A good friend of mine is on an 8-day silent retreat on the Potomac River. She is centering on God. The writer of Genesis centers on God too, as creator. Rather than silence, creation is teaming with the sounds of new birth. Continents rising, seas forming and animal life coming into being from the birds of the air to fish and other creatures. All this happens as God speaks it into being.
We experience the creation story in the statement made by the creator God who called all things “good”. Meredith Miller’s book, Woven, offers to us this word, “God is good because God is love, and God is love because God is good.” The goodness of God is our contemplation in the preaching moment this week. Miller gets us back to the voice of God by saying, “God speaks and there is goodness all around”.
The goodness of God is certainly embraceable in a world that is filled with so many difficult things. We see the news and can often think of the brokenness of humanity. And yes, humanity has its broken edges, self-centeredness and destructive natures that distance us from the beauty of creating. None of us is going to “create a world” but we do create, or at least have the capacity to create community, beauty in art or music or in the deep personal relationships with family and friends. We even have the capacity to respond to God and create a beautiful spiritual relationship through Jesus Christ and in the influence of the Holy Spirit.
In our Genesis story, the people are together in one place. However, there are other people in other places that have similar stories. Miller reminds us in her book that “Every group has a story about who made the world and how they did it”.
We do this too. I remember from a class in seminary on human development and spirituality that the earliest question you and I ask about our story is, “where do babies come from?” This question comes to us at about age three. It is a question about existence and a connection to creation. A creation that God called good.
As my friend is on her silent retreat, I wonder if she is contemplating the goodness of God. I imagine she is doing just that very thing.
Pastor Todd