Text used – Genesis 1:1-5

• There’s a beautiful children’s book that I have loved my whole life – one that my mom read to me and that I now read to my kids.
  • Miss Rumphius written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney[1]

• • Story of a little girl named Alice who has grand plans for her life
    • Travel to beautiful, adventurous, far-away places
    • Live by the sea
    • When she shares these grand plans with her grandfather, he tasks her with one more plan: “That is all very well, little Alice, but there is a third thing you must do. You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”
    • Alice grows up and becomes a librarian → decides one day it is time for her to embark on her travels → visits many, many beautiful, adventurous, far-away places
      • Climbs mountains and makes friends on tropical islands
      • Visits jungles and desserts
      • Encounters lions and kangaroos
      • Injures her back getting down off a camel in India → decides it’s time to go home
    • Alice realizes her 2^nd goal: buys a small house by the sea → plants some of her favorite flowers – blue and purple and rose-colored lupines – in the rocky gardens around her house
    • One day, after being ill in bed for a long time, Alice goes for a walk near her seaside home. Along the way, she encounters more lupines just like the ones she planted in her garden, and she realizes that the seeds from her garden have been transplanted down the lane by the wind and the birds. And all of a sudden, Alice knows how to accomplish that elusive 3^rd task her grandfather had set for her: “do something to make the world more beautiful.”
      • Rushes home
      • Orders 5 bushels of the very best lupine seeds
      • Walks all around her village and the surrounding area with pockets full of lupine seeds sowing them as she walks: “She scattered seeds along the highways and down the country lanes. She flung handfuls of them around the schoolhouse and back of the church. She tossed them into hollows and along stone walls.”
        • Garners Alice the nickname: The Lupine Lady
    • And sure enough, the next spring, there are lupines everywhere, creating seas of blue and purple and rose-colored flowers wherever you look … creating beauty – delicate and growing and alive – wherever you look.
• Throughout this season of Epiphany – this liturgical season that started with the Feast of Epiphany yesterday and continues through to the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday – we’re going to be focusing on creation and creating → idea: Created Anew
  • Another series based on work of ELCA minister Tuhina Verma Rasche (just like our Advent series)
  • All about celebrating God’s creativity – an our own – in the season of new beginnings: This series begins at the start of a new year, a time to start over and create the world anew through resolutions, hopes, and dreams. This is an opportunity for a community to explore what it means to be a follower of Jesus in a new calendar year and see Christian identity in a new way. Through Scriptures that span all sections of the Bible, let’s discover new and creative ways to explore what it means to be a baptized Christian in the world today. … Epiphany is an opportunity to tap into the creative energy of your community.[2] → It’s this emphasis on creativity that made me think of Miss Rumphius. Sure, the Lupine Lady doesn’t create the flowers … but by sowing the seeds, she creates the opportunity for them to grow. She creates the chance for beauty to flourish all around her.
• Perfect illustration to keep in your mind as we begin talking about God’s creation → Because God’s initial act of creation and all the creation that followed is the source from which all our own creative energy and imagination flows. → begin, of course, at the beginning: When God began to create the heavens and the earth – the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters – God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. God named the light Day and the darkness Night. There was evening and there was morning: the first day.[3]
  • First thing I want us to notice about this passage is its cadence – the innate rhythm it possess → You can’t help but move with the words – with the rise and fall of them, with the breathing-in and breathing-out of them. [RE-READ, emphasizing cadence/movement]
    • Cadence/rhythm repeated throughout the rest of the Gen 1 creation story: God creates → God observes/speaks to the supreme goodness of that creation → “there was evening and there was morning: the X^th day”
      • Cadence/rhythm to creation as well
        • Cadence/rhythm to God’s creation
          • Rhythm of living beings: heartbeats, lungs expanding and contracting, cadence to the way we move through the world whether we walk or crawl or slither
          • Rhythm of the seasons: new life in spring to the full flush of summer, fading life in the fall to the long sleep of winter, then back to new life in spring again, migrations of species from one season of life to the next
          • Rhythm of the world in which we live: phases of the moon, journey of earth around the sun, daily rise and fall of the tides, movement of wind/water currents, constant shifting of earth’s plates
        • Cadence/rhythm to our own creative processes, too
          • Idea phase → brainstorming, concept mapping, playing with words or colors or concepts or chords (depending on your creative medium of choice)
          • Initial burst of creation → color to canvas, chords in progression, words piling up into paragraphs or stanzas on the page, materials coming together (sculptor, engineer, carpenter, etc.)
          • Refining creation → adding and tweaking, changing and emphasizing → If that initial burst of creation is large, expansive brush strokes, this refining phase is small, focused brush strokes. If that initial burst is basic chord progressions, this refining phase is adding the riffs and particular melody.
      • Cadence/rhythm is set from the very outset with God and creation → our own rhythm continues to flow from God’s very first rhythm, God’s then-and-now-and-forever rhythm
  • Second thing to notice = something-from-sheer-nothing of creation – text: When God began to create the heavens and the earth – the earth was without shape or form[4]
    • Heb. is particularly vivid and revealing: “without shape or form” = combination of two nouns (which lends emphasis to both, sort of like saying “strong strong” instead of “really strong”)
      • First word = wasteland, emptiness, nothingness, confusion, unreality, solitude, formlessness
      • Second word = void, emptiness, waste
      • Truly, the text could not be more clear: there was nothing but God … and then, God created. And created. And created. And created.
        • Did God create because God was lonely?
        • Did God create because God was bored?
        • Did God create because it was the plan all along (whatever “all along” might mean before anything even existed)?
        • Did God create because the beckoning of an utterly blank canvas called even God into action?
          • First day: light and dark … but God had more creation stirring within.
          • Second day: sky and waters … but God had more creation stirring within.
          • Third day: dry land and all manner of plants growing on it … but God had still more creation stirring within.
          • Fourth day: sun and moon and stars … but God had more creation stirring within.
          • Fifth day: all birds and all fish … but still, God had more creation stirring within.
          • Sixth day: all the creatures on dry land … but even still, God had more creation stirring within.
          • Seventh day: God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image, God created them, male and female God created them[5] … and finally, God’s creativity was spent … at least, for the time being.
  • Another thing that’s crucial in our understanding of creation: Nothing about our Scripture reading this morning or in the rest of Genesis 1 or even in the parallel creation story that we find in Genesis 2 (that story of Adam and Eve) … none of it says that God stopped creating. It simply says, “God rested from all the work of creation.”[6] → implication: creation is ongoing
    • Rasche: Remember that it was out of the void, out of chaos, that God created the earth and the seas and the birds and the snakes and us. God was so creative in wanting to know our experiences, how we live, what we feel, and what we do, that God came to us in the person of Christ. When I think of what Christ did for you and for me and for creation, reconciling us to God, forgiving us our sins, dying and rising, that amazement and wonder is amplified. Not only did God create; God wanted and continues to want to be a part of creation, beside and in and through you and me.[7] → One of the most amazing things about creation is that God created each and every one of us in God’s own image with the ability to love, hope, dream, and create as God loves, hopes, dreams, and creates.
      • Words of Osho, 20^th Indian philosopher and mystic: To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it. → God was so in love with the world, and particularly with the humanity – broken, imperfect, and frustrating though we can be! – that God continues to choose again and again to enhance that beauty.
        • Creating beauty around us
          • Every sunrise/sunset
          • Every fall when the leaves blaze orange and red and gold
          • Every spring when we are surrounded by a thousand shades of green
          • Every flower the blooms
          • Every mountain that reaches toward the sky
          • Every wave the laps or crashes against a shore
        • Creating beauty within us
          • Beauty of love
          • Beauty of hope
          • Beauty of forgiveness
          • Beauty of connection and relationships
          • Beauty of creativity
• And so, friends, there is something you must do – something that you are called to do, something that you are created to do by the One who created you in all love, all joy, and all grace: You must do something to make the world more beautiful. Amen.

[1] Barbara Cooney. Miss Rumphius. (New York City: Penguin Random House), 1982.

[2] Tuhina Verma Rasche. “Epiphany Series: Created Anew” in A Preacher’s Guide to Lectionary Sermon Series: Thematic Plans for Years A, B, and C, vol. 2. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019), 88, 89.

[3] Gen 1:1-5.

[4] Gen 1:1-2a.

[5] Gen 1:27.

[6] Gen 2:3.

[7] Rasche, 90.