The Journey from Was to Is

One of my favorite passages of scripture opens with the words, “In the beginning…”

As a science major, and before that as a small boy, creation always fascinated me.  Later as the astronomy coach for my physics teacher at Cerritos Community, on clear evenings I would roll out our telescope and train it on some cosmic delight, the object of that day’s lesson.

We could view Jupiter with its great red spot and the Galilean moons, the four largest moons being: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.  Later, many more would be discovered.  We could easily see the rings around Saturn.  Mars was a distant, fuzzy orange speck.

On trips out to the Mojave Desert, at night, the sky was spectacular with the Milky Way sparkling overhead with its millions of stars.  We didn’t yet know that it was a monstrous black hole that kept it – and us – all in regular order slowly circling its gravitational pull.

Later, the James Webb Telescope would delight us with the fantastical images of far-off nebulae and pictures of millions of other galaxies in far off reaches of space.  Because the light arriving from some had taken billions of years to reach us, what we were actually seeing was a glimpse into the early creation of everything.  Almost all the way back in time to the Big Bang.

Just as an aside, go treat yourself to a planetarium show at the Griffith Observatory right here in Los Angeles.  It is a spiritual experience.

The Creator is to be found in the splendors of the sky and the natural world.  All around us — as close as that annoying mosquito keeping us awake at night, as bright as the sun and Sister Moon.  It’s all dazzling to behold.

In Abram’s despair over a living inheritance, he complains to God concerning his childless existence.

The Lord God commands Abram to step outside.  “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them…so will your descendants be.”

I can only imagine Abram staring open-mouthed, beholding the cosmic light show.  Stars beyond measure.

And if he had lived in the northern reaches of Alaska and Canada, he would have beheld the Northern Lights dancing across the skies – pink, purple, magenta, dazzling white.

To seal the deal of a new beginning, God’s faithfulness is enshrined in a lasting Covenant.  Abram, on his part, sacrifices a young goat, a turtledove and a young pigeon.  That’s how the Art of the Deal was done back then.

After the sun had gone down and a deep sleep had fallen over Abram a “smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces.”  God always works God’s wonders in “terrifying darkness.”  The Covenant was sealed.  Such a deal!

All this metaphorical language sounds very primitive and bazaar to us modern folks.  Not unlike a children’s fairy tale or ghost story.

Yet, here is the truth wrapped up in this passage.  However we moderns might understand this Covenant, the fact is that we are here.  We live on a planet uniquely suited to our being present.  The place is not only habitable (or at least it was not too long ago), but is a most delightful place.

I notice the splendor every morning as I go out to my car and see the flower stalk on the agave next to the driveway.  It’s taller each day, now approaching ten feet.  My neighbor Jim tells me the flowers on it should bloom sometime around April or May.

As it shoots towards the sky, I told my wife that actually that plant grew from some magic beans I bought with our life savings from a little boy out in the street.

Delightful, all of it.  That is how I understand this promise from the salvation history of Deuteronomy.  The hallmark of all this is the simple fact that I’m here.  That we’re here.

Think of it – of all the impossible trillion possibilities of a certain egg meeting a certain sperm – well, the odds against it are astronomical.  Replicated over billions of years – and here we are!  Beyond quantum computation.  Incomprehensible!  Sheer grace.  The same for the odds of you being here.

Sheer existence, messy as it is, is the primal seal of this Covenant, birds and goats aside.

In that Big Bang, was all the eventual ingredients for the “wonders of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this earth, our fragile home.”  All released in a nanosecond of a nanosecond after the Big Bang.  From aardvarks to zebras along the little creepy-crawlies we don’t like in our kitchens.

 As hostile as the environment would seem at times – here we are.  Alive, descendants of some Cro-Magnon Adam and Eve. Given an amazing ecosystem favorable to our continuing flourishing.  Unless we totally mess it up.

This is what was, always moving towards what is and what will be.  All the ingredients present.

But we haven’t been left without an instruction book and guidance.  Wisdom and reason have been bequeathed us.  Torah Righteousness instructed us as to our relationships with one another, as to our relationship to this our fragile “island home.” 

Through the prophets, again and again, we have been given promptings on how to flourish and thrive.  Jesus Christ being for us a living example, a spiritual mentor, opening the door to eternity.  A vision bringing each one of us to the full Glory of God – women and men fully alive.  Alive to ourselves, to one another and to the One who left us here.  And, all this, too, out of the Big Bang. 

We are not left adrift.  The Spirit of Christ continues to move through conscience, thorough imagination, through inventiveness, through delight and creativity.

I have been fortunate to have a caregiver from the wonderfully named organization, “Motherly Comfort Care.”  Most of us have been fortunate through part of our lives to have known a mother’s tender care.  It is the first evidence most of us have as newborns of a hospitable universe.

Motherly comfort is a frequently used metaphor for God’s care and love.

Speaking of Jerusalem, the city that kills its prophets, the city doomed to disaster under Roman siege, Jesus laments.  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…”

And yet, the universe till now has done just that, given us an out-of-the-way planet just the right distance from its sun – evolved through the eons with an atmosphere that supports life and with faithful rains providing life-giving water.

Barbara Brown Taylor, through a meditation on having an orphaned baby chick, brings flesh to this picture.

Barbara, I think, is sort of like our member Ellen who has a tender heart for all sorts of strays.  The stray in this case was an orphaned guinea chick.  Barbara had heard that one type of chicken tended to be good mothers, the white Silkie.

She shopped around, and through the Market Bulletin, found a person selling them over in Royston.  After a bit bargaining, she had one rooster, two hens and four juveniles.  As she was about to leave, she spotted a gray hen.

“What’s that one?” she asked.  “A Blue Silkie,” the woman responded.  “A cross between a black and a white.” 

“How much for her?”  For another six bucks she concluded her purchase and left for home with all her chickens.

“When the Silkies and I got home, I saved her, [the Blue Silkie], for the orphaned chick. First, I lay on the grass while she and the baby watched each other through the mesh of the cage. Then I placed her inside. Both she and the baby froze. The baby cheeped. The hen did not move a feather. The baby cheeped again. The hen stayed right where she was. The baby took a few steps toward her. I held my breath. The gray hen lifted her wings. The baby scooted right into that open door. When I checked on them an hour later, all I could see was a little guinea chick head poking out from under that gray hen’s wing. Six bucks. What a deal.”[1]

Like that Blue Silkie, you and I are meant to be the Motherly Comfort Care for one another and for this creation.  And for this republic.

Here’s the altar call – a call to each of us as a citizen.  How will you use your God-given “reason and skill” that we have been bequeathed in service of the covenant we share as Americans? Every day we move from what was to the “is” of our present obligation to one another and to the stranger seeking refuge here. 

We are that Blue Silkie for the one another – providing tender shelter under her wing.

To begin…here is the necessary, opening question when arising from slumber, “How can I be part of the solution to the ills daily besetting our nation?”  How can I fulfill my role in this covenant we have with one another?   What one action can I take today?  Will you take?  Now, in your mind’s eye, lay it on God’s altar.

As an American and as a Citizen of our World?  — how can I be God’s Motherly Comfort Care?  For friend and stranger?  For family and neighbor?  I guarantee you this…the Spirit will answer.  And you will be the better for it.  Such a deal!

Every morning is the First Morning of what today is and what tomorrow will be.

“Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from Heaven/Like the first dewfall on the first grass. Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden/sprung in completeness where his feet pass.”[2]  Amen.

---

[1] Op. cit.

[2] Eleanor Farjeon, Songs of Praise, second edition, (published in 1931), to the tune “Bunessan“, composed in the Scottish Islands, 1938. Made popular by Cat Stevens and found in many hymnals.

March 16, 2025
Lent 2


Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27;
Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

“The Journey from Was to Is”