Creatio Continua

Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. 

—Genesis 1:11

I. Two Hymns of Creation

In this morning's reading from the Hebrew scriptures, we heard the account of what God did on the third day of creation. This third-day activity included two very different things. First, God separated the land from the water, calling the water Sea and the land Earth. At the end of the service we'll sing the Navy Hymn, which puts this act of creation in these terms: God “bids the mighty ocean deep its own appointed limits keep.” [1]

And then God did something else: God created plant life. But please notice how that happened. There's slightly different language used here than had been used previously. When God created light, God said, “Let there be light.” This was creatio originalis: original creation, or creation from nothing. But here for the first time we see a different kind of creation: “Let the earth put forth vegetation...” It's as though plants were not so much an original creation (creation from nothing) as they were simply a result of evolution. According to Genesis, God seems to have created a power within the earth to generate life, and rather than speaking plant life into being from nothing, God spoke the power to create into the stuff of the earth.

And so here on the third day, we discover a bit of permission to believe in evolution. Just as our final hymn will talk about the separation of earth and sea, our second hymn beautifully expresses this other aspect of what the Book of Genesis says happened on that third day:

Praise to the living God, from whom all things derive,
whose Spirit formed upon this sphere the first faint seeds of life;
who caused them to evolve… [2]

This kind of creation isn’t creation from nothing, but is what is called creatio continua, or continuing creation. It is the aspect of creation that appears to be self-perpetuating—the aspect of creation that even appears to adapt and evolve. Where some see natural selection that needs no Creator, people of faith see the hand of God at work, continuing to create by sharing the gift of creativity with creation.

II. God’s Hand, and Our Neighbor’s

This is perhaps the aspect of God’s care for us that we are most likely to take for granted, precisely because it’s the aspect of God’s care for us that appears to need no God at all. People in the past attributed all of creation to God, and the miracle of seeds and birth and growth could, in their mind, only be completely explained by attributing those miracles to God—even if they were miracles that seemed to perpetuate themselves and to which human beings could lend a helping hand.

Even as our ancestors were more likely to believe that God had something to do with seedtime and birth, growth and harvest, they were also more likely to believe their neighbor had something to do with it as well. I don’t know if anybody here remembers this (I certainly don’t), but there was a day when people raised their own fruit and vegetables, their own cows for beef and dairy, their own chickens for eggs and poultry. That’s because back in the old days, most people were farmers.

And those that weren’t farmers and lived in towns had a very different experience of how to come by the things they needed to stay alive. If they wanted bread, they went to a bakery: a shop dedicated to selling bread. If they wanted fruits and vegetables, they went to a greengrocer’s: a shop dedicated to selling produce. If they wanted meat, they went to butcher’s shop, and so forth, and so on.

Sometime before I was born (I really don’t know when—it could’ve been the year 1066 or it could’ve been 1959), some sort of a revolution occurred. Farms became factories. They needed fewer workers and more machines, freeing more and more people to move to towns and cities. And as more people moved to urbanized areas, all the little shops that people used to have to visit one-at-a-time to get the stuff they needed to live were consolidated into bigger stores that sold everything. These stores were called supermarkets.

Suddenly people no longer felt connected to God through the rhythms of nature upon which farm life depended. Nor did they feel connected to God through the friendly hand of their baker or butcher. Providing for one’s self and one’s family became a matter strictly of commerce. We found ourselves picking our own pre-packaged groceries from shelves and coolers in enormous shops. The only actual contact with another person involved the exchange of money at the end. That person was not trained to know anything about our food other than how to ring it up on a register and make change for us when we paid for it. Western humanity—or at least American humanity—suddenly imagined itself to be self-sufficient.

Martin Luther once stated that (for townsfolk, at least) God hid behind the masks of the baker and the milkmaid. [3] Living far from farms and having no contact with bakers and milkmaids, it should come as no surprise to us that God is more well-hidden than ever before.

III. Mail-Order Tide

I may not remember when people moved to towns and supermarkets became the way we shop. But I do remember the next step in separating people from the source of their groceries. That’s because it’s happening even as I preach this sermon.

Early last month, I heard a loud knock at my back door one evening. I was just standing in my, so I was at the door within seconds. I figured it was probably a neighbor who needed something (ever since last year’s big power outage, we’ve been much friendlier to each other in my HOA). But there was nobody there.

Then I looked down and saw a package at my feet—a package from the same online company from which I order most of my books. I didn’t know what it was, but I was excited to see which books had arrived. But when I picked it up, the outside of the package told me what it was. The package contained two good-sized bottles of Tide®. So instead of opening it, I read the address label to see if there’d been some mistake. And indeed there had been: The package was addressed to somebody with a very different name with a completely different house number on a completely different street. The Tide® had been delivered to me by mistake.

But at least I learned something about the world that I didn’t know before. Rather than driving or (God forbid!) walking a couple of blocks south to the nearest grocery store where there are several shelves full Tide®, there were people living near me that were ordering their laundry detergent online. The world was officially moving in a direction that was intended to remove us even farther from the source of our needs. If it was harder to believe in the God of farm machinery and supermarkets, how much more difficult is it going to prove to be to believe in the God of the computer keyboard and the anonymous delivery dumped unceremoniously at our doorsteps?

IV. Turtles All the Way Down

The process that has brought us to this newest retail crossroads was begun on the third day of creation, when God said, “Let the earth grow plant life: plants yielding seeds and fruit trees bearing fruit with seeds inside it, each according to its kind throughout the earth” [Genesis 1:11, CEB]. The God who provides need not provide directly, as happened with the manna in the wilderness. The vast majority of the time, God provides through systems and processes and cycles that God built into creation. And so it’s true: God built into creation all the reason some people need not to believe in God at all. Once we can explain the science behind the seeds, we need not believe that there was a creative hand involved in making and planting the first seed which grew and flourished and put forth more seeds which evolved into what we experience as life.

Yet this clarion call of doubt need not result in atheism. For seeds are not just of the kind that yield physical life. We’ve heard about creatio originalis (creation from nothing), and we’ve heard about creatio continua (continuing creation). There is yet another kind of creation, and that is the creatio nova. This is the new creation, and it is not something that can be explained scientifically. The new creation comes about when God plants a seed in the heart. It might well be a seed of doubt: When we begin to realize that there’s more to what we see around us than pat answers and scientific explanations… or even that standard religious or theological answers are no longer sufficient. Or it might be a seed of faith: When we begin to hope that there is an origin behind or beyond even the best science… or that physical well-being and material wealth are not our purpose.

Just as in times of joy and hope people of faith can find it easy to say along with the psalmist, “This is the day that the Lord has made: Let us rejoice and be glad in it!” let us, as people of faith, share the message that in times of doubt and dejection, we can join that same psalmist in saying that “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone: This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes!” [Psalm 118:22-24]

Our God is a God of original creation, the Source behind all sources. Our God is a God of continuing creation, the Engineer who set in motion all the systems and laws of nature. And our God is a God of new creation, a loving Parent who sets us free from fear of the unknown, and then invites us back into the Creator’s loving embrace by planting seeds of hope and love.

Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, begins with the story of a scientist who

once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You're very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it's turtles all the way down!’ [4]

The turtle-lady, of course, is a metaphor for people of faith. But we need not be ashamed that no matter what the universe throws at us, and whatever mystery is uncovered by science, we can with humble faith acknowledge that it’s God all the way back. There is a Mystery behind all discoveries, a Farmer who planted the first seed, a Spark that ignited the big bang, and a Source of love that takes us into realms that are beyond the concerns of science.

On the third day of creation, we learn about one of the ways that creation might perpetuate itself through fruit trees and seeds. May we, the fruit of a new creation, plant seeds of faith, hope, and love, that the church of God may flourish in the midst of a world of doubt.

—©2012 Sam L. Greening, Jr.

1. William Whiting, Eternal Father, Strong to Save (1860), from The Hymnal of the United Church of Christ (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1974), no. 273, stz. 1.

2. Curtis Beach, Praise to the Living God (1966), no. 47, stz. 2.

3. Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), p. 353.

4. New York: Bantam Books, 1988

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