BEGINNINGS Genesis 1: 1-5 Mark 1: 4-11 January 8th 2006

A complaint of many a reader of the novelist Thomas Hardy, is that the beginnings of his novels seem to be of interminable length. The reader turns page after page just longing to get to the real action of the story. And yet, to miss those early pages, leaves the reader unable to fully appreciate what is to follow. Beginnings are important when it comes to understanding what is to follow.

Today we often ask the questions - Why are we what we are? How did we get to this place? Some years ago, Alex Hailey’s epic “Roots” became a best seller and in the past year we have had, and are apparently programmed to have in the coming year, programmes in which celebrities are enabled to discover something of their own family history, something you may find just a little more edifying than “Celebrity Big Brother.”

Beginnings are at the heart of today’s Bible readings. From Genesis, we have heard the beginnings of the first of the Biblical Creation stories. It is a story of God bringing order and light out of chaos and darkness. Now it is a story whose form is poetical to bring out great truths. Nowadays, there is some debate about these scriptures. Often Scripture and Science have been pitted against each other as if in some ‘to the death struggle.’ It is a conflict that has done Christianity little good at all.

I think we do much better to follow the example of the past where rather than divorce faith from science, many Christians were particularly involved in scientific discovery. Certainly today, science is revealing more and more about the wonders of both this planet and the cosmos to which it belongs. A best selling book at the moment which addresses such matters in an accessible manner is Bill Bryons’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” It is a book which tells the story of human understanding developing as to the story of our world and humanity. More importantly, it excites in the reader a sense of wonder that the writers of Genesis could have empathised with. For can we but be amazed that this planet should have the right delicate balance of co ordinates to support life when so many other solar systems and planets seem unable to do so.

It is a perfectly natural human impulse to ask the question as to how this world came to be what it is and how at a certain points humanity has emerged. Ultimately science will go on searching for answers to such questions and we can enjoy learning of the discoveries.

But that is not the task that the ancient writers of Genesis set themselves. They did not write a scientific manual But that does not mean that they did not offer an equally if not more important truth to us. The truth that they offer is the profound truth that in the processes of creation, God is found to be present, working in love. So God is discerned as the author of the physical world of creation, the One without whom nothing would be. And because Creation continues today, God’s spirit continues to move as in Genesis. For God cannot be seen as having set in the world into being, just to wander off . No! The God revealed by the writers of Genesis is very much with us today.


But of course, God is most specially revealed to us in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Mark’s Gospel from which we have heard today, has no Nativity to tell us of. Instead, its account of the story of Jesus begins with Jesus as a man. John the Baptist has led a religious revival movement down by the River Jordan. Peoples’ lives have been changed by what they have heard and witnessed and the sign of that change has been baptism. John has spoken of a great one who is to come. Now this does not mean that John understood the way of Jesus. We know that later as a prisoner he had his uncertainties. Probably, he shared the violent expectations of his day concerning the notion of the Messiah who was expected to be a figure of power who would overthrow the power of Rome. How different was to be the way of Jesus!

Jesus, indeed, shows us a very different way. As we discover in one of the early hymns of the church which is echoed in the Letter to the Philippians, the path taken by Jesus is the path of humility, powerlessness and self giving. And yet, it is this path that undoes the demonic powers of darkness and violence and reveals the truth even to a Roman man of violence who having done his worst gazes at the cross and says, “Surely, this man was God‘s Son.”

And here in our Gospel reading, despite the chasm between his view of Messiahship and that of John, Jesus submits to that baptism. What does this mean? Well, I think part of the message is that Jesus does not stand against us even when our ideas and religion are perverted. Jesus does not stand against people but instead he stands alongside us. He reveals God to be “for us” and this is endorsed by the Divine voice at the moment of his baptism. And as such, he challenges the curse of religion that is based on fear, for as David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham puts it;

“God is. He is as he is in Jesus. Therefore, there is hope.”

And so, our readings have told us something about beginnings. God is intricately involved in the beginnings of our world and continues to be so involved. Jesus, in the beginnings, told to us by Mark is revealed to be One who is for us and with us. But what of us? At our stage of life, can there be new beginnings for us?

On December 12th, a prisoner gave an interview to a journalist. He protested his innocence of the crime concerning which he had been questionably convicted but admitted that he had been a “wretched person.” He went on to say that “redemption is tailor-made for the wretched.” As to his legacy, he expressed a desire to be “remembered as a redemptive transition, something that I believe is not exclusive just for the so-called sanctimonious, the elitists” but that which is “accessible for everybody.” Hours after that interview, Stanley Tookie Williams, co- founder of the Cripps gang turned campaigner against gang violence, was killed in a botched execution that took nearly half an hour.

The Governor of California who authorised the execution, disputed William’s claims to be a changed person. Read about the case if you wish and decide who you think was right! But changed man or not, the words of Tookie Williams concerning redemption ring true. For in his baptism, Jesus voluntarily identifies with those whom John the Baptist has derided as a “brood of vipers” and soon the religious establishment will accuse him of being a “friend of sinners.” Later he will even tell a condemned man hanging next him on a cross, that that same day they will be together in paradise. It is a Charles Wesley put it in one of his hymn;

“The vilest offender who truly believes,
That moment from Jesus, a pardon receives.”

And that is what Grace is all about.

So God is present at the beginning of all things and in all that follows. In Christ’s beginning of his ministry, God’s love is revealed to each of us. And finally in Grace, the offering of new beginnings to each of us when we mess up, is made. And surely such a beginning is sorely needed in our world, that instead of being filled with hatred, prejudice and violence, instead, the songs of grace might fill the world.

And so back to Thomas Hardy and another of those beginnings that seems to last an eternity.

This sermon was preached at Torrington Methodist Church on January 8th 2006