Tag Archives: creation

Working the Clay

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In college I studied both biology and religion. Upon finding this out, people would sometimes ask me, “Do you believe in creation or evolution?”

And I would say, “Yes.” 

The staunch creationists of the day – the biblical literalists – were firmly committed to the belief that God created all living things ex nihilo – out of nothing – in their present, fully realized form. Like a magician, pulling a rabbit out of an empty hat. Many creationists do acknowledge the existence of now-vanished life forms, like dinosaurs; although I have encountered some who believe that fossils are a giant hoax perpetrated by God, to test our faith. But most creationists believe there were dinosaurs once; they just believe humans existed alongside them. They accept extinction, sure; but evolution, no.

This is the Biblical story of creation as told in the first chapter of Genesis, in which an omnipotent God brings forth living things, each distinct, according to precise divine specifications. God makes everything exactly according to plan, like an almighty engineer.

But then we get to the second chapter of Genesis, where we find an entirely different creation story.

We know it is a different story, because the order of creation is re-arranged. In the first story, God fills the earth with plants and animals, and only then creates humans – which makes sense, because how could we survive without them? But in the second story, God creates humans before the animals, “when no green things had yet sprouted.”

In the first story, God creates humans, plural, male and female, simultaneously – all, we are told, in God’s apparently non-binary image. In the second story, God makes one human out of clay, and then borrows a bit from it to make another human.

Think about that: no sooner does God create this work of art, than God tears it apart – but not to destroy it. God re-worked the clay, so that we might be not one groundling, but two. What a lovely, generous act, on God’s part – to create a rival, for his creature’s affection! From the beginning, God wanted us to love, not God alone, but one another. 

Here creation begins with clay, which is, essentially mud. God is playing in the mud. In the first chapter of Genesis, God calls us forth with a word; but in the second chapter, God gets God’s hands dirty. In the first we have God the Senior Engineer; in the second, we have God the Artist.

**

When I was deeply immersed my biology and religion studies, in my senior year, I decided I needed to have some break from these subjects, so I took a single introductory class in studio arts. It was taught by a dynamic young artist* whose own work was primarily three-dimensional. I remember an exhibit of his work in the college library; it consisted of large wooden sculptures – human sized – that all look somehow biological, like something that you might see through a microscope.

One day, as I was painting my beginner still life (which still hangs in my kitchen because I was so proud of it) our teacher spoke with us about his own artistic process. He told us that he never knew when he started a series, what a given piece would look like when it was done. “If I know exactly how the sculpture will look when its finished,” he said, “then there’s no point in making it.”

He did not desire absolute control over his medium; he wanted an interactive relationship.

“If we are to keep in touch with reality, we must work with some material substance that resists us, and against which we have to pit ourselves to reshape it.” So writes Cistercian monk Andre Louf, in his book The Cistercian Way. He goes on to say, “whatever it is – the soil, clay, wood, water, metal, cheese or chocolate – the monk needs this simple material to measure himself against every day. He will thus be kept in contact with reality, for these things come from God, and are solidly rooted in the earth, of which they are a part.”

As human beings — groundlings, beings of earth, creatures of clay — we are in the paradoxical position, the almost unique position, of being both creators and creatures, both the sculptor and the clay. We are the material God works with, the substance that resists God’s hand. We are the clay on the wheel that sometimes slips so far off center, that the potter has no choice but to start again, and re-form us from scratch.

**

So we come to the prophet Jeremiah, who visited a potter at his wheel, and saw there a parable.

Under the potter’s steady hand, the clay begins to take shape, and something beautiful and useful emerges; but, as Jeremiah observed, sometimes the clay slips off center, and there is nothing for it but to return to the clay to its original formless lump, and start again.

Jeremiah saw in this a parable for his people. Jeremiah lived in tumultuous times. During his lifetime, he would bear witness to the collapse of his nation; he would see his people carried into exile, and his sacred temple razed to the ground, the sculpture reduced to dust. But before these events – before it all spun out of control — he tried to warn them, to tell them, some thing is off center here.

But the powers that be censored his warnings, which they found unpatriotic.

When Jerusalem finally fell, when the clay finally collapsed on the wheel of history, Jeremiah’s people lamented, feeling that God had abandoned them. But Jeremiah, the former prophet of doom, became suddenly, oddly hopeful in their midst. Perhaps he remembered that afternoon in the potter’s shed. He remembered, how the potter patiently reworked the clay, to make it pliable, to see what beautiful thing might yet arise from such a stubbornly resistant medium.

**

In the history of a people, in the life of an individual, there are times when things seem to be taking shape: when we see our family thriving, our vocation unfolding, our nation progressing toward justice and peace. When the form on the wheel becomes lovely, as if shaped by some unseen potter’s hand.

But then how suddenly the shape of our lives can change. The emerging peace vanishes and all is chaos again. Perhaps there was some flaw in the foundation, some persistent imbalance, some bit of resistance and rigidity in us.  I know that many of us are experiencing this loss of balance now – some of us in our personal lives, and most of us in our collective life as a nation. The center has shifted, and we are become de-formed. We can no longer recognize our own shape, and we lament the loss of our former beauty.

But let us remember the lesson of the potter’s shed. And let us not despair. There is good clay here still.

We are God’s work in progress. We know what we are, but not what we may be. Or to quote the poet Jan Richardson: “All those days you felt like dust, like dirt… Did you not know, what the Holy One can do with dust?”

O patient artist
shape us for love.
Keep us right-sized and malleable.
Center us, and save us from rigidity.
And when we collapse
under the weight of our own
obstinacy,
cradle us again in your hand,
and warm us
until our hardness yields to mercy.
Amen. 

Rev. Liza B. Knapp
The First Church of Deerfield, Massachusetts
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Pottery and photos by Audra Teague Mackey
*my professor was artist Brian Meunier; you can see his sculpture here.

In the Beginning Was the Water

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Labor Day has come and gone. School has begun. Vacation days have been spent.

We like Thoreau, have left Walden behind, and are once again sojourners in civilized life. We have returned from our summer retreat of longer days and lowered demands. And maybe our souls have been renewed, and maybe our minds have been refreshed, by this respite. Or maybe not. Either way, as we return from our summer pilgrimage, we wonder, how long until our routines re-assert themselves? How long before the numbness returns, how long before the exhaustion claims us again, how long before we return to autopilot?

I used to savor my summer tan, which lasted well into winter. I understand now, of course, that a tan is not something to be sought, but in my younger years I took it as a hopeful sign, that I had been marked and changed by my time at the seashore. That the ocean’s edge was imprinted on my skin – not a permanent tattoo, but long-lasting enough to see me to the next summer. My father was a teacher, and had a long vacation; for a full month, I was baptized daily in the salt water, and my thoughts were scoured clean by the wind and the water.

Peace of the running wave to you, says the ancient blessing.

And then it would be back to the sweaty city and the long list of labors. But something of the salt clings to us. After the ocean, there is a deep coolness in our core that will take some time for the heat to penetrate.

I wonder if church shouldn’t be more like this: A bracing immersion that shocks us into full presence, and a moment of wonder at the great immensity from which we emerged. A pilgrimage to the edge of the known world, where words fail us and we become our true, nameless selves.

My mother taught me this trick as a child: Hold a seashell up to your ear, and its curving labyrinth will echo back to you the sound of the blood coursing through your veins. It is the sound of the sea. God within, God without. There is no holier place than the ocean’s edge. There is no better sermon, than a seashell.

Today we begin a new season, in our yearly cycle of faith. It is a fairly young liturgical season, only recently adopted by churches around the world. It is the season of creation, when we turn our attention to the abundance and fragility and wonder of the earth. And so this week, and in the weeks to come, we will be considering the stories of creation. For there are several; in the Bible alone, there is more than one creation story. Today, we start with the most famous: the first chapter of Genesis. It goes like this:

In the beginning, there was… water.

Some of us may remember another creation song from the Gospel of John, which begins, In the beginning was the Word. But the song at the start of Genesis begins differently. In this, the first of the Bible’s creation stories – for there are several – we begin with water. There is no point at which God says, Let there be water. It is there, before God speaks a word. In the beginning, all was without form; and the breath of God moved over the waters.

For how long? An instant? An eternity? How does one measure time, when all is without form?

Then God speaks, and shapes the formless chaos, separating light from dark, and the waters below from the waters above; the ocean depths, from the depths of space – both blue by day and black by night, both immense beyond measure. The ancient people who told this story imagined the seas and the skies to be of one substance, separated by a great dome from horizon to horizon like an inverted bowl. A “firmament,” in the old King James translation. When it rained, the waters of heaven return to touch the waters of the ocean.

I touched the ocean only briefly this year, out on Cape Cod, near the town of Wellfleet. The waves there have a strong pull, on both body and soul. I am not a strong swimmer, so my body has a healthy respect for the ocean, a fear of its power. At the same time, my soul is drawn to it, with a sense of wonder and longing. This, I imagine, is the psalmists meant, when they spoke of “the fear of God.” Not some petty or craven fear of punishment, but the fear of a great wave coming toward us, bearing the immensity of the unknown, from which we came.

Life began in water; we only moved onto dry land when our ancestors figured out how to carry some of that brine with us, enclosed in our skins or shells or cell walls. Even now, each of us begins life submerged, in the water of the womb. In touching the water, we touch our source.

Deep peace of the running wave to you.

**

There are other creation myths, some older than Genesis. Some tell of a primordial battle, in which a heroic god slays a primordial sea monster, and forms the earth and sky from the monster’s severed body. The fact that the monster is female – and is in fact the hero’s mother – adds a disturbingly Freudian and misogynistic dimension to the story. Humans fear the chaos from which we came, our primordial formlessness.

While I was on the Cape, I picked up a copy of Moby Dick — and yes, I did read it. To any of you who found it a slog in high school English class, I can only say it is better when read voluntarily.

The plot of Moby Dick is well known: the narrator, Ishmael, sets sail from Nantucket on a whaler under the command of the one-legged Captain Ahab. Once at sea, Ahab reveals to the crew that he sails with a single purpose only: to seek vengeance on the whale that took his leg, the legendary white whale known as “Moby Dick.” The book ends with a catastrophic encounter between the great whale and the ship.

In his first encounter with the whale, Ahab has encountered something greater than himself: not the orderly god of heaven, but the chaos monster of the deep. That this beast should dismember Ahab, and yet live; this, to Ahab, is the unbearable injury. He dreams of conquering the monster, of literally cutting it up into pieces.

It is an old, old story.

But this is the thing that surprises many first-time readers of Moby Dick. The book has 135 chapters; the ship sets sail in chapter 22, but the white whale does not actually appear in person until chapter 133. In between, there are a great many chapters devoted to the subject of whales, in general, and to the sperm whale, in particular. But all this knowledge comes to nothing, in the face of the living whale. When Moby Dick finally appears, it is all over, in three short chapters.

I am reminded of the final chapter of the book of Job, where after many chapters of theological debate, God shows up, in person. God speaking from the whirlwind, and silences Job’s theology with a single question: “Can you catch Leviathan with a hook? Think of the battle. You will not do it again.”

The scripture we read today does not tell of a God who destroys the sea monster. Yonder is the sea, great and wide, sings the psalmist; there go the ships, and Leviathan, whom you formed to sport in it. This no warrior god, at war with nature; but a God at play, among the waters of creation.

Much like the children I saw, on the beach at Wellfleet, suntanned and salty, at play in the waters, at the edge of the great unknown.

Amen.

Deep peace of the running wave to you
Deep peace of the flowing air to you
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you
Deep peace of the shining stars to you
Deep peace of the gentle night to you
and to your dear ones. Amen.

Sermon by Rev. Liza B. Knapp
The First Church of Deerfield, Massachusetts
September 7, 2025

Scriptures references: Genesis 1: 1-10, Job 41:1-8, Psalm 104: 24-30

Photo above by Leslie Chappell on Unsplash
Photo below by Silas Baisch on Unsplash

Revolutionary Repentance

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“What then should we do?” — Luke 3:2-18

In the first chapter of Genesis, God tells the newly created humans to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.”

I think we can safely cross that one off our to-do list.

When Jesus was born, there were fewer than half a billion people on earth, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere was less than 300 ppm – as it had been for hundreds of thousands of years. Today, there are over seven billion people on earth, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is over 398 ppm.

Now, here is a problem our ancestors never saw coming. So what does our faith tradition have to say to those of us who live in this brave new world of overpopulation and industrialization, of climate change and environmental degradation? When we read in the headlines of 500-year droughts and raging wildfires, of melting ice-caps and vanishing species; what scriptures do we turn to? Where do we find resonance? Where do we find hope?

Thursday morning, I was among the millions of people who tuned in to watch Pope Francis as he spoke to the United States Congress. In the middle of that speech, he told the lawmakers, “I call for a courageous and responsible effort to redirect our steps and to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity. I am convinced that we can make a difference. I am sure.”

This is the sort of language that caused Fox commentator Greg Gutfield to describe the Pope as the most dangerous person on the planet. Dangerous, because he calls upon us to change our course. Francis has asked for nothing less than a “bold cultural revolution” to liberate both the planet, and the planet’s poor — and he talks as if he believes it could happen.

In the past year I have been struck by the fact that many of the same people who used to deny the possibility of climate change, are now saying that climate change is already here and there’s nothing we can do about it. One minute it was too soon to tell; the next minute it was too late to act. We seem to have jumped straight from complacency to resignation, without any room in between for urgency. Without any room for hope.

But here is the Pope, claiming that we not only should, but could, do something. Here is the Pope, expressing both urgency and hope.

Of course, there are some who might point out that the Pope is not an authority on climate science, any more than Donald Trump is an authority on pediatric vaccinations. But the Pope makes no claim to know the science better than the scientists. His information comes from published research, not special revelation. But his urgency, and his hope – where do they come from?

Well, I can’t speak for Francis, but let’s go looking for ourselves:

John the Baptist appears at the River Jordan, fresh from the wilderness. He wears a coat of camel’s hair, he eats locusts and wild honey,he is a nature freak if ever we saw one. He stands there, with his feet in the flowing water, and says: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

I suspect that for most of us, a call to repentance wouldn’t really qualify “good news.” In fact, public calls to repentance often produce something of a backlash. No one wants to be publicly taken to task for their errors. It makes us feel ashamed, or defensive, or both. We don’t want to hear that we are “to blame” for global warming and so we tune out the science that makes us feel guilty.

But the word, “repentance” – or rather, the Biblical word metanoia – that word does not mean, “to feel ashamed.” The Biblical word metanoia means to change. To change our hearts and minds, and to change our lives, to change direction. Or, as Pope Francis puts it: “to redirect our steps.”

A better translation might be, “revolution.”

And so it is with John the Baptist; when the people ask John, “What then shall we do?” he doesn’t tell them to fast or to do penance or say five hail Marys . Instead, he tells them: If you have two coats, share one. If you have extra food, share that. If you have power, stop using it for your own profit.

John the Baptist comes along, wearing his cruelty-free clothing, and eating his macrobiotic diet, and calls the powerful to repent. No wonder Herod decided the John was the most dangerous person in Judea. He was calling for nothing less than a “bold cultural revolution.”

“Revolution” may seem like a strong word, but the truth is that repentance is always revolutionary, that hope is always revolutionary. “For who hopes for what he already has?” So asks the apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans. Such revolutionary hope, Paul believed, was not confined to the human race, but was shared by all creation:

“For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed…in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”

Paul may never have envisioned a world with over 7 billion people, or a climate endangered by human activity, but he understood that the redemption of creation and the redemption of the human race were inseparable. And he had hope, that such redemption was possible. A hope based not on a clear vision of the future, but on a firm grounding in the past. God had liberated Israel from Egypt; God had liberated Jesus from the grave; and just as miraculously, God had liberated Paul  from his own prejudice and hatred. If God could do all this, then surely, God might liberate creation as well.

God of creation:
Fill us with the hope of Paul,
and the urgency of John.
May we believe the good news,
and repent.
Amen.

PHOTO is of street art installation by Isaac Cordal; click here for the source, and for more images of his extraordinary work (blog text is in French, but the images need no words…)

TEXT from sermon originally preached by Rev. Liza B. Knapp at Belchertown United Church of Christ, September 27, 2015.