The Eighth Day of Creation: Part I
Worship Leaders: Meredith Guest & Jodi Boyle
Description: In Genesis, it says that on the sixth day, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Whether you believe we are created in the image of God or not, what is clear is that each of us is born with the inherent capacity – like God – to create. Expanding on the Judeo-Christian creation story, it’s as if we are now on the 8th day of creation, and this time we are the creators. Each thought we think, each word we speak, each action we take is an act of creation. Yet how conscious are we of this innate capacity and of what comes into being as a result of our thoughts, words and deeds? In the first of two messages, let’s examine our capacity and consciousness to create so that at the end of the day we too can survey that which we have wrought and, with The Creator, proclaim it good.

Full Sermon:

Once upon a time, a man was driving down a country road late at night when he had a flat tire. Opening his trunk, he discovered that he was without a jack. He immediately looked around. “Perhaps I can find someone nearby who will lend me a jack,” he thought, and started down the road. But then he began creating his own story about everything as he walked.

“I’m in the middle of the country,” he cried. “There won’t be a house for miles.” But then he saw a farmhouse just ahead. “It’s so late,” he said to himself. “There’s probably no one up.” Then he saw a light in the window. “It’s probably just a night-light,” the man told himself. “The whole family is fast asleep, and the farmer will have worked all day in the fields and be impossible to wake up and I’ll have to bang on the door and bang on the door forever until someone comes, and if the farmer does wake up he’s going to be furious with me for getting him out of bed, and when I tell him I need a jack he’s going to say, ‘My God, man, I have to get dressed and go all the way down to the barn to get one!’ and he’s going to be really angry now and probably slam the door right in my face, and, and…” By this time the man had arrived at the farmhouse door, agitated beyond all measure. He banged on the door especially hard – and the door swung open almost at once. “Yes?” said the startled farmer inside. “What do you mean, acting like that?” the man blurted. “What kind of a person are you? Can’t you see I’m in trouble here? All I want is a simple favor! All I need is a jack! Now don’t even think about slamming that door on me!” At which point, the farmer slammed the door.

In the Jewish creation story found in the book of Genesis, God says “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…And so God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Now, regardless of what you think about the Genesis story, it seems to me that it names an undeniable truth: we are, by design, creators, and we are always – through every thought, word and deed – creating.

Some of the ways we create are obvious.

Health and illness, physical fitness or the lack thereof are created through the choices we make. If every afternoon you settle on the couch in front of the TV, eat a couple of Big Macs, wash them down with three or four martinis and top it all off with a pack of cigarettes, you create a very different you than if you choose to eat mostly fruits and veggies, exercise daily and practice meditation.

Global warming is another example of how we create through what we do or don’t do, and sponsoring our actions are, of course, our thoughts about what is essential to the quality of life we define as desirable.

And then, of course, there’s the media, which, in this gathering, is probably all I need to say, since all of us here are well aware of the creative power of the programs being beamed into virtually every home on the planet via the one-eyed god of television.

But some of the ways in which we create are not so obvious, yet are just as powerful – if not more so.

I’ve got a friend; I’ll call him Gary. I’ve known him since we were in high school together – ten years ago. I’ve watched Gary over the years, how he has operated and navigated through things and I’ve noticed something interesting. Gary has a story he seems to tell himself about who he is and what others are up to. If I gave voice to it, it might sound something like this: “People are basically messed up (though his choice of words would be slightly different). Most of the time they are self-serving idiots who run the gamut from clueless to down right out to get you.” Like the man with the flat tire, I’ve watched Gary time and again create circumstances that appear to him to reinforce this story and of which he then becomes victim. On occasion, I’ll suggest a different way of thinking about what someone in his life is doing but it appears almost impossible for him to even perceive what does not fit with his story. What’s worse, when Gary interacts with people professionally, he will set structures in place meant to protect him from other’s behavior which, in fact, invite the very behavior he says he is trying to avoid.  You can picture this can’t you… protective action produces suspicion which gives rise to defensiveness which erodes trust which produces more protectiveness… and on it goes.  Perhaps even sadder than   what Gary creates in these interactions with others is the experience he is having of himself as a person who is suspicious, cynical and angry.  Were he to become conscious of this story he is acting out, I imagine he would choose a very different one, a story in which he gets to experience himself as generous, optimistic and peaceful.

I had an experience recently that highlighted this for me.  One day a few weeks ago when the kids and I were at my grandmother’s cabin we set out for the lake.  On the road in front of the cabin was a guy who was working on digging out the sections of cracked road that had been loosened by winter snowplowing.  He hopped out of a small backhoe to inspect his work and we talked briefly about why the roads were especially bad this year. Now I’m aware that I don’t know this person and I hear the voice of caution but it feels like it is going to be a warm day and I can see by the condition of the road that his is likely to be there for a while.  It occurs to me that over the course of this warm day he might need a drink of water, a place to sit down, a bathroom.  And I realize I have a choice here.  I can follow the reasonable voice of caution or I can have an experience that I find much more satisfying.  I can choose to experience myself as compassionate, kindhearted and trusting. The opportunity to have this experience and perhaps add a little bit more joy to the world was irresistible to me.  And so I say, “Our cabin is right there. We’re going to be down at the lake, but if you need to get a drink of water, take a break or use the bathroom, the door’s unlocked. Feel free.  His face lit up with gratitude and so did mine and that feeling stayed with me the entire day.

These two contrasting examples, illustrate how the stories we tell ourselves are enormously powerful engines of creation, and I would suggest that one of the most important venues for storytelling is what we call “the news,” and I’m not just talking about Fox, though that is certainly the grossest example, but also, NPR and even The War and Peace Report. We like to think of the news as reporting the events of our time, but at another level, a deeper level, a mostly unconscious level, the news is creating and recreating the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, who they are and the way things are. I like what the biblical scholar Bernhard Anderson has written: “Now it is quite true that legend (saga) lacks the precise accuracy demanded by a twentieth century historian. In our sophisticated age no historian would think of writing history in the form of the narrative of the Flood, or the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel, or the Joseph cycle. But in a deeper sense these ancient popular genres tell us something about history that is sometimes ignored by the modern historian who is concerned only with giving a dispassionate report of wars, daily events, relations between nations, and so on. Saga is able to communicate to us out of the past history as experienced by those who lived it, the internal meaning of events and happenings. And if the deepest meaning of man’s life is his relation to God, saga and poetry are exceedingly important ways of telling history.” B. Anderson Understanding the Old Testament pg. 202.

Perhaps the ancients understood something that we in all our supposed sophistication have forgotten: that the stories we tell ourselves, the events and experiences we highlight as significant, memorable and newsworthy are not facts; they are acts of creation.

I recently began a subscription to Ode, the magazine, as they say, for “intelligent optimists.”  This magazine is full of stories not about the worst ways we humans treat each other and the earth but the best.  Each issue contains articles about people all over the world who are telling themselves that everyone of us can live a well-fed, healthy, industrious life within free, just, war-free societies on a thriving planet.  Imagine what our world might be like if every day we consumed stories about people who demonstrated the best of what we can be? I know when I read Ode I come away amazed at human ingenuity, thinking more things possible than ever before and inspired to take action.  I don’t know about you, but I rarely have that experience after watching the evening news.  Which do you think best serves to create the world we say we want?

If we are in fact always creating, if we are never not creating something through our thoughts, our words and our actions then we desperately need to become conscious: conscious that we are creating, conscious of what we are creating and conscious that, if we want, we have the capacity and power to create something else, even though that may feel impossible.

How would we change things if we were conscious that every act is an act of self-creation… that  what we think, say, and do adds to the story of who we are and announces our choice to the world… that we are literally creating ourselves and our world as we go?

Christmas Day Truce, Rifkin pg. 5

Remember that dark and dreary quote from Thomas Hobbes that we read earlier in the worship about the lives of men being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short? As Rifkin points out that is the story we have been telling ourselves about who we are for nearly seventeen hundred years. Such a story about what it means to be human obscures the insanity of war so that killing and dying for cause and country are not only thinkable but laudable. But on December 24, 1914 the Germans and the British told themselves another story, a story about Christmas, and this story allowed them, for one day, to create something entirely different.

In the middle of a brutal and bloody war, these men created peace through the story they told themselves about it being Christmas. That story, and that story alone, allowed them to do the unimaginable and seemingly impossible on December 25^th and on the 26^th go back to making war.

The key is consciousness. This is why the process of creating our mission statement is so important. We get to consciously choose the story we want to tell ourselves and others about who we are and what we are up to here at UUP. That story will create our future.  It will help us select a minister who will take us where we want to go.  It will help us draw into membership people who are interested to join in what we are doing.  It will guide the board in allocating resources and selecting new initiatives.  It will create our future together.

And so, how do we become conscious of what we are creating and what we want to create. This is where spiritual practice comes in and that’s the topic of our second installment of the Eighth Day of Creation to be played here on August 29^th.

If God created the Universe in six days and on the seventh day rested, let us declare this to be the 8^th day of creation and do what we were made to do: create, consciously create ourselves, create a church, create a world out of a new story, a story we tell, a story in which all of creation is a glorious manifestation of the Divine.