The Lectionary for Sunday starts at the very beginning of the Bible. People have imagined how God created the world. (God did, I believe – although it’s hard to imagine how our earth- and time- bound language can make any sense of such a thing. There’s a lot of gold in those stories about humanity’s relationship with our Creator though).
If God created the world from chaos, or from nothingness; our beginnings are mostly not from nothing, but start somewhere. They are the endings of something else, or steps along the way. In Sheffield, the scrapheap is the beginning for fresh steel and a new piece of engineering.
The ending of Trump’s term as President of the US will probably be the beginning of a newly organised movement of resistance against democracy. I hope it isn’t, but… China is right: democracy is fragile. I believe it needs a lot of work to defend it (i) because it depends of fair and accurate information by which people can make choices (ii) because democracy depends on people, and people are prone to do wrong from time to time, most relevantly by believing what they want to believe (mea culpa too) so as to save their psychic skins. We’d much rather blame someone else or some other group for our misfortunes than admit our own fallibility. (iii) etc..
To return to the Lectionary, there’s another little word-worm that is a refrain in that section of Genesis; “And God saw that the light was good…” It was good. Hard to believe sometimes, but this is a wonderful world – dangerous sometimes, a place of pain as well as joy, but fundamentally wonderful. A surprising amount of our misfortune is more to do with human actions than the world we inhabit. COVID-19 is both natural and terrible. But its impact on us depends on our response and on how we are as a society. As with other health issues, it’s people in poverty who suffer disproportionately. As I think I’ve said already (somewhere) one of the reasons for this (not the only one) is that people who are desperate to put food on the table or who are terrified of losing their jobs will go into work even when they are infected or might be infected – and this feeling of desperation has not been discouraged over decades of government in England – indeed some people consider it the bedrock of a healthy economy. Anyway, may God forgive us.
