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And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to divide the light from the darkness: In the name of the F, S, and HS+ Amen

In his prequel to the Lord of the Rings, “The Silmarillion,” the celebrated creator of worlds, JRR Tolkien describes the creation of Middle Earth by Eru Ilúvatar, the supreme being:

The unfolding of the cosmos, the shaping of the lands, and the establishment of the heavenly bodies form a rich tapestry of creation intended to parallel to the divine act of creating the world Tolkein actually inhabited.

Famously “The Lord of the Rings” narrative touches upon the consequences of human greed and the fall of the kingdom of Númenor. And throughout the trilogy, characters embark on quests that involve self-sacrifice, courage, and the struggle against evil.

Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring is particularly poignant.
The notion of embarking on a transformative journey toward a new beginning.

Often the Biblical or Torah narratives of the archetypes Adam (literally The Man) and Eve are taken to apportion responsibility for the corruption of creation in a similar way.

At some point in the distant past, our nature was corrupted through our own choices, and this tendency to go against our proper ordering- which we call Sin – has somehow got into our bones.

The chaos is, so the story seems to go, our fault.

“Lord, what fools these mortals be” Puck famously exclaims in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-nights Dream, which also explores that idea of human folly and the need for a divine renewal of the heavens and the earth. And for many people that is what they think the start position of the Christian story is.

Yet, despite the central temptation narrative, which brings with it a whole load of further crude implications around original sin and guilt, I think that the Genesis narrative is actually far more sympathetic than that, simply describing the predicament we find ourselves in rather than apportioning blame for it.

We can note, for instance, that even in a straight literal reading, chaos – upon which Canon Richard touched in his sermon last week – is presumably also a created thing (given our Doctrine of God).
And we can note that it predates the creation of humankind.

Biblically speaking we not, in fact, the source of the chaos we experience.

No. Instead of getting bogged down with guilt, blame, original sin, sexual ethics and all the rest, I would suggest that the purpose of those creation narratives is not to declaim blame – that the disorder of creation is the fault of mankind – but to offer a true reflection of the experience of humankind living in an inherently chaotic and disordered world.

It is a sympathetic reading of the state we find ourselves in:
a world, unsettling in its exterior and interior aspects.

And it is a sympathetic narrative that offers – most significantly – the possibility that this is not the real basis of what is.

Chaos is not God’s intention, (as it were).

And because it is not, we are allowed to believe in something that does not – on the surface of things – seem to be very believable: a new creation the promise of relief from chaos through relationship with God in the Holy Spirit.

On the subject of creation and our misunderstanding of it and a further example of our predilection with self-blame us post-moderns are also burdened with a sentimental view of nature, which we see as essentially good and us as the bad actors within it.

Whilst this would have been an incredible idea to our biblical forbears and even to our more recent agrarian ancestors, we can understand where it comes from, given humanities deleterious impact
on the environment since the industrial revolution in Great Britain.

But that can also be taken too far. So many contemporary prayers and liturgies refer to creation exclusively as a sign of God’s love and orderly intentions.

(Gone are prayers against storms, drought, and failed harvests which plagued our ancestors well before the scourge of human-induced climate change)

A properly scientific appraisal would surely conclude that, whilst the natural world can be very pretty, it is essentially chaotic and violent in its operations.

And dangerous to boot.

It is a hostile place for any creature and the further into the cosmos one ventures, the more hostile and violent it becomes.

Not to put too fine a point on it: whilst the survival of the fittest plays itself out on earth, in the end, all will be utterly consumed by the force of the Sun – from whose immense and shocking heat we are presently protected.
Just.

You may think I am now being deliberately obtuse but… this more sober account of creation is actually the one reflected throughout the Old testament and echoed in the New.

We see it through repeated narratives of the waters being dangerous and chaotic places from which and through which God creates and then rescues then renews his people.

There are over 700 references to water in the King James version, well over half of them, wary.

The spirit hovers over the chaotic waters of creation.

God’s people Israel are delivered through the waters of the Red Sea.

Jesus, as we also heard last week commands the storm waters and provides us a reason for hope in him and in baptism we are delivered through the same waters.

And… from the dangers of the sea, the gospel was spread to the early church.
And so on.

Strangely, it is the very moon – whose beauty we stand in awe under this afternoon, that is the effective cause of those the much maligned waves that creates such danger for those upon them.

Not to mention the fact that the moon also governs the night – another biblical bad guy.

This older story about nature does still exist in the contemporary Christian imagination even if it is hard to spot, and sometimes confusingly set up.

Take, for instance, the common trope of the church as a lifeboat or as a ship set upon the dangerous waters of modern culture.

In Tolkien’s mythology, the Undying Lands represent a kind of paradise or an elysian realm to which the Elves sail at the end of their lives – a metaphor for the hope of a blessed and renewed existence, but one which we need to escape to in boats to get to.

Both the idea of sailing away, and of resisting the tide echo those older biblical ideas but they are actually deviate from it in important ways.

The genesis of this idea of the ‘church as ark’ was not intended to set the world and the church against one another socially culturally or politically or to set up the church as a vehicle of escape from earthly difficulty but to reveal the presence of the saving grace of new creation within the chaos of the old.

This is certainly how Augustine uses the image it in City of God – the earliest example I could find.

A new city – a new ark – that arises as a sacrament within and for the life of the world in which it lives.

I think then, as we sit with this moon over us as reminder of the dangers of this world, it is that image of church as ark, within which this moon subsists, which should really excite the Christian imagination.

It subsists within the great nave of God’s Church.
Reminding us that it is within the ark of his new creation that the chaos of life can be best held, redeemed, and restored.

This relation of forms- if we attend to it for a moment- reminds us of this truth:

That salvation from chaos is the first purpose of God in Creation; is the primary work of the Holy Spirit and is the principle vocation of the Church.

That God’s new creation is not pie in the sky when you die, by and by but here and now, in the midst of us – the reason for the Hope we have.

This new creation is so real to St Paul that can say:
“if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”.

And later that:
“God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting our sins against us.
And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation and our lives may be incorporated into it and find in it grounds for present and future hope.”

So friends – there is a New Moon Rising.

But it is not that big dead rock- as beautiful as that may be.

It is the ark of God’s grace that upholds it and all of us.

The Spirits work of Grace – who is, in the words of the great hymn,
a sea without a shore,
a sun without a sphere;
whose time is now and evermore,
whose place is everywhere.
In the name of the F, S, and HS. AMEN