The old story tells us that God finished the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh. So what happened on the eighth day? Clearly creation wasn’t finished because the universe has been continuously unfolding for fourteen billion years and will be new yet again tomorrow. On Mother’s Day we celebrate the spiritual truth that all creatures are also partners in further creation.
Back in February, I spent a week visiting my father in Waynesville, North Carolina. After living alone for three years in the house that he had shared with my mother until her death in 2021, dad’s health, at age 92, had reached the point where he needed to have more regular care. So, early in February, my brothers and I helped dad move into a skilled nursing facility. I arrived at the end of the month to lend emotional support and to do some work emptying out my parent’s home to get it prepared as a rental.
The visit went well. Dad was doing OK. He was eating better. His hygiene was better than he could manage by himself. And my brothers and I no longer had to worry that he might fall or experience some other problem with no one there to tend to him.
I took dad out for meals. He likes Burger King and Waffle House, so that’s where we went. I took him to his Methodist church on Sunday. I drove him up to the house one day and then we drove the long way back to town so he could see the hills and farms and he could point out to me the places that were still recovering from the hurricane that went through western North Carolina back in the fall.
And he recommended a book to me. I had asked him what he was reading lately, because my father’s always been a reader. He confessed that reading had grown difficult for him, so he stopped. That was the only sign of depression I observed in him. And I’m glad to report he has started reading again.
We don’t share taste in reading material. He likes those kinds of espionage and action stories that come in multi-novel series, with heroes like Jack Reacher and Jason Bourne. But for some reason he was thinking of a science book he had read a long time ago and he recommended it to me. The book is called, The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg. It was published in 1977. Two years later Steven Weinberg won the Nobel Prize for physics for work he had done on the strong and weak nuclear forces.
The subtitle of The First Three Minutes is “A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe”. It’s Weinberg’s telling for a lay audience of the then new-ish “standard model” of what happened in the first three minutes of the universe, some fourteen billion years ago.
When I got home, I put a hold on the book at the library. It took a few weeks to come in. And then I read it in April, finishing it on the plane ride to New York that Jim and I took two weeks ago.
It didn’t pass my attention that I was reading what amounts to a creation story at the same time I was thinking about the creation-themed sermon I was planning to write for Mother’s Day.
You all know the creation story from the Bible. There are two, actually. One is the one that begins, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” and talks about how the earth was formless and empty with darkness covering the surface of the deep and God hovering above the waters until God said, “Let there be light” and there was light. And so on for six days and a day of rest.
The other creation story is the one with Adam and Eve and the serpent. “Earth was given as a garden,” as we sang in our opening hymn. “Tree of life and tree of knowledge placed for our discovery.”
Weinberg begins his book with a different creation story. He begins this way:
“The origin of the universe is explained in the Younger Edda, a collection of Norse myths compiled around 1220 by the Icelandic magnate Snorri Sturleson. In the beginning, says the Edda, there was nothing at all. “Earth was not found, nor Heaven above, a Yawning-gap there was, but grass nowhere.” To the north and south of nothing lay regions of frost and fire, Niflheim and Muspelheim. The heat from Muspelheim melted some of the frost from Niflheim, and from the liquid drops there grew a giant, Ymer. What did Ymer eat? It seems there was also a cow, Audhumla. And what did she eat? Well, there was also some salt. And so on.”
Weinberg opines that this isn’t a very satisfying explanation of creation, and I have to agree. Any origin story that starts with something already there just avoids the question.
That reminds me of a story I first heard from my mother.
William James gave a lecture in which he talked about the earth being a ball that goes around the sun. After the lecture, a woman came up to him and told him she enjoyed the presentation but he was wrong about the earth. Actually, she said, the earth is a flat crust balanced on the back of a giant turtle.
Humoring her, James smiled and asked, “And what does the turtle stand on?”
The woman answered confidently, “on the back of a second turtle.”
James asked, “And what does the second turtle stand on?”
And the woman answered, “You can’t fool me, Professor, it’s turtles all the way down.”
Weinberg’s creation story from modern physics is a little more satisfying than that, but even he avoids speculating about the very beginning.
He starts his story “about one-hundredth of a second after the beginning” explaining that before that the super high temperature of the universe and the unbelievable density would create a super-abundance of pi mesons which would interact so strongly with each other and nuclear particles that it would make calculations about the behavior of matter difficult, and perhaps even the concept of time meaningless. There’s your “formless and void.” There’s your “Yawning gap.
But a hundredth of a second after the beginning, he writes, “The temperature of the universe is 100,000 million degrees Kelvin. It’s filled with an undifferentiated soup of matter and radiation, each particle of which collides very rapidly with the other particles.” And the universe is expanding and cooling, rapidly. If the universe is infinite now, then it was infinite then, too. If it’s finite now, with an estimated circumference of about 125 thousand million light years, then it had a circumference of about 4 light years one hundredth of a second after creation.
After a little more than a tenth of second the universe has cooled to 30,000 million degrees Kelvin. Heavier neutrons are decaying into lighter protons.
At a little more than a full second after creation, the temperature is down to 10,000 million degrees. The still expanding, but gradually slowing, universe has brought the density of the total energy of the universe down to about 380,000 times that of water. Electrons and their anti-particle, positrons, are now annihilating each other faster than they can be recreated out of the ambient radiation.
13 seconds after creation, the temperature is 3,000 million degrees Kelvin. It’s now cool enough for stable nuclei like Helium to form, but they don’t, yet, because the building-block particles required to create Helium are still unstable at that temperature.
At three minutes and two seconds past creation, the temperature of the universe is 1,000 million Kelvin. That’s about 70 times hotter than the center of the sun. And a few seconds later we get Helium.
Although Weinberg calls his book The First Three Minutes he goes on a little further. The next step, at 34 minutes and 40 seconds after creation, about the length of an I Love Lucy episode, is the point when all nuclear particles are either bound into Helium or free protons. There is one electron for every proton. The energy density is about one tenth that of water and is made up of 31 percent neutrinos and 69 percent photons. “Let there be light.”
It will take 700,000 years before the temperature drops enough to sufficiently decouple matter from radiation so that matter can start to clump together into stars and galaxies.
About 13,000 million years after that, I wrote this sermon.
But, of course, the story doesn’t end there.
I actually wrote this sermon on Friday, sitting in my office, a couple of hours before we started the dress rehearsal for the choir concert. Think of everything that’s happened since then. We had all day Saturday. I did laundry. We had the concert last evening. We had this morning. We had all of the worship service up to this moment.
And in the next moment, creation will continue. A new world will come into being, at first looking very much like the world a moment earlier, with all the furniture and bodies in their same places, and the stars tonight appearing again approximately where they were yesterday, but burning through their fuel, and the universe continuing to expand, more slowly now, and continuing to cool.
Everything keeps changing, moving, evolving. Creation isn’t finished.
Creation isn’t something that happened once, “In the beginning” but creation happens every moment. Not in seven days, long ago, but every day. The first three minutes were pretty spectacular, but so were the last three minutes, in their own way. And in the next three minutes, well, anything that doesn’t violate the laws of physics might happen.
I’ve been spending a year looking at the fundamental theological issues and as I considered each one, I tried to offer some final thoughts from my perspective of thirty years in the ministry. As I approach the end of this year, I thought I’d devote these three Sundays in May, to looking at the biggest theological issue of all: the question of God.
One way to think about God is to ask the question, “what is the nature of God” meaning what kind of being is God? The traditional way to answer that question, in the Abrahamic religions, is to say that God is a father, a person like us, but greater. I don’t believe that. I follow more closer the Buddhist answer, which begins with a conception that the basic building block of existence is consciousness. To me, God is not a separate being in the universe but is a constituent part of all existence, expressing the totality of the fundamental consciousness, to become, as it were, the mind of the universe.
Another way to think about God, is to ask the question, “what does God do?” meaning what is God’s job description? Among the traditional answers to that question, is that it’s God’s job to be a creator and a judge. If you think of God as a person, like a wise old father, then it’s easy to think of him doing what people do, raising children, rewarding and punishing, and making things.
But if you think of God as the mind of the universe, as I do, then you can imagine God doing the kinds of mental activities that we do with our minds: remembering, planning, sympathizing, encouraging, setting standards, infusing events with meaning, laying out goals that give purpose to the unfolding movement of the universe.
And then, as the universe develops sufficiently and eventually beings of higher consciousness emerge, beings like ourselves, we can place ourselves into dialogue with the divine consciousness. According to the story in Genesis, it was when we ate from the Tree of Knowledge that we became like God. So now we are able to hear suggestions emanating from the divine mind, but also enjoy freedom of will to make our own choices. Instead of creatures, created and dependent, we become partners in creation, guiding and shaping our own future.
Mother’s Day asks us to acknowledge and honor that we are created. We had beginnings that none of us chose or controlled. Our mothers performed the common but extraordinary work of creating in their own bodies from a few bits of genetic material, a new human person, and birthed us into this marvelous world.
Then as we grew, again with mother’s assistance, or father’s, or other parent-figures, we learned and were guided but also began to assert our own selves. We began to be partners in our own creation. Eventually we reach an age of development where we can begin to create our own world to fit our desires: choosing this, and not that. Guided by a sense of conscience, experienced as a whispered intuition I associate with God, of right or wrong, good, best, most healthy for ourselves and most helpful to others, we become creators of our lives, and our world.
My father, not the one in Heaven, but the one in Waynesville, North Carolina, got me started. He and mother kept me fed and safe and loved. My parents provided me with tools I would eventually pick up to create my own life: knowing people they don’t know, having experiences they never had.
Now, I can stand with dad and together we can look back at our beginnings, my beginning with him, and his beginning with his mom and dad. I never knew my great-grandparents, but I can imagine them, and wonder about them, and feel awe and gratitude. And their parents. And their parents. It’s parents all the way down: mom’s and dads, back to the first humans, about 300,000 years ago in Africa.
Of course, the first humans didn’t come from nowhere, they and eventually us are the descendants of the first life on earth, about 4 billion years ago, made from the stuff available as the earth formed, about 4 and a half billion years ago.
And further back, retracing Steven Weinberg’s description, we and our Milky Way galaxy and every other existing thing was once part of that hot dense soup of undifferentiated matter and radiation where all existence had its start, and we did, too.
That first creation day. That first three minutes. Those first incredible seconds and fractions of seconds. And how incredible that from that start minds evolved that can look back and describe how creation happened.
And how still incredible, that we stand today on the edge of a new creation, creators, now, ourselves, looking toward the future, and deciding for ourselves what will come next.