SPEAKER_00: When I consider your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars and the set in their courses.
SPEAKER_00: What is man that you should be mindful of him, the Son of Man that you should seek him out?
SPEAKER_00: In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: It is core to the work of being human that we yearn to be known and to be loved, seen and beheld.
SPEAKER_00: Christian psychiatrist Kurt Thompson describes what it means to be a human child, to look for and find comfort in our caretakers.
SPEAKER_00: We are born looking for someone looking for us, he writes.
SPEAKER_00: While psychological theories attempt to describe the developmental stages at which people understand themselves to be a thing, what is wonderful about this description from Thompson is that he doesn't begin the discovery of being human with the formation of one's own identity, but with the reflexive desire to look, to be seen, known, and loved, to be beheld in the gaze of another.
SPEAKER_00: I am already in relationship with the other before I understand myself to be an I.
SPEAKER_00: And the discovery begins not with oneself, but with the other.
SPEAKER_00: We are born looking for someone, looking for us, and we never stop looking.
SPEAKER_00: It is mildly interesting to me that we are born looking, but what I'm really amazed by, and what's taken for granted in the looking, is that before the one born even knows to look, there is another, gazing and beholding, waiting to be sought in the gaze.
SPEAKER_00: And this, before we look, we are already beheld, points to one of the deep claims at the heart of the Christian faith to be in relationship with God is to be found, to be the object of God's gaze and love, of God's beholding.
SPEAKER_00: We are sought before we are aware even to look.
SPEAKER_00: Indeed, we are sought before we are born.
SPEAKER_00: But there is an even greater reality still, one which is prior to all of this.
SPEAKER_00: Before there was an us at which to gaze, there was God.
SPEAKER_00: And the life of God was already one of beholding.
SPEAKER_00: We do not have this in our lectionary today, but it's not possible to avoid hearing the echoes of this in the opening words of the Gospel of John.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning was the Word.
SPEAKER_00: The Word was with God, and the Word was God.
SPEAKER_00: The Word was with God in the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: Christians have understood that this divine life, prior to anything else, is part of what is meant in the language of the Trinity.
SPEAKER_00: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Spirit, eternally a community of persons, beheld and beholding.
SPEAKER_00: Before time begins, God is in loving relationship with God's self.
SPEAKER_00: The radical claim of Scripture is that God has always desired to share God's life with creation.
SPEAKER_00: But this is not from a kind of necessity in God.
SPEAKER_00: God does not need the world in order to complete the task of love, but in being who God is, God creates in order to share what God is as a gift to the world.
SPEAKER_00: For that sake, God makes all of the created order and then seeks to bring it into the life of God.
SPEAKER_00: God desires to be with us in the same way that God is with God to behold us, for us to behold God.
SPEAKER_00: What kind of God is this God?
SPEAKER_00: What is this mystery of life which has been shared with us?
SPEAKER_00: And why does it even matter?
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning, God creates a world of immense activity and difference with a word.
SPEAKER_00: Let there be light.
SPEAKER_00: God illumines the chaos of the deep, bringing it into order, making the unfolding creativity of the creation story visible to us.
SPEAKER_00: This light divides day into night, and with the division of light and dark, God creates time.
SPEAKER_00: God names the day and night.
SPEAKER_00: As the creation story from Genesis continues, we would not be wrong to imagine God bursting with creative and generative energy, given over to the work of attention to creation, this thing which has been called into being with God's very word.
SPEAKER_00: On each day, God speaks and in speaking brings forth something that never was before that moment.
SPEAKER_00: Let there be lights in the dome of the sky, let there be seasons for days and years.
SPEAKER_00: Read closely.
SPEAKER_00: You can feel the text as it becomes more playful, as though God's becoming absorbed by what's emerging.
SPEAKER_00: The seas are filled with teeming fish, the depths of the waters with the great sea monsters.
SPEAKER_00: And then the earth itself becomes a participant in the creativity of God as God with a word says, Let the waters bring forth life.
SPEAKER_00: And as God creates, God names and blesses, each day beheld by God is seen as good.
SPEAKER_00: There is abundant life and difference, growth and generation, and all without rivalry, violence, or competition.
SPEAKER_00: While God is still other, the creator, not a creature, God is not disinterested or uninvolved.
SPEAKER_00: This picture is a picture of God giving exquisite care and attention to the created order as God imagines it, providing for its flourishing, and then observing it, calling it good.
SPEAKER_00: And then on the sixth day, the same day that God makes all of the other creeping things and cattle, God creates humankind.
SPEAKER_00: And if something of God is unclear in the rest of creation, there is no doubt that the int about the intention for the human person.
SPEAKER_00: Let us make humankind in our image according to our likeness.
SPEAKER_00: While God has given the created order a sense of provision and abundance, here God creates responsibility for the creation for itself, the love of the world for itself.
SPEAKER_00: God creates humans to share in God's own care for the world so that the created order carries a mark of God's character, overflowing with creativity and joy, mutual care and love.
SPEAKER_00: From the beginning, creation is an object of God's love and care.
SPEAKER_00: It is made for the purpose of giving glory to God.
SPEAKER_00: God beholds all that God has made.
SPEAKER_00: All that God has made experiences and beholds God's gifts.
SPEAKER_00: While we do not have something like a fleshed-out doctrine of the Trinity operative in the stories from Genesis for the original writers and readers, Christians have nonetheless made the claim that God is always and eternally the same, and that is eternally triune.
SPEAKER_00: Something of what we have come to understand about the Trinity, though, is present, gestured toward, even in the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: Not because God is embedded in creation, but because creation is a gift from God's life and imagination.
SPEAKER_00: It is made for being a thing outside of God's self, with which God shares God.
SPEAKER_00: We cannot make sense of the identity and character and activity of God without these stories, without encountering and coming to know God as God has given God's self to us.
SPEAKER_00: And creation is just this first way that God has opened God's life to the world, so that God can, in the words of Rowan Williams, desire us as if we were God.
SPEAKER_00: The world is meant to reflect God's character and experience God's love and itself as an occasion for God's joy and delight, for the sheer joy of God's beholding.
SPEAKER_00: And we do not believe only that God shares God's life in a general sense with creation in the beginning, but that God's life is offered to each person particularly.
SPEAKER_00: To know something of this world which is made by God is to know something of yourself as made in God's image and beheld.
SPEAKER_00: So many people believe, consciously and unconsciously, that it's impossible for God to love them, to love all of them.
SPEAKER_00: And there is in our own time a desperate loneliness such that we can say that we're living in a loneliness epidemic, a need to be seen and known, a need for community, a hope for love, and a waiting and desire to be acknowledged and known.
SPEAKER_00: I hear this in moments that I share with some of you.
SPEAKER_00: And then in the breath before confession, when for a moment we fear that our own lives and what we have done or who we are is not good enough to receive God's grace.
SPEAKER_00: If you hear nothing else today, I want each of you to hear that you are a sight for God's love, desire, joy, and care.
SPEAKER_00: And to consider what it means for your life as a creature, that from the very beginning, this love, desire, and care has been lavished on you and on all of creation, human and non-human, animate and inanimate by God, that it is given as a gift from the very heart of God's own triune life.
SPEAKER_00: And in receiving this life, you become a participant in God's love, not just as one who receives the gifts and abundance of God's love and grace, but as one who offers it back to God and the world.
SPEAKER_00: You, in effect, become a part of God's creative ministry to and with the world, a lover of both God and the world, beholding and beheld by God.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.