midweek Lenten devotion 1

*nb: Pastor Erik Parker (St. John, Golden Spike AB) and I share midweek Lenten services this year. Our challenge to each other, as we trade off doing the devotion each week: they must be fairly abstract, yet simple enough to follow; and less than a page long. The texts for the devotions come from the readings of the Great Vigil of Easter. This weeks' reading was Genesis 1:1-2:4a.

Creation. Words floating down from generation to generation, from lips old and parched and crackling, into ears small and open and wondering.

Creation. Words that brought forth light, and life.

In the beginning, we say, when God began to create the heavens and the earth. That’s our great story; not a scientific theory or fact or explanation – but truth. We are created. All that we live on is created; all that we eat and drink and breathe and wonder is created first by God, and not by us.

Maybe that makes our greatest creative minds copycats, nothing really more than poor shadows of the great word of God.

We all have our own creation stories – stories about our origins; stories about who and what we are, and how we became that way. Stories that define us, that are part of our history.

Christians are odd; they remember their history by looking both to their past and to their future. We begin on Ash Wednesday with a little smudge of dirt and the words “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Our us-ness, our existence, created out of endless motes of dust. Maybe that’s why our ‘goodness’ crumbles so quickly: being dust, it comes apart and leaves a shell of what remains.

We are dust, and water. Water that was chaos, was not-life; was not-God. Take away our dust, and what remains is water. The Spirit of God moves – sweeps – over the waters; moves – sweeps – over us, and leaves nothing in its wake; we become again created ‘in the image’ of God; not so much a blueprint but a child’s poor drawing; stick people with straight arms and bulbous heads, compared to the image of our Creator.

Yet, we are told, we are created ‘good’.

That is not a judgement; not a moral condition; not even a spiritual state. It is, nevertheless, just as true as saying that the earth, the living creatures, and the plants are ‘good’.

Endless ages of endless sages spin creation to their owns ends: we choose ‘bad’. We can be ‘good’.

But we remain created in the ‘image’ of God; awkward, fragmented, pixelated beings seeking something greater than ourselves. We are dust, and water; created and chaotic – but we are, above all things, ‘good’.

Good is created. Good is life. It is our past; it is our future: good, because God speaks us that way; good because God creates us that way; good because God redeems us that way. God ignores the not-life in us; names and claims humankind as ‘good’.

Redeems us through light, and life. Our history is known by our past, and our future: light, and life.

God’s first words to us: “you are good. Take, and eat.”

God’s last word to us: “you are good. Take, and eat.”