Messy Church returns Wednesday, September 13 at 5pm and the theme is “In the Beginning.’

For our crafts this month we will be making trees and birds and animals and even an edible ‘dolphin’. There is a great fall craft for the adults.

Weather permitting we will be having BBQ hamburgs and hot dogs. We will be inside though for Messy Church and supper as the days grow shorter and dusk earlier.

‘In the Beginning’

There are Christians who take the story of creation very literally. God created the universe and all that is in it in six days and by their reckoning the universe is 4000 and some odd years old. For them, evolution is a scientific myth. As Anglicans, our faith is based on ‘three pillars’ – scripture, tradition and reason. Reason would have us look at this story, not as a literal telling of the facts, but as a way of helping us to understand a complex system of events. Scientists explore the beginning of the universe at the moment of its creation, but what brought that moment into being eludes them. As Christians, we smile, because we know the answer to that is God.

Creation is on-going. The world changes, ice ages come and go, warmer periods come and go. The cosmos intrudes on our well-ordered world with asteroid impacts and solar flares. These events effect the fragile biologic creatures and plants of our world and they are either able to adapt or they die. Life can look radically different during different periods of our earth history. Without the ability to evolve, life would falter. Evolution is God creating and re- creating God’s world.

A day for us is one revolution of the earth on its axis, a little over 24 hours. We are finite creatures who have an allotted number of days on this earth. Our physical bodies are governed by minutes, days, years. God is eternal and is both outside of time, and through God’s creation within it. How long is a day to God? Is God’s watch set to earth time? How very human of us to think that earth time is the standard for God. Each planet has a different length of day. In our small solar system the variation is tremendous. Jupiter has the shortest day at just under 10 of our earth hours. A day on Venus is 243 of our earth days.

Our creation stories (there are two of them in the Bible, one in Genesis 1 and one in Genesis 2) were oral stories handed down generation to generation. They were written down much later. They were a people, with limited understanding of the sun, moon and stars and so understanding that God gave them was at a level that made sense in their world view. It is a pretty sophisticated explanation, considering the rudimentary science of the time.

When we look at the creation story in scripture, know that it is truth in that all things come from God and God is the author of all creation. Know that it wonderfully lays out how things came into being over time in a sequence, one step at a time. Know that God is still active. Above all, know that God loves all that God has created and that we are not in charge, God is in charge and we are called to be caretakers of this wonderful gift of creation.