Dust to Dust

Young at Heart Message

I’d like to start today’s message by showing you a series of photos that I asked ChatGPT to create for me.
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In this first photo, how easy would it be to separate out the individual colours on the colour palette?

I suspect that for most of us, it would be quite easy. All the colours are completely separated on the plate.

All we would need is a spoon or butter knife - or even a finger if we were feeling spunky – and we could separate each individual colour.
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Now, what about in this image? Would it still be as easy to separate the colours?

Now it’s getting a bit more difficult. No matter how hard we might try, the colours have blended a little bit – at least in the middle – so completely separating the colours would become more difficult.

We can still see the original colours though, and we could still use a spoon or our finger to pick up the original colours if we wanted to.
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But how about now?

Now it is getting even harder to separate out the colours.

We can still definitely tell what the original colours were, and we might be able to lift a little bit of the original colours off the plate, but it would be more difficult now to not get any blended colour.
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And if we went even further…

​Now it would be almost impossible to lift the original colours off the plate without getting any blended colours.

Our eyes can still tell, for the most part, what the original colours were. But we are pretty much beyond able to parse out the individual colours.
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And in this next one…

​Now we can hardly tell what the original colours were with our eyes. We certainly wouldn’t be able to lift any of the original colours at this point from the plate.
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And finally…

​Can anyone tell what the original colours were anymore?

If I asked you to take this plate of paint and separate out the original colours, could you do it?

Definitely not. Not without some extremely fancy tool of some kind.

I’m sure it exists… somewhere. But it’s not something we could do on our own for sure.

This final photo is essentially colour chaos. Well, really, it’s a totally new colour.
 
But if we look at where we started and where we are now, this image is pure chaos of blended colour. It is impossible to discern what colours we started with, and extra impossible to separate out those colours if we were given this task to do.

And yet, this is exactly the task that our Creator God set out to do.

“When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos…”

In other words, God started with our blended colour photo and set out to try to separate the chaos into some kind of order.
 
This is a task that, to us, would seem utterly impossible.

And yet God simply had to say “let there be light” and the light separated from the jumbled chaos.

If I had our blended, chaotic colour plate here in front of me and I said “let there be turquoise,” absolutely nothing would happen. You would look at me like I’d lost my mind.

So it would be helpful for us to take a brief moment to recognize the magnitude of God’s ability to create order from chaos.
 
The Message

Scholars have written an abundance of theories and analyses of Genesis 1-2. You could spend your entire life reading and analyzing these two verses if you wanted to.

But, for our purposes, it might be useful to think about the enormity – the gravity – the magnitude – of this passage and of what this creation story might mean for us on a practical level in our lives today. 
 
It’s easy to assume that this passage is some cosmic story written to impress us, or to emphasize some theological fact or perspective.

But what if the purpose is simply to help us understand just how amazing it is that we are here in this time and place in the first place?

I’d like to share with you a couple paragraphs from John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara. John O’Donohue was an Irish poet, author, and priest, and many would say he was a prolific Christian mystic as well.

He has written many blessings, poems, and deeply spiritual passages.

Today, I want to share with you two paragraphs from the section of his book called “To Be Born Is to Be Chosen.”

He says,

“To be born is to be chosen. No one is here by accident. Each one of us was sent here for a special destiny. When a fact is read in a spiritual way, its deeper meaning often emerges. When you consider the moment of conception, there are endless possibilities. Yet in most cases, only one child is conceived. This seems to suggest that a certain selectivity is already at work.
 
“This selectivity intimates a sheltering providence that dreamed you, created you, and always minds you. You were not consulted on the major factors that shaped your destiny: when you were to be born; where you would be born; to whom you would be born. Imagine the difference it would have made to your life had you been born into the house next door. Your identity was not offered for your choosing. In other words, a special destiny was prepared for you. But you were also given freedom and creativity to go beyond the given, to make a new set of relationships and to forge an ever new identity, inclusive of the old but not limited to it. 
 
“This is the secret pulse of growth, which is quietly at work behind the outer façade of your life. Destiny sets the outer frame of experience and life; freedom finds and fills its inner form.

“For millions of years, before you arrived here, the dream of your individuality was carefully prepared. You were sent to a shape of destiny which you would be able to express the special gift you bring to the world. Sometimes this gift may involve suffering and pain that can neither be accounted for nor explained. There is a unique destiny for each person.
 
“Each one of us has something to do here that can be done by no one else. If someone else could fulfill your destiny, then they would be in your place, and you would not be here. It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity that has brought you here. When you begin to decipher this, your gift and giftedness come alive. Your heart quickens and the urgency of living rekindles your creativity.”

- John O’Donohue, from Anam Cara
 
I think some would hear this and believe it is a nod to the concept of predestination. That is not where we are going today, but I don’t read that here.

Instead, I read this in light of our Genesis passage and the amazing feat that God undertook to separate out light from darkness, heaven from earth, night and day, plants and animals, and ultimately, humans.

And even if you aren’t fully convinced of the creation story and lean instead toward the scientific explanations of creation, the fact of the matter is that our being here is incredible.
 
The complexity of biological and environmental circumstances that had to manifest themselves such that each one of us could be born into this time and place is uniquely special and important.

I think John O’Donohue emphasises the enormity of this perfectly.

To simplify it all, none of us should take our lives for granted because we have been gifted something amazing.

Yes, life throws us curveballs sometimes. Yes, life is hard sometimes.
 
Yes, some of us grew up in difficult or traumatic homes. Some of us have been through incredibly difficult circumstances or life experiences.

I am not discounting those things, and I am not saying that we shouldn’t feel the emotions or the pain, the grief or the longing, the shame or the regret that come along with those things.

But what I am saying is that in order for each of us to be here now, not only did the biology of our parents’ reproductive systems have to mingle perfectly, but so did the systems and circumstances of every one of our ancestors before us.
 
We know that many movies and stories throughout history have played with this concept.

Back to the Future, for instance, plays with the idea of time travel and the notion that even one small change to the past could make it such that we couldn’t exist in the present.

In short, we are just one of many examples of order being created out of chaos.

Each one of us was created to be here in this time and place.
 
And often, when we think of the magnitude of this reality, we may struggle with our sense of purpose or our reason for being here.

We are inclined to think that we must do something grand and memorable with our life. We must live our life with purpose, and if we don’t feel that we are fulfilling that “duty,” then we feel a weight of failure fall upon our shoulders.

But I don’t think Genesis or John O’Donohue is telling us that we are failures if we don’t fulfill some grand purpose.

What if our purpose is simply to live a life of wonder, or to love and care for our family, or to create art of some kind, or to impact another person’s life in some way?

We don’t need to stress over this, but neither should we take our lives for granted.

We were each uniquely and wonderfully chosen to be here. Somehow, God separated us from the chaos and created us for this time and place.

And, we have each been brought to this community – in some way or another – for a reason.
 
We were created from the “dust of the ground” as a reminder that our calling is always toward the flourishing of life in the world.

Made from the dust of the ground, we are designed to return to the earth, for the replenishing and renewal of the world.

It is a vision of the past and future that can transform our present.

We are in humble service to a God who can do the impossible and separate order from chaos. 
 
We are each unique and this fact should leave us in absolute awe and wonder of a God who created us and chose us for this time and place.

So, may we leave here with a sense of assurance that God loves us and chose to separate us from the chaos – to combine our unique DNA and life circumstances such that we are capable of being here now, together.

You are a wonder. You have been chosen. You are loved beyond measure and beyond human comprehension. Amen.

Let us pray:
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Gracious and loving God, we are in absolute awe at your creation, and our existence here in this world. Not only are we in awe, but we are filled with deep and unending gratitude for our lives and your presence in them. We are grateful for this community and the love and care we experience from, with, and for one another. Be with us as we move through our day and our week ahead. In your holy name, we pray. Amen.