by Rev. Dr John Evans
The French artist Paul Gaugin escaped France to continue his painting in the South Pacific. He has been variously described as a mad, bad and perhaps having a less than respectable reputation. He is however, famous for his depiction of women and girls of the South Pacific. Towards the end of his life in 1897 a mail steamer came to Tahiti bearing the sad news that his favourite daughter had tragically died back in France. He was absolutely distraught. He worked through his grief by painting a giant canvass, almost a mural, of human endeavour and tragedy. He placed on that painting three obvious, perhaps childlike, questions – but they are the questions of our existence:
Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we going?
Obviously Gaugin tried to address these questions in his art.
I would like to suggest these questions are also the questions which might be attached to our piece of art we will be referring to over the next little while. What is happening for this group of people – they are looking, they are waiting. There is the normal fidgeting of any family group or groups of people. There is an expectation – but there is no obvious leader, or reason why they are there.
I think it is fair to assume it might be Jesus who is addressing them, like from the hill in today’s Gospel reading; or perhaps God; or perhaps the disciples, or even the early Church. The people in the painting may be ourselves – God addressing us; it may be the people outside – on the Carlton Estate, or in the streets of Carlton – and is it us who needs to address them. But whoever it is – the people waiting there will have in the mind those questions of Gaugin:
Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we going?
The Sundays after Pentecost are called ordinary Sundays. Within the rhythm of the Christian year the focus is our growth in faith; if you like the implications of our Easter faith for life, and not so much the great events of Jesus’ birth and death. When our lectionary planning group met recently we looked at some works of art. . . and I think we were all taken by the open-endedness of this simple collage. Indeed we want to use it through this period as a sort of prompt or aide memoire when we consider our readings. How does the reading address our very reality of this group; and those Gaugin questions:
Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we going?
This collage (printed on the Bulletin) will remind us, week by week, in this the longest season of the Christian year what is being said that addresses my life. Our readings might be an incident that involved Jesus or his teaching as recorded in the gospel of Matthew – the gospel we will be looking at through this time; or it may come from the various stories of beginnings as recorded in Genesis and early chapters of Exodus; it might be from the rigorous, and at times dense teaching of Paul in the book of Romans.
Today our readings, on this Trinity Sunday, can be seen to focus on the very nature of God. . . God as Trinity – God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And I guess that is relevant to our crowd. How does God, the Triune, God address us. How does God the Creator, Jesus the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit speak, what does this Triune God say – and how do we respond. Jesus, certainly from our gospel reading challenges us to “make disciples of all nations” – there is that phrase again –“all nations”; and baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Welcome them into this fellowship of followers in the name of the fullness of God.
There is a rich, perhaps unduly complicated area, to unpack here in our understanding of God – but this morning I would like to take the opportunity – mainly because we don’t often have an opportunity to focus on it – the creation account from Genesis. In particular what it says about the creation of us humans.
So God created humankind in his image,
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.God blessed them, and God said to them
“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;
and have dominion over the fish of the sea
and over the birds of the air
and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Remember Gaugin’s second question – What are we?
Do these verses answer that question? I want to suggest yes — in a limited, but a very important sense.
Over the last couple of hundred years the significant, indeed the great fault line for the place of Christianity in society has been that these verses from Genesis, and the complementary verses from Genesis 2, are the total and complete answer to that question: What are we? Once it was true. But as science has pushed forward the understanding of the human body, and where we have come from; and evolution as a scientific theory has gained acceptance – these verses are seen to be redundant and irrelevant.
Recently someone suggested to me that when it comes to the big questions in life – you really should be asking the big questions three times.
What do you mean?
What do you really mean?
And then - What is true?
And I see the same here with the simple question: what are we?
What are we, can be answered at a basic scientific level. We are a collection of certain arrangement of atoms, molecules, DNA and so forth. That is what we are – and every time I go to the doctor today I affirm my faith and belief in that scientific understanding of me. I would even be prepared to accept there are scientific understandings of where I and my forebears came from; and how all that happened. Enter Darwin, out of Africa theories of early human migration, and the like. Are these scientific theories to be judged by the criteria of what is science or by ancient theological texts, albeit profound theological texts, which were written not really to answer those questions. In other words Genesis 1 is not science; and don’t let us apply that category to it. (I would careful to say there are crossovers between science and theology at this point - which are interesting, even troubling. For example, is there a randomness and open-endedness in God; or is God beyond time and absolutely determinative of all there is.)
If we were to go deeper – to that question what really are we – we encounter a level of answering that would encounter the fact that we are sensate individuals, we can reflect, we think, we feel, we relate with others. There is a thing called culture and society. At a scientific level we are male and female; we can therefore breed and multiply – that is how the species works. But there is for example, a difference, as we are now discovering, between the fact of reproduction involving a male and a female, and what we have come to call our sexuality. What we really are - comes to be determined by questions of our thinking and psychology, or our relationships and our human community, our feelings and our mind. Is this really what we are? Our various disciplines of psychology or sociology, even law, help us, and our passage about what are we from Genesis begins to get at some of these issues – but by no means all. We are not just individuals – “male and female he created them,” for example. It remains a raging debate about how this gets interpreted when we come to the issue of homosexuality. Is this a biblical reference to just the obvious need that for the species to be fruitful and multiply, and therefore there are rigid and immutable categories of male and female; or are these few words a broader acknowledgement of sexuality and a self perception of our maleness and femaleness.
However, there is a the level which the author of Genesis was getting at which is not really about what are we – rather why. And here is the theological issue. . . which by and large is beyond the issues of science, or studies of humans and human communities. We now move to questions of truth, ultimate meaning and of God. . . and of our faith and belief.
From scripture we believe God’s creation is good. He has blessed us humans and challenged us to fill the earth. The whole of creation is affirmed as being good. However, us humans have some distinguishing features in considering our what we are; in particular two very significant features.
First, as humans we have a special relationship with God. We are created in the likeness, image of God. We are still creatures of the creator, but there is a special relationship here. At the time of writing of this theological reflection, the Children of Israel found themselves in captivity in Babylon. Being in exile was a great time to ponder the really big issues of meaning and truth. The common understanding then was that the king would put his statue, his image, all over the place because he was the representative of the gods and he, the ruler usually was a male, was ruling the place. Genesis 1 democratizes this royal image so that all humanity are now across the face of this planet.
And secondly we are across the face of the planet for a reason. The first words to us as humans, having being blessed – is not about our relationship with God, but rather with this planet of ours – which has been created by God. We are given a role in sharing of the exercise of power – that is dominion. God alone, from the beginning, does not exercise creative power – there is a power sharing with us humans, even it would seem post- sin and the narratives about the fall coming a few chapters later. Having dominion is not a justification to rape and pillage the earth, which we seem to been able to do – but rather subdue is seen to involve development in the created order. Paradise is not a static state of affairs. As one commentator has observed, the future remains open to a number of possibilities in which creaturely activity, our activity, will prove crucial for the development of the world. We carry a spiritual role with regard to the future of our planet.
What are we? Well it can depend on how deep you delve – and what you might believe. More than ever, we need to hear there is a deeply spiritual aspect to who we are, and that we have our role in developing God’s creation.
