The season of Lent is a time for all Christians to think carefully about their faith - how God is working in their lives and in the world. It is a time to examine our relationship to God, to our neighbours, to ourselves and to the rest of creation.
For that reason I have chosen to follow the great themes of the Bible which give background and meaning to the Easter Story, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The Bible is the story of the relationship between God and God's people. It does not provide clear and simple answers to all the questions we have. Instead, it is covers certain crucial events in human history which a community perceived the action of God. As we explore the Bible, several key concepts emerge, to which we give the names Creation, Sin, Judgement, Repentance and Salvation. I hope that when we reach Palm Sunday we may understand these themes a little better.
We must begin with Creation, because the first fact we acknowledge about ourselves is that we exist. In any problem or discussion we start with the things that are. In talking about God, the world and humanity, we start with Creation. Creation is something to praise God for, to be thankful for, and it is something which allows us to trust God. The God who created all things can be trusted to bring all things to completion.
Basic to our understanding of Creation and our relationship to God is that God the Creator is personal. An impersonal God or blind chance might be the cause of the world's existence, but only a person can create. Birds and ants make things. Automated factories manufacture things. But the act of creation is the work of an artist who brings something into being for the sheer love and joy of it. The creative act is intensely personal and purposeful. God chose to create the universe. God spoke and all things came to be. And the words of God's speaking show the relationship that God has with creation. This relationship is personal, and throughout the Bible the relationship between God and the world is expressed in terms of person to person interaction. God's words created the universe, God called to Adam and Eve, to Abraham and Isaac, God spoke to and through the prophets. God even journeyed with the Israelites and lived among them. But God is never reduced to human size or understanding. God is far beyond the limits of human thought or comprehension and remains always a mystery to us.
God created the world for a reason and purpose known only to God, again this is a mystery. God created a world which was and is, very good. God declared the world to be very good, but it was not perfect. A perfect world has nowhere to go, and God's world still has a great way to go, from the disobedience of Adam to the final coming of the Kingdom.
And, as I have said, God journeys with God's people. Creation is also about community. "It is not good for the man to be alone." says God at the beginning. Humanity is created to be in community, in community with other humans and in community with God. One of the greatest achievements of the church has been to discover God as community, the Trinity, three persons, one God, but even in the book of Genesis God appears as community. "Let us make…" says God. God is one and only one, but within that one-ness exists also perfect community. God, as a personal God, is in perfect personal harmony.
Our understanding of God in Creation also helps us to understand who we are as human beings. God chose to create us in God's own image. This does not mean that we look like God, but that we are like God. So that as God created the universe to be in relationship with God, so we humans are created to be in relationship with God and with each other. To be human means to live in relationship with others, to be bound up with them in the conditions of daily living. Without these relationships we are less than God intended, we are less than human. Those whom God creates are to live in communion with God, in relationship to one another and with a responsibility for the created world. This is how we are made, this is why we are made. Without God we have no context or purpose for living, without others we are less than human, and without the created world we would have no life at all.
But although we are completely dependent on God, on each other and the world for our existence as humans, we share another aspect of God. We are created with free will. Just as God chose to create the world, so we have choice. The relationships we have are both given and chosen. We cannot choose to be or not to be, and individually we are born into a network of existing relationships, but we do have the free will to choose how to respond to God and to creation as we find it.
This results in problems. God has a will and purpose for creation and we have the free will to choose how we respond. Over the next few weeks I will explore the tensions that appear between God's will and purpose for creation and our own free will. To do so I will use the concepts I described at the start, sin, judgement, repentance and salvation.