A Homily for Trinity Sunday All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern
Shores, NC June 15, 2014 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Last week I mentioned that the stories from the Book
of Genesis are best understood as myths. We have this unfortunate habit of
thinking that myths are lies, but myths are more than that. Myths are cultural stories
- which may or may not be factually correct – that we use to explain our
understanding of what might be the deeper truth of the fundamental nature of
things. The themes for these stories
come from our connections to the layers of personal and cultural and collective
unconscious. As I explained last week, myths are public dreams and dreams are
private myths. Each night we dream, and our personal, cultural, and collective
unconscious speak to us in symbols in order to help us understand ourselves and
our relationship to our true selves, our souls, our God, and the world in which
we live.
In a dream group, we give a title to each dream we
share and the title gives us a clue to the theme. The name “Genesis” comes from
the Greek translation of the first word of the first book of the Bible. In
Hebrew there is the letter “bayit”, which we tend to pronounce as Beth, and
when the Hebrews used the letter for a word, it meant “house” – that which
contains – or “household” or “Temple” as in Beth-lehem, the “house of bread”.
However, when only the letter is written, it is a preposition meaning “in”. The
next word in the book of Genesis is “raysheeth” which means first, beginning,
most importantly, so therefore, when the word and preposition are combined, the
word is “b-raysheeth”, “In the beginning” or “First and foremost” or “Most
importantly” God created the heavens and the earth, everything that ever was
and will be.
The myth that follows gives the Hebrew understanding
of the nature of all creation. In the other
cultures around them, like the
Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the creation myths were tied into a
struggling encounter between two or more Gods, like the Canaanite Ba’al, the
storm God, struggling with Yam the Sea Goddess, dragon, or the Babylonian
Marduk, the hero God, and Tiamat the Sea Dragon, or the God of light and God of
Darkness. Out of that battle (or sexual encounter, since both are symbols of
struggles), then the earth is formed and life begins as both a resolution of
one battle and the first act of the continuing struggle of life. The Hebrew
myth aims to explain that most importantly there is only one God, and
everything that is our understanding comes from the expression of that one God,
whose spirit brooded over the void and whose expression, breath of that
brooding spirit, gives life. God is the God of dark and light, of sea and sky,
God of both male and female, giving life to everything we know, even to the
things we fear, like the sea monsters, which the Psalmist declares that God
made for the sport of it.
If you try to make this story literal, you miss the
point, so we are urged to see each part of the myth as symbolic pointing to a
deeper truth. My way of understanding it is that the myth tells me that science
tells us that the Cosmic clock begins when 24 Billion years ago there was an
explosion, a burst of being; the burst of energy hurling outwards within the
tension of the allurement of gravity drawing it back in. The myth tells us that
God spoke the breath of energy that begins this whole process and that every
atom of all creation contains the spirit of God. If we look at the Cosmic clock
as divided into 12 portions of 1.25 Billion years, galaxies start forming in
February, with our Galaxy forming in September, a galaxy so wide that if one
traveled at the speed of light in order
to get to the other side, it would take 100,000 years. On October 1st,
the words “Let there be light” reaches here as our sun begins to form. On
October 10th the earth is formed. On October 20th single
cell organisms start to appear, and on December 31st of the Cosmic
clock at 10:54 PM, the mammals of the genus homo and subspecies sapiens or
humans with wisdom start to appear. Humans are last to be made in this myth to
remind us that God makes us in God’s image; the image is not physical but
rather, at the core of our being, the true self which has the three-fold
ability to create, to care, and to love as God creates, cares and loves. At
December 31st at 11:59 and 51 seconds the Homo sapiens begin to
write down thoughts and record dreams and imagination; five seconds later Jesus
comes into the last four seconds of this cosmic clock to point us again to God,
to remind us of the Divine Word spoken at the beginning calling us to create,
care, and love.
The Genesis myth of creation, that public dream
speaking a deeper truth to our true selves is meant to fill us with wonder that
this whole creation is filled with God, and our task in these last nine seconds
of creation is to pay attention to the whole of creation. We are not to rise
above matter but to go deeply into all of the spirit-filled matter. The Spirit
is not separate from matter but infuses all of matter. Jerry Wright, a former
Presbyterian Minister and current Jungian analyst and one of my instructors for
dream encounters (and from whom I have stolen this whole Cosmic Clock analogy)
warns us of the attempt to split spirit and matter saying, “When we don’t deal
with the things that really matter, it becomes the matter with us.”
First and foremost, “In the beginning”, “Most
importantly”, “b-raysheeth”: we are called to live into that wonder of all
creation as we listen to that initial creative word resonating with those homo
sapiens, humans who, in their wisdom given by God, create, care, and love. Jeff
Edwards told us about care which is what stewardship is, the care for all of what
we have as a gift from the loving God. We are stewards of the continuing
creation which is still evolving. This is also what our Sunday School teachers
do with our younger children, as they pass on the stories, dreams, and myths about
what it means to be humans in relationship with God - humans with the ability
to create, care, and love in the image of God as God creates, cares and loves. It
is what we do when the Preacher calls us to pay attention to what is first and
foremost. We have to listen.
Paul in his letter to the Corinthians ends with a
call to them and to us to listen and, in listening, create a Shalom peace in
our communities. He says:
Finally, brothers and
sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one
another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet
one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all
of you.
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