I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, August 15. The text is Genesis 1:1-25. Read it here.
*
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the
earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,
while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
My religion teacher in college once told me a story about
the night his first son was born.
That night he woke up in a sweat, from a dream he had, that somehow this
child of his, this tiny, new baby, had grown up to be a murderer. Had grown up to an evil and sinister
person. And he went over and
looked at this new baby in his crib and thought, I have idea who this person
is.
The experience of creating, of making something, crafting
something,
is primarily an experience of fear.
Before all of this, the story tells us,
before people and animals
and fish and birds
and trees and plants and oceans,
before even the sun and the moon and the stars,
before there was a difference between light and darkness,
the earth was a formless void.
Tohu wa bohu.
The set of Hebrew words that appear just a few times in the
bible, and always in reference to this moment of creation. They mean, emptiness, nothingness,
waste, chaos.
There is only this void, and the breath of God, passing over
the deep.
Artists have a reputation for being intense.
I went to college with a bunch of intense artists,
and continue to hang out with some intense artists,
and every so often I even count myself as an intense artist,
if you can count a dinner church as a work of art,
which I think you can.
I think the reason artists can be intense, have to be
intense, is that they spend a lot of time
staring straight into the face of tohu wa bohu.
Staring into the void, looking straight into the nothing, and wondering
what you could possibly hope to draw out of it.
To create is an experience of fear:
of the clean, unmarked sheet of paper,
of the blinking cursor,
of the unblemished canvas,
or the infant so perfect and new that you fear
all you’ll be able to do is somehow screw her up.
It’s the fear of the hugeness of all that you hope to
express,
and reality of your inability to ever find the words.
To create is an experience of fear.
If God experienced the fear we do as we stand on the brink
of creation, the text doesn’t tell us.
But the text does speak of darkness, of emptiness, of chaos that existed
for a long, lonely time. And God
lived and breathed in the midst of that chaos before ever daring to speak a
word.
When creation comes, when God finally speaks, the chaos does
not disappear, is not vanquished or banished, but instead becomes an active and
living part of creation. God takes
the watery darkness and pierces it through with light, then makes a place for
it:
the ocean, and the sky. Eventually, we’ll live between the two, the waters around us
and the sky above us, both drawn from the void that was once all there was.
Many creation stories from this time period are of cosmic
warfare, of Gods who kill chaos monsters, cut them in half and make the world
on their remains. The Hebrew story
is different. It turns out tohu
wa bohu, the formless void, is with us for
good.
It’s the materials we work with and the fodder for our
imaginations, its face can keep us up at night or keep us transfixed, wondering
what we might pull from its depths
Thanks to Steve Hassett, who's teaching on chaos and artistic practice is woven through this sermon.
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