UU Church of Berks
In the Beginning: Creation
Rev. Sandra Fees
January 29, 2012
Reading: George Carlin on Football and Baseball
George Carlin is well-known for his skit about football and baseball. He compares the two popular sports, saying “they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values.” Here is an excerpt of his description (the full skit is available on YouTube):
Baseball is a 19th-century pastoral game. Football is a 20th-century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
In football you wear a helmet. In baseball you wear a cap.
Football is concerned with downs - what down is it? Baseball is concerned with ups - who's up?
In football you receive a penalty. In baseball you make an error.
In football the specialist comes in to kick. In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness. Baseball has the sacrifice.
Baseball has no time limit: we don't know when it's gonna end - might have extra innings. Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.
In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness. In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least 27 times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.
And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different: In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line. In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home! (www.baseball-almanac.com/humor7.shtml)
Sermon
Football or baseball? If we were going to design or imagine a world based on one of these two sports models, football or baseball, which would it be? For you sports fans, I know the super bowl is coming up, so I may be stomping into some tender territory. But I do think this is an enlightening way to imagine the kind of structure that undergirds the universe – and our individual lives. And we can get a pretty good idea of how that structure plays out in everyday life.
In theology, we look to creation myths to help us do this. They help us get to the truth of our origins. Myths provide a different kind of truth than facts do. They function much the way abstract art, dreams, and poetry do. When we explore myths, we engage in a different way of knowing and experiencing the truth. Many of us are familiar with Joseph Campbell’s exploration of myth and also Karen Armstrong’s efforts to help us reclaim myth as an important way of knowing. Creation myths, or what are known as cosmogonies, are poetic ways to conceive of a primordial time, of the origin of things. Unlike fairy tales, which begin “once upon a time,” creation stories begin “in the beginning.” It’s hard to conceive of “in the beginning.”
Obviously it all happened in a place and time we can’t possibly know. It’s billions of years from where we are today. Just the same, people throughout the world have always told these tales. Our human imagination and intelligence gives us a desire to contemplate origins. Humans have wondered about how the universe and earth were formed, how humans came into existence, and how we learned to live on the planet. People want to find their place in time and space, in history, in the cosmos. The result is more than 500 creation myths. It would seem that people in different places and different times have had a need for different kinds of creation stories. We haven’t all come to the same conclusion about our beginnings.
Most of us are familiar with a variety of these creation stories. We are well versed on evolution versus creationism, and its many nuances. We probably know the Biblical creation narrative and some others from the world’s religions. Maybe we’ve read Greek mythology. It’s helpful to note that even within one religion or culture, there are often numerous versions of the same myth. There are, for example, two creation stories in Genesis, which are often conflated into one in the retelling.
I grew up with the classic creation story that grew out of the West. It’s sometimes referred to as creatio ex nihilo, Latin for creation out of nothing. The monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam fall into this category. God, the Creator, is the absolute beginning. God exists in a void. God’s actions, thoughts, or intentions bring the world into being. I always had trouble with this story, because I could never actually conceive of nothing. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I couldn’t imagine how something could come from nothing.
Perhaps I became attracted to literary studies because of their orientation toward Greek mythology. In contrast to creation out of nothing, Greek myth is creatio ex materia, or creation out of eternal matter. In this type of creation myth, the beginning is characterized by chaos and formlessness. Order arises from a primal chaos, from undifferentiated matter. Light and dark, earth and sky, and other organizing principles get established. It’s found not only in Greek myth. The Chinese story of Pan Ku is another example. And I want to share this one as a continuation of last Sunday’s conversation about Chinese religion and specifically Taoism. According to Chinese tradition, the first living thing was Pan Ku. Pan Ku evolved inside a cosmic egg. The cosmic egg is a common creation motif, which first originated with Hinduism. The cosmic egg in the Pan Ku myth contained all the elements of the universe but intermingled. As Pan Ku grew, he separated male and female, light and dark. After 18,000 years the egg hatched. Pan Ku came out along with Yin and Yang. Yang formed the sky and Yin the earth. Pan Ku died from the effort of creation, and the universe was created from his remains. The sun and moon were created from his head, rivers and seas from his blood, wind from his breath, and thunder from his voice. Humans came from the fleas and parasites, which lived on his body. It’s a humbling start for humanity, isn’t it? We could probably use a little more of that humility today.
It was when I first encountered the idea of the earth as the body of God that I felt I had finally found a creation story that I could embrace. This was after I became a Unitarian Universalist. I was first influenced by feminist theologians. Over time, I discovered other thinkers from a variety of religious traditions who have contributed to an understanding of humanity as part of a creative, participatory universe, as part of a holistic process. I became attracted to eco-theologies and eco-feminist theologies which incorporate naturalistic, science-based philosophies.
These creation stories follow a creatio ex deo model, which means creation out of the being of God. In them there is no separate creator or divine being. The universe and God are one and the same. Some have argued this is no God at all. Gaia myths fall into this category. So do pantheism and some forms of process theology. Pantheism says the world is God. Pantheism, as you can imagine, has been considered a heresy in some religious traditions. Process philosophy sees the world as part of an unfolding process. It can be understood with or without God. And you can begin to see the varieties of stories. What appeals to me in each of these creatio ex deo myths is that nature is the centerpiece of creation. The perspective is ecological and evolutionary. The world is participatory and relational. It is open and creative. The universe is seen as in process and ever unfolding.
It may seem that only traditional religion needs a creation story. But even skeptics and humanists have a need for a creation story. Even Unitarian Universalists. Our planet has a need for a creation story that can speak to our contemporary needs and problems. We live in a world in which many people feel alienated from other people and lack a sense of connection and belonging. Many people lack a sense of rootedness, that deep-down feeling. Wars, famine, poverty, and environmental degradation are reminders that the stories we tell have consequences, and that some of the old stories are inadequate to the task at hand. They even create more harm than healing.
What we believe about our origins helps us establish rules and guidelines to live by. Remember, though, we humans write these myths. Creation stories signify our values even as they strive to express the values we believe are embedded in the whole of existence. They indicate what we think is worth creating, whether life is random or intentional, the power structure or hierarchy involved, and who is in charge. They teach us what value to place on life, both human and non-human. They establish our morality, justice, purpose, relationships, obligations, and destination.
An important part of this story is the emergence of human life and how we fit in the scheme of things. That also has something to do with our being the authors of them. There’s a cautionary tale here, because humans built in their own ideas about authority, hierarchy, and other structures. Those who created the myths as well as those who have interpreted them over the years have tried to institute their own ideas about whether we’d be playing baseball or football, metaphorically speaking. As we know some of these stories have been used to oppress and subjugate the planet, other people, and nature. If a warlike God created the universe then it follows that the world will be organized more like the military with a rigid hierarchy and with the idea that it’s okay to fight with people and take their land.
If the model of God is love, then life will be organized around principles of treating each other kindly and fairly. If we envision a creative force behind the origins of the planet, then we might better enact the creative impulse. The same could be said for intelligence. If there’s an intelligence or consciousness that created the world, then the universe will unfold with awareness. If the model of God is an ecological one, then existence will be understood as organic, as evolving and growing.
Whatever creation story we tell today must be able to address the very real concerns of the 21st century. It will need to help us have a sense of belonging here as part of the continuum of time and space and as part of a much larger story. It will help us understand we are participants in the world. It will help us see we have a role and a responsibility. It will help us see the hope for a better world, one that we don’t look at and think of as irretrievably broken but as filled with possibility and opportunity for renewal. Kinship will be its aspiration rather than mastery over people, nature, and the planet. Creativity and innovation will be prized rather than a closed, rigid system, hurling toward a foregone conclusion. Suffering and death will be taken seriously as part of the fabric of life, but there will always be the hope for healing.
Do baseball or football, a cosmic egg, squabbling gods, the earth as God’s body, or some other model of creation provide a framework from which we might address the challenges that confront us and help to create a future filled with promise? No matter which sport we might prefer, when it comes to everyday life we would probably agree we’d prefer a cap to a helmet and a picnic to a rumble. We might recognize that the game of solitaire would create a lonely planet, and Scrabble would be a great linguistic model that would celebrate creative use of language. A potluck dinner would offer a gathering to which we would each bring our best dish and from which we could feed the hungry.
There is no better time in the history of life on this planet to reconsider our creation story. What is your story? What is our story? Perhaps there’s no better time to imagine one that can make this world a place that sustains, nurtures, enlivens, and heals. There is no better time to create a place where we’ll be safe, at home.
Amen. Blessed be.