Rewind
Deborah L. Hughes Third
Presbyterian Church
January 8, 2006
Genesis
1:1-2:4; Mark 1:4-11
The movie, RENT, opens with the chorus singing, “525,600
minutes. 525,000 moments so dear. 525,600 minutes - how do you
measure, measure a year?” (From “Seasons of Love,”
composed by Jonathan Larson)
Last Thursday night, about 7,100 minutes into 2006, I opened
an email from an old friend in Portland, Oregon, and it contained
this sad news:
“Kendall passed away yesterday in his sleep as I was
holding his hand. He is at peace now. I miss him terribly. --Don”
I started to type a reply to Don, telling him I was sorry,
that I hadn’t known Kendall’s health had declined,
and how much I knew Kendall loved him, but suddenly I burst
into tears and began to sob. 7,140 minutes into 2006. . .
What was it about Kendall that had touched me so deeply?
We met at the Pension Board where I worked in New York City.
By some measures, he wasn’t a great success or a born
leader. I don’t know that he was ever president of anything,
though he certainly earned respect. He was on the administrative
staff at work—basically an executive secretary at the
highest level. Though he was well-educated, talented, and well-read,
he wasn’t ambitious. In fact, he turned down a number
of promotions, saying he wasn’t interested in the added
responsibility, the stress, or the crazy, longer hours that
he saw some of us working.
He wasn’t particularly handsome, until you got to know
him, though he was always tastefully dressed and meticulously
groomed. I don’t know that he played golf or tennis; I
don’t imagine him playing any sports, really. He liked
rules and structure, a lot, and he could organize anything.
Before he left his office each day, his desk was clear, and
tomorrow’s to-do list was outlined. He carefully turned
off the same six switches in the same order before he put on
his coat. He would eat the same type of sandwich every day for
a whole week, feeling it was much more efficient than having
to make a decision about what to eat early in the morning.
He loved animals, and he respected people; he received everyone
with grace and gentleness. He had a wry and playful sense of
humor. He was absolutely trustworthy, reliable and loyal.
When I first met Kendall, he was sick, though he covered it
well and he never talked about it. He was taking AZT, the only
real treatment for HIV at the time.
He lived alone. He knew he didn’t have long to live,
and he had resolved that he would probably die alone. He didn’t
expect romance to ever come into his life again.
Kendall was honest, and real, and afraid, and brave. I was
drawn to his quiet integrity and strength of his character.
He had a deep sense of the abiding presence of God. He looked
for the very best in each person, and he sought to offer the
best of himself to each day. Even though his life was full of
chaos and order, darkness and light, routine and uncertainty,
he lived each minute as though it was a gift from God. And,
most hours, he trusted where he would be going next.
Our liturgical year began a few weeks ago (after Thanksgiving),
with Advent--waiting for Christ to arrive. A few billion minutes
into the story of people on Earth. But then, this morning, we
seemed to hit the “rewind” button on the Biblical
narrative and go right back to the very beginning—more
than a few billion minutes backward. Day one, minute one in
creation, some would say.
Let’s talk for a few minutes about what is in Genesis
and what’s not here. I’ve been told that post modern
minds have trouble with this great myth about how it all began.
I have a scientific and rational mind, and I don't have any
problem with it at all. After all, this is not a scientific
description of how things began. Contrary to what some have
been asserting for about four-score years, there is no contradiction
between Genesis and Darwin. Never has been. The people of the
ancient near east who passed this story down by telling it to
their children and their children to their children were not
concerned about scientific facts. Nor were they concerned with
carbon dating or chronological history.
Instead, they wondered about the meaning of life and their
place in the order of the cosmos. They wondered if they were
alone or if there was something grander and more significant
than they. They wondered if there was any point to it all—this
life on earth-- and if so, what that purpose might be. While
they may not have possessed our empirical knowledge, and certainly
had not yet imagined our technology, they weren’t dumb,
nor were they naive. They were asking the very questions that
trouble keen minds and souls today. They were searching for
truth. And this story from Genesis conveys the truth as they
came to understand it and passed it down to us.
You may have noticed as we read from the book of Genesis this
morning, that our interpretation didn’t begin exactly
the way you may have remembered. The text begins with a Hebrew
word that is difficult to translate: “berashit.”
Some 2,200 years ago or so when it was translated from Hebrew
into the Greek version of the scriptures, the Septuagint, it
was interpreted to mean “in the beginning.” Another
translation, now favored by many Hebrew scholars, reads “when
God began to create the heavens and the earth. . .the earth
was without form and void. . . ” This reading tends to
suggest that there was some kind of pre-existing chaos out of
which God began to create.
It’s interesting that some theologians, scholars, and
philosophers have exhausted pages, chapters, and books on the
idea of creation ex nihilo: that God created from absolutely
nothing at the first moment of time. All that argument is based
on the one Greek translation of the Hebrew word, “berashit.”
It tells us something about building theories on “literal”
translations of the Bible.
Well, let’s posit that this story of creation from Genesis
conveys Truth. Here is what we might glean:
· There is something in the universe that is greater
than us, greater than the powers of nature, yet somehow separated
from and connected to nature.
· This power is good, and all that it has created is
good.
· This power separates darkness from light, yet it is
does choose one as good and the other as evil. Seemingly contradictory
forces come under the same power and from the same source.
· This power is the source of all that is living.
· This power, like the wind, continues to move all around
and through our universe. It’s active.
· This power has placed humanity in the midst of creation—as
a part of the whole—not the center of it, as we so often
wish to be.
· We are born into relationship with this power.
· This power has given humanity a special role. We have
free will, and we have responsibility. There are ways to order
our lives.
· There is a purpose to our lives. We may not understand
this purpose, but it is good by its very nature. There are cycles
beyond us that make meaning out of much that we do, even though
we may not understand it.
If we rewind to this point, to the truth in our story of creation,
we discover a framework for the grand design of that God intends.
Here, in Genesis, is a fully implied relationship between God,
humanity, and all of creation. This is what is intended, and
this fullness is what is good. And, here, in Genesis, we infer
accountability for human beings.
As is often noted, and as the rest of scripture reveals, we
choose to live outside these relationships. This is what we
call sin: living apart or separate from God and out of right
relationship with God’s creation, including plants, animals,
the planet’s resources, and other human beings. This is
sin, individual and corporate.
Human nature. Sin. Accountability. No wonder some people stay
away from church!
But, I tell you this is a new year, and a time for new beginnings.
(Though, with God, it’s always time for new beginnings.)
If we stopped right now, at the beginning of 2006 and rewound
our life stories, what would it tell us about who we are and
what we value?
Now, for some of us, rewinding would take a good while. I calculated
that some of you have lived about 47 million minutes of life.
In other words, it would take more than 635,000 CD’s to
record the minutes of one of those lifetimes. Fortunately, we
spend ¼ to 1/3 of our minutes snoring or sleeping, so
we could skip over all those minutes.
If you looked at your life, what would make you laugh? What
would make you cry? What would you want to do over? What would
you regret? What does your life story say about your relationship
to God? How have you related to God’s created world? How
have you treated or been treated by other human beings?
Let me let you off the hook for a minute, and we’ll rewind
the story back before our personal histories to a time and place
some 2,000 years ago. Stop when you get to the place described
in the gospel of Mark. There it is: the scene where John is
baptizing in the wilderness at the river Jordan.
People were coming out to the wilderness, to the river Jordan,
because something had caught their attention. Apparently, they’d
reviewed their lives, because they came repenting.
Now, wait. What’s Jesus doing here? You can’t tell
me that God’s son is out of relationship with God, can
you? Why on earth does Jesus get baptized? You know, scholars
say that the apparent strangeness of this story about Jesus
makes it all the more likely that it really happened. They say
that it would have been edited out if there wasn’t such
a strong community memory that it happened. The other gospels
attempt to make sense out of it, but Mark doesn’t. Jesus
comes forward to be baptized by John.
And here’s what happens. . .
The heavens split (you know, God is able to separate the light
from the dark, the sea from the land, and so splitting the heavens
at Jesus’ baptism was not too difficult a challenge) and
Jesus sees the Spirit descending on him like a dove. This doesn’t
necessarily mean that the Spirit took the shape of a dove, though
that does make for beautiful banners and images in stained glass
windows. . . It does imply that from Jesus’ experience,
something visible happened that represented the presence of
the Spirit of God.
In Mark’s gospel, we know right away, in Chapter 1, who
Jesus is: God’s beloved son. Well, it takes the disciples
the rest of the story to figure out what that means, and it
takes some of us our whole lifetimes to figure it out as well.
But here, on this same Sunday that we start with the first
chapter of Genesis, our lectionary readings bring us to the
story of Jesus’ baptism. Baptism is all about new beginnings.
It’s about the power to change our lives. And that power
comes from above, from God, from that one who created the universe
and pronounced it good.
But we have to be willing to participate in this change. We
have to be willing to step into the water. Friends, you are
a new creation. It is never too late to live as though you are
God’s beloved. Every day is an opportunity to live life
anew. Every day is an opportunity to start fresh and get it
right. Every single day—not to bog down with regrets but
to live as though the next 525,600 minutes are the most important.
So, in this New Year, and whenever you need to: Rewind.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and
all that is in them.
In the hours of doubt, when despair enters the corners of your
dwelling and your heart:
Rewind.
Behold creation. The sun to rule the day. The moon to rule the
night.
In the hours of anguish or self-doubt, in the hours when you
fear you do not have enough or you may lose what you have: Rewind.
Count what is yours, but not yours. Everything that is green
and grows or walks or crawls or squirms or swarms or swims.
When you note that humanity has this incredible ability to
create new forms of chaos and destruction. . .in the hours of
fear or despair for the state of the world: Rewind.
For God saw that it was good, and God has not abandoned us.
There is always time for new beginnings with God.
My friend Kendall would not have thought of himself as a hero.
I suspect he would have been very uncomfortable with that. He
was by no means a risk taker. He had charted the course he expected
his last years to take. And he sought to live it faithfully.
When Don came into his life, he couldn’t believe that
someone could love him and want to be with him, in life and
in death. But Kendall took an ultimate risk: he let go and chose
love and life for the last 3 million minutes of his time here
on this earth.
So, Don was there holding his hand when Kendall slipped across
the muddy waters of the Jordan to the other side of love.
And Kendall’s life stands as a witness to a God of power,
hope, and love.
“525,600 minutes - how do you measure a year in the life?”
May we, like Kendall, live our minutes with God. Amen.
