St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Sermon preached by the Reverend Bruce W. B. Jenneker in the Cathedral Church of St George in the Diocese and City of Cape Town on the First Sunday of the Year – Baptism of our Lord, 11 January 2009

Today, as we begin to number our Sundays, on the First Sunday of the Year, the lectionary calls us to the first page of the Bible, to the first verse of the first chapter of the first book: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”

Scholars believe that these verses had their origin in Israel's captivity, when the Jews of the ancient kingdom of Judah were deported and exiled to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, 600 years before the birth of Christ.

The people of Israel were utterly hopeless and despairing. Their country had been pillaged, their temple ruined, their cities destroyed. Their world spun out of control, full disaster, not only robbed them of their security and prosperity, it threatened their very identity. This world gone desperately wrong is the context in which Genesis 1 was born. These heroic words were first proclaimed amid national desolation.

Babylonian culture was centred on a highly developed cosmogony – beliefs about how the world began, where things came from, how they hold together and what reality means. The Babylonian understanding of the world was a complex and sophisticated rationalization of the origins of reality, but the universe it described was one held in the grip of chaos, with warring dualistic gods seeking to subdue a world spun out of control and dominated by sun-gods and moon-gods, myriad star-gods and a whole host of heaven. This story of creation was venerated in a consecrated text and celebrated in a sacred liturgy.

Bill Wylie-Kellerman, a Methodist minister and seminary professor in Chicago, holds that the “creation story...came into circulation, as an underground political tract.” It was the protest of a people in captivity against an understanding of the universe as inhospitable, threatening, random and ultimately out of control. “Here is a text, writes Wylie-Kellerman, “which may properly be read, its beauty notwithstanding, as a parody of the Babylonian creation liturgy.” In the opening chapter of Genesis, the Jews in exile defined the universe as coherent and reasonable, held together by the providential grace a loving God who remains always and ever in intimate solidarity with God's people, caring for all of creation, in all its passages through time.

In the beginning, says the creation story of the Jews, the earth was a formless void. It certainly was so for those who first heard these words. Their world, at one moment so stable, secure, fixed, and reliable, was found to be infinitely more fragile than it seemed. At one moment they were secure in their kingdom, the next they were slaves in exile, their world destroyed, their lives lost. They had believed that the thick walls around Jerusalem couldn't be breached, that their vast and venerated temple would stand forever. And when the walls fell and the temple crumbled, dark despair went with them into exile.

Crushed and devastated, with the obliterating weight of exile and slavery pressing down upon them, Israel risked some of its most assertive and confident poetry. Declaring in full throated joy, they sang, “In the beginning, when there was nothing but formless void, then God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light.”

It would be reasonable to expect the first word to be vengeance, or cowering fear, or bitterness. But no, the first word the exiles heard God say to formless void was, “Light!”

Our world too is spiralling downwards into a deep, dark, formless void. Wisdom is despised. Integrity has been forfeited. Justice is subverted. Kindness is absent and gentleness nonexistent. Palestine is massacred, Israel stomps all over it like a callous bully. The great nations debate and deliberate, cherishing their separate selfish interests. On our borders a passive genocide ravages whole nation and threatens an entire continent. Again, the great nations debate and deliberate, cherishing their separate selfish interests. Here at home our education system is in a mess, HIV and AIDS continue to decimate our population and TB is more prevalent than one would expect. Our newspapers and TV screens keep us informed about corruption and crime that seem both endemic and never-ending. There is, to use the evocative words of Genesis 1, nothing but a formless void.

Is the word 'Light' buzzing in our ears? Do our eyes catch glimpses of the light rising about the dark horizon? Do our hearts begin to sing the songs of hope and new life that light brings?

'Light' is not a word that we can say to ourselves. It must be spoken to us, overheard in God's conversation with the formless void. No word, not mine, or the president's, or some economist's, nor even the word of a therapist can help us when the mountains shake and tremble, the earth quakes and swirling waters are raging, no word can help except one spoken from the outside our little worlds of complacency and confusion. And just when the gloom is thickest and the encroaching night is darkest, then comes the word - and it is a sovereign command, a promise, a creative act, 'Light!'

Clear as a trumpet call, God's life-giving word is spoken into the formless void, and with that animating word, everything changes. God, the Lord of life and light, brings light out of night, dares the void in all its menacing formlessness to give reality its shape. God's word forms a universe that is born of love, held together by love, finds its identity in love.

This is the good news that sounds as we enter the gates of the year. With all that is sad and distressing all around us, in the face of the challenges of a world that is selfish and greedy, callous and destructive, the trumpet call sounds over us, and in us and for us, 'Let there be light.' This is the first word of God's love. It is still and ever the word of God's love. And it is in fact the last word. 'Let there be light.' All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, God's love is stronger than anything else whatsoever, because that is the way God has created the world. In life and death, in life beyond death, there is only one word. Always, ever and at the end, it is the same word as at the beginning: “A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

It is for this ministry of light shining in the darkness that Jesus is baptized. It is a radical and revolutionary ministry, taking on the powers of the world, challenging religious authority and overturning the commonly-held assumptions of the prevailing culture. It is into this ministry that we were baptised, and for it we are fed in the sacred bread and wine of the meal we have gathered to share.

Once, long ago, at the other end of our beloved Africa, Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, preached to his people at the beginning of a year and said, “Let us sing alleluia here on earth, while we still live in anxiety … Let us sing, not to delight our leisure, but to ease our toil. In the way that travellers are in the habit of singing, so we should sing, but keep on walking. What does it mean, “Keep on walking?” To go onward always – but go onward in goodness, If you are going onward, you are walking; but always go onward in goodness, onward in the right faith, onward in good habits and behaviour. Sing, and walk onwards. … Do not grow tired, but sing with joy!”

So it is right and proper, that here at the gate of the year, we confront our broken and troubled world with probing eyes and honest hearts. It is right that we claim the confidence of the Light that shines in the darkness and is not overcome by it. And it is right that we sing – this morning with the Royal Schools of Church Music Summer School to urge us on – but tomorrow still, and the next day, all through the year, singing 'Alleluia for life, Alleluia for light, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

[Quotation from St Augustine: Sermon 256, Patrologia Latina 38]

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