Reading the Book of Creation

 

Trinity Sunday / Year C

Quoting a portion of the Athanasian Creed in her book Letters to a Diminished Church, Dorothy Sayers, the English novelist and playwright, famously said of the Holy Trinity, “The Father incomprehensible.  The Son incomprehensible.  The Spirit incomprehensible.  The whole darn thing incomprehensible.”  From her perspective, I guess the best sermon I could preach today would leave you confused and confounded.  In her book The Mind of the Maker, Sayers likens the Trinity to the various ways a book is manifested.  It exists simultaneously in the mind of the writer, as a publication, and in the mind and imagination of the reader. 

St. Paul would have approved of her analogy because he writes this to the Christians in Rome:

“Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” (1:20)

Just as you can know something of an author by reading what is on the written page, so too God is perceived through what God has made.

The bible is, in part, a record of what people discerned about God by reflecting on the best observations and knowledge available to them at the time.  And in their time creation was thought to consist of three layers: the heavens above, the earth, and under the earth.  The heavens were made up of multiple layers or tiers separated from our world by a dome referred to as “the firmament”.  God, they believed, dwelt in the top layer, superior to all other divine beings populating the ancient cosmos.  Reflecting on the Person and Nature of God based on this perspective, one of the titles biblical authors gave to God was the “Most High.”

It goes without saying, our access to tools such as the Hubble telescope and particle accelerators has led to an understanding of the creation vastly different from theirs.  We now estimate the universe is about 14 billion years old and consists of an unimaginable 2 trillion galaxies, each having hundreds of billions of stars.  We measure it not by the biblical cubit (the length of a person’s forearm), but by the speed of light.  At this rate you can make 37 round trips from NY to LA in just one second.  To cross the universe a person would need to do this every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year for 93 billion years.  If the enormity of this boggles your mind, try getting your head around another reality.  If you started with the size of an average person, and then multiplied or divided by factors of ten, the subatomic world is actually more minute than the universe is vast.  Using ourselves as the initial measuring point, creation is smaller than it is bigger.

Peter Enns, a theologian and popular writer who blogs at a site called Science and the Scared, contends creation as we understand it today still is telling us something about God.  The problem, as he sees it, is our language and thinking about God have not kept pace with our understanding of reality.  For the most part, people of faith still speak of God in terms and ideas relevant to a worldview which existed 3,500 years ago, but increasingly is out of touch with our current understanding and the frontiers of knowledge we are pursuing. 

Enns argues our language about God needs to keep pace with the creation as we understand it.  Why?  Well, it is something akin to examining a piece of modern art.  Experts can determine much about a work’s age, the materials used in it, and the platform on which it begins, but they cannot answer the most important question, the one which most of us ask when looking at modern art… What does it mean? 

Discovering the secrets of creation is best left to the scientists.  Describing what it means is a task best left in the hands of poets and artists.  Our sacred writings, when approached in this manner, offer relevant guidance and stirring insight.  Consider just what we heard in our readings moments ago:   

I [Wisdom] was daily [the Creator’s] delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race. (Proverbs 8:31)

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers, *

  the moon and the stars

you have set in their courses,

What is man that you should be mindful of him? *

  the son of man that you should seek him out?      (Psalm 8:3-4)

These passages speak to us of meaning and are as pertinent in our days as they were when first put to parchment.  More of what we heard:

Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.  (Romans 8:5)

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.       

                                  (John 16:12)

These passages give us courage and permission to pursue all manner of inquiry because we are assured our discoveries about creation will always tell us something about the Creator.

Faith, it seems to me, is not about defending tooth and nail religious formulas developed centuries ago in spite of obvious incongruities with what we have learned in the ages since.  It is a confident quest to discern in what we are discovering what it says about the God who is revealed in and through it.  As people of faith, we read not just the first and second chapter of the book of creation, but the whole thing.  And, as readers, we realize we are perhaps, at best, only in the middle chapter of what is a very interesting book.  We still have much to learn about the universe.  There is much we don’t understand.  But as we learn and as we understand, we gain new insight into the One who created it all.