"The Creation Story: An Eight Day Version"
© 2009 Rev. Thomas Perchlik

I want you to think about how we got here. Not just how you and I drove or rode or walked here today but how did we, as human beings, come to be on the Earth, and how did the Earth come to be here? I will tell you this in the Great Story of Creation. Many people throughout history have tried to tell this story in different ways depending on their knowledge and their culture. In some versions raven rises between the sky and the sea looking for light and land. In others it is the One God that moves over the early waters of chaos and separates the sky and sea. In some the universe always is. I tell this story as if it were only a little more than a week because it is hard to imagine how very, very long it really is. I begin this story before the beginning which we can never really know.

In the beginning was only the Great Mystery; and the Mystery was without form and everything was within the Mysterious. Then (13+ billion years ago) there was movement and change, what some call The Great Radiance. Then light was, and gravity and atoms and elements came into being. This was the radiant dawn of the First Day, and it was good. But there was nothing alive. There were no people or living things of any sort.

Way back then (11 bya) atoms and elements and light began to form into great balls and masses and clouds. And Galaxies were formed, vast balls and pinwheels of stars swirled in space, too many to count. In these galaxies were explosions of stars and furnaces of fusion. In these were forged new elements such as aluminum and iron, silver and magnesium, sulfur, mercury and lead. This went on for a very long time and this was very good because of what could be made out of such things. That was the First Day.

At the beginning of the Second Day (5 bya) in the midst of one cloud in the midst of one "Milky Way" galaxy there was a flaring and swirling of matter which burst into the light of our happy yellow Sun, and this was very good. So, (about 4.6 bya) the forces of the Sun and gravity and creation packed together the eight planets and many moon like rocks. They were all set swinging, or orbiting, around the sun and around each other. Some crashed into others leaving craters, or fragments that spun out into space. One of these planets was the Earth. She was molten hot back then, mostly a ball of lava. Late in that day (4.5 bya) something crashed into the earth and wonderfully, the Moon was born, to spin with us and reflect sunlight onto our nights. Finally the Earth began to cool, and rain fell, and all of this was very good.

But there were still no people at the beginning of the Third Day and not much in the way of life (3.8 bya). The forces of the mystery of creation and the elements of the earth moved together for a very long time. First they formed the Archaea, the very earliest forms of life; teeny-teeny one-celled things like bacteria (3.2 bya). Then some, called cyano-bacteria, turned on a chemical switch and began converting the light of sun into the energy of life. This is the way of life: ever growing, and ever changing. Life began to use oxygen and nitrogen and carbon all together forming for the first time a biosphere, a layer of life around the earth. Now it could form more complex forms of life, and this is quite good, because without it we could never have been born. That was the Third Day.

Now on the Fourth Day (2 bya) living things begin to depend upon one another. Cells begin to work together, forming creatures. Eventually there is a great massing of life at the bottom of the sea. This is known as the Edicaran Garden. New forms of life emerged, some become predators, eating others; some developed defenses and increased their numbers. This was a long and largely uneventful day but new forms of life finally caused the end of the Edicaran Garden. This may seem a little sad, but this is how the circle of life allows new living things to form. So there is evolution, only in groups over long spans of time, but it is good. The start of evolution was the end of the Fourth Day.

The next Day I call the Paleozoic, or Day of Ancient Life (540 million years ago.) First, quiet things like sponges and clams were formed as well as sea urchins and jawed fishes. The Appalachian Mountains were pushed up to begin their long lives. Giant dragonflies hummed through ancient forests at their feet. Some things like Trilobites and sail-backed Dimetrodons formed and lived millions of years and then became extinct, so that there is nothing that is quite like them on Earth any more. But other things, like insects and spiders, turtles and sharks, trees, ferns and mosses all saw the end of that Fifth Day (245 mya.) Their descendents still live with us today, and this is good.

Then was one of my favorite days, the Sixth Day; or Day of the Dinosaurs (245-65 mya.) There grew up many different kinds of dinosaurs and they lasted a very long time. The very last to survive were the triceratops with three horns on their heads. The earliest birds formed on this day, flying and singing as their descendants do today. Frogs developed and conifers grew, and a most wonderful thing began to bloom: true flowers, full of color and scent. Near the very end of this Sixth Day there was a new form of life that came into being; mammals. These are creatures that have hair or fur and which don't lay eggs, but give birth to their babies and feed them with their own milk. They were pretty small at first and kept out of the way of the dinosaurs so as to not get stepped on. But they saw the end of Dinosaur Day. We think it came when a great asteroid crashed into the earth. The air and weather all changed, and the dinosaurs ended, but many others creatures, including the mammals, survived to thrive into the next day.

So in the Seventh Day (65-1 mya) there formed horses and camels, elephants and dogs. Turtles began to multiply along waters of this continent which they shared with new fruits and daisies and squirrels and ravens and toads. The Rocky Mountains were raised up from older mountains, and the Grand Canyon began to form. Thus there was a beautiful land for the great Golden day of Mammals. Saber-toothed Tigers and Wooly Mastodons wolves and whales and new kinds of trees evolved through times of deep cold and times of warmth. And somewhere in Africa (2.5 mya) the first early human beings stood up and looked about and realized that they were different in their minds from all the other things that had been created up till now.

So this is now a new Day, the Eighth Day. Humans began (~30,000 thousand years ago) to study and learn and grow and leave art on the walls of caves. We moved out over the whole of the earth, until one day I was born, and then only some 40 years later you were born, and so here we are on this beautiful earth with all the living things that we need to love and respect. That is part of why this church is here in the woods, to remind you how long it took to get here and how important it is to be here to live in harmony on this good earth within the universe that was formed out of the Mystery of time.