Letter from the Vicar (March 2010)
Dear friends,
A number of you have asked me to put a recent sermon on creation and evolution into print, so here it is as this month’s letter:
For Christmas my daughter bought me a camera. It’s one of these not-so-new digital cameras. Being a bit backward technology-wise I’ve only just got round to getting one. Of course one of the big advantages of these cameras is that you can flash away without worrying that you’re wasting film. If you don’t like it you can just delete it. Anyway on my recent Swiss holiday I flashed away taking all sorts of photos, many of which are not really any good. Because of the beauty of the surroundings I was trying to capture something of what I saw.
But however much we try to capture the wonders of creation you cannot reduce it to a photograph. Before cameras existed people used art to try to reproduce the splendour of creation. One great artist in particular tried to do this as literally as possible. In one of the greatest pieces of art in the world, Michelangelo tried to actually represent God’s act of creation. He painted Rome’s famous Sistine Chapel to re-tell Genesis’ story of creation.
Michelangelo had 6,000 square feet of ceiling to cover - the size of four average house roofs. Anyone who has painted a ceiling with a paint roller can understand it is a difficult task! But Michelangelo’s plan called for 300 separate, detailed portraits of men and women. It took him more than three years to paint the vast overhead space with his tiny brushes. Sometimes he painted standing on a huge scaffold - painting over his head. Sometimes he would sit, his nose inches from the ceiling. Sometimes he painted while lying on his back! In the long days of the summer he had the light to paint for 17 hours a day, taking food and a chamber pot up onto the high scaffold.
For 30 days at a stretch he slept in his clothes, not even taking off his boots. Paint dribbled into his eyes so that he could hardly see. In the winter he froze - in the summer he sweated, but he just kept on painting until the ceilings were transformed into the creation drama, with creatures that looked so real they seemed to breathe. But as Michelangelo knew very well, his work was a poor, dim image of what God created. Outside, over the Sistine Chapel was the great dome of God’s sky, breathtaking in its simple beauty. Mountains, seas, the continents all these and much, much more, the creative work of God, the Master Artist - so much bigger and more beautiful than Michelangelo’s masterpiece.
I have the strongest belief in God as the creator of the universe. But I am also convinced that there is strong proof for the truth of theory of evolution. I do not believe that evolution and creation are contradictory. The story of creation in the Bible is just that, a story. Written between two and half and three thousand years ago the author of Genesis, who told about the seven days of creation, was not attempting to write a scientific account of the origin of the universe. He was recording a mythological account of why the world came to be using ideas that pre-dated him by many centuries. In the end he was simply saying that this universe, in all its glory, owes its origins to God.
In recent centuries scientists have discovered how the universe came to be the way it is. We need not be defensive and fearful as Christians, somehow thinking that if we say that the creation story is a myth our faith will be undermined. It is a myth, but a myth expressing the great truth that behind all the amazing complexity of our universe, behind the evolution that most of now accept, lies God. God is the origin and source of all that is. The writer of Genesis was a little like Michelangelo. He was trying to express in words, as Michelangelo was trying to express in art, the inexpressible. Before the wonder of creation we can only stand back in awe and cry out in the words of Revelation: “You are worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”
Yours sincerely,
Richard Franklin
March 2010
