We believe in God, the Creator. Who’s love is the life-force of the Universe.
TWO CREATION STORIES
In the book of Genesis, there are two main creation stories in the first two chapters. The first one begins with, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” The second creation story begins with almost the same line but switches the words heaven and earth in the order they appear. “In the day that the Lord God created the Earth and the Heavens…” You will probably not like this if you are one who only reads the Bible literally. The first story had God creating in 6 days and the second it only takes one. Putting that aside, it strikes me that these two stories seem to come from two different understandings of how the creation happened. The first story in Genesis 1, which is thousands of years newer, has God speaking things into existence. “And God said, ‘LET THERE BE LIGHT.’” Light appeared. This happens throughout the first story. It shows the power in creation. In the second story, God gets down and dirty, fashioning things out of clay. It shows the intimacy of creation. We need both of them to better understand God as Creator. God is both powerful and intimate. These stories then balance each other out. You might say that the first one understands God the creator from a heavenly view and the second one from an Earthly view. I don’t take either of these stories literally but taken together they allow us to wrestle with what it may have actually been like.
GOD DREAM
What interests me is not that God created the world, or how long it took, but that God has given us the gift to be creators as well. Every living thing God created has the ability and recipe to continue to create. It is not just that we also create but God calls us to be co-creators of the world that God dreams this world will become.
THE WAY OF PEACE
Jesus called it the, “Kingdom of Heaven.” He used this title to compare it to the earthly kingdom that they all knew too well, “The Kingdom of Rome.” Jesus said, in God’s Kingdom the last will be first and first, last and the greatest will be the servant. Both kingdoms had a slogan for peace, Pax Romana, peace through domination and Pax Christi, peace through Christ. The way the Emperor of Rome made peace was by threatening and killing all those who disagreed. The way of Peace in God’s Kingdom is through loving your neighbor and praying for those who disagree with you. God’s kingdom is as creative as Rome’s was destructive. When we use our creativity to create a beautiful world for all people, we align ourselves with God’s creative power.
EVOLUTION
I don’t personally think God is threatened by the theory of Evolution. It may actually be a way of understanding from a scientific perspective how God created the world. Even if you use evolution and the big bang as a way to explain away God, you are stuck with where the energy came from to create the big bang. While it may be a fun distraction to argue about things we can never know, it doesn’t help us figure out why we have been created or what we have been created for. Instead, let us explore the role we have as co-creators and what our creative actions can do in our world.