Creation and Coronavirus: In Him All Things Hold Together
A text message notification popped up on my phone the other day from a friend, and I opened it eagerly to see if she had finished the puzzle she had been working on for several days. We’ve been jigsaw puzzle buddies during the long Coronavirus days at home, sending updates of progress on new puzzles, always including a picture of our completed masterpieces.
The text I opened wasn’t at all the picture I expected. Instead of a completed puzzle shining on her dining room table, I saw a dark corner of her hallway floor – pieces of a puzzle scattered and jumbled. Some chunks were still connected but torn and bent – most pieces strewn like fallen leaves, with no clear image evident among them. “I was trying to move it to a different table” her text explained, a tiny crying emoji next to her words. “Trying to salvage it now.”
Her picture conveyed what many of us have experienced during the transition from life B.C. (Before Coronavirus), the life we’ve always known, to living in a global pandemic. Trying to move from one reality to another has been messy and disorienting. The virus has directly impacted some through illness, grief, job loss, or working on the front lines of medical care or supply. But even those of us whose greatest contribution is staying sequestered at home have found plenty of disruption, distress, disarray.
As many of our touchstones are stripped away, discussions emerge about how to find a “new normal,” new rhythm and balance, new ways to steady and center ourselves. We’re all struggling to put pieces of what once was back together again.
Why has this season been so disturbing and disruptive? Our difficulty adjusting to distanced life can certainly be diagnosed using the tools of psychology, sociology and other disciplines, but as Christians we can trace the roots of our sense of disequilibrium and its cure to our origins – all the way back to the biblical account of creation. A Wesleyan approach to the creation story and its implications for the current state of the world can help us not only diagnose our disequilibrium but also understand how we are to live within it as fully surrendered followers of Christ.
The Letter to the Colossians is addressed to people living in a world in turmoil, off-balance and out of control. It’s unsurprising that an epistle of the New Testament advises its recipients to take hold of Jesus, the unchanging center, as a central stabilizing point for life. What is surprising, perhaps, is that Colossians points back in time beyond the cross or ministry of Christ, locating his authority in his presence in the story of creation.
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17 NIV).
According to Colossians, because Jesus was present and in control before creation began, nothing in creation can disrupt the balance he brings. While each generation has its own set of disruptive circumstances that cause people to feel, as William Butler Yeats said at the end of World War I, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” it is the actions of Jesus the Son in creation that call us back to the truth that “in him all things hold together.”
Grounding ourselves in the Christ of creation reminds us that God is no stranger to chaos. Indeed the creation story locates our beginnings in the context of an earth that was “formless and void” with “darkness over the surface of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). God brings light where there is darkness, order where there is chaos, and fullness where there is emptiness.
Reflecting on these actions, Wesley declared that "the Creator could have made his work perfect at first, but by this gradual proceeding he would shew what is ordinarily the method of his providence, and grace" (Explanatory Notes Genesis 1:2).
The revelation that God’s method of lighting darkness, ordering chaos, and filling emptiness is God’s method not just for the first moments of earth’s existence, but an ongoing means by which God brings grace to the world, shows creation as the primary story that brings us hope in times of disruption.
Since the Fall humans continually find ourselves in a world where the forces of chaos seek to turn the order of creation backward. Each generation faces its own distressed and distanced reality, times when as Jeremiah describes this reversal of God’s trajectory of creation: “I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.” (Jeremiah 4:23) When we find the pattern of life - chaos to cosmos - sliding apart again, we remember that Corona-tide, with the darkness of sickness and death, the formlessness of cancelled events and unvisited places, and the void of human touch, is simply one chaotic season of post-Fall creation among many seasons, each with their own symptoms of breakdown and mess.
In our recent cultural memory, consider the year 1968. The Vietnam War was wreaking havoc; the resulting protests sharply divided American culture. The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the brother of the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy, rocked any sense of stability and predictability of life. These events and others unframed life as it was known. It seemed the center could not hold.
In the midst of this world that was coming unglued, the Apollo 8 mission succeeded in putting three astronauts in space to orbit the moon, a precursor to the Apollo 11 mission just six months later that would land the first human on the surface of the moon in 1969.
For those watching, the pictures Apollo 8 sent back - the first taken of earth from a distance - projected an image of creation that restored some sense of perspective and serenity in a deeply troubled time. On Christmas Eve, 1968, the crew offered a live television broadcast from lunar orbit.
From a perspective that we might now name extreme social distancing, one of isolation and cosmic quarantine, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell said, "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth."
Then the crew offered an extraordinary gift. NASA permitted the three astronauts to choose what Christmas message they wanted to offer the people of their home planet. This is a script of what they spoke over our planet as they projected never-before seen pictures of creation, zoomed out to a distance that offered a needed perspective of peace:
Lunar Module Pilot William Anders:
"For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you".
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."
Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell:
"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."
Commander Frank Borman:
"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called The Seas: and God saw that it was good."
Borman then added, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you--all of you on the good Earth."
Taking a step back to view their planetary situation from the perspective of outer space, humanity had a glimpse of order among chaos, light in darkness, fullness in emptiness. Along with Wesley, they had a chance to view these as God’s ongoing method of grace. And as God once had in the beginning, the astronauts named creation “good.”
The Apollo 8 mission gave a dramatically counter-cultural view of creation, changing the perspective and memory of 1968 forever. Time Magazine had planned on naming “The Dissenter” as “Person of the Year” that year. But after this extraordinary event, it gave the title to the crew of Apollo 8.
With everyone asking what our “new normal” will be post-Coronavirus, we are called to remember an old normal, one found much farther back than early 2020, as we stare longingly through space and time at the distant but beautiful home to which we hope to return. As quarantined pilgrims traveling the endless space of empty chaos, we recall that we are not adrift; we are in orbit of one who is The Center. We are tethered by grace to the One who was present in creation and is present now still making cosmos from chaos, as he always has done, scooping the pieces off the hallway floor and fitting them together until we glimpse the image he intended.
Rev. Jessica LaGrone is the Dean of Chapel at Asbury Theological Seminary. Her book Converting Chaos is scheduled for release by Zondervan in early 2022.