Created to Create - Sermon Transcript
A sermon preached by Rev. Mitchell Boone at First UMC, Dallas on June 2, 2024
Friends, I'm excited about our new worship series, Sacred Glow, because I believe that it is an opportunity for us to ponder and reflect on the goodness of God, the ways that God's grace shows up in our life, that God’s grace is tangible, tactile, and transformative. For the next five weeks, we will ask questions about God's nature and the implications of God being a God of love. We often talk about God as omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, right? All-powerful, all-knowing, present everywhere. But I don't think that description gets to the heart of this idea that we serve and follow a good God. What does it mean for us to say that God is good?
Beyond these divine abilities, there is a divine nature. As we read scripture, learn about Jesus, and discern the Spirit, we see that the nature of God is a rich, deep expression of love for us and all of creation, and this love invites participation. If God is forgiving, then what does it say about our responsibility to forgive? If God practices radical hospitality, how will we treat the strangers in our midst? So, we will ponder how God is good for the next five weeks. As we come to know God as forgiving, hospitable, or creative, we will begin to look at the ways we are called to mimic God's goodness to the world, reflect God's love, and cultivate the divine spark that burns within each of us. There isn't a more appropriate place for us to begin this series than Genesis 1.
Genesis 1:1-7, 14-15, 24-27 (NRSVUE)
When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.
And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so.
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind and the cattle of every kind and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humans in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
A few weeks ago, someone asked what I was reading. I get this question a lot, which always catches me off guard. I must admit that most of my reading outside my work and preaching responsibilities is an inconvenient stack of books on my nightstand. I do not spend enough time reading for pleasure. My current excuse right now is the NBA and NHL playoffs. Go, Mavs, go Stars, right? But the best book I've read - the best book I've read for pure self-indulgence - was released in early 2023. It's the book that comes up when people ask me what I'm what I'm reading, and it's called The Creative Act: The Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Show of hands if you know who Rick Rubin is.
Rick Rubin is one of the best music producers of all time - the creator of Def Jam Records. He's worked with artists such as LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lucinda Williams, Neil Young, Jay-Z, the Avett Brothers, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Adele, Weezer, Johnny Cash, Eminem, and the great Wu-Tang Clan. He has this inherent beautiful gift of taking something good and making it incredible. Rick Rubin is at the top of what it means to be an effective producer in the music world. In the first few pages of his first book, he says that the source of creativity is that we begin with everything: everything seen, everything done, everything thought, everything felt, everything imagined, everything forgotten, and everything that rests unspoken and unthought within us. He says this is our source material, and we build each creative moment from it. This content, he says, does not come from within us. The source is out there.
Wisdom surrounds us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available, whether we sense it, remember it, or tune into it, not only through our experiences but also through dreams, intuitions, subliminal fragments, or other ways still unknown by which the outside finds its way inside. This material appears to come from within the mind, but Rubin says that's an illusion. There are tiny fragments of the vastness of the source stored within us. These precious wisps arrive from the unconscious like vapor and condense to form a thought or an idea.
His writing, especially in the first few chapters of his book, reflects how I understand the all-encompassing, all-present, all-powerful God we learn about at the beginning of Genesis. Paul also talks about God in this way in Romans 8 when he describes God's reach, power, and accessibility as greater than any peril or divide humans can implement, and nothing can separate us from God. The outside is always finding its way inside. We can often read the earliest chapters of Genesis and, because of our familiarity with the creation story, move quickly past the poetry, the truth of the stories of origin. We leave them alone as rational individuals who elevate science to its proper place. But as I've said from this pulpit, scripture shouldn't be debated around its likely or unlikely factual accuracy because something can be true without being factual.
Looking more closely at Genesis 1, we can elevate ourselves and our conversations above the Big-Bang-theory-dinosaur-debates culture loves to have. When we do so, we realize that Genesis 1 presents God as a creative God - a creator and maker - before the authors and editors of Genesis say anything else about who God is. Think about that: the first thing that is said about God is that God is creative, that God reduces God's self, makes space, and then creates in that empty void. The abundant creativity from which God is operating seems to be stitched and grafted into and throughout all of creation. There is both beauty and function that radiates throughout creation.
Genesis 1 is a great example of that. Genesis 1 invites us to put texture and purpose to those moments of beauty that stir within us when we discover or experience them: the beauty of a waterfall that we hiked to see, a cave cut into the side of a mountain, holding a newborn baby for the first time. It produces a deep transcendent feeling of awe and reverence, or what C.S. Lewis would call the sublime. While the secular world offers us often-needed critiques of the church, the idea that this feeling of awe is simply a function of biological evolution falls flat to me.
Maybe I find beauty and awe in a waterfall because my ancestors once found food there, they found shelter in a cave, or they protected the newly born members of their tribe at all costs. But my ancestors couldn't access a Hubble telescope that produced jaw-dropping and spiritual pictures of galaxies thousands of lightyears away. My ancestors did not have access to microscopes that revealed the complexity of ice crystals or submarines that explore the incredibly diverse and beautiful ocean floors. There is something beyond what science can explain. As we read Genesis 1 as an origin story, I want to encourage us to read it well and read it as a biography about who God is, for it shows us that there is divine beauty in the world, which is intentional and brimming with purpose and possibility. The text says that God spoke creation into being but also made and crafted creation into existence. In verse 6, God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters.” God spoke. God speaks creation into existence for sure, but God also makes things. God made the dome and separated the water under the dome from the water above the dome. God made. The Hebrew verb is commonly used when describing a craftsman's wood, stone, and clay work. The dome in verse 7 is better translated as a stone-cut vault chiseled and carved. God speaks creation into existence, but God also makes and fashions creation. God is a creative maker who combines beauty with function and brings order out of chaos.
See this bowl? Joe Bass made this bowl. It's rather simple, beautiful, and functional. Joe is humbling to hang out with because I don’t know anyone more talented than Joe Bass. While Joe can speak to the specifics of this bowl, how it was made, and to a deeper purpose in the beauty of simple woodworking, I'd like to propose that this bowl, Joe's work, and its intrinsic value is beyond just its simplicity, is beyond it just being made of wood. I propose that Joe's work in this bowl reflects the sacred glow of God's creativity. You see, this bowl started as a form of chaos. A limb from a black walnut tree in our backyard fell to the ground in a storm, and it was big and cumbersome. Joe and I, along with Cash and Declan, loaded it into Joe's pickup truck. From what was likely destined to be just one of many limbs that fell during that storm and were put into bulk trash, Joe started to work with it, transform it, and make this beautiful bowl. I think that's what Joe's work is all about. Our creative output and ability directly reflect our creative God, and while we may get sick of thinking about how much talent God gives some individuals, we all have this ability. We are all capable of reflecting God's creativity to the world.
We see this in Genesis 1, where God said, “Let us make humans in our image according to our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish, the sea, the birds, the cattle, all wild animals of the earth, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So, God created humans in his image. In the image of God, He created them. Male and female, He made them.” The entire worship series for the next five weeks is based on this imago dei, the image of God, the divine imprint upon humanity. Think about pressing an image into the side of a coin, or consider Van Gogh's self-portrait or an “I Am” poem written by a God who is best defined as love. That's how we should begin to view ourselves. This may be the height of my preaching as a hippie from East Dallas, but it is the truth in Genesis 1. We all can be creative and reflect God's creativity in the world. While not all of us can invoke emotion in our singing like Joni Mitchell, write like Viet Thanh Nguyen, or paint like Mark Bradford, we can bring beauty, creativity, function, and purpose to a world that desperately needs it.
It's simply about reframing how we interact with the world. What if our solutions to a significant issue at work weren't framed as a problem to be solved but rather a possibility to be explored? What if, when we successfully argue a case in front of a judge using obscure case law, we think of it as an act of creativity before we view it any other way? What if we value new teaching methods in a third-grade class as an offering of creativity and function before we rush to make it required learning? What if the first thing we offer the world is connected to this idea of creativity? Can the simple ways we bring beauty and creativity be more than just fleeting moments? What can our ability to create show us about God, and what does it mean for our spiritual health to create and share with others? What does it mean to create your own life within community?
This leads me to FirstChurch because there is no doubt that we are filled with creative people and have creative people offering themselves to the world. Variations will leave here after worship and head out on their tour. It's why the Chancel Choir gathers every Sunday to sing and offer their gifts, creativity, and beauty to a world in desperate need of beauty, purpose, and truth. We have art galleries featuring artists and a Rotunda Theater offering plays and musicals.
However, there are more possibilities for us as a church to be creative within the community. What does it look like to create positions where there is an artist in residence? What does it look like for the community to write liturgies? What does it look like for us to sing original songs written by our members, offer public art installations, offer more plays and musicals in the Rotunda, and create creative systems and spreadsheets that reveal more holistic metrics around church vitality? Each and every one of us can offer creative selves, not only to this community but - in doing so - to God, not only as an act of worship but as a way to reflect the very goodness of God. We can do more. Each and every one of us can do more, and we don't have to be Joe Bass to do it. We should do more because when we offer our work to the world, we point others to the image of God, the image of a creative God. For us, it's a very important thing to do. Friends, it starts with simple awareness. Where are those moments in your life where you can offer creativity?
We were without power for a few days during the storms. Eli and the boys were staying at my parents' house, but I found myself back cleaning up. I was putting away the magnet tiles and Hot Wheels we left in the living room. In that mess were some markers and - it was shocking - a blank piece of paper in our house. There, for a brief moment, I stopped what I was doing. I picked up a marker and drew something for the first time in a long time. I don't know why I did it. Maybe it was because I was running on fumes and wasn't thinking, or maybe it was because I was tired of doing a lot of tasks and needed to stop. I picked up a marker, and I drew something. I drew this picture of our house and spent about 10 or 15 minutes doing that. Then I realized it looked horrible. I was going to show it to Cash, but I decided I'd throw it away and keep cleaning up.
But as I was thinking about this sermon and trying to find a way to challenge us to do more, maybe it starts with recognizing that there is real, intrinsic, inherent value in creating simply as a reflection of who God is. Maybe our creative output, whatever that looks like for us as individuals and as a community, starts with not immediately throwing that stuff away. What would it look like? What would it look like for us to be a church that creates simply to create because, in doing so, we gain a better sense of who God is in the world?
I encourage you this week to find one thing you can do to be creative. Maybe it's to draw a poor picture of your house. Perhaps it's to bake a poor batch of cookies. If you bake good cookies, please bring them to the church office. Maybe it's finding that musical instrument you've kept in the closet for far too long. Maybe it's finding a creative solution to a problem in your homeowner's association. I don't know what it is for you, but I do know that if we can engage in that creative output and exercise that creative muscle, it's not only about what it means for us or what it can do functionally in the world. It is also about revealing God's goodness to a world that needs a relationship with a good and loving God. Next time, I promise that if I draw something, I will show it to Cash before I throw it away. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.