Glory in Creation (Epiphany 5C)

Marc Chagall, Call of Isaiah (1968)

Glory in Creation
Homily delivered for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
10 February 2019

8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11; Psalm 138

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

We all know the song of the seraphs around God’s throne recounted in today’s Hebrew Scriptures lesson, because it echoes in the Sanctus, part of the canon of the Mass we celebrate each week:  “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts.  Heaven and earth are full of your glory.”  The Hebrew’s stately rhythms resonate with the scene of the Holy of Holies of the Temple with its shaken pillars and clouds of incense smoke: Qadosh, qadosh, qadosh, YHWH tsebaoth.  Melo’ kol ha’arets kevodo.  Robert Alter, in his newly published translation of the whole Hebrew Scripture, renders the verse, accurately, as follows:  “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Armies, the fullness of all the earth is His glory.” 

Qadosh:  separate, special, holy.  Kavod: weightiness, gravitas, honor, or brilliant light.   The idea is that God is separate, unique, and apart, holy, and that thrice over. What makes God noticeable,  resplendent, and brilliant, however, is God’s creation itself.  The idea is not that God’s glory is apart from all creation, invading it somehow and filling it.   The idea is that the whole of creation, the handiwork of God, itself is God’s glory.  

Blessed Ireneaus of Lyons, the great second century theologian who was one of the first Church fathers to write in Latin as well as Greek, said “Gloria Dei est vivens homo” “God’s glory is a living human being.”  We often hear this expressed “The glory of God is a human being, fully alive.”  Irenaeus means that God’s brilliance is not ultimately found out there, in the angel choirs or seraphic dance, but here, in that part of creation made in God’s image, a living breathing human being. 

Seeing the glory of God in our human lives should not be an alien idea for us, since we affirm the incarnation of God, God taking on flesh and becoming truly human in Jesus, as part of our creeds.    Seeing the glory of God as all of creation itself is also not foreign:  most of us have experienced awe and wonder at the beauty, complexity, and balance of the natural world around us.    This is the idea behind the great canticle from the Greek Additions to Daniel, Benedicite Omnia Opera Domini, which we chant every Saturday in Morning Prayer, whose verses on the winter cold are particularly apt this morning:  "Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, drops of dew and flakes of snow.  Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, praise him, and highly exalt him forever." 

What becomes tricky is this:  when we look to see the glory of God in our cranky, bothersome, and worried selves, in us when we are not our best, not our loveliest.  It is harder still, I think, when we seek to see the image of God in us and in those about us when we are clearly broken, twisted, and lame. 

That is where all the other passages in today’s lectionary come in:  Isaiah sees the splendor of God, and immediately bewails his failings, his shortcomings, where he does not measure up.  Paul recounts the wonder preached by those who went before him—Christ died for our sins, was raised, and appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, then to James and the apostles, then to more than 500 at a single event.  When he comes to the risen Lord’s appearance to Paul himself, all he can talk about is how monstrous it was, how untimely, given his own failings, “the least of the apostles,” indeed!   In today’s Gospel, after the miraculous draft of fish, Peter recoils, “Get away from me, Jesus!  I am a sinful man!”    It is hard to see God in us when we note how far we are from the splendor of God.   

But that is where the Psalm teaches us: it is gratitude and thankfulness for God’s gracious acts to us that give us eyes to see we indeed are in God’s image, we are indeed God’s glory: 

“I will give thanks to you, YHWH, with all my heart;
It is your praise that I will sing even before other gods.

Toward your Holy Temple I will bow down;

You name I will praise. 

All because of your love and steadfastness.

For you live up to your name of Being Itself,

and you do what you say despite everything. 

I called you, and you answered me;
You strengthened me from within…

Though YHWH is over all, he looks after the lowly.

And from afar he sees the haughty for what they are. 

Though I walk through troubles all about, you keep me safe;
you stretch forth your hand against my raging enemies. 

Your right hand shall save me.

YHWH will come through for me;
YHWH, your love lasts forever. 

You do not abandon us, the works of your hands.” (TAB)

Accepting our limitations, confessing our brokenness, is key in seeing the image of God in us, in perceiving glory here where we did not think it was.  Not that the brokenness is the image of God, but that such honesty, coupled with grateful hearts, helps us distinguish between flaws and pain and the underlying goodness.  We thus perceive the glorious brightness of the Creator in us and all about us. 

At the end of the Priestly story of creation in Genesis 1, we read: “God saw everything God had made: how very good it was!”  We are part of that.  Scripture here teaches clearly: we are God’s beautiful and good creatures.  We are in the image and likeness of God.  The Psalter teaches we are but a little lower than the angels.  Original blessing—the basic goodness at the heart of humanity—is scriptural teaching.  God’s image is woven throughout our nature, no matter how we may have broken or twisted it.  If it were somehow pulled out of the warp and woof of our beings, we would, simply, unravel.  The whole of creation is the Glory of God.  A Human Being, alive, is the Glory of God.  Original blessing is scriptural. 

But then so is the seeming universal tendency we all have toward brokenness.   Genesis chapter 2 is often called “the Fall of Adam and Eve” but it is most definitely NOT history.  Modern biblical scholarship and theology are unanimous that when we read scripture paying due attention to the literary forms it uses, it is clear that Genesis 1-11 contains origin myths and legends.  Genesis 2 is about ha’adam, Hebrew for “the Human Being,” or Every Man and Every Woman.  It is about each and every one of us, and the predicament we find ourselves in regarding evil, sin, and knowing the difference between good and bad.  The sin of Adam and Eve is not a historical event, but an image for how things are for each one of us.  To see evidence for it, look not to fossils or old books.  Look into a mirror. 

We often lose sight of this because of the historicized way these stories are commonly read, a process helped along by the rhetorical flourishes you can see in such places as Romans 5. But even here, note that Paul says Adam passed sin to his descendants “because all have sinned,” not “so that they all sin,” or “be punished for a sin not theirs.”   Augustine and Calvin’s doctrine of Original Sin  makes an error when they deny the underlying goodness and glory in creation, and in the human person.  They compound the error when they couple their doctrine of universal human depravity with a twisted idea of an angry God thirsty for blood and the Cross as God’s intentional infliction of pain on Jesus as a transferred punishment.  This is not scriptural at all.  But the idea of gratitude opening our eyes to God’s glory in us is scriptural.  And it is all the more powerful when our gratitude is for the love of God shown in God becoming truly human, human enough to suffer along with us unjust death on the cross at the hands of Empire. 

Other scriptures try to account for a glorious and good creation, including us, harboring brokenness.  The story of the flood in Genesis 9 says that every human heart mysteriously seems to have an urge to be bad, a yetser hara‘, despite our being in God’s image.    In Genesis 1, not all the commands of God in creation are perfectly reflected in the nature that results, especially if you read this in the original Hebrew.  “‘Let light be,’ commands God; ‘Light was,” comes back the report.  This is not ham-fisted editing: whoever put this story together knew exactly what they were doing.  ‘Grass grass,’ God tells the earth.  But the earth does not.  It ‘puts forth’ grass.  The created order is slightly disobedient from the start.”  Of the eight “let there be” orders in creation, only “Let there be light” is implemented exactly  (Charles Foster, The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin [Hodder & Stoughton, 2009] pp. 132-33). 

The whole of creation, including us, is the Glory of God.  When we call upon God, God hears us.  And when God calls us, we hear.  We see the glory.  We perceive the beauty and the love.  Gratitude and thanks are what opens our ears and eyes. 

Thanks be to God. 

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