The founding of an institution is a unique time in its history when it has no history.  Where does creation come from?  Do we create “Ex Nihilo” (from nothing) as Christian doctrine holds God created the universe, or, as the text in Genesis reads, do we create by giving shape to something that was “formless and empty” but already existed in some way before we acted on it?

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

There are two creation stories in the Bible.  The first one, though it was written later, is the one I just quoted, which goes on to say how God makes everything in six days and nights and rests on the seventh day.

The second story, more ancient, is the Adam and Eve story.  It starts like this:

“In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 

            Why does God create human beings?  We’ve been talking about purpose as one of the key spiritual issues:  the question, “What should I do?”  God could presumably create anything or nothing.  What is God’s purpose in creating human beings?

            In the first creation story God creates human beings after all the other animals and gives humankind “dominion” over creation “in our image, according to our likeness,” says God.  The text doesn’t explain why creation needs a God-like creature with dominion over the rest of the earth, but that’s the “org chart” according to the first creation story.

            In the second story, humankind’s purpose is more clear:  God needs a gardener.

            God made the earth itself but there are no plants, nor “herb of the field” because it hasn’t rained, and there was “no one to till the ground”.  You wouldn’t think that would be a problem for an omnipotent God, but that’s what the Bible says.  So God makes Adam and then:  “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”

            But God doesn’t think Adam should have to work all alone, a compassionate thought.  “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” 

            You would think that God would simply make a second creature like Adam, to be Adam’s helper.  Instead, God makes all of the animals and all of the birds in the sky, and brings them to Adam.  Adam gives every animal its name…

“but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”

The two Biblical creation stories are very different, in many ways.  The first is cosmic and liturgical and it makes a big deal of the seven days and nights.  The second is humble and folksy.

In the first, God is all powerful and distant.  In the second, God is a little unsure of what he’s doing or how to do it.

But as we talk about the very beginning of our church, take a look at how the two stories portray the act of creation.  Listen again to the first line of the first creation story, the first line in the Bible.

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.”

Orthodox Christian theology will tell you that God existed alone before God began to create.  Nothing but God existed.  And then God created everything that exists, made from nothing:  ex nihilo is the Latin phrase.

But a plain reading of the Bible text shows that God wasn’t alone at the beginning.  The earth already exists but “formless”.  The “deep” already exists, covered by darkness.  God comes as a wind sweeping over the waters – waters that already exist.  The first thing that God creates is light.  Later, God “divides” the waters but God never created the waters.  The water, and a formless earth were already here.

Well, who made that?

The second creation story doesn’t resolve the question.  It simply says:  In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” and then it immediately shifts focus to the earth “when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up…”

Whether God created ex nihilo, or whether “nothing comes from nothing” as Parmenides, the Greek Philosopher, and Julia Andrews as Maria von Trapp, noticed in The Sound of Music, is an important theological question.

If God created out of nothing, then everything that exists can be attributed to the direct power and plan and choice of God.  Therefore, every existing thing is infused with the transcendent qualities of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.  You can count on the world.  You can trust it.  It’s all good, because it’s all God.

But if some material already existed and God used that material to make the heavens and the earth, then creation must contain some of the qualities of that pre-existing stuff.  And God knows what was in that!   Maybe there was something imperfect, ugly, harmful, or evil, in that stuff prior to God.  God may have intended to create beauty, but if the marble was flawed, his creation might show a crack.

And so, Christian theologians, wanting the universe to be entirely God’s free creation, insist that God created “ex nihilo” even though the plain text of the first line of the Bible says something different.

The beginning of this congregation was on October 3, 1943, eighty years ago Tuesday.

October 3, 1943 was a Sunday.  The church that would become our church held its first worship service in a rented store front at 12236 Ventura Boulevard.  Today that address is occupied by a jewelry store called, Padani, next to Art’s Deli and Licorice Pizza, on the south side of Ventura Boulevard near the intersection with Laurelgrove.

There was our Eden.  Our Adam and Eve were Rev. Herb Schneider and Lois Rainwater, husband and wife.

Herb’s mother had given her son $100 to start a new church.  Rent at 12236 Ventura Blvd. was $75 a month.

The Church was called Christ Memorial Unity Church.

The “Unity” in our original name didn’t mean we were Unitarian, that would come later, it meant that the new church was associated with the Unity faith.  

The Unity church movement was founded by a husband and wife named Charles and Myrtle Filmore in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1889.  Myrtle Filmore had been cured of her tuberculosis, she believed, by spiritual healing, which motivated the couple to learn more about spirituality.  Their research led them to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement that emphasized the divinity present in all creation, and regarded Jesus not as a son of God apart from humanity, but as a model and teacher of what all humanity could be.

Generally, the Unity church belonged to a movement in the late nineteenth century called “New Thought”, and included Unity, Science of Mind, Church of Religious Science, and Christian Science, all of whom can trace their origins back to Emerson, at least in part, and to Transcendentalism.

So why didn’t Charles and Myrtle Filmore simply join a Unitarian church?

Unity and the other New Thought churches, differ from Unitarianism, largely in that the New Thought churches continued to emphasize the centrality of Jesus.  They use Christ language, employ prayer as spiritual healing, and hold other supernatural beliefs, while the Unitarians were shifting in the late nineteenth century to a more post-Christian, naturalist, and humanist faith.

So we were the Christ Memorial Unity Church, before we were the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City.

Nothing comes from nothing.

Though a new church opened its doors for the first time on Sunday, October 3, 1943, something already existed.  Herb Schneider and Lois Rainwater brought their Unity church background and the Unity church name with them.  They brought Herb’s mother’s one hundred dollars with them.  The building they rented had been built before they arrived.

The Unity church beliefs were founded in Emerson, so they founded their new church from him, indirectly.  And Emerson’s beliefs emerged from his own history as a Unitarian minister early in his life.

The Unitarian history connects to early Christianity, as we saw last week.  Early Christianity emerged from Judaism.  The early Jewish beliefs emerged from the cultures that surrounded them, sometimes borrowing, sometimes in opposition to their neighbors.

Nothing comes from nothing.

Still, there is something unique about the first day of a new creation.

Never again in our church’s history will there be anything like that first day, when Herb and Lois unlocked the doors at 12236 Ventura Boulevard and the first congregation gathered for the first worship.

To be the Founders is to be a different thing than we, the Stewards of what they founded, can ever be.  The church they gathered to start, could become anything after that first day.  Every choice was available.  There was no history to offend.  There were no traditions that had to be followed.  There was no, “the way we’ve always done things here” because nothing had been done before.

Imagine the sense of freedom and possibility, like God hovering over the waters.  What church will we make?  What do we see for our future?  What do we want for ourselves and our children?  Every element of worship done on October 3, 1943 was a first.  The first hymn.  The first prayer.  The first sermon.  The first time anybody laughed in church.  The first time anybody cried.  The first dime in the collection plate.  The first cup of coffee.  And when the morning was over, Herb and Lois saw that it was good.  They turned the lock in the door and walked away:  the first day.  

Something was created that first day that still resounds eighty years later.  Seeds were planted.  A course was set.  In ways subtle or large, but surely, that church is with us today.  Even the fact that we notice and celebrate a Founder’s Day, eighty years after the founding, testifies to the debt we owe to that day and those people.

            But though I’ve emphasized the freedom of that first day, we can also see how they were bound by a history that preceded them just as we are bound to a history that includes them.  That hymn they sang had surely been sung before.  That they had a sermon and a collection shows they created their new church or models they already knew.

            And so, when we arrive at our church today, celebrating our eighty years of history, we can see that our situation isn’t really all that different from what Herb and Lois and their congregation encountered on their first day.  Where we are bound by history, so were they.  And where they were free to create, so are we.

            Today is our first day, too.  We have been placed in a garden someone else made with the purpose given us to till it and keep it.  A building that existed before we arrived.  An endowment left to us by prior supporters who want us to succeed.  Some sense of “how we do things” learned from previous church members, but meant to be helpful, not controlling of the way we might want to do things

Within that context, of pre-existing material, we are free to create what we will.

            Here we are, asking the same questions as on that first day:  What church will we make?  What do we see for our future?  What do we want for ourselves and our children?

            There’s a common trope in time travel stories, where a person from the present goes back in time and because of one small change they make in the past, the present is vastly different.

            Sometimes the time traveller goes back to the past with a mission to change the world.  What if Hitler had never been born?  Or sometimes the time traveller is warned to be careful, for even an accidental interaction with the past may end up re-making the world in a completely different direction.

            Imagine if Herb Schneider had chosen a different topic for his first sermon.  Imagine if someone who wasn’t there that first day had been there.  Imagine if no one had remembered to bring cookies for the coffee hour, but fortunately someone did.  And our church today is the result of that good fortune.

            But if those kinds of changes that might have happened on October 3, 1943, could turn out to be significant 80 years later, why couldn’t a similar small difference that we might make today, seemingly so trivial, be consequential to the church this church will be 80 years from now?

            We’re so concerned that a time traveler not make a change in the past because the later effects could be so vast, but we don’t notice that we have the same power:  that our own small changes in the present, will have the same size effect on a future not yet created.

            Today is the beginning.  Today is when creation begins.  Not ex nihilo, for the material we build from already exists.  But nothing comes from nothing.  And whatever of the good, the true, and the beautiful, will emerge from today’s creation, well that depends partly on the people who preceded us and the choices they made, and the unfinished church they left to us.  God bless them, for the wise and loving choices they made.  And God bless, too, the people here today, and the choices we will make.  May we be as wise and loving in our creation as were the first creators of this living church, eighty years old on Tuesday.