The Genesis Creation account. Is it science? Is it a blueprint? Is it an answer against the secular humanists? No, not really. It is proclamation...it is lyric praise...it is song. The Genesis Creation account. Is it antiquated wives= tale? Is it myth? Is it hopeful fable? It is deep, powerful truth.
We need each other to be the people of God. Here’s where it’s the hardest. Our society fragments us, individualizes us, separates us. It rewards a few and punishes a few. But to enter the abundant and good land God has promised us, we as a church must unite...we must be deeply involved in one another’s life, we must break the bonds that separate us in our own little houses, our own little rooms, our own little jobs, our own private thoughts and practices. We need each other. I can’t imagine what freedom from greed, freedom from brickmaking, freedom from fear looks like unless I see it in you. When you model the life of Christ, I can grasp it, try it out. When you open your home to others, I want to open my home. When you share generously with the needy, it makes me want to open my wallet too.
Prayer begins with the inhale. Before we are able to utter anything with our lips we must first draw through them the air that fills us, enabling not only our speech but also our life. And we must remember that humanity did not take the first breath but that it was given to us. God’s exhale became humanity’s first inhale, filling us not only with life, but the ability to participate in the creative power of breathing. For it was God’s breath that uttered the world into existence, and God’s breath that filled humanity with life.
And so before we gather words to give to our God, we must first realize that this activity of prayer is itself a gift from God. It is the very breath that God breathed into humanity that we in turn direct back to God. Taking in and breathing out this breath of God is no trifling matter. “This is not an enterprise to be entered into lightly,” Eugene Peterson notes. “When we pray we are using words that bring us into proximity with words that break cedars, shake the wilderness, make the oaks whirl, and strip forests bare (Ps. 29:5-9).”
In Jesus’ culture, a day began at night. As the first day began with darkness, and God spoke light into it, so our days begin with God’s spirit hovering over our lives as the details blur with the lengthening shadows of evening.
After an eventful Sabbath, the first day rose as the sun set. Mark frames our view through the doorposts of Peter and Andrew’s house. Rather than serving as a barricade against the undulating chaos of broken people gathering outside, the door opened to a new creation. The depressed, the anxious, the traumatized, the disturbed received their wits and grasped reality like they never had, or had long forgotten. The over medicated and uninsured extended their hands and receive health. God’s life poured irresistibly through his Son. Even the forces of evil could not refrain from declaring the good news. But Jesus silenced them. It is better to believe because of God’s good works than the devil’s word. Wholeness should speak louder than the last screech of a broken spirit.
