Prevenient Creation

Every once in a while I’ll go down a rabbit hole on YouTube. I enjoy watching people make stuff out of wood. For some reason, I really enjoy watching them make bowls, kind of like the one in the video below.

You don't have to watch the whole thing. Skip
around to see more of the process

There’s something about how they take a piece of wood, or a log in this case, and turn it into something useful.  There are parts of this, where when you look closely, that it doesn’t even seem like his touching the wood at all, but it’s still working.

What surprised me about this creation is it’s final shape.  It doesn’t look like what I thought it was going to when he started.  But that doesn’t matter, because the piece that he ended up with still looks very good, and like it’s a well crafted bowl.

For us, our experience is a little different.  

**caution Jesus Juke ahead**

In our case, we are the bowl that is being created, and in the midst of our creation we don’t always know what our creator looks like. We are only able to see a part of him at a time, but that’s okay.  We don’t have to have a complete experience of God to know that what he is creating is good.

Over the next few posts, we’re jumping into the Trinity.  This is the Doctrine that defines who we are as Christians.  At times it is confusing, but that comes from trying to know everything all at one time.

For us, the Trinity is all about our experience of who God is. Most importantly, it’s about how our faith in a Triune God is vital to our religious life, our everyday life, and how we receive God’s grace through each day of our life.

As Methodists we start with grace.  Our understanding of God, of Jesus, of the work of the Holy Spirit starts with grace.  This is what makes us different from others.  The technical term for this is Wesleyan Arminianism. And we start making the turn in this direction at the very beginning.

I love how some of the modern translations take the start of Genesis in a little different direction.  You wouldn’t think that would be a case, but reading and understanding ancient Hebrew is a challenge and there are sometimes different ways of translating the same thing. And based on context, and writing styles, and a bunch of other factors, we end up with a slightly, but very important difference in translation.

Read the full creation story at Genesis 1

This is a little different from what we know, and what came down to us through the King James translation of scripture.  

But I like it.  

It doesn’t seem like that big a difference, but there isn’t an ending there.  

When God began to create. 

God started the process, and there is a bit of a suggestion that that is still ongoing…maybe even to today; that God is still creating.

And this is important because that means that God isn’t done yet, and he isn’t done with us yet.  That holds with what we continue to learn and read about what God is doing all through scripture.

Remember, that through Genesis 1, God creates different parts of the world that we’re in.  The running refrain through that is that, it is good.  God looks on his creation, and sees that it is good! 

This is true, even though God gave us as humans the ability to disobey, to not do as we’re told, to do something wrong, to make mistakes, and so on and so forth.  We are still good

And as we read through scripture, we see that no matter how bad we are, God never gives up on us.  Sometimes what we have to go through isn’t pleasant, but that doesn’t mean that God isn’t there.

This is our first experience of grace.  The grace that God gives to us, before we know that he is there, and that he still calls us good and wants what is best for us, even though we’re going to do things wrong, even though we are going to sin.  From our Methodist heritage we call this prevenient grace.  

This is also our experience of the first person of the Trinity. We say that God is three persons, yet still one God.  We even have symbols we use to represent this.  Up on the image above, you can see what is sometimes called a celtic knot, or the triquetra. As Christians we see the overlapping circles as persons of the trinity.  Each are different, but none can exist without the others.  The circle that goes through each of theme reinforces that point.

God, as our creator, shows us grace, even if we don’t deserve it, and even if we don’t know he is there, he still wants what is best for us, and so is still working to make that happen…..God is still creating.

What does that mean for us, in practical terms?  This series is called Vital Religion, because this is vital to who we are, but we have to be able to apply it.

We all know family, or friends, who don’t know God.  That doesn’t mean that they aren’t covered by God’s grace, or that God doesn’t want what is best for them.  

We also know neighbors and other members of our community who never come to church.  

God is still there for them.

We know kids who’s parents weren’t there for them, who neglected them, and some who abused them.  

God is still there for them.  The kids and the parents.

There’s the guy down the street who can’t seem to hold a job. 

God is still there for him.

There’s the mom that has chronic health problems, so she can’t do much, and is always in need of medication. 

God is still there for her.

There are many members of our community, of our state, and of our nation who are addicted to drugs, to opiods, to other things that are tearing their life apart. 

God is still there for them.

There are people who don’t believe like we do, who act differently from us, who have beliefs that we don’t understand, and that we would yell at the top of our lungs are wrong.  

God is still there for them.

There are many out there, who are hurting and suffering through no fault of their own, but are there because of other people and the decisions that they have made.  

God is still there for them.

There are even, the folks that have it all together.  Who don’t have the worries that we do, that are part of stable, healthy families and relationships, who aren’t currently dealing with hard problems.  They’re doing okay.  

God is still there for them too.

The first place for us to start and remember is that God is there.  

God is still creating.  God has not given up on us.  

The first experience of God we have is as Father, as Creator, as grace given to us before we ever knew he was there.

Then we take that with us.  Through all the people we come across every day, God is with them.  

For each of the people that cut us off in traffic.  
For each of the people that aren’t doing what we think they should be doing.  
For the people who seem to have nicer things than us, but we “know” they shouldn’t because they can’t afford it.  
For the people who are going hungry and begging for money.  
For the people who are causing problems for others that we can’t understand, 
for all of those folks and even the folks who get up, go to work, come home, spend time with family, then go to bed, only to repeat it the next day.  
For all of them, God is with them.

What would it look like to show them grace, just as God gives it to us?  That’s my challenge to us this week.  For all these that we come across, show grace.  Its as simple as that.  Go and do that in Jesus name.