Bible Text: Genesis 1:1-5 | Preacher: Pastor Dorry Newcomer | Series: Genesis | We’re starting a new year this week, 2020. They say this is the year everything comes into focus!  When I planned worship for today, I thought we would be talking about how we’re starting a new year, and a new decade, and what a great time that is to think about new beginnings.  The very first words of the Bible give the 411, all we really need to know about the beginning of things:  In the beginning God.  The rest of the Bible is the story of how the God who created in the beginning continues to be at work for good in the world, and how even though humans are prone to messing things up, God never gives up on us.  In the beginning God.  As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be!  Amen!

We will be working through the book of Genesis for the next three months, and I hope you will take time on your own to read and study these foundational stories of our faith.  You might be tempted to skip over chapter one, since the first creation story is so familiar to us.  But I hope you won’t, because it is a beautiful tribute to our Creating God.  In these 31 verses, God is the subject of at least 25 sentences!  God created.  God hovered.  God said.  God saw, God separated, God called, God made, God set, God blessed, God gave.  If we were in junior high English class and had to diagram the sentences in this passage, almost every single one would have God as the subject, and God doing something as the verb.  Creation is beautiful and amazing, yes.  But the subject of this passage of scripture is not creation but the Creator.

What an important observation!  When we go back to the beginning, and the word Genesis means beginnings, when we go back to the very beginning, what do we find?  That it all began with God.  There has long been controversy surrounding the creation accounts in Genesis.  A lot of people want to read them as historical or scientific explanations of how the world was created.  If that’s how you see it, that’s fine with me.  But for me, well the thing is, I am no scientist.  All I ever saw when I looked through the microscope in biology class was my eyelashes.  When I look at this passage, I don’t see science. I don’t see history.  I see religion.  As we said, this passage isn’t really about the world.  It’s about God.  It was not written to explain the mechanics of creation.  It was written as a praise song to the creator.

When I planned worship for this winter, I chose the book of Genesis because we are starting 2020, a new decade.  I thought looking at the book of Genesis would help bring things into focus for us.  What might God’s hopes and dreams for Lima be this decade?  We are going to plow our time and energy and resources into something.  What are the things God would most have us focus on?  I hope that these next few months in Genesis will help us set our priorities for the next ten years.

And the very first of those priorities is worship.  In the beginning God.  It all starts there, doesn’t it?  If it weren’t for God, we wouldn’t even have night and day.  The Spirit of God hovered over the chaos of the waters, and created so many good things for us.  Worshipping God is so basic to our faith that the very first chapter of the Bible is dedicated to that.

And isn’t it amazing that the first thing God created for heaven and earth was light?  Verses 2 and 3 tell us, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.”  Talk about an Epiphany!  Epiphany was the very first thing God did for us.  God gave us light.  As we remember the wise men today who travelled by the light of a star to find the Christ child, we celebrate God’s second Epiphany—Jesus.  Jesus is the true light given for all humankind.  Tomorrow we begin a new season of the church year, Epiphany, when we focus on shining that light out to the world.

But before we shine the light out, we need to receive it for ourselves.  When the wise men who followed the star to Bethlehem found the Christ child, what did they do?  They worshipped him.  Matthew tells us they were overwhelmed with joy.  They entered the house.  They saw the child.  They knelt down.  They paid him homage.  They opened their treasure chests.  They offered their best gifts.  The first chapter of Genesis is a litany of praise for the Creator, because the most important thing we need to do as people of faith is worship.  Matthew echoes this in his description of the wise men.  The most important thing they could do was to worship.

Matthew also tells us that the wise men returned home by another way.  Presumably this was to avoid Herod, like we talked about last week.  But figuratively, don’t we all return home by another way?  My hope is that everyone who comes to worship leaves different.  Hopefully we have epiphanies every week!  When we encounter Christ, we get moved out of our darkness and into the light.  We get transformed.  We change and grow.

Most of us associate worship with “sitting” in church.  But at the heart of worship is movement.  Our memory verse this month (Psalm 96:8-9) tells us to “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; bring an offering, come into his courts.  Worship the Lord in hold splendor, tremble before him all the earth.”  The Hebrew word for worship literally means “prostrate yourself”.  Moving our bodies was an integral part of worship in Jesus’ day.  Bring your offering.  Come into his courts.  Bow or lie down before God in honor and respect.  All of this body movement was meant to help facilitate heart and spirit movement.

When I think about what God might most want for Lima in the next ten years, I think it’s fair to say that the Bible would have us make worship a priority.  No doubt, there are many other things we are to do as well.  But in the beginning God.  It all starts with that.  Lots of other community groups can provide service opportunities, or run a pre-school, or host Boy Scouts.  These are all good things Lima UMC does.  But if you want to connect to what is most foundational in life, you need to worship.  And if you want to worship Jesus, church is the place to go.  If you want to hear about Jesus, and perhaps meet him and be changed by him, church should be the best place for that.  Learning to worship—learning to encounter God and be transformed by god and give God the glory?  Those are the most important things we can do.

For people like us who associate worship with “sitting in church”, it’s important to remember that worship always requires movement.  John Wesley called this movement sanctification, becoming more Christ like.  Worship requires us to move our bodies and get physically ourselves here each week.  It requires us to move spiritually in response, leading to changes in our thoughts and actions.  Moving was a big part of faithfulness for John Wesley.  He thought it was so important that he required clergy to itinerate, to move from place to place, so that church members’ main focus was to grow closer to God and each other, not their clergy person.  Over Christmas, my mom asked me out of the blue if I thought I’d be moving this summer.  I said, I hope not!  I’m only in my second year here!  She said, well in the Methodist Church, you never know.  I said, you’re right.  We don’t.  It used to be pastors moved every two or three years, which was really hard on everyone.  Now they generally stay a good bit longer than that.  I put this series on Genesis together with the intention of being here in 2030.  I’d love to spend this whole decade with you.  I would be completely shocked if I were asked to move this year.  But staying here ten years?  I do not know if that will happen or not.  Movement is part of our Methodist system.

And even though I do not expect to move this year, my prediction is, there will be a lot of movement among Methodists this year.  On Friday, The Council of Bishops issued a press release describing a new “way forward” at last—but sadly, this way forward will mean some Methodists moving to a new denomination.  For the last few months, diverse United Methodist leaders from around the world and across the spectrum of beliefs have been meeting behind the scenes and have unanimously agreed to a plan that would provide for a split to accommodate the diversity of views within our denomination over human sexuality.  If this plan is approved at General Conference in May, the more traditional Methodists will break off into their own denomination.  Centrists and progressives would remain United Methodist.  The ramifications of this are not completely clear at this point, but the point of the split would be to allow congregations that remain in the United Methodist Church the freedom to host same sex weddings and for our clergy to preside over those ceremonies, as well as for openly gay clergy to be ordained.

Bishop Johnson sent an email out yesterday and said, “Please tell your people this is not a done deal!”  The United Methodist Church has not split—yet.  She went on to say in the email,

 

I do offer a personal lament at this time. Being who I am, with the image of the “Body of Christ” as a central part of my theology and heart, it is important for me to offer my thought that with a divided body we will be less whole…When we go to our respective “corners” I believe we will soon discover that we are “less than” we could be without the other.  However, having struggled together for 47 years, it is likely a season for this Protocol to be enacted for many practical and important reasons. Our witness has taken a serious hit as people from the outside see us as a warring body and much ministry time has been spent engaging in disagreeable conversations. May there come a day when we get back together, we people called Methodists.

 

Let me reiterate that our denomination has not split, even though the newspaper headlines make it look like we have.  There is a plan for us to split, but that plan must be approved at General Conference in May.  Tomorrow I will ask the office to forward the emails about this plan, which they are calling The Protocol.  In early February Pastor Karen and I will be attending a clergy meeting to learn more, and we will share with you what we learn.

It has been my hope that we as a denomination could move toward unity, but it looks likely we will be moving toward division.  It has been my hope that we as a congregation can find ways to serve and enjoy Christ together, but that is not always possible.  The most important thing we can do is worship, and worship always requires movement.  And because movement is at the heart of worship, we know from time to time people will move from church to church.  Sometimes people outgrow their church.  Sometimes the church outgrows some of its people.  Ask any pastor you know, and they will tell you that throughout their career, they have had many conversations with church members who, for one reason or another, felt led to leave. This is never easy.  But it is always a time for blessing, because each of us needs to find the place where we can worship God.  Each of us needs to find the place where it is safe for us to tell about what God is doing in our lives, and get support for what God wants to do through our lives.

Movement is bittersweet.  As we mature, there is much to celebrate.  But we also grieve what we leave behind.  This seems like a good time to re-read Genesis chapter 1 verses 1 to 3:  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.  Right now things are a little chaotic in our denomination.  We’re not sure if, in the long run, all this is good news or bad news or no news!  But the Spirit of God is always at work, hovering over the chaos.  Out of that chaos came the complexity and awesomeness of our universe.  Out of that chaos came Light!  And that light was life for all humankind.  From there it has been one epiphany after another.  I do not know what 2020 will bring.  But no matter what happens, may we be guided this year and always by the light of Christ, to worship God, and to bless each other.  Amen.