In the Beginning…

February 26, 2008

What follows is a sampling of the striking results.

Stephen B. Chapman

Genesis 1:1

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.

How easily are beginnings forgotten. Today, I dwelled on this verse a little too late. I began to consider the grades I am slowly starting to receive from papers, tests and quizzes. I began to plan out what my final grades would be if I did this well on that paper and how hard I needed to work on the next one. I printed out the daily schedule for the spring semester. What courses will I take…How can I get to the end, to graduation? It seems that as soon as I’ve started school, I’m already looking towards the end.

But the question I should have asked was: “how did I get here in the first place? Oh yes, because God called me here. Just like creation, God willed me to a beginning in this place…

Prayer:

Wonderful Creator, you are the beginning. The beginning of all that we are. Long before we breathed our first breaths on this earth, You breathed life into the world. Your eternal nature allows You to create and be involved in Your creation. Your creation is beyond our comprehension. In our pettiness that consumes us, help us to recognize Your greatness. Amen.

— Drew Holland

Genesis 1:4

And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

It turns out that I am a very poor reader of scripture. When I read Genesis 1:3, I thought that by the creation of light, darkness was overcome or eliminated. Essentially, I thought that Genesis 1:3 entailed the separation of light from darkness. And yet, this sequence makes it clear that light was created and then separated from the darkness in two distinct steps. As I reflected on my misunderstanding from yesterday, I realized that my reading of scripture is very much guided by assumptions. I assume things that are not a part of the text, jumping to conclusions, sometimes without a scriptural basis. I infer much, and by doing so I sometimes don’t let the text speak for itself…Am I looking into the water and seeing only my own reflection, but believing that it is the image of God? My reading of these verses makes it clear that I must be extremely careful that what I am reading is present in the passage, and not simply my beliefs inserted into the text…

Prayer:

Merciful God, forgive me for not sufficiently respecting the testimony of your Word. I have forgotten to let your Word speak for you, and have instead brought my assumptions and self-interest to it. Help me to be only interested in what you have to say, not what I want you to say. Guide me, so that I may discern your truth from the scriptures and discover the beauty of that truth. You are a magnificent God, and your scripture is a magnificent library full of beautiful stories and perfect truth…Thanks be to you, Wonderful Teacher, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

— Brian Johnson

Genesis 1:7

God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

Today I couldn’t stop thinking about how delightful and frustrating it is to go through the Bible so slowly. “The second day.” “The second day.” I kept thinking about this all day long. Somehow, in the course of dissecting these opening verses of Genesis into day-long explorations of each verse, I began to think of God’s actions as happening in the course of my days. It has been over a week since I began the scripture journal, and it feels like God’s work in creation has been at least a week’s worth of work. Yet, surprisingly, the text itself continues to remind me that it has only been two days of God’s time. This made me think about the question of time for God, and my experience of disjuncture between my concept of time and God’s concept of time has become revelatory…How can we manage something like “time” if we don’t understand whose hands created time and whose hands hold it together? I have been afraid of time for so many years of my life, as time was often “sneaking up on me.” I have long been deeply afraid of being caught by time, caught unprepared with my work undone. I am controlled by my fear, and I know that this fear is not how God wants me to understand the beauty of this particular creation.

Prayer:

Please take from me my life when I don’t have the time to give it away to you. Unwrap my fearful fingers as they clutch time, afraid that it will pass away and leave me unprepared. You alone understand how time was created, and only by placing my time in your hands will it cease to be a source of fear and curse, and return to being a source of blessing and love. God who is beyond time, I place my lifetime under this dome in your awesome hands and ask you to be my time-keeper as I journey through this life. Amen.

— Amanda Earp

Genesis 1:30

“And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

Interestingly, here is the first point in Genesis where we see the phrase “the breath of life.” That leapt off the page to me this morning. I guess up to now, all God’s creative acts have involved the language of “let there be.” But here, as God speaks of the living creatures God has created, we get this magnificent turn of phrase: the breath of life. Whatever it is that animates us surely comes from God, and it seems like it is present in our very breathing.

To pass the time during long car rides, I always listen to music. Oddly, while I was driving from New Jersey to Virginia today, I found myself tired of music. I couldn’t settle on anything that I wanted to hear, but I don’t think my problem was one of selection. Sometimes you just want to be quiet, and to resist the urge to fill the empty space with something. And once I had turned off the stereo, I started to consider my own breathing: the breath of life.

It’s a bit morbid, but my thoughts turned to the idea of breathing one’s last breath. I don’t know why, but that’s a difficult idea to consider. I have breathed every few seconds for my entire life, but one day, I will inhale, exhale, and that will be it. I won’t inhale any more times, and the life will be gone from my body.

I didn’t rest on that thought for too long before I turned the music back on, but it was a moment of lucidity that went with me the rest of my day.

Prayer:

Holy Spirit, I am not ashamed to pray to you for my continued breath of life. You breathed life into all that moves on the earth, and I believe that it is your continued breath that enables the continued breath of all that lives. Do not turn from us, Lord, else we will not be able to drawn another breath. Amen.

— David J. Allen

Genesis 2:3

So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

As I approach this last journal on the final evening for my ultimate reflection, I cannot help but contemplate the value of this experience. What does it mean to read the Bible painfully and joyfully slowly in order to see the face of God who condescended to us in scripture? ….It was a novel concept for me to read and re-read one single passage over the course of a day and to listen for what resonated with my daily routine. Normally, I bite off and chew such large pieces of biblical text that I am drowned in thoughts and ideas…I had all kinds of fears: What if I resonate with nothing today? How can I find something new to say? Will this be an exercise in futility? The blessing of having one pre-chosen passage was its freedom. If I trusted that God was alive and powerful, then any encounter with the living God in any passage would surely speak to my heart and life….In this way, this journal was itself a journey of faith…I delight in the newfound joy of combining scripture reading and journaling. I pray that the creation of a new discipline in my life will be an opportunity for God to dwell, if not rest, from all the work that God has done in these pages and in my heart.

Prayer:

To you be the glory, to you be the honor, to you be the thanks, and to you be the praise. In all that I read, think, do, and say, I pray that you, dear God, will be revealed in love. With a heart full of thanksgiving for your incarnate word, and with a soul full of rest for the creation you have wrought in me, I offer you this journal as a prayer. Amen.

— Amanda Earp

Contributors

Instructor
Stephen B. Chapman is assistant professor of Old Testament.

Students
David J. Allen is a member of Bridgewater UMC in the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference.

Amanda Earp is from Greensboro, N.C., and is pursuing ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Drew Holland is a member of Myers Park UMC in Charlotte and a candidate for ordination in the Western North Carolina Annual Conference.

Brian Johnson is from Fredericksburg, Va., and a member of the Virginia Annual Conference.