Sermon: “The Power of Nothing”

Well, I don’t know about you, but it seemed to me perfect timing to begin a New Year, when the world as we knew it seems to be falling apart, to read again this powerful and poetic story of God’s Creation in the book of Genesis – to begin the year with Chapter 1, Verse 1.  You don’t have to read it as science to hear the blessing and see the beauty in these words, and to feel the exquisite symmetry of those 7 days. 

1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, ²the 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.

God’s wind, God’s spirit, God’s breath – in Hebrew the word is ruah … ruah.  It’s a sound we don’t even have in English; it carries the breath.  First there was nothing – nothing but the black empty vacuum of atom-less space, and then, like the tiniest ripple of a breeze before a storm…and then… the ruah of YHWH moved over the face of the waters.  Before energy became mass, it … took a breath.  It sucked in the power of nothing, like a clearing of the throat, and something happened.  God spoke.  “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” (Genesis 3:3)

One infinitely dark, infinitely massive causal singularity exploded 13.7 billion years ago like a pistol shot at the starting line of time, and a vast universe was set into motion.

⁴And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

God’s creation is good; it is orderly. 

It’s timely, I think, that tonight our Middle School Youth Group is going on an outing to look up at the heavens, to study the patterns of the stars in their orbits.  For many of us, I know, in these recent past months of uncertainty and change, much of we have come to rely upon as solid or stable has been shown to be a lot more like a dark and formless void as it stretches into the future.  Some of you have lost jobs or investments, some of you have suffered declines in income or are expecting new rounds of layoffs.  Some are struggling to sell homes or reduce debt burdens through refinancing.  And others, God bless you, have told me you have had to be the ones to deliver the bad news about layoffs or foreclosures.  Many of us suffer under the strain that these difficulties cause – intensified worries and arguments – that threaten to bring health complications and even violence, and divorce. 

Well, I confess it has been getting to me too – just the tiniest bit – perhaps more than it should have.  Coming from a newspaper family, I admit I sometimes spend more time each day reading the bad news in the paper than the Good News in my Bible.  I spend a larger portion of my days listening to your concerns than I do lifting those concerns to God in prayer.  (Despite what some of you may think, I don’t spend my whole week on my knees in this meetinghouse… perhaps I should.)  And as you know, if you attend many church meetings, we have a tendency to focus more time on our problems around here and how to solve them – things like our malfunctioning heat – thank you, Church House, for solving that furnace problem for us today!  But we could just as well spend our time thanking God for the blessings we know in this place. It’s all too easy to slip from thankfulness to worry, to slide from praise into complaint.  It’s all too easy to start to allow the darkness to overcome the light.

But that’s why we can be so grateful for the amazing gift it is to be called here into this church – into Christ’s church here at this crossroads in Brookfield, where in 250-plus years of rain and slow and sleet and hail, the Good News of God’s love has never ceased to be delivered.  I understand that in this meetinghouse, on some of the stormiest Sundays in our history, worship has been sparsely attended, but it has never been cancelled.  That’s a record I think we can be proud of, but more than that, I think it’s a recognition of the sacred trust that we hold in our community and in our world.  So I hope we can begin this season of Epiphany with a kind of dawning upon us of what an honor it is – as people of faith – to be called not only to be stewards of our beautiful green planet, but also to be stewards of the Good News that God revealed to the world in Jesus Christ.  In the face of all the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that history has flung at us, we stubborn and stiff-necked people of faith have continued to get up and proclaim hope to the hopeless.  That gift to the world is something we can celebrate.  We stand in a long line of God’s faithful people who dared to come out, through whatever terrible storms life brought to them, to sing our hymns of praise.

I love now that I get to be one of you sturdy NEW ENGLAND Congregationalists.  In the South we wore little Easter dresses to Easter Sunrise services!  But I got to stand on a rocky hillside, wearing every piece of clothing I owned, to feel the hard grass crunch under my feet – as we stood together to proclaim the Good News of the resurrection of Christ in the dark before the dawn.  We are not alone, though.  It’s staggering, when you think of it!  All across the planet as that line, that demarcation between the dark and the light, moves across the face of the globe, church bells start to ring in town after town, each Sunday proclaiming that resurrection.  People of faith have always been those fools to get up and do what needs to be done.  We’ve always been the ones to stumble forth and to strike the match of hope against the sheer wall of the world’s darkness. 

And to stand, as I get to do – I love that I got to do it; poor Jen had to read the words – but that moment gives me chills, to be able to lift that candle into the air in the darkness and to proclaim those words from the first chapter of John’s Gospel: “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall never overcome it”!  I was reading this week a little devotional book that I love by Frederick Buechner.  It’s called Whistling in the Dark: a Doubters Dictionary.  And of his title, he writes, "I think of faith as a kind of whistling in the dark, because in much the same way it helps to give us courage and to hold the shadows at bay.”  Whistling in the dark—we do that!

It may seem small or foolish to you, but I encourage as we begin a new year together as Christ’s Church, I encourage you to remember that we celebrate the creative power that arises out of nothing.  We celebrate with the words of that Psalm we read today, Psalm 29 – what did it say?  “All you mortals and angels, honor the glory and power of the Lord.” Mortals and angels together!  We ARE those honored messengers – God trusted us to carry that Good News out into the world.  We people, we flawed human beings, are called to be stewards not only of all Creation, but to see and name Holy Radiance all around us in the world for one another.  We have to do it, we are called to do it, we are compelled to do it – it is our job!  I love that worship, the word “liturgy,” comes from a Greek word that means “the work of the people.”  It’s WORK to get up some days and to sing God’s praise.  So thank you all for getting up this morning and coming to work with me this morning. 

We have to do this because, precisely because, God is NOT so obvious and visible in the world – not even to pastors like me and Jen, who can get a little worn down and burnt out by the end of a holiday season.  Even true saints like Mother Teresa or St. John of the Cross, if we are to believe their biographies, were prone to suffer “dark nights of the soul.”  We all can become sickened and our faith weakened by the prevalence of evil all around us.  How do we proclaim the Good News of God’s love when Israelis and Palestinians get up and greet the dawn by killing one another’s children?  How do we proclaim hope in a world like that?  How do we do that?  How do we NOT do that?  Who else will do it?  It’s our job, as disciples of Jesus. 

It’s been such a small thing for me, my whole life – I grew up in the church – like my kids, I don’t think I ever missed a Sunday, you know.  Remember those days when we put on our patent leather shoes and little anklets and our little white gloves and we bundled up and we went to church?  It’s such a small thing.  We respond to the call to worship, we stand up and we sing a hymn – whether or not we can sing (Amen, choir?) – and we unite our voices in a prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray, and that Christians have been speaking together, in all kinds of places and in all kinds of weather, ever since.  We do that – We DO that! – at the crossing of highways 25 and 133, here on planet earth.  WE do that.  It’s our job.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.