A mood makes manifest ‘how one is’ and ‘how one is faring’. In this ‘how one is’, having a mood brings Being to its There. (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 173)

However, the conditions under which we all operate – our individual ways of getting through the day – tend to require that we ignore moods as best we can. They are the kind of thing that we paper over or drown out as we busy ourselves in being the kind of person that others need us to be. Heidegger was particularly interested in what lies behind such human experiences as Anxiety, and Boredom. What do these experiences mean? What do they tell us about being human, and as such, what do they tell us about Being?

I think Weariness can be an experience, a ‘Mood’, that lets us lift the veil and glimpse something real.

There is a kind of weariness that fixes us in our being. It is the ‘pushing-back’ of the world against my exertions, the ‘Something’ that properly resists me, and thereby fixes me as a being with will, and desire, and goal. How good this is! It enables us to be creatures and to create – there is no music without friction. It lets me be an individual. It lets me love – to find myself in finitude, with limited powers, and to trust, embrace, and depend upon the love of others. It is the kind of weariness that I imagine pouring through the arms of the First Man, after a day working the Garden, that led him to take pleasure in kicking his boots off and lying out full stretch in front of the fire.

But there is a kind of weariness that threatens to overwhelm. The bone-tired, aching weariness that flows from wrestling with a ‘Something’ that does not merely push back, rather it holds us in a death grip, dragging us down to Nothing, to be consumed and disintegrated.

For a while we might believe that this Weariness will not win out in the end: that it is not the truth of the world. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we only keep trying we can roll our boulder to the top of the hill, and not have it roll back down the other side. A myth.

There is no Rest here. There is no point in this world at which motion may cease. This is fundamental physics: if you do not move you will shiver, starve, be caught up, be dragged down, be eaten alive. Thou Shalt not Rest!

By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.
(Genesis 3:19 NIV)

‘Fatigue’ is how Engineers describe a weakness that develops in materials through repeated variations of stress. Weariness can sometimes be like this, a similar weakness induced through conflicting forces. To be weary can be to experience in ourselves the particular ‘There’, of Being in This World. A world riven by a multitude of opposing wills, conflicting desires. moving toward multiple goals, operating under both a Curse and a Blessing.

And in which, if there was no reconciliation, no proper administration, would eventually shake itself apart.

photo (which is brilliant) by
Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

The Vandalised Creation

Genesis 3-11

Our Stories:
Stories from the News…
Imagine for a moment that we are visited by Aliens, who drop into Starbucks down the road for a coffee and pick up a cheap newspaper…
what would they make of the stories?
What is the story of the world?

Is is basically a happy story, where things get steadily better, the lives of people get easier and more happy, with a few hiccoughs along the way of course.

Is it basically a tragedy? A sorry tale of good intentions gone wrong, great potential snuffed out too young, of the triumph of the ruthless and cunning over the vulnerable and honest?

Depending on which part of the newspaper you’ve been reading, depending on your own life experiences, you could well believe either of these things about our world.

But, What about your story? is your story a good story or a sad story. Do you things are getting better or getting worse?

A story for Israel:
These chapters are a story told by God to a group of people who lived at a time and place far distant from ours.

It’s a story to explain their origins, their relationship with God, their purpose,
and ultimately, how the world got its shape.

The Big question for us is: How does the story told by God to the people of Israel become part of our story? How do we fit into this story from the Bible? How is it part of our story?

Think about that question while we work through this part of the Bible together…

The Story:

…gone bad

A world created by God, with order… we read of God seeing his creation and saying “This is very good”. It is a world that conforms to what he intended.

At the heart of this world, there is a garden, and in the garden God created a man and women, to share in his character, and to be his partners in caring for the world he had created.
This was what God intended, this was what he called very good…
but this good world soon went bad…

In the garden was a tree. the one part of God’s creation that was off limits to Adam and Eve. Eve was told by the serpent that if she took some of the fruit of the tree and ate it, she would become like God, knowing Good and Evil. Eve already was like God. He made her, and Adam, in his image. But he had reserved for himself the right to decide what was good and what was evil in his world. As God, the Creator, he is the only one who could properly know what is good and what is evil for his creation. But Adam and Eve, took this right for themselves. They determined good and evil for themselves, and rejected God’s right to decide for them. This is what we call sin.

It broke the world, and it broke the friendship between God and humanity that was at the heart of the world.
We soon see the consequences of this action in the generations of people who came after.
The most terrible for Adam and Eve, must have been what happened to their sons…

[I filled this bit in as a narrative overview, i.e. I retold the stories as stories…
One day Cain and Abel came together to offer some of their work to God…

…

Patterns:
It’s hard to tell just from my retelling, but as you read the story there are patterns to what happens…
Sin – speech – mitigation – punishment pattern (repetition)
Spread of sin – spread of grace (development)
Creation – uncreation – recreation

Conclusions:
Well, What kind of story is this story? The story of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, and the Tower of Babel?

Is it a Sad/Bad Story? about the way that humanity continually makes a mess of God’s good work. God creates, humanity makes it a mess, God’s begins to fix things, he shows friendship and forgiveness, but people still wreak everything in sight. The world is a place of potential unfulfilled, people unloved, creation abused, and God unthanked or acknowledged?

Or is it a Good story? About a God who will not give up on his plan for a good world. Who when ever humanity destroys, he recreates – who shows love and commitment to people, time after time. And who’s love begins to create in people a response, so that some people do turn to God and seek to live in friendship with him.
Is it a good story or a bad story? There is no way to tell just from this section, it could go either way…

But how does this story fit into our world, how does it become part of our story? This is the question I asked you to keep thinking about…
As I was retelling it, you would have noticed that it’s a story about the whole world, which suggests that we must be involved. But how are we involved?

I said that it was originally a story for the ancient people of Israel. It was the story that God told them because it was through that nation that God would send his Son into the world. This story is the beginning of the story about Jesus, it’s the story that makes sense of why he came to the world and what he did.

When Jesus came he had a news-flash from God with the message that God was beginning again. He told people that this new beginning would see God’s original plan fulfilled, and all the graffiti with which humanity had vandalised the face of God’s world would be taken away. And this would be a new beginning for people to.

A new beginning for anyone who was sorry for their old life, with its mistakes, good intentions not carried out, potential unfulfilled, people unloved, a world abused, God unthanked, and unacknoweldged.

The message is this: God is beginning again. Anyone who is willing to trust Jesus enough to follow him with their whole life, will be made able to follow him into God’s new world.

So, this brings us back to one of our original questions: What about your story? If someone was to pick up the newspaper of your life, what would they read? I’m sure it would include good stories, and some sad stories. There would be things that you’d never want read out in public.

But does your story include a New Beginning?

Without any planning it turned out that our Old Testament lecture today was on exactly the same passage…
…Cut and Paste the notes?

Well, I can’t really. At the 9:30am Service probably 70% of the people attending are not Christian, and at least 1/2 have virtually no background knowledge of Christianity at all.
(The reason for this is that we have a group of couples who are currently attending because they are planning to get married in the Church. One of the conditions of using the Church for their wedding is that they become part of the Church community for a few weeks. I really enjoy getting to know these people. They have no Church background or hang-ups.)

So, I’m preaching on Genesis 3-11, which covers the defining event in the history of humanity and a larger chronological time period than the rest of World/Biblical history combined.
… And I’ve got 20mins with people who don’t know a thing about it…

I think that I need to stick as much as possible to simply retelling the story. I can’t possibly have the whole section read out for the Bible reading; the people who are listening won’t have Bibles open; and they won’t know any of the stories. (other than Noah’s ark – they might know that there was a Noah, and that he had an Ark)

I want to start with the questions that I think motivate the original telling of the story:
I have an image in my head of a group of people gathered around Moses to here the story of how they came to be.

It is very easy to over-read these dense texts from our earliest history. But I don’t think we can read them well without starting with the questions that the story is seeking to answer. I’m throwing out as many questions as I can, but ultimately the one question is:
How did our world become what it is?

‘Our world’ means different things when you are an ancient Israelite or a post-modern Australian. Some of their questions mean nothing to us, others strike a note of resonance – we have a similar discontent with how things are, and a desire to know how they came to be.
But whether our questions are similar or not we should be careful not to simply ask our questions of the story in the place of those Israelite questions.

We are drawn into the story by seeing that the answer God gave to these people, which was an answer for them, and which addresses their questions, is a story about the whole world and all of its people.
We are drawn in by implication rather than identification.

How do I demonstrate sensitivity to this in my preaching?
I’ve got a few ideas but no idea how to keep it simple.
And without simplicity, it will almost certainly be a waste of time.

For your interest, I think the implication of the story for us is summed up by Paul in this:

“Now the Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and foretold the good news to Abraham, saying, All the nations will be blessed in you.” (Gal 3:8 HCSB)

Showing why that is the implication…
now, that’s the tricky part.

Ideas?