of all that is.

Freeman Dyson says The more I examine the universe, and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming. I cannot see what sense that could be other than the will of a Creator. Thus I would suggest we are brought face to face with a difficulty as that of free will and predestination.

Professor John Polkinghorne suggests that an evolving universe is one that we should theologically allow, within divine providence ‘to make itself’’. God the Creator explores in creation, for God cannot be thought to need to use the universe as an analogue computer to explore possibility. The roles of chance and necessity should be seen as reflections on the twin gifts of freedom and reliability. Such an account of God’s relationship is for some, contentious. On the one hand, there are many who feel it removes God of too much of his power, on the other his hand is positively active in all that happens.

We move quickly to find ourselves in a place where we need to absolve God from being responsible for specific happenings. A God of ‘one great act’ is not a God who can be blamed for the Holocaust. Yet we believe he is the God who raised Jesus from the dead. We face difficult questions concerning a world full of Cancer and concentration camps - and we find ourselves asking, how can this be the creation of a God who is all powerful and all good?

Keith Ward summarises the dilemma we face: It often seems that we can neither stand the thought of God acting often (since that would infringe our freedom), nor the thought of him acting rarely (since that makes him responsible for our suffering). We do not want to consider ourselves as part of God’s puppet theatre, but if he acts to heal some people, why does he not act to heal many more? Hence for some people, moral considerations lead them to prefer to deny that God can act at all, rather than to say that he acts arbitrarily or manipulatively.

We must recognise that there remains a great mystery in suffering, and I do not want to suggest that there is any easy way to understand it. I do not think we have to choose between a God who is inactive or arbitrary or (worst of all) a cruel manipulator. There is only one broad strategy possible, which is to suggest, that the world’s suffering is not gratuitous or for nothing, but a necessary contribution to some greater good which could only be realized in this mysterious way.

In relation to moral evil (the chosen cruelties of humanity), this leads us to embrace the free will position: that despite the many disastrous choices (and one cannot say that in this century without a quiver in one’s voice), a world of freely choosing beings is better than a world of perfectly programmed people without intelligence. In relation to physical evil (disease and disaster) there is a parallel ‘free process position’: that in his great act of creation, God allows the whole universe to be itself. Each created entity is allowed to behave in accordance with its nature, including the due regularities which maybe part of that nature. God no more expressly wills the growth of a cancer that he expressly wills the act of a murderer, but he allows both to happen. He is not the puppet master of either humanity or matter.

I would want to say that these are perhaps the most perplexing issues that confront humanity and any religious believer. For Christians in particular, we have to turn to the cross of Christ, and try to begin to understand how that death is seen as part of the divine participation in the brokenness and pain of the created order. Yet we also know that we cannot think of the cross without thinking of the resurrection.

Death we believe is not the end, but the means to a new spiritual life in another place. As human beings we leave not the weak to die alone, but fuelled by curiosity and a desire to manage pain more effectively, we have accumulated human knowledge to intervene in the genetic process through genetic engineering. Whilst there is not one Christian view point, there are those who speak of humanity as the created co creator.

We know today that ‘green’ issues are of great importance for the future of the earth, and that an understanding of creation is an important undergirding of our intuition to the value of the world, quite apart from that world’s utility or usefulness for our own purposes. The subtle complexities of ecological feedback, make the predictions of models very uncertain in their relevance, however confidently they may be proclaimed. This applies of course to those that are optimistic as well as those that are pessimistic. What does seem certain is that the politically very delicate question of population control is central to the attainment of a sustainable strategy. Although some scientist’s believe that Aids and HIV maybe a regulator of our own making, and provide the necessary control, even by remote chance.

Next week, we look at how the God who created the universe enters our world, and begins to transform our individual lives, our churches and our communities.