This is sermon to mark Gay Pride month,, preached on the 4th Sunday after Trinity 2024
Trinity 4
Mark’s story of the calming of the storm opens up a great tradition of Hebrew mythology. In this, the sea is a place of evil, of disorder. It features like this in early creation stories, in the flood, in the parting of the Red Sea and in the story of Jonah who tries to run away from God. Crossing the sea, in Mark’s gospel, is a journey from Jewish to Gentile towns with complete differences of culture so it means going to alien places. The storm symbolises all that is evil, and today’s psalm is a pattern for the gospel. And, if you recall the gospel recently when we began ordinary time, Jesus’ healing is portrayed as a battle with evil, as Jesus was accused of casting out devils by Beelzebub.
But there wasn’t a battle to be fought. There is no Beelzebub. The mythical monsters are all imaginary. Galilee is freshwater lake, not the open ocean. Experienced fishermen, like Peter, James and John would have known how to deal with it. It sounds as though the others who were not used to fishing boats, started a panic when the boat rocked. Mark uses the story to illustrate how the event brought Jesus’ disciples closer to understanding whom Jesus was. They ask themselves, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’
Mark doesn’t have infancy stories of Jesus, nor anything like the prologue of John’s gospel to assert the divinity of Jesus. Instead, he uses stories like this which give us the evidence that Jesus in no less than Immanuel, God with us. Mark’s gospel is written, most probably for Christians facing political hostility and persecution in Rome, facing storms of their own. Mark tells the story to assure his readers that they must have faith in facing the storms of life.
Yes, there are real challenges, but in the midst of them, it is easy for us to frighten ourselves even more with myths. This month is now marked as Pride Month. There were three parish events last weekend to celebrate this, with the title Love is Love. The first was a talk by Charlie Bell, then we had a concert on Saturday and to round it off, the Sunday Eucharist.
In Charlie Bell’s talk, he began with the creation myth. And this is precisely where today’s reading began. Out of a scene of primeval chaos, God asks Job, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.’
We have to ask ourselves, ‘What kind of creation is it?’ And more particularly, does our creation myth actually convey a true idea of what creation is? Or is the myth just some kind of imaginary bogeyman to frighten people? Is it, like the people in the boat who were not used to sailing, setting up a panic, indeed rocking the boat to the extent that everyone was in danger?
I answer this as a lifelong believer in the goodness of God and also as someone who has explored some of the mysteries of creation as a geologist. Looking at the past, through the insights of science, we aren’t limited to what we see today. We can probe back further into the dawn of creation towards that point where God ‘laid the foundation of the earth.’
When we do so we find the myth is false, and that building a picture of what God is like out of it can lead to mistakes. We create bogeymen to frighten us. The first and most obvious mistake must be the notion that creation was finished, in six days. It never was finished and isn’t finished yet. Throughout the whole of time from the big bang at the start, new things have come into being. Evolution has taken place. There were billions of years before there was even a solar system and our earth. As Jesus says, in John’s gospel chapter five, when he was accused of healing on the Sabbath, ‘My Father is still working, and I also am working.’ Jesus could see his father at work in the world, constantly doing new things. Evolution is still taking place.
My second point then is that the creation myth, in assuming a fixed creation, imagines a world which was perfect, and imagines that we know what such perfection consists of. It is wrong. No such world ever existed. And we only have to think about it for a moment to realise that, had such a world ever existed, nothing could possible have happened, because it would have broken the original perfection. The problem with the myth, then is that it portrays what we see, not as God’s creation, but as something broken by humanity’s sinfulness. That is the story of the Fall and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.
The myth is a lie. Creation has been changeable, uncertain, open to new things, from the very beginning. We can now probe back into the past and recognise that there was time before our world existed, never mind just time before the dinosaurs.
Scripture imagines that ‘God made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved’. But it spins like a top. A better simile might be to suggest that creation proceeds like someone riding a bike, constantly in motion, and constantly in danger of falling to right and left without doing so, for 14 billion years.
Once the myth had been exposed by the theory of evolution, it was famously ridiculed in a joke in W S Gilbert’s Mikado. Pooh-Bah says ‘I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.’
Once the myth becomes a joke you don’t have to be afraid of it. It is a fundamental mistake by the Christian Church that instead of demolishing the creation myth, as Jesus did when he healed on the Sabbath and showed this was the work of God, continues to tell the creation story as if were proof that we are all to be blamed for destroying a primeval perfection.
No, it’s not that kind of creation. The creation into which we came is one full of hard decisions at every turn, and perpetuating the myths means that we won’t be able to see the world as it is.
And the simple fact when we see it is that, as last weekend’s posters said, ‘Love is Love’. That’s what it is wherever it is found.
As Christians we have a particular problem with the creation myth, which is the ways in which St. Paul, following on his training as a Pharisee, unfortunately built so much on the myth. In his best moments, he realised the error of his ways. To the Galatians he describes what it was like. He writes
Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
He understands this to the point of asserting that Jewish food laws are unnecessary, and circumcision in order to admit Gentiles into Christians faith – there is no longer Jew or Greek, he says.
Yet he persists with the myth in saying that women are inferior, he persists in the idea of an original perfection followed by the Fall, saying ‘Since by man came death’ and he persists in claiming that love is only in marriage, and not open to anyone else. But all of this simply uses the mythical creation stories as though they were fact, whereas they are only the bogeymen of imagination, made up to frighten people.
Throughout Christian history the Church has used the myth of ‘original sin’, a doctrine not shared by Jews who have always used the books of Moses as their scriptures, to enslave and frighten believers. Anselm and others in formulating ‘doctrines of the atonement’, strengthened the myth, though such doctrines have never been part of the catholic creeds. It was only when the implications of the theory of evolution were understood that the ancient bogeyman could be laid to rest. But it held the greatest theologians in thrall for generations.
Jesus calmed the storm. It might just have been danger caused by panic in an overloaded boat, We don’t know how or what happened, but the disciples calmed down and sailed safely to shore. When Jesus was accused of ‘casting out devils by Beelzebub his healing the paralysed man both disproved the myth and demonstrated his divinity.
But perhaps our greatest bogeyman today is the belief in the myth that this is a creation broken by human sin rather than the place of rich and changing variety which God created, and in which we are increasingly required to act to secure its future.
God did not make the round world so fast that it cannot be moved. It is spinning like a top and could go off course if the human race is not willing to do something about it.