Original Blessing

(Gen 1:1 - 2:4a; Ps 8; Mtt 28:16-20) JG White ~ 10:30 am, Trinity Sun, May 31, 2026, FBC Amherst

A few of our Amherst folks attended the service on Friday in Halifax for Janet (Wells) Balsom, who died at age 47 last weekend. Many more people watched Janet’s final video, the end of a YouTube series that chronicled her life with cancer.  In it she spoke of the love of the ordinary people all around us, the ones we meet randomly and from time to time. Janet valued learning to break down some of the barriers between people. “So,” she said, “we can see everyone as [being] someone we can care about, because there is good in everyone and because we are all equal as humans.”

There is good in everyone. That’s today’s sermon. There is a good person there in you, and in every single person you meet, you see, you hear about. 

And yet, my inner conservative evangelical responds with guilt, and I look over my shoulder. “That’s wrong!” Doesn’t the Bible teach original sin: everyone a sinner, fallen from grace? People quote Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—  who can understand it? And Romans 3:23 all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God… 

Evil, guilt, shame, sin… these things are real, but they are not the whole story. And they are not the start of your story or mine. Not the deepest root, not the core. Before there was ‘original sin’ there was ‘original blessing.’

So we read Genesis 1 today, the first of two creation stories. (You may have noticed it overflows into chapter 2.) Those seven days are so well known. Well, at least we know there are seven days; we have to look up what happened on each one. And when we appeared. We don’t even get our own day, you may well know. We arise along with all the other animals upon the land. On that sixth day, like the others before it, God looks upon what God made, and the declarations go out, “it was good.” “It was very good.”

I went for a walk in the woods yesterday. I took a friend with me, who was also keen to see some beautiful plants and cool bugs - whatever we could find. I suppose if I was a lover of cars, I’d head out to see some special, rare vehicle and simply admire it, and any other cars of interest we saw along the way. If I was a sports fan I’d have gone to some event in the area and cheer on a favourite team. But John from Parrsboro and I headed out to the woods by a lake to see the Ram’s-Head Lady’s Slipper, a very rare orchid in NS.

There it was. Easy to consider it a good, a very good creature in creation. Less than one foot tall, each stem with a few narrow leaves, and a single flower with a white and deep pink lip, pointed like the chin of a billy goat, with other petals like its little ears and horns sticking out. Ah, the glories of creation! John spoke of God, who ‘sees the little sparrow fall’ and hides this Lady’s Slipper flowers deep in the woods for almost no one to see. 

With yesterday’s cool weather there was not a blackfly, and but one mosquito in the vicinity of Lake Angevine. It was hard to believe; it was a blessing. People joke of the creation of the mosquito, and what purpose it could truly have. What did find me in the woods yesterday was three ticks, three dog ticks, crawling around my knees, and one more on my head I did not find until I got home. 

Creation is complicated. All things, in the six days, were good - altogether very good. Yet we know the goodness of some are hidden now, and the evil of others is obvious. Malaria - the disease - is one of the greatest killers of people every year: all spread by mosquitos.

Our Faith, our teaching, our values, our relationship with the Living God, features a sense of creation and of us humans as part of it. We all share the original blessing. 

I look back to my own influences in childhood and youth. There were two main things. The Christian Church and nature/science. I was in Sunday school class, followed by worship service, each weekend. Plus a weekly youth choir and a children's program every week. As a teen there actually were four extra-curricular things at the Baptist Church for me during the week. 

At home, I was digging up wildflowers in the woods and bringing them to the flowerbed. I was exploring the wild acres on the fringes of my Grandfather’s campground, down the brook, up the trees, by the pond, along the Annapolis River. On TV I was watching ‘The Nature of Things,’ with David Suzuki, ‘Nova’ on PBS, and was enthralled with Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV series, “Cosmos.” I got the book for grading in 1983, Grade 7. 

So I was influenced by all this beauty. Here is a quotation from Sagan. “Were the Earth to be started over again with all its physical features identical, it is extremely unlikely that anything closely resembling a human being would ever again emerge. There is a powerful random character to the evolutionary process.” (p. 282)

Eventually, I grew up to expect an extraordinary God who could use millions, even billions of years, to bring us to the wonderful world that is extolled in Genesis chapter one. 

So is the universe good? Creation good? Humans, within creation, good? We know there has been a ‘fall’ from grace. Read the third chapter of the Bible for that iconic story. We look around us and it is obvious. And are all creatures fallen? Hard to say that, in so many words. The mosquito and the tick seem perpetrators of evil. The existence of cancer in bodies, another painful injustice. 

Even the lives of the beautiful animals and plants is often not all beauty and bounty. We know this. One of the classics of nature writing and spirituality is ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ by Annie Dillard. (1974) I finally got a copy, and read it, just a few years ago. It is known as a book of beautiful, evocative writing about nature. When I mentioned it to a friend who is an intense nature lover and a devoted volunteer with many environmental organizations, she rather frowned. Didn’t like Dillard’s classic book. I can guess why. It does not paint an idyllic picture of all creatures great and small. It tells, with beautiful writing, the nastiness and ugliness of nature. Whatever Annie Dillard saw, she pondered, she prayed, she wrote. She told of a small frog she approached at the water’s edge one day, but it did not move, it seemed dull-eyed, it flattened and sagged and then sank. A giant water beetle swam away: it had stabbed and dissolved the insides of the little froggy, and sucked it empty for its supper. Dillard wrote, “That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created.” 

Then she concluded: “Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull.” (pp. 6-7)

The original goodness, original blessing of all things is at the hidden heart of life. For centuries upon centuries we have had these formative stories at the beginning of holy scripture. The very first is the seven days we heard again here. The goodness of it all is declared. It is all very good. 

We remember this is the start of our sacred storytelling. The fall, the temptation of evil and the fall, are not where things begin. The goodness, the organization, the togetherness, is the beginning. 

Perhaps our own attitude has the greatest influence. By the grace of God we can find the identity of all things - including us - in the original blessing. Original sin does impact everything: but first, primary, deepest, is the original blessing. 

People these days, getting somewhat secular or at least new age talk to the Universe, instead of God, and speak of ‘the universe’ being good and providing blessings. However you talk about this all, there are many other folk who find the world harsh, nasty, evil and bad, for the most part. 

Our attitude has a big impact on how we live in this life, and have our little impact upon the universe. How does our God root us in creation? How does the Saviour reach us here upon earth? Jesus joins us, so completely. And the final vision is not even a heaven far away, it is a renewed earth with renewed heavens shining above. And God is at the centre. 

Is this how we shall train the children today? With a hopeful view of the world, even with nature that is red in tooth and claw?

The story has often been told of a fellow who greeted visitors to his town. The first visitor, one day, asked what the people were like in this place. The local man said, “Well, what are they like where you came from?”

“Oh, I’m from a one horse town, and the folk there spend more than they earn, are not friendly at all, there are a lot of unmentionable scandals among them, and I almost want to shake the dust off my feet against them and leave them for good.”

“Well,” said the man of the new town, “You will find them about the same in this place, I’m afraid.”

When another stranger arrived, she got talking with the local fellow. “I see you’re from here. Tell me, what are the people like?”

“What were they like where you came from?” he wisely asked. 

“Oh,” said the woman newcomer, with a sigh. “They were fine folk, such good neighbours, and I was so sad to leave them. Business called me here, and we had to leave our old friends.”

“Aww,” said the local man, “You will be happy to know you’ll find the people here just as gracious and good as those you left behind.” 😊 

God give us the eyes - really the hearts - to see the world as a glass full and overflowing, not half empty nor filled with poison. Not that we can live happy and free without caring for the terrible pain and crushing evil that goes on, year by year. We must have compassion. We must grow to be resilient. But to see more! There’s the key. To see, from the start, the original blessing, before we are overcome with an impression of evil, curse, disgust.

Original blessing or original sin - it is found in the stories we tell. The stories we tell the world. The stories we tell ourselves. And how we tell them. Let us begin with Genesis. With Chapter One. And with the Spirit of God, over the waters. “Go and make disciples,” Jesus said. We do this starting with good news.