Spoken into Creation

Genesis 1:1-2:4a There is a restaurant in Austin Texas called El Arroyo. It has become famous, not for its food, but for its sign. Every day they put up some new witty saying – often reflecting an issue of the day, sometimes just weird and off-the-wall.  Like this one: There’s no way that “everybody” was Kung Fu fighting. Or: 90% of marriage is shouting “What” from different rooms. Or this one: We all think we’re smart until we try to turn on someone else’s shower. The sign has become a marketing bonanza for El Arroyo. They’re happy to sell you coasters, magnets, tea towels, Christmas ornaments with some of the cleverest sayings from over the years. It’s way more popular than the restaurant, and it caught my attention because, many years ago, I worked at the restaurant – for about five minutes. I started working there as a waitress when I […]

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One Piece at a Time

Isaiah 40:21-31 ;   Mark 1:29-39 There are many stories of creation, coming from a variety of different cultural and religious traditions. We know best the two creation stories in Genesis. And we know them in a different way than we might know others, outside our religious tradition. But they are stories, like the others. And the reason we need such stories is simply because a story can contain greater, deeper truth sometimes than a whole pile of factual statements.  There’s the old saying, a picture paints a thousand words. I think of stories as word pictures. They use words imaginatively to paint pictures that help us understand who we are and where we came from, and why we are here. The two stories in Genesis about how the world came into being, the story in chapter one, about the seven days of creation, and the story in chapter 2, about Adam […]

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