Out of Control?

Genesis 1:1-3

January 8, 2023 • Mount Pleasant UMC

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it or not, but a week from tomorrow, I’m getting on a plane bound for Israel. I am excited, if you don’t already know that. This trip has been postponed several times, so it’s sort of an unreal feeling that we actually have flights scheduled and are starting to pack. This will be my sixth trip to the land of the Bible, and I sometimes get asked why I keep going back. Haven’t I seen it all by now? Well, no, and I really enjoy introducing people to the places Jesus walked, the places the patriarchs lived. I love seeing the way a visit there transforms people’s understanding of the Scriptures; there’s a reason we call the Holy Land “the fifth Gospel.” But I also keep going back because I learn and see new things every time I go. It’s always a pilgrimage, not a vacation, and it’s never the same trip.

As we begin a new year, I hope we can approach reading the Bible that way. Sometimes, especially if we’ve been a Christian for a long time, it’s easy to become so familiar with the stories in these pages that we think we already know what’s there. But one of the most beautiful things about the Bible is that it’s ever new. It’s constantly speaking to us in new ways. Maybe no passage is as in danger of being glossed over than this passage we read this morning from Genesis 1, the very beginning of the Bible. We think we’re so familiar with it that we don’t notice what’s missing, what’s not there. Let me read it again and see if you can catch it. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (1:1). Did you hear what’s missing? Try to read it like someone for whom the Bible is brand new and listen for what’s missing. Here it is again: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Did you hear it—or not hear it? There is no description of this God who is introduced. We’re not told anything about him and we’re not told why this God is doing all this creating. It’s like we’ve jumped into the middle of a movie with no context. Who is this God, and what is he up to (cf. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone, Part One, pg. 6)?

Maybe more importantly for us, we want to know what God is up to in this new year, 2023. I’ve heard from several folks who are hoping 2023 is better than 2022, but I think we say that every year, don’t we? We come to the beginning of a new year, hoping that the chaos of the previous year doesn’t continue, doesn’t carry over. And it is a chaotic world. We’ve been through—and, in many ways, are still going through—a global pandemic. We have an uncertain economy and in the last year have watched as prices went up, then up some more, and then down just a little but still not back to where we would like them to be. Our flights to Israel were a lot higher than we expected because of that. There’s also a war going on in Ukraine that we still might get pulled into. And for others of us there are relational crises, where families have broken apart or loved ones no longer speak to each other. Some of us have lost jobs, and others have buried loved ones. The world seems broken, and some of us feel our lives are in pieces, like chaos is winning. As we begin this year, I want to take us back to the beginning, to a place and time when chaos actually was in charge…until God stepped in. For the next several weeks, we’re going to be “In the Chaos,” and we’re going to look at the ways God makes new things out of the broken pieces of life. The very first time that happened was at the beginning.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” Genesis says. Then the author goes on to describe the situation: “Now the earth was formless and empty…” (1:1-2). The Hebrew phrase there is (and I’m probably butchering the pronunciation) tohu vavohu. Formless and void, or chaos and empty. Eugene Peterson translated it this way in The Message: “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness” (The Message Bible, pg. 20). The Hebrew phrase describes “an unformed emptiness bathed in darkness.” Tohu describes something that has no boundaries, nothing to define what it is and what it isn’t. Vavohu describes a vast emptiness—no purpose, no meaning (LaGrone, Out of Chaos, pg. 19-20; Gifford & Sobel, The God of the Way, pg. 90). And Genesis God created the heavens and the earth; it was tohu vavohu. Sounds like a pretty depressing place, doesn’t it?

Now, wait a minute. Remember that we’re learning about this God along the way by virtue of the story Genesis tells. So did God create something that was a mess? Did God mess it up the first time? Does it take this God a few tries to get it right? Why would God create something that was “formless and empty”? Lots of questions, and there are a lot of theories among Biblical scholars and theologians about the answers to those questions. I remember being taught when I was young that there is a gap between verses 1 and 2, and in that historical “gap” is when Satan fell and rebelled against God and that’s when the earth got all messed up. Maybe. But there’s no clear Biblical evidence for that theory. There certainly is evidence that before what we know as creation, God did create other things, like the angels which we’re told were present at this creation (cf. Job 38:4-7), and the word in Hebrew that is translated as “create” can also mean “recreate” or “renovate” or “refashion.” It seems that something happened in between these verses, something ominous that resulted in the earth being made tohu vavohu, formless and void. What, exactly, we’re not sure because “Genesis is not interested in explaining the darkness or the formlessness or the emptiness, just what God did about it” (cf. Ross, “Genesis,” Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 1, pgs. 32-34). And what God did about it, according to Genesis, is bring order out of chaos. Because that’s what God always does. Paul put it this way: “God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33; cf. Gifford & Sobel 91).

But chaos loves to show up, to challenge that order. The enemy of our souls doesn’t have to directly pull us away from God if he can just create some chaos in our lives to make us doubt God’s goodness. Pastor Jessica LaGrone, Dean of the Chapel at Asbury Seminary, describes chaos this way: it’s “the unravelling of our plans followed by a head shaking, disorienting realization: That’s not the way I hoped this would go” (LaGrone 3). Sometimes it may be garden-variety daily-ness—running late to an appointment and you get stopped by a train in Terre Haute. I know, an unbelievable scenario, but I’ve heard it happens. Or you have plans for a nice dinner out with friends and the babysitter cancels or you start coughing and that aggravating test shows two little lines—positive for Covid. Chaos—this is not the way I hoped this would go. The evening of December 22 I noticed our furnace was having trouble getting to the set temperature, but it was cold and getting colder and the dog kept wanting to go out, so I just figured there was cold air coming in every time the door opened. When I got up the next morning, the day before Christmas Eve, it was 52 degrees in the house. The furnace was not only not keeping up, it was putting out cold air. And you do know that everyone was already on a holiday schedule on December 23, right? So we fired up the fireplace and got out the electric heaters and we made a weekend of it with Christopher anyway. But that was not the way I hoped this would go. Chaos loves to show up and challenge the order we try to place in our lives.

Here are Jessica LaGrone’s words again, because she says it better than I can: “Chaotic conditions can go from a trickle to a flood in one fell swoop. From a broken headlight to a broken marriage, a fender bender to a cancer diagnosis. One day it’s a bounced check; the next, an economic crash. Or a global pandemic. Or sometimes all of the above” (3). That’s not the way I had hoped this would go. Suddenly, your world is tohu vovahu, formless and empty.

Generally speaking, there tend to be two ways we approach the chaos in our lives. When life seems to spiral out of control, we either accept what is or we try to take control. I think about a couple of Biblical characters who seem to represent each of those, which should tell us that human nature hasn’t changed all that much over thousands of years. But the first one I think of is the woman at the well. She was a Samaritan, a woman who had had four husbands and was currently living with a man who didn’t love her enough to marry her. She kept going from man to man because, in that culture, a woman without a man had no means of support. So this woman really have very few options; when one man left her, she had to find someone else. We don’t know what caused the chaos of her life, but we do know how she chose to deal with it because she came to the well to get water for her household at noon. No one came at noon. You got water at the beginning of the day, when it was cooler. No one wanted to be out in the hot noontime sun. Rather than fight against the cultural perceptions of her, and rather than listen to the whispers she knew were about her, this woman just gave in and accepted what was, going to the well in the heat of the day. Chaos may not have been the way she thought it would go, but that was the way it had gone. There was no use fighting it. For her, acceptance was the way to go (cf. John 4:4-7).

And then there’s Peter. His original name was Simon, and he was a fisherman by trade. He was used to taking charge, running his business, and knowing what to do next. So when he became a disciple of Jesus, a follower, he had a few rough edges that needed working on. Now, you have to admire Peter because, when Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is, Peter is the only one with the courage to speak up, and he speaks the truth. He says, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus congratulates him; in fact, that’s when Jesus gives Peter his new name. Then Jesus tells the disciples that he is going to suffer and die. And Peter pulls him aside and said, “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:15-22). Never mind the contradiction of Peter calling someone “Lord” and then trying to tell him what’s going to take place, this is Peter taking charge. This is Peter trying to control or negate the chaos because Jesus dying would seriously upset their plans and their lives. “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” And there’s one other scene that goes along with this. Not too long after this, on the last night before his crucifixion, Jesus takes Peter and the rest of the disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives to pray. And it’s while they are there that soldiers arrive to arrest Jesus. Chaos, right? The disciples are praying when soldiers, chief priests, Pharisees and Judas all arrive in this quiet garden with “torches, lanterns and weapons.” And Peter, who for some reason has a sword, pulls it out and cuts off the ear of the servant of the high priest. A lot of scholars think Peter was actually going for the neck, but somehow he missed and instead cut off the lobe of the servant’s ear (cf. John 18:1-10). Whatever actually happened, here’s the point: Peter is once again trying to control the chaos. If he can change the narrative, if he can take charge, chaos won’t win. Because Jesus being arrested—that is not the way he had hoped this would go.

I’ve spent most of my life in Peter’s camp. I tend to be a person who tries to control the chaos, who comes up with plans and procedures to push it back. When the furnace was out, I immediately developed a plan to get it fixed. When Cathy’s dad’s health took a turn for the worse just as we were about to walk out the door on a vacation last fall, I immediately developed another plan, a different route for the week. Last Sunday, when we got here for the New Year’s service, there was no internet, so I immediately started running back and forth, unplugging and plugging in routers until we could get at least enough internet to livestream. And when I was seventeen and my heart problem was discovered, I remember asking the doctor, “What can we do to fix it right now?” I’m definitely in the control camp. Maybe you are, too, or maybe you’re in the “acceptance” camp. But do you know what the problem is with both of those approaches? It’s that they are focused on what we can do. They’re both self-centered. As we push back the chaos, whether through control or acceptance, we’re trying to make ourselves look better. And “any path of escaping chaos with self as the central actor inevitably leads us to focus on the self, which circles around until we find ourselves back in a different kind of chaos” (LaGrone 23). Which brings us back to creation.

Here’s something else I can’t help but notice this time through Genesis 1. Whatever happened to cause the chaos, the world couldn’t get itself out of the chaos. Someone had to step in, and that someone was God, the original creator. Or, here is another way to say it: “The formless chaos of Genesis, tohu vovahu, was temporary, but God is permanent” (LaGrone 24). Chaos doesn’t rule; it is ruled by the one who created everything in the first place. There is no chaos he cannot overcome, and look how Genesis says he does it. He does it by forming the formless, filling the emptiness and most of all, lighting the darkness. When God steps into the chaos of Genesis 1, what does he say? The first words out of God’s mouth in the Bible are these: “Let there be light” (1:3). And what happened? “There was light.” No ifs, ands, or buts. When I was a kid, we were putting on some sort of presentation and one of my classmates had to recite this verse. I don’t remember what the presentation  was about, but I do remember how her dad told her to say it: “God said there should be light, and sure enough, there was!”

That’s why John, when he set out to write his Gospel near the end of the first century, the last of the gospels to be written, he doesn’t start with a genealogy as Matthew and Luke do. He doesn’t start with Jesus’ baptism, as Mark does. John starts with creation. And do you remember those words that we read every Christmas Eve as we light candles in this dark sanctuary? It’s worth hearing again this morning: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” And don’t miss this: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:1-5). Here’s what John is proclaiming: the same way the chaos was pushed back in the very beginning, Jesus is coming to push back the chaos that sin and corruption and rebellion has caused. Jesus’ very life comes to say, “Let there be light.” And in his death and resurrection—sure enough, there was!

So when confusion and chaos, grief and loss, breakdown and bedlam become part of your life, you can confidently say to the chaos, “You are not God. You are temporary. You are not the boss of me, and you will not be the end of my story” (LaGrone 24). Because, as I often say, when God is in the story, the worst thing is never the last thing.

I belong to a group that, every year, tries to read a book that’s considered a Christian “classic,” which generally means it’s an older book written in another time. This year, it’s been “Orthodoxy” by G. K. Chesterton, a preacher and author out of the early 1900’s—so compared to some of the books we’ve read, this one is relatively new! I really have to work to get through some of Chesterton’s paragraphs—not that it’s not good stuff but it’s so dense. And yet, every once in a while, a phrase jumps off the page at me. In his chapter on “The Paradoxes of Christianity,” he writes this: “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild” (Wax, ed., Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton, pg. 137). Good things running wild. God brings order into the world so that good things can run wild. I love that, and it makes me think of our trip to Mayfield, Kentucky last November. As you may remember, an EF4 tornado had ripped through that community in December 2021, and we went to spend a week there with Samaritan’s Purse in rebuilding efforts. There may be no better picture of chaos than when a tornado or some other natural disaster rips through a town or a community. Even still, almost a year later, Mayfield has huge empty lots in their downtown awaiting reconstruction. Homes gone, businesses gone, churches gone, lives gone. Chaos. And into that chaos comes groups like Samaritan’s Purse who are God’s agents to say to that town, “Let there be light.” We came to be part of their efforts to bring order back to the community, to shine the light of Jesus brightly into what has been a chaotic situation.

But there was something else happening on our trip. As I’ve shared before, we were the first group that ever brought special needs folks along as part of a work camp with Samaritan’s Purse. That all came about because Jess knows people who work with Samaritan’s Purse, and they began to ask “what if.” It was a fantastic trip, not without its difficulties and not without some chaos along the way, but I can tell you that in the midst of all of that, as others saw our special needs friends step up and serve, and as our friends got to participate in something others never imagined was possible, there was room created for good things to run wild. That’s what happens every time we cooperate with God, when we allow God to shine the light into the tohu vavohu, when we refuse to believe that confusion and chaos are the last word. Through us, all of us, God can create order so that good things can run wild.

So I’m wondering where the chaos is in your life today. What is the situation you’re facing which feels tohu vovahu, formless and empty? Is there something so chaotic in your life that feels like it will never get better? I want you to hear this clearly today: God was there at the beginning of the story, bringing order, filling emptiness and shining light. And we’re told God will be there at the end; in fact, he will be the very light by which we walk at the end (cf. Revelation 21:23-24). God is permanent; your chaos is not. The worst thing is never the last thing. God can and will bring order out of chaos—in the world and in your life as well, and over the next few weeks, we will be exploring ways God does that and ways we can cooperate with God. But this morning, as we begin this journey, I want to ask you to get the picture of that chaotic situation in your mind, and picture what has happened or what is happening. Now picture Jesus walking into the midst of that situation, and hear him as he speaks the words he spoke to the chaos of the storm: “Peace! Be still!” (Mark 4:39, NRSV). And then picture yourself saying to that same situation: “God is permanent; you are not. You will not be the end of my story.” Then picture the light of Christ shining through the whole situation, and know that when the light of Christ comes, the darkness must flee because the darkness cannot overcome his light. Friends, receive the good news, and let’s take all of these situations to God in prayer.