Creation Stories
Text: Genesis 2:4b-25
Speaker: Joel Miller

The book of Genesis is appropriately named.  It’s about beginnings.  It reaches all the way back to the origins of, as it says, the heavens and the earth.  It goes on to tell the origin story of a small near eastern tribe through its patriarchs and matriarchs.  They are a people who will be, for much of their existence, on the losing side of history – slaves, exiles, living under foreign rule in their own land.  And that’s really something, because, as has been repeated many times, “history is written by the victors.”  Usually.  Remarkably, a sizeable portion of humanity has now adopted Genesis, this minority report, as their own origin story.  The fact that we’re even talking about it today and that most of us have a printed copy – or ten – in our home is remarkable indeed.

It’s hard to overstate the power of origin stories.  For example, consider the founding story of our nation many of us were taught in school.  The Pilgrims came to America in search of religious freedom, which they found as they established Plymouth Colony.  We fought a revolution against the tyranny of a king and founded what is now the world’s longest living democracy.  Our values are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Now consider the turmoil, still churning, caused by the 1619 Project, a project of mostly Black academics, which suggested that a more truthful telling of our nation’s origins would begin in the year 1619, the year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Colony.  That was the year the ship the White Lion delivered between 20 to 30 Africans to Virginia Colony, setting off 240 years of…

CMC Service 9323 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

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Baptismal Waters: Creation, Choices, Beloved 
Speaker: Joel Miller

Genesis 1:1-2

In the Genesis 1 creation story, there’s no need for God to create water.  It’s there from the beginning.  Along with the darkness. And the Ruach Elohim – the Wind from God or the Breath or Spirit of God, depending on the translation, hovering, like a mother bird, over those primordial waters. 

There’s something about water – something so essential, so given – that makes it hard to imagine existence without it.  Genesis 1, the opening words of scripture, doesn’t even try.  In the beginning there was darkness, there was the Divine Breath, and there was water.

A creation story told by Native peoples of this continent, the Haudenosaunee, shares this sense.  It’s the story of Skywoman, who descended on a beam of light, down to our world.  At that time, the story goes, there was only darkness and water, and those who lived in the water like the beavers and swans and fish. 

As she descended these beings held a council and determined she would need a patch of earth to land on.  It was muskrat who dove down deep and retrieved a fist full of earth, even though it cost him his life.   The other animals spread the earth on the back of turtle, and the swans flew up to guide Skywoman to a soft landing.  With her presence now on the earth, surrounded by those waters, the turtle grew and grew until it became a large island, our present home, Turtle Island.  (See Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, pp. 3-5, and HERE for two versions of this story which I conflated)

There’s something about water and creation stories.  No water, nothing for the Wind of God to sweep over and stir into life.  No water, no council…

CMC Worship 8/20/23 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

The Whole Bible in (About) Half an Hour
Texts: (References within the text)

You may notice we don’t have any scripture reading this morning, but I assure you the sermon will have plenty of scripture.  The Bible is a big book, more like a 66 book library, written down by many authors and edited over a span of 1000 years, give or take.  Remarkably, it does contain a cohesive story, beginning to end.  There are many ways to condense that story down to half an hour, many ways to pick and choose what gets highlighted and what gets left out.  This is one of those possibilities.  A heads up:   The Old Testament is about three time longer than the New Testament and this roughly keeps that proportion.  So here goes: 

In the beginning, the world was made with words.  The Divine spoke, or sang, and the words took their shape.  Light.  Sky.  Land.  Fruit.  Bird.  Cattle.  Humankind, created in the image of God.  Our words too make worlds.  All this was very good.  Original goodness, with cycles of work, and play and Sabbath rest. (Genesis 1)

In the beginning, there was earth and water and a garden and the Tree of Life.  And the god formed from the earth a human creature, and then another human, and other animals and placed then in the garden as caretakers and learners of the good way of life.  In their freedom, the humans discovered other paths, those that lead to harm, and the earth responded by hardening the ground and the garden was closed off to them. (Gen. 2) 

The first human couple, Adam and Eve, had children. And the older, Cain, killed the younger, Abel.  And their…

CMC Service 8-13-23 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

An offering of earth and Spirit

Texts: Romans 8:22-26; 12:1-2

Speaker: Joel Miller

On the last day of seminars at Mennonite Church USA Convention I attended one called “Resistance and Healing: Queer, Decolonial Movements.”    This and the entire event this took place within the large Convention Center in downtown Kansas City. One of the panelists was Sarah Augustine, a Pueblo (Tewa) woman from the Pacific Northwest.  In her introduction, she mentioned her morning routine of making a gratitude offering, and joked about the difficulty of finding a patch of grass amidst the concrete and asphalt.  Fortunately, earlier in the day, she had managed for find about a two foot by two foot green spot somewhere nearby where she could touch the earth, an essential part of the ritual. 

As we reflect today about the church – the wider church, the local church, what it means to be church, I’d like to linger with this image from Sarah Augustine — Searching for a patch of earth to touch to make an offering. 

It’s a pretty good description of how I have experienced these national conventions.  Truth be told, I haven’t approached these times with very high expectations.  We are a theologically varied clan, which is fine until some of those convictions involve drawing sharp lines of who’s in and who’s out.  And we do meet in these cavernous convention halls with zero acoustics that swallow up one of the most potentially beautiful parts of gathering – thousands of folks singing in one space, raising our voices in harmony.

But it’s been quite a while since I expected the church to be perfect.  Which is why I like Sarah’s image so much.  Even the wider church can feel…