Reverse the Big Bang, Find Genesis Within
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Readings
Matthew 7:1-5
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Genesis 2:7-9,15-17 (group reading for the live service)
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Read the written message below with music videos
Up until the James Webb Space Telescope came online recently, most of us science-oriented people were pretty sure that the universe started about 14 billion years ago with the “Big Bang.” Now that we can see further out and further back into the universe, not only is our idea of the age of the universe scrapped (it’s clearly much older!), but we have to go back to the drawing board about how the universe might have started. One thing we can learn from this monumental moment in science history is the importance of being flexible, and not investing too much in any one idea – even a popular one. All ideas and all concepts are beliefs and subject to the whims of time, revelation, and perspective, even the most seemingly obvious ones. Even our beliefs that we are mortal, finite, fallen, separate, individuals, right, wrong, false, or true may be subject to revisiting. And perhaps, the truth of the matter, about us and about the universe, is ultimately beyond words: as words at their best only approximately point to the reality of things. Perhaps this revelation about the Big Bang serves as an opportunity to let go of our tight sense of knowing and of judging, and to return to a recognition of the peace and joy of life when we’re not so “in our heads.”
Weirdly enough, many scriptures throughout the world paint the most ignorant of us as the ones set in our knowledge and set in our ways. And although the Bible has been used as a tool for this kind of ignorance and its destructive tendencies, the text itself can be read to condemn this type of misuse, just like with many Buddhist or Hindu texts. You could say that the history of the book of Genesis is kind of like the opposite of our belief in a 14 billion years ago Big Bang, considered to be out of date and foolish, but perhaps with more wisdom than we thought. Perhaps even Genesis is set for its own type of revolutionary rereading. I’m not condoning creationism here, but instead, inviting us to look deeper and more mysteriously into this set of ancient indigenous tales that are too often taken at face value, too often taken as hard and fast facts.
Indigenous peoples seem to naturally know the importance of parable. A parable embraces the mystery of words, of life, and instead of pointing to cold truths, it uplifts the more mysterious truths of our journeying together. A parable knows and embraces the fact that it will inevitably speak to people in various ways, and it uses this knowledge to be more effective. Genesis is just this sort of multifaceted indigenous tale, initially part of the Jewish oral tradition before being put into scrolls, and like the Christian gospel says of Jesus, it seems to always speak in parable.
And also similar to Christ, this parable can be understood to invite us back into the root of life, back into the Garden of Eden at our core, the space that we look out from even when we don’t recognize it. Sometimes called “coming to Jesus,” we’d do well to remember that Christ’s teachings weren’t about believing in specific historical facts, but learning from parable, about uncovering the light that we all are: as he said, “You are the light of the world.” They were also about helping us see that we carry the Divine Love that we all are at our root, the source of our very awareness itself: “Love others as yourself… Be perfect as your Father God is perfect.” As we recognize this about ourselves, and truly see it for ourselves – not as belief in words but as a living Truth, we unveil the Alpha and Omega of our lives, we return to the Genesis and Eden of our Being.
Genesis paints the picture of the opposite of this process of returning home, when it describes how humanity, called “Adam and Eve,” bought into the tree of knowledge and fell from their birthright. As the story is probably meant to indicate, we do this ourselves and have generally done it from our own genesis, since early childhood. We invest too much in any given moment in our knowledge, in our thinking, in our reactive feelings, instead of noticing, “Hey, this tree of knowledge of good and evil sits in a vast garden.” We must come to see that all of our experiencing is a form of knowledge, it all enters into our awareness as a type of noticing of something happening. Even our false thoughts are a type of knowledge, we are seeing what is arising in our minds. But we don’t have to be so caught up in the specifics of this knowledge, we can also simply notice that we are aware and that our mind jumps from thing to thing. Always changing its focus but never changing in its fundamental being.
If we start to rewind Genesis, it’s sort of like rewinding a bad country song: we get our partner back, our dog back, our truck back, and our sobriety back. A return to Eden is to recall the space that our tree of knowledge arises in. Which, funny enough, is more us than that tree, because it watches this tree arise and it also holds the tree of life within. Like Adam and Eve, we can continue to invest too much into one tree, into specific fruits of that tree, or we can return to walking with God in the Garden.
Along the same lines, Christ tells us thousands of years after Genesis was crafted not to judge. Then he says that we will be judged along the same lines that we judge. It’s so easy for us to believe that our minds are the natural, perfect arbiters of justice. And yet, how often do we lack knowledge or perspective in our judgments? We misread things and always judge from a sense of our own moral superiority, our own sense of dominance, even when we seem to ourselves or others to be kind, humble, and insightful. There’s a reason Christ starts off his message about judgment saying not to, we cannot judge our own judgment skills without bias, no matter how wise or loving we are. And our tendency to judge is part and parcel with us being too invested in our own heads, too absorbed in the tree of knowledge of what’s good and what’s evil, instead of being led by our heart, by the core of our being, by the Lord. Christ’s message is a call for our return to the garden of light already within.
The tree of knowledge is meant to be in the garden, as we read in Genesis it is right in the middle of it. However, we’re told that out of all the trees there it is the only one deadly poisonous, meant to be observed from a distance but not imbibed. How do we gain distance from our knowledge, our own judgmental nature, and escape the death we already carry? Perhaps by observing more instead of imbibing, seeing that thoughts arise but don’t have to be plucked or imbibed. Christ and the sages throughout cultures share many pointers for this, such as turning to love and letting go of attachments, but in the end, it is up to us to find the reality that these parables point to. Sometimes just starting to notice that we are aware, aware of changeful thoughts but still always just aware, is enough to help us start to experience the space of our garden within. This spaciousness helps us to enjoy the Garden’s space and the Tree of Life, finding that we are much deeper than we thought, full of wonders only beginning to be seen, full of God. And, like the Big Bang, what we thought was our inner limitation, our very root and beginning, is in fact mysterious but available to us, infinite and unimaginably immense, our past but also our future.
Peace is with you,
Cory