Creation Sunday: Random!
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 6:6-9, Psalm 19:1-6, Romans 8:18-25, Matthew 6:25-33
When I was at first at university in Exeter the word everywhere was “random”: “oh that’s so random”. I was never sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. I think it was just something people said. Like: “I just saw Sophia and Harry crossing the road” “That’s so random.”
There are, at a very basic level, two ways of looking at the world. We can see it as chance: random! Neither good nor bad. – or we can see it as creation. ‘And God saw that it was good’. Made with purpose and value. Which of these two paths we adopt will lead us to faith or not, but also gives some sense to how we treat our natural world.
The first obvious problem with looking at the world as chance, is just that it seems so unlikely. The chance that anything is there – how would you even calculate that? And every time you say that the universe started with this – There is the childish voice that asks “and what made that happen?” Then: what’s the chance that this coherent synchronised expansion happened to hit an appropriate rate that created uniform conditions that could sustain? How likely is it that rational coherent ordered universe would emerge totally by chance? What’s the chance that those things move constructively together, not fall or drift apart. The chance of life emerging is probably the big one. A twentieth-century biologist put the odds of the random formation of a single protein molecule (which is necessary for any organism) at 1 in 2 billion, billion billion, where I keep saying the word ‘billion’ 37 times. So a long shot. More recently another two scientists put the odds of life forming at 1 in ten to the power of forty thousand. And we haven’t even come to the odds of sentient life being able to reflect back on these odds and head to the bookies. At some point you have to ask yourself, isn’t it maybe more likely that all this was not random.
But there’s also a darker tyranny in living in a random world. A random world operates on the law of the jungle. It is just ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ and survival of the fittest as an ethic is not terribly kind or terribly ethical. Or I suppose one might concede it is terribly ethical: Or ethically terrible. In a random world why would we not just use the natural world to our advantage. Is that not what nature herself teaches? We would still fight against climate change and support biodiversity – but in order to better sustain human life and to keep our zoos interesting. For the proponent of the random world, man is the measure of all things.
The doctrine of creation has not unfortunately led Christian nations to an improved relationship with nature. We have certainly fulfilled one of God’s first commands to: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’. We have always taken God’s last act of creation as the pinnacle – by which I mean the limit and the point of creation. But that assumes that what was created first – and most of that first week – is not more important – and misses the fact that creation ends with the rest of the Sabbath. Perhaps the point of creation is not humanity – but peace. This is Isaiah’s vision: Where the wolf shall live with the lamb. The leopard and the kid, the calf and the fatling. The cow and the bear. A vision of harmony, not dominance.
But just because humanity has been selective in its interpretation of Scripture, does not mean that Christianity is the problem. There is a meditation in considering the works of God’s hands. Thinking through the infinitely low probability of there being anything – To the vastness of the cosmos; And the panoply of creatures we see in our world today. And as we reflect in wonder upon just that which we understand in nature, in the cosmos, how can we not but see our smallness? Our finitude?
Contemplating creation is perhaps the best starting point to thinking through the divine. On the one hand we have systems – our weather, eco-systems, solar systems, circulatory systems and more that point to the inter-connectedness of creation. The migration of birds is a meditation on glory. But, equally, the detail. To see the perfection of the tiny hand of a new child, or a sea-shell washed up on the beach. The head of a sunflower; The fragile beauty of all things points to the value of each divine work. And within each thing a new complex interconnectedness of systems. And within each system, the glorious works of God – from the excretory system of the stick insect to the rings of Saturn. The heavens are telling the glory of God. If we have but eyes to see them.
Now there is much in our world that does seem random. And worse than that – indifferent. It’s all very well Jesus telling us not to worry, but faith is stretched in the difficult tension between the random vicissitudes of nature and the assurance of the ordered framing of the universe which gives rise to our hope in a loving God. That famous line of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ comes from Tennyson’s reflection on grief:
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law --
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed --
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?
It’s only by taking in our littleness within this creation that we will grasp the humility required of us. But in grasping our part within the greater systems of this world, the craftsmanship of our body, mind and spirit, we can know ourselves sacraments – the handwork of God. A visible sign of an inward grace.
So, yes, God is intimated in picking blackberries, staring through a telescope, or in a grain of sand. And the nature of God is hinted at in the complexity of systems within systems within systems that speak of the divine interconnectivity of the Trinity.
To describe anything as random neglects its place in the larger scheme of things. Nothing is random. But we may not perceive its place, just as we might neglect our own significance as a unique, infinitely complex (some more complex than others) creature serving its purpose and creator within the vast horizons of time and space. To describe this world as a creation implies its value, and the significance of each piece. So as we gaze out into the garden, on our non-human animals, these stones, this congregation, we might remember our duty to the wellbeing of all our environment. But also that all this has been made by God, perfect in his image; And that the hope of resurrection is for all creation; Nothing is unwanted. Nothing is wasted. All creation exists to the glory of God. Alleluia. Amen.