Community of Life – Genesis 1.1-5, 1.24-2.4b; Psalm 104, 1-4, 14-31; Colossians 1.15-20; Mark 7. 14-23
If you were to tell the story of St George’s, where would you begin? With your arrival in the parish? With the renewal under Bruce Wilson? With the founding of the parish in 1889? With the establishment of Paddington as a suburb? Or further back into Indigenous memory and beyond? How would you frame the story of our life together? Would it sound like the start of a comedy or a tragedy? How would you start if a friend asked you: so tell me about your church? Or if a visitor walked in the gate over morning tea and said “what’s the story with this place?”
If we can’t name our story, how can we name where we are going or discuss what we might need to do to get there? So how might our story begin?
Once upon a time [there was a church]. – Fairy tales
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. – Star Wars
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. – J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. – George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. – C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
Of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
The wanderer, harried for years on end,
After he plundered the stronghold
On the proud height of Troy. – Homer, The Odyssey
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife. – Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet I.i[1]
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 waters. Then God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. – Genesis 1.1-3
First impressions are vital. The opening of a story must catch our attention; pique our interest. A certain amount of information must be given in such a way that the reader or viewer is interested and, perhaps, challenged. We are given a first glimpse of a place not yet recognised, a face not yet familiar.
How a story begins shapes our expectations: a setting is established, a tone struck, a point of view revealed, critical characters are introduced.
The scope and ambition of the narrative to follow is often revealed or implied.
“Once upon a time” takes us into a realm of talking bears, kissable frogs and impressively lofty and lucrative beanstalks. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” triggers thoughts of interstellar travel and alien creatures. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” makes us wonder as to what manner of creature is being introduced and whether it may ever venture forth from its hole. The clocks striking thirteen renders a familiar experience disconcerting; something is amiss; we are in a world close to our own but just a bit beyond it. Eustace Clarence Scrubb almost deserving his name tickles our curiosity about why while also subtly posing the question whether this may still be true by the end of the story. The invocation of a musical muse to aid the narrator in relating the story of a crafty wanderer foreshadows the long journeys ahead while reminding us of the great battle just past. Shakespeare, never one to hold back from spoilers, pretty much gives us a synopsis of Romeo and Juliet; his concern is not surprising plot twists, but the development of a rich verbal and visual tapestry of the antagonism and reconciliation of two warring households in Verona through the lens of two star-cross’d lovers.
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and earth”. These words the most famous of all openings, and some of the best known words of the entire Bible. But what effect do they have on us as listeners? Take a moment to discuss with someone nearby. When we read these opening verses, what do we expect? What is brought into the frame of our attention, or what is implied? What kind of narrative are we being introduced to?
This morning/evening we begin a new journey ourselves, a ten week series tracing the big picture narrative arc of the whole collection of scriptures from Genesis through to Revelation, the story from creation through to new creation, the story of holy Creator, human creatures, and the whole cosmos centred on the humble Christ. While the lectionary can be great for walking along the road with Jesus week by week, or for accompanying David from shepherd boy to king of Israel, or for placing mutually illuminating passages side by side so that we might start to see some of the thematic connections between parts of scripture, what it lacks is the ability to give a synopsis of the whole, to trace the entire show from go to woah: to tell in brief the big story of God, creation, Israel, Jesus, the church and the renewal of all things. Our conviction in putting together this series is that this big story has something to do with our story here in Paddington. As we also seek in the coming weeks and months to together find ways to articulate the St George’s story, this tale of God’s unfailing love for creation might infuse our imagination and guide our attempts.
And to explore these two intersecting stories, we’ve selected the lens of place. We’ll take ten iconic places in scripture and consider how they illuminate aspects of this place here in Paddington. Our place this morning in one sense could be considered the garden of Eden, yet that doesn’t really appear until the second creation narrative in Genesis 2. Since I preached on that last year, today we’re looking at Genesis 1 instead. Where is this place?
- More than our little patch
Well, we start big. It is nothing less than the heavens and the earth. This phrase embraces everything that is, visible and invisible, as the creed puts it. Or in the language of our reading from Colossians 1, “all things”. The heavens and the earth. And heavens here primarily just means sky, so to say “the heavens and the earth” is to be speaking of everything around us, our context considered as broadly as it can be observed and conceived. This is the widest view possible.
And the narrative goes all the back as far as it is possible to go: in the beginning. Again, just as with the language of heaven and earth, I don’t think this is intended or needs to be read scientifically. Instead, it is phenomenological, a description of our experience. That is, this is a story concerning as broad a canvas as we can see and going back as far as we can imagine. This narrative is to be the outer context within which everything else we consider is embraced, including our scientific inquiries into cosmology.
The universality of this opening place and the originality of the timing are important for our St George’s story. Before we get into the particularity of Paddington, the specifics and idiosyncrasies of our local context, before we seek to distinguish ourselves from our neighbours down the road, this first place reminds us that we are part of something much, much bigger. Not just Sydney Diocese, nor the global Anglican church, not even the universal church, but part of the universe. We exist in the same reality as everything else. Our little patch has to find its meaning with reference to creation as a whole.
And that means that we can’t see ourselves as simply doing our thing, unconcerned with anywhere else. We are one particular place in a much larger space. We are one small chapter in a much longer story.
- In the beginning, God
In this biggest of all possible stories, the first and primary character is God. God is author and protagonist. There is of course far, far more to say about just who this God is, but at this point we note not just the presence, but the centrality of one who is not us. We come later. We join God’s context before we get to speak of God in Jesus joining ours. And so this space, this story is not ours to do with as we wish, but is received, like our very lives, from the hand of God. We don’t have a place that created by our own cleverness, by the determination of our willpower, by the generosity of our wallets, by the longevity of our attendance. This place is not, fundamentally, ours to own or dispose of according to our desires. This story is not ours to tell according to our preferences. We don’t get to call the shots
This is a deep affront to our cultural assumptions about being self-made people, a profound challenge and rejection of the enlightenment narrative of autonomy and self-possession. We don’t begin with me and my consciousness. We don’t begin with my desires or dreams. We don’t begin with the power I have managed to grasp for myself. We begin with one who dis-places us, who sets the stage onto which we are then summoned. This place is not ours.
3, Not just place, but placed
And this means, third, that we must speak not simply of place, but of being placed. We experience what philosopher Martin Heidegger calls “throwness”, or what Rowan Williams calls “creatureliness”: that we always experience this bigger story in media res, from the middle of things. Our entrance is into action already occurring, into a context we did not determine, into a life context that we did not choose. Through birth or movement we enter places that already exist and that we don’t get to define from scratch. We are more defined by our places than our places are defined by us. Of course, we have an impact, and we can and should be thoughtful about the nature and manner of the strands we weave into this tapestry. But we are first creatures before becoming in various small ways co-creators.
And one of the implications of this is that we can’t ignore history. The history of this parish extends back well beyond the memory or experience of any of us. All of us have been newcomers here. All of us received from those who came before us a sense of this place, however much we may have also contributed to tweaking or developing it. But not just the parish history of St George’s, but the history of the suburb in which the parish participates. Paddington: built as worker’s cottages to house the builders of Victoria Barracks. For a long time a working class neighbourhood, with a maternity hospital at its heart. World War I saw heavy losses and unemployment here hit 30% during the Depression, leaving a legacy of broken homes, alcoholism, violence and depression. After WWII plans were drawn up to demolish virtually every dwelling to clear the slum for total redevelopment, but the plans were shelved and then in the 1960s, waves of gentrification began and a radical shift in socioeconomic class, bringing with it the displacement of many of those who called this place home and the arrival of professionals: academics, designers, sophisticated and increasingly wealthy urbanites, many with a Bohemian vibe. And continuing into more recent years with further waves of even more financially robust professionals, especially from finance and law, with considerably more conservative and establishment social outlook.
What might it look like for us to thrive in this context? With a morning congregation composed more of earlier arrivals in the area and not yet reflective of demographic changes visible at Glenmore Road Public?
But of course, the history of this place extends back before European dwellings were constructed. The Gadigal people, who used the ridge on which Oxford Street now runs as a walking track, who gathered reeds at Rushcutters Bay, who had their own sense of this place and its now buried streams and smoothed topography. And their history is decisively marked by the great catastrophe of 1789. Within a year or so of first contact, the local Gadigals were decimated, indeed almost entirely wiped out, by smallpox. Like so many indigenous populations around the world, the guns, germs and steel of European invaders turned their world upside down. This too is part of this place. We occupy land taken by force, never ceded. We live in the still open wounds of dispossession and a long history of racism, forced assimilation, prejudice and acrimony. We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us. How might this context be part of what it looks like for us to thrive today? How might we honour this history and walk towards healing and as yet largely incomplete reconciliation? What might repentance for the sins of our mothers and fathers look like? For the ongoing sins of indigenous incarceration, marginalisation and forgetfulness?
And we can go even further back. Because even the Eora nation arrived in a context that was here before them, with its own long, long ecological history shaping the geology, topography, hydrology and biota of this place. And that brings us to the fourth point from Genesis chapter 1.
(See Peacetalk from Dr Meredith Lake this Saturday)
It’s a more than human space
Famously or infamously, Genesis 1 concludes with a hymn celebrating humanity as male and female in the image of the creator, reflecting and participating in God’s caring presence and gracious rule. The first humans are blessed with the invitation to
be fruitful and multiply. This has in recent centuries been taken as a more or less carte blanche welcome mat for human appropriation of everything our power can grasp and ingenuity can exploit. We have Christians claiming that the maximal development of all resources is not just a right but an obligation, that the human filling of the planet is a never-finished trajectory of greater and greater humanisation of every space, a turning of every wild place into a garden.
But such a reading is fatally one-sided. For the very same blessing to be fruitful and multiply is also given to other creatures. Furthermore, the plants and trees given to humans to eat are also given to other animals. While humanity does have a particular calling in this chapter, it is within a context of a more fundamental solidarity with other creatures. We are not the climax of creation, that title has to go to the Sabbath rest in which God delights in all that has been made in its rich and abundant variety and interconnections. Thus, if our multiplying is squeezing out non-human life, then we’re doing it wrong. Our dominion is intended to be modelled on God’s, seen supremely in Christ, and is no license for turning everything else into raw materials for our projects. Instead, as we read in Colossians, Christ is the true image of the invisible God. Christ’s rule over all things is the perfect expression of humanity’s task, not the violent subjugation of unruly nature to sate our desires, but the servant hearted care for all in which strength is expressed most beautifully in gentleness and wisdom rather than impatient profit maximisation.
Furthermore, the highly stylised ordering in Genesis 1, far from being a proto-scientific account of origins, points to the ordering of all creatures in a matrix of interdependence. We are but one strand in the web of life, dependent on other beings for every breath of air and sip of water. We do not meet our own needs by creating things ex nihilo, but by participating in the creaturely privilege of interacting with other creatures.
And so this too has implications for our story. Because an increasingly pressing and unavoidable part of our context here in Paddington is a series of interlocking global ecological crises, in which industrial civilisation is undermining the conditions of its own stability and sustenance and is rapidly homogenising cultures and ecosystems in a reckless destruction of diversity and upsetting of the dynamic homeostasis required for life. As a very wealthy suburb, this context is easy to ignore, since our daily bread appears without apparent trouble in the window of Sonoma or Thomas Dux, but as a very wealthy suburb, this context is even more important for us to pay close attention to, since it is our lifestyles that have a disproportionately destructive effect on the ecological health of our neighbours around the world and into the future.
Today is Hope for Creation Sunday, an annual reminder of these realities only fairly recently included in the church calendar here in Australia. Indeed, Pope Francis has declared the 1st of Sept a global day of prayer for creation for Roman Catholics and the Uniting Church have for some decades treated all of September as the Season of Creation. These various inclusions of ecological discipleship into the worship cycle of the church must be understood as symbolic of a growing and deepening realisation that these matters are not yet another issue to be placed in a side chapel for tree-huggers, but are unavoidably important to the life, discipleship and mission of the church as a whole. Ecological concern is not a boutique optional extra that we may choose to adopt as our pet issue. It is not a bandwagon we may decide to climb aboard based on aesthetic preference as though we were without prior attachments on the matter, nor is it just a upper-middle class romantic concern for avoiding nasty industrial experiences and keeping certain national parks nice places for retreat from the demands of urban existence. Paying attention to the community of life in which we participate is the foundational ground of our existence as creatures.
In our Psalm [104] this morning/evening, we see God’s heart for all creatures. God’s provision not just for humans, but for wild animals who at the time were almost entirely outside human economies. Indeed, God even gives food to the lions, a dangerous threat to human society and a drain on human agriculture. For all God’s particular love for humans, God is no rapid anthropocentrist. God’s paternal provision for birds and beasts, goats and goannas, humans and honeybees invites us into a picture of ourselves that is both more humble and more expansive. More humble because are to remain close to the soil: humanity is made from the humus, from the dirt, as Genesis 2 will go on to picture. But more expansive, because our identity is not exhausted by our forty-six chromosomes. We are creatures of God; and our membership in the community of life means our moral community cannot be sharply ended at our human neighbours. Our web of dependence for daily bread, for shelter, for predictable seasons, for stable coastlines, spreads far beyond this particular place. That we are not just humans, but first and fundamentally creatures means that a thriving parish here requires a planet whose fundamental health is not being recklessly eroded by consumerism, technocratic hubris and capitalist acquisitiveness.
So, there are four initial thoughts.
Let me conclude with a paragraph from Pope Francis’ recent encyclical whose subtitle On care for our common home:
“Each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God. The history of our friendship with God is always linked to particular places which take on an intensely personal meaning; we all remember places, and revisiting those memories does us much good.” (Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §84)
How can we discover and develop the story of this place to become a space whose every detail speaks of God’s and boundless affection for us? How might Paddington become the embodiment of God’s friendship? This story is just beginning. To be continued…
[1] It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. – Cervantes, Don Quixote