Our youngest daughter, now 21, told me once that people her age have the resurgence of
Disney pictures such as Mulan or Lion King as a deep part of their mental landscape. In a similar
way, a deep stream flows beneath the Bible, and it carries with it the ancient idea of chaos, or
what we would call random activity. that entropy, that decline toward formless disorder from
science class was thought to always lurk at the door of God’s good harmony. In other words,
God;’s creation is a bulwark against a life of no meaning or purpose.Yes, chaos was defeated,
but it was still in the shadows, waiting for another opportunity to strike, like Voldemort in the early
harry potter books.( 2010 sermon on eureka))
You see, even the first orderly creation account has elements of the ancient near eastern notion
that the waters of a primordial chaotic beginning were at the victims of a mastery by power over
them.Not that long ago, we read Ps. 82 where God is either given powr or take sit over a lesser
pantheon of divine beings.Underneath many biblical notions is a god who sets boundaries
around the continuing power of death, uncertainty, even malevolence against hte order of life
itself.Sin touches on this basic order when it is perceived as a rebellion against god’s
boundary-setting.As I am working on this we hav emoved form a bbile study on Wednesday
morning to a consideration of Reformed tradition basics. One of those is that God continually is
at work sustaining and preserving the created order. Put differently, we can see that creation
itself is a fragile as the precious environment of this pretty blue marble sitting in the black void of
space.
Jeremiah uses an anti-creation account to try to get out the shattering events he could perceive
hurtling toward his people, his nation.I would say that chaos is anything that alters or threatens
what we see as the narrative arc of our lives.At the same time, we enocunter a glimmer of hope,
in that god;s commitment to the good creationis too full to make a completer end to it all. It brings
about the chilling question if God’s power seems to be fading, the great divine warrior may be
losing a step against younger, more aggressive rivals.
that same daughter like to hide in the pants of a clothing store, and with my heart in my mouth I
would slowly call out to her until I heard her giggle and I could breathe again. I told some of you
that I got stranded in Yellowstone as my bus could not go through the smoke at night, so I was
lucky to get a cabin, except it was really dark, so i was so relieved ot finally find it and find a
shower and a bed.I think of Archimedes discovering a principle of specific gravity in the tub and
running out crying eureka, i have found it and it became the cry of the gold fields in our country
years and years later.
It may be one of the great test of friendship or community to be able to celebrate someone’s
good fortune. It’s hard for us to even grasp celebrating the discovery of the lost coin with the
woman. Being lost is not so easy in an era of GPS. It seems all the more easy to feel lost amidst
the choices we encounter and to seek purpose for all we can or should do. It hit me hard on a
walk this week that the story jesus tells speaks of God feeling lost as the divine searches for
the lsot. Maybe we could even speak of our own sense of God as the lsot coin that we seek.
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