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Message 9-4-16: "The Heart of Christianity - Part One, Beginnings"
David Weber, Pastor
Pangea
was a
supercontinent
that existed approximately 300 million years ago, and it began to break apart about 175 million years ago. In contrast to the present
Earth
and its distribution of continental mass, much of Pangaea was in the
Southern Hemisphere
and surrounded by a single ocean,
Panthalassa
.[1] There have been other supercontinents, but Pangea was the last one to have existed, and the first one to have been reconstructed by geologists by looking at how the various continents seem to fit together like a puzzle, and then comparing the various mineral and fossil records of the continents.
The supercontinent broke apart because of continental drift, which is caused by the pressure of heat from deep within the earth. Like a cake baking - it rises, and sometimes it falls, and cracks appear in the batter. Other pressures - of the oceans themselves, of volcanoes, cause the sections of land mass to drift apart. They drifted then, they are drifting now...at about the same rate of speed that a fingernail grows. There will, in about another 80 million years, be another supercontinent.
On each of the continents, life as we know and think about life today - many-celled plants and animals - had already begun to form on Pangea. Some remnants of that same life that existed on Pangea, and then on the slowly drifting continents, continues today.
As I write this, I am sitting in one of the national rain forests of eastern Australia, which broke away during this time of drifting from one of the northern shores of Antarctica. All around me are the same kinds of plants and trees which existed 300, 100 million years ago. Varieties of gum trees, from the Eucalyptus genus of plants, tower all around me; the ground is covered in winter piles of their shed bark, so many of the trees appear sleek and bare. The ground is traversed by many succulent plants - thick leaves to hold the scarce water during frequent times of drought. And ferns...ferns in so many varieties - even fern trees, 20, 30 feet high.
All are plants with no flowers; all of the native trees, ferns, and ground cover here evolved before there was a single flower anywhere on earth. Along with stands of bamboo, these are many of the same kinds of plants which covered much of this part of Texas, which, along with life found in the teeming oceans which lapped at the once-upon-a-time shores here, became the great reserves of oil which each of us tapped into in some way as we came here today.
I sit and I look out at this green remnant of one of the oldest forests on earth and hear the cries of flocks of cockatoos overhead, and screaming parrots. It is not hard at all to imagine their predecessors in these same forests - the dinosaurs, the flying pterodactyls, or the reptilian raptors whose bodily shapes echo in the running and hunting forms of always present bush turkeys and kookaburra. Yes, the kookaburras are laughing. I squint my ears and hear their ancestors preparing to attack. I sit and watch and hear and imagine, and I feel both spooked a little bit, but also incredibly privileged to look backward into a time I cannot otherwise even begin to comprehend.
This is the essence of life as it has developed on earth. Before mammals; before the colors of flowers or the birds the reptiles became; and long, long before the first boats from Africa or India brought the first indigenous humans to these sun-drenched but animal and food-filled shores of Australia.
The Australian aboriginal people call the Creation of this world Dreamtime - a difficult concept for anyone not steeped in their culture to comprehend. Their spiritual metaphors - of snakes, of rocky shelters, of nomadic hunts for kangaroo and fresh water holes, are not the metaphors available to me as I try to describe their time and place in the human story. I can only accept their truths in their words as those truths which give meaning to them and answer those deepest of questions all humans have: Who am I? And from where have I come?
The aboriginal sees the great life-birthing snake trailing across the sky at night, the snake which you and I call the Milky Way. It is the snake which has carved beds for rivers and streams and which gave birth to the kangaroo and wombat. It is the source of food and sustenance. The Mother Earth is acknowledged by smearing her ochre soils through the hair and over skin, and it is a sacred and humbling event to do so.
I speak and write and read of my own spirituality in the not-as-ancient metaphors of Middle Eastern kingdoms and lordships and Greek philosophies out of which my - our - spiritual traditions have emerged over time. But, the trees I am within, and the sounds which were here eons before I came and which will be here eons after I leave, inspire me to dare to ask - out loud - difficult questions about Creation stories, about God, about the meaning we all - all of us humans - strive to find:
Question
: Is my ceremoniously eating bread and wine of the vine, or praying to an invisible god better than/less than the ceremonial sounds of the didgeridoo played in invitation to the Serpent while dancing in the mud dress of Mother Earth?
Question
: Do I know my God as well as these people know theirs?
Question
: Are we really so different?
The answers I have are all a part of a historical and specific cultural journey my family, my culture, my instructors, my nation, and my contemporaries have been on for several thousands of years. My answers have as much to do with where I was born, and when, and to whom I was born, as any other factors.
And I believe the answers of the aboriginals would reflect those same foundations as well.
The heart of our Christian faith, the heart of aboriginal faith, of Jews, of Hindus, of Muslims, of all human expressions of faith, is God. God of a thousand names, God of all the various metaphors and names used by persons around the earth and through time because of their geography and history, their environments and cultures. We talk about revelations of God in kingdom language because that is the language that our European and Middle Eastern spiritual ancestors had available to them. They had never seen a lotus blossom or elephant, two local realities which form many of the metaphors used by Hindus or Buddhists. The Aboriginals saw their first source of Creation in the death-threatening snakes they lived among, and in the life-giving snake shapes of the rivers and streams they depended upon, and in the snake shapes they could see in the skies which they breathed and were dependent upon.
We may well - all of us- understand God as One God, but..over time, our various understandings of God have drifted, like the continents. Our understandings of God have different attributes, different characteristics, different languages and symbols used to describe them. And, over time, they continue to drift.
That's why, in understanding the heart - the essence - of our faith, of Christianity, we must I think, acknowledge the common spiritual continent from which we've all begun our spiritual journey.
There are two accounts of Creation in the book of Genesis, and they are different. As stories were gathered together for writing down, after first being shared orally around campfires for a thousand years, this variance is understandable. Just as we can only imagine with only a relatively small amount of evidence, what the supercontinent of Pangea may have been like, so too were the first storytellers able to imagine - through the evidence they had around them - how the beginnings of everything began.
They wanted to describe what and who they understood
God to be, just as the Aboriginals, or the Navajo, or the Hindus, have stories about the beginnings of Creation. Those stories differ from the stories we are most familiar with, but what they all have in common can be found in this scripture - which is the story that Jews, Christians, and Muslims share in their understanding as the beginning of Creation:
Genesis 2:4-9 (NRSV)
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
In the day that the Lord[a] God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up-for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; 6 but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground- 7 then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground,[b] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. 8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The story shows our spiritual ancestors to have understood Creation happening in generations, over time, in chapters, so to speak. It was a process.
The story shows both land and water to be the vital and recognized elements of Creation, upon which all life is dependent.
Genesis 2 shows humans rising from the dust, the soil, the stuff of Earth, and Genesis 2 shows that the other stuff of the earth - the garden - contained that which was necessary - food - to sustain life.
This short description also reveals the main topic for all the other books of the Bible: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Humans would have choices to make: some choices would line up in harmony with the garden (good!), and some choices would not (evil). Unlike the plants, and the dirt, and the water and everything else God had created, humans would have a consciousness - they would have a vital role in how the rest of the Creation story would continue.
Those elements of the Genesis creation story are a common spiritual continent, or body of understanding, that we share with all peoples of the earth. That common spiritual understanding has broken apart, and it is told in different ways just as the peoples of the earth live in different ways, look differently, speak differently as they live separated from each other.
But God is the beginning. God the Creator - God the Sustainer - God the Redeemer.
The journey began with God, and continues with God. That's the One Place, the One Truth, the One Supercontinent of an Idea that all tribes, nations, and persons share.
Now, there is another geographical and history reality that we need to have in our minds as we continue to understand the Heart of Christianity over the next several weeks. Pangea, as I said earlier, was not the first and only supercontinent; it is the most recent one, if you can call 250 million years ago recent. The reality is this: land masses, plates of the earth, drift apart over time, but they also drift back together over time - oceans, climate, volcanoes, the earth's core - they're all pushing land masses apart, but bringing them back together again.
That movement of drifting apart, and then drifting back together again, affects every movement in the universe, in our own bodies, and in all things including our understandings of God. The faiths of the world may seem very, very different, but because they have a common source - God - be assured they are also drifting back together.
And that's the exciting part for those who know that is happening.
Jesus Christ is the perfect guide in that continuing spiritual movement. It is a movement of hope: "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to all People." It is a movement of acceptance and inclusion: "Come unto me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." And it is a movement anchored in the God who is Love: "God sent his son into the world, that the world might be saved."
Those truths are as sure and as valid now and for the future as they were during the 30 years Jesus Christ was among us. They continue to exist just as the many-millions-old eucalyptus and ferns of Pangea continue to grow and flourish in Australia today, right now.
We are all - all of us - riding on continental ships, on a single sea, through a universe that is still and always will be, being born.
Our destination, no matter the language, no matter the many different metaphors, is the kingdom - the realm, the reality, our place - on earth as it is in heaven.
And Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life in that Greatest of Stories. The Heart of Christianity is literally a beating heart: of God; in the universe; on earth; in Pangea; in Australia; in Mesquite, TX; in the seat where you are sitting right now.
Next week, the journey to that heart will continue, as it continues now in Holy Communion.
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