Love Created

The last time that Ash Wednesday fell on Valentines Day was 2018. I was preparing for the beginning of the first lenten season at my church, along with my boss who was the senior pastor. We had both started there the year before. We were distributing ashes at noon as well as planning a community dinner and service for the evening.

In the early afternoon news began to break that there was a shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida. We sat in his office just staring at each other, as the business of the day halted and the weight of what was happening sunk in.

Then this week, as we celebrated Ash Wednesday on Valentines day, our siblings in Kansas City experienced a different but similar situation. Violence ensued at the end of the Chief’s superbowl parade.

The irony of it all, the tragedy of it all, the mess of it all is not lost on me, nor is it lost on you I’m sure. On a day where we simultaneously celebrate love and the frail sinful reality of our humanity and our world it seems that the frail sinful reality has shone brighter.

Perhaps the intersection of these two realities, love and human brokenness, on display for us is a subtle reminder that in the mess of this world, we are not alone. In the mess of this world it is our togetherness that will allow us to overcome the darkness. And all of that is true because God created us to live and to love together.

Today we are beginning a sermon series that really began on Wednesday. It’s called We Believe in Love, and we are going to be looking at the Apostles’ Creed and seeing how the things that we believe about God and the Christian Faith are an invitation to live out a faith of love in the world.

We are going to anchor this entire discussion in the words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthian Church

1 Corinthians 13:1–3 NRSV

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

What Paul is trying to teach the church is that having certain gifts, or believing certain things about God and the world amount to absolutely nothing if those gifts and beliefs don’t amount to a way of living in the world that communicates and spreads God’s love to all people.

Essentially being a Christian is more than simply believing the right things, yet believing the right things is a super important thing. What needs to happen is for our belief to spread from our heads into our hearts and out through our hands.

Today we will begin by just examining this very first line of the Apostles Creed

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

So, that’s it. That’s all we are going to talk about today. And you might be like, wait. What does this belief have to do with Love?

Glad you asked. Let’s take a look.

First of all, please understand that we call God “The Father” because that’s tradition handed down from God’s relationship with Israel. God’s not an old man in the sky. Unless that old man looks like and talks like Morgan Freeman, then I’m on board. So don’t get hung up there. The important thing is the words Almighty and maker or creator. What we mean when we say this is that God is all powerful. So powerful that God was able to create all that is seen and unseen, the sky and the earth. Basically, if it exists — God’s hand is on it in some way or another.

And honestly as simple as this concept is, this is one of the hardest things for people to wrap their minds around. But it doesn’t have to be. We’ve pitted science and theology against each other. They don’t need to be. Heck if it wasn’t for religion science would not exist. I do not care if you believe that God created the whole world in 6 literal days, or if you believe that the world came to exist over a slow process that took millions of years. The Bible actually doesn’t care either. The point of the Bible is that — however things came to be — God directed it.

So the question I have for you is why. Why did God created anything? God lacks nothing, doesn’t feel empty inside without a bunch of stuff. God doesn’t need people to worship him so that he can feel important. So why create the heavens and the earth?

Well my best answer to that question is that God has eternally existed as the Trinity — Father, Son, Spirit. We’ll talk about the son and the spirit in the coming weeks. And because God eternally existed as 3 in 1, God has eternally existed in community. And that community has eternally had a loving relationship with one another. Therefore, God is in God’s being a Community of Love. And because of that Love, God decided it would be wonderful to share that love beyond themselves.

Are you with me? God is a community of love.

Ok so then God begins creating. The earth is created, its chaos but God brings it all into order. Realms of sky, sea, and land are created and God populates them all with plants and creatures. But something is missing.

Genesis 1:26–28 NRSV

Then God said, “Let us make humankind 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 humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

And then when we flip the page to the second account of creation we get these words:

Genesis 2:4–8 NRSV

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

So here we are. God created everything but there’s a problem. There’s no one to care for the earth that God created. So God creates humans. It says he picked up the dust of the earth and breathed the breath of life, the spirit of God into those humans, and in that act they are declared “The Image of God.”

These are creatures that are more than everything else that God has made. They possess the very essence of God, the breath, the spirit of God. And God gives them the task of caring for creation on God’s behalf. But in the beginning there was simply one human. And God thinks, “maybe this could be better.”

Genesis 2:18–23 NRSV

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.”

The important point here is that God was not satisfied with simply sharing love with a single human. God wants love to be shared amongst and between human beings. So God creates out of Adam the second human being. They are separate people, yet they both share the same flesh, and the same spirit of God amongst them. This means that humans are created by love to share love. All human beings are intricately connected through our purpose: To be vessels of God’s love in the world.

And that’s wildly beautiful and idealistic isn’t it? How have we gotten to a point where, on a day that we celebrate love, violence seems to consistently take the center stage? How do we, as people who believe that God created us out of love for the purpose of spreading love live in a world that is so deeply opposite of the love that we are charged with sharing? How do we avoid growing cold, hardened towards our broken world? How do we avoid “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth” becoming a simple preamble to a creed of similarly empty words?

It begins with stopping for a moment. Disconnecting from the noise. Turning off the news. Emptying ourselves of talking points and stances, and simply remembering that this world — all of this, all of these — it is still God’s good creation. Created to experience love, created to be cared for by God’s images on earth. Just like we’ve got to stop separating “science people and God people” using the first 2 pages of our Bibles, we’ve got to get “us and them” language out of our hearts so that our hands can do the Good Good work that God has created us for.

Stating that God is the maker of heaven and earth means that heaven and earth are still God’s to have ultimate authority over. And God’s authority means that God gets the final word. And God’s final word is that before there was evil and corruption there was a good world filled with very good people who shared the love and breath of God. And God’s not done declaring that over us. Because of Christ we have been given the power to live out that love, and the final word will be that this world is once again very good.

Friends, this is our charge this lent — That in all that we do we empty ourselves of the hatred, the indifference, the propaganda, the talking points that separate us from one another, and just simply leave space for love to prevail. After all, we are people who believe that Love has prevailed on the cross to which we journey, let us not allow that gift to have been given to us in vain.