Lent 1: maker of heaven and earth

I believe in God, maker of heaven and earth.

It’s not been a very good week for the Primate of All England. Following his lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday Rowan Williams has been attacked by politicians of every hue and received death-threats and calls for his resignation, while that peerless band of seekers after truth who write and edit The Sun have called him a dangerous threat to our nation, and yesterday urged their readers to (quotes) ‘Bash the Bishop’ – an eloquent defence, if ever there was, of the tolerant democracy they no doubt they believe they are defending against creeping Islamicization. No doubt his critics would want him to confine himself to teaching Christian truths instead of getting us all to think a bit about the status of religious minorities (these two activities rarely being seen as complementary). No doubt they would be delighted to learn that our Lent series continues this morning to follow in his footsteps through the essential doctrines of the Creed.

Talking about faith with the young is one of the great privileges of the ordained life, although it is one of those privileges with which one would occasionally like to privilege someone else. Before I embarked upon said ordained life I used to appear before the Court of Appeal every so often, and, let me tell you, the confirmation class at St Peter’s School is a good deal more intimidating than their Lordships.

Their question of the week was ‘if God made the universe, who made God?’ Of course, it’s a very good question, although every time I told them that I felt like a shifty politician trying to evade his interrogator. It’s a question which has its roots in the habit to which I suggested we were prone when I spoke on Ash Wednesday. This is the habit of talking of God as one thing among the many things with which the universe is cluttered: the first thing, maybe, and the begetter of all the other things, ourselves included, but a thing nonetheless. Yet if God is the maker of heaven and earth, and if he makes them out of nothing, then he is not a thing at all. He cannot be explained or accounted for by the language which we deploy or within the rules which govern our existence. He is beyond our language, beyond our rules, beyond our universe: he is his own explanation, his own cause.

Such a God corresponds to the insights of science and does not necessarily conflict with them. Those insights tend towards the notion of a ‘first event’, a point from which the universe begins to expand. That point, Christian faith claims, is God’s reaching into the primeval nothingness in abundant and selfless love, and bringing forth a universe Those insights also disclose a universe which is a dazzlingly complicated web of different sorts and different networks of energy, yet which is also a web which holds and coheres. It holds and coheres, Christian faith claims, because it is still God’s creation, sustained in every minute by that same selfless love. As Rowan Williams puts it, ‘within every circumstance, every object, every person, God’s action is going on, a sort of white heat at the centre of everything’. It is, as he also says, a rather exhilarating thought.

It’s a thought which leads directly to a question which has not been asked by the confirmation class just yet but which can’t be far off. That is, if God is at the centre of everything, why do bad things happen? When it does get asked the questioner is unlikely to be impressed by the first limb of my standard response, which is to ask whether any answer could ever possibly be satisfactory. The devastation of hurricanes and floods and the ruthlessness of cancerous cells cannot be explained in any way that can reassure or quieten human sorrow. But when God creates out of nothingness he creates something that is not him, something that is different, a universe which can change and develop, a universe which must change and develop if it is to be any sort of universe at all. It is a universe of processes and events, and these sometimes clash with destructive effect, and sometimes catch other parts of the creation up in their destruction.

‘Aha’ the keen-eyed Year 5 pupil will interject, eager to put a supplementary. What about miracles, and what about prayer? For what appears to contradict entirely everything I have just said about the universe’s ordering are the Biblical accounts of God’s ready interventions in the its processes and events, interventions which distort what is natural and inevitable and ameliorate their consequences. Yet those interventions only do violence to the natural order if we take God out of the equation and forget that he is a part of and player in the natural order: the white heat at the centre of everything, remember. The white heat is not always effective to warm and cheer because the processes and events of the universe sometimes work against it. But at other times perhaps a very intense prayer, or an act or series of acts of great holiness and self-sacrifice can be effective, opening the world up to God’s action and giving him a little more freedom of manoeuvre.

To believe in God, the maker of heaven and earth, is not to enter a sterile debate about the historicity or otherwise of the early chapters of Genesis. Nor is it to engage in a futile wrangle with scientists about the mechanics of the universe and their beginnings. It is instead to believe something very profound about the world and our place within it in 2008, to see the energy of God’s love rippling below the surface of every thing, and to understand that the things seen and the things unseen within our world and within our lives are in his care, and that he will never shrink or shy away from them. Amen.

Sunday 10 February 2008,
First of Lent