Jeff Garrison
Mayberry & Bluemont Churches
November 2, 2025
Genesis 1:1-5 and Job 38:1-7
At the beginning of worship:
In her delightful book of essays titled, Things That Are, Amy Leach ponders God.
The people say the word repeatedly, and the more they repeat it, the less I can understand it: listening to words I do not understand is like swallowing stones. With each repetition of the word it is like I am given another stone to swallow… The word refers to someone no one has ever seen. Perhaps this is why people say it over and over, as if repetition of a word can make up for the absence of its referent.[1]
What can we know about God? This question takes us to the doctrine of revelation, which has little to do with the last book of the Bible. Theologically, revelation is how God chooses to be revealed. The ultimate revelation is Jesus Christ, God in the flesh. But you know, God didn’t have to come. God could have stayed hidden. But God loves this world and goes great distances to connect to a fallen humanity. God calls Abraham and Moses. God sends Judges, anointed prophets and kings, and works through ordinary and broken people until finally coming to us as a Son. Jesus Christ reveals God in a way we can know and understand.
God directs what is revealed and not revealed. There are times God may be silent, especially when we attempt to usurp God’s position. Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest and author, provides this explanation:
Silence becomes God’s final defense against our idolatry. By limiting our speech, God gets some relief from our descriptive assaults. By hiding inside a veil of glory, God eludes our projects. God deflects our attempts at control by withdrawing into silence… When we run out of words, then and perhaps only then, can God be God.[2]
Barbara Brown Taylor and Amy Leach are on a similar page. When we expend a lot of words on God, we find ourselves out over our skis. With skiing, when you get ahead of yourself, just like when you think you know too much about God, you’ll liable to come tumbling down. We need to let God be God, have faith, and trust in God’s love for us.
In this my second sermon on the Nicene Creed. We’ll explore the first article, on God the Father.
Before reading the Scriptures:
The Nicene Creed is divided into articles. There are at least two ways of doing this. One divides the creed up into 12 articles, where the first deals with God the Father, the second through the seventh deal with Jesus Christ the Son, and the remaining articles focus on the Holy Spirit and the work of the church.[3] A simpler way divides the creed into three articles, which is what I plan to use as we look at the Creed. After all, I don’t have twelve weeks to devote to the Creed. This manner breaks the creed into the three persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit.
The first article for both divisions of the creed deal with God the Father. It’s short, just 21 words in the English translation which appears in our Book of Confessions. “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.”
God is the creator. There are things about God we, as mortal creatures, are unable to know as we’ll see in our scripture this morning. I want us to look at two different texts, the first from the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1 and the second and main text from chapter 38 of Job.
Let me say a bit about Job. He was a righteous man who suffers greatly after a behind-the-scenes contest between God and Satan. Early in the book, Job loses everything: his family, his flocks and herds. He’s reduced to a sick and improvised man. At this point some friends visit him. They come with the best of intentions but a severe lack of social awareness. They try to comfort Job while insists he did something bad for all his suffering. Much of the book consist of a dialogue between Job and his so-called friends. They do a lot of God-talk. At the end, God corrects them all when he speaks out of whirlwind. Let’s see what we might learn about God the creator and the God who dresses down Job from the whirlwind:
Read Genesis 1:1-5 and Job 38:1-7
The first article of the Nicene Creed introduces us to God the Creator. It draws on both passages of scripture. God is “Father Almighty,” a term well known in the ancient world. In the epic poem Aeneid, this term referred to Jupiter, the great God within the Roman pantheon of gods. But the pagan gods of Rome were not Almighty, nor were they the creator of all.[4] So, the Creed reminded those in the 4th Century that the God it speaks of is much more powerful than the gods they worshipped.
Furthermore, this God has created everything. Older English versions say “all things visible and invisible,” which reminds us that God’s creation includes things we can’t see or understand. This doesn’t refer to things only seen through a microscope or telescope, but things in different realms.
We’re not privy into the world of heavenly beings, or even demons, those beings who have fallen from grace.[5] All things remind us that everything has been created by God.[6]
This opening article of the Creed, while setting up our understanding of God in opposition to the ancient gods, doesn’t spend much time with God the Father. This is because there was no conflict. Jews and Christians, of all different stripes, believed in one God, the Father Almighty. The conflict came in the understanding of the Son and Spirit, which we’ll look at over the next few weeks.
When the Almighty speaks to Job and his friends out of the whirlwind, it becomes immediately clear that neither Job (who is later vindicated by God), nor his so-called friends know what they’re talking about. This is why I like the essay I quoted a portion of earlier by Amy Leach. The more we talk about God, the less sense we make. We will never fully comprehend God and when we encounter the Holy One, we should stand in silent awe. “Be still and know that I am God,” the Psalmist tells us.[7]
God response starts at creation, reminding Job he wasn’t present when God laid out the earth’s foundation. Although God tells Job to be ready to answer, Job finds himself speechless at God’s questions. And we would be, too.
One of the beautiful things about this opening speech is the joy of creation. In verse seven, we’re told the morning stars, and the all the heavenly beings sing joyfully. They accept their position in creation and remain quite content. Imagine the stars singing like birds sing on a spring morning. But we humans tend to focus too much on ourselves. Wanting to be like God, we find it easy to break the Commandments. We’re like Adam and Eve in the garden, delighting in the forbidden fruit.
“God is Great, God is Good,” the prayer many of us said at the table as children goes. But a great God cannot be controlled. A God in which we can fully understand would be a limited God, which is not God. By definition, God is greater than anything we can manage. There must be a mystery which we accept by faith. The creed calls us to accept this mystery, as we worship God who has creates everything, and as we’ll see next week, loves the world enough to send his only begotten Son to save it.
A former professor of mine, Donald McCullough, wrote a powerful book titled The Trivialization of God. McCullough points out how we, as a society, tend to cheapen God. We do this because we want to control God. One of my favorite quotes attributed to Mark Twain is that God created us in his image and we return the favor. When it comes to God, we think we know more than we do which leads us into idolatry. McCullough has this to say about backing away from the trivial gods which we surrounded ourselves:
The most important step that could be taken toward removing trivial gods from the altar of devotion and renewing faith in the one true God, the Holy One, would be for the church to rediscover the Bible, to open itself anew to its creative and redeeming Word.[8]
We need to be like Job, speechless before the Lord in a whirlwind. We acknowledge we don’t know everything about God, but we trust that God is good and will work out all things to his glory and our well-being. Amen.
[1] Amy Leach, Things that Are: Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2013), 99-100.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, When God is Silent
[3] Kevin DeYong, The Nicene Creed (Wheaton, IL: Crossways, 2025), 25.
[4] Phillip Cary, The Nicene Creed: An Introduction (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2023), 25.
[5] Isaiah 14:12, Revelation 12:7-9.
[6] Cary, 29-30.
[7] Psalm 46:10
[8] Donald McCullough, The Trivialization of God
Trusting is very important… 😉
Yes, that’s what faith is about
I did a study of Job once and I remember how much his friends frustrated me. If anything, it reminded me there is nothing wrong with sitting in silence with those who are grieving or hurting. Our presence can often be what is most needed.
Yes. Sometimes there is nothing which can be said, but presence can be comforting.