We began our service today with a line from the Hebrew Scriptures the second line of the book of Genesis. Genesis ‘Bereshith’ in Hebrew means in the beginning, at the head or the start, and in the beginning of The beginning we read: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.”

As I ‘ve said before the word spirit in Hebrew is synonymous with the word for breath so an even translation could easily give us: ‘the breath of God brooded over the face of the waters. A feminine verb brooded so we also have an indication of the gender fluidity of the Divine but that’s neither here or there to me today. Today I ‘m interested in this image of the spirit suspended over the waters in the beginning of times, fluttering, hovering or brooding at the transition from nothing to something. And the mirror it offers to us at our own hesitancy and consideration here this morning as the dawning of a new year is once again upon us. New year’s Day is a moment of such potential isn’t it – like an unsullied page before we begin writing – here we are, and for a moment, no matter how illusory, all is possible.

On the service i held here just before Christmas I noted how the solstice is a moment when in ancient times it was believed that the sun stopped in its orbit, held for a moment before it continued in its journey. the sun stops is what the term Sol- stice means. When we discovered that the Earth in fact circles the Sun and not the other way about we retained this sense of celestial pause, a time of halt in the flow, a hiatus, a pause. Isn’t it like that at Christmas  every year? although we forget this almost as soon as it passes, we lose track off the days, “Is it Tuesday?” we ask ourselves on Boxing day without much clue… The lovely period between Christmas and new year is frankly always a bit of a blur and I dont think this is all the result of over indulgence on the feast day. I think its a residual sense of the rest, the pause of the solstice.

Hovering over the face of the waters of course has an added piquancy here this month as the waters have barely receded down the Kirkstall Rd. the rising and falling of the waters through out the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is of course a recurring motif – from the waters of the deep at the beginning of Genesis, to the Floods of Noah, the waters of the Jordan and the baptism of Jesus, in common with many great religious forms, the rising and falling of the waters is a symbol of renewal, of hope and of the promise of spiritual life. Oddly these great religious texts rarely mention ruined carpets and insurance claims – but hey, nothing is perfect.

I am not claiming great knowledge of the archeological record but I do know that Ur, home of prophet Abraham, is situated in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

These rivers would flood regularly and this flooding ensured that the plain became very fertile.
Interesting to consider this in light of the scriptural motif I’ ve mentioned, the waters rising and falling, waters of deluge and rescue, waters rising and parting and waters providing a solid foundation for walking upon, for bearing up a human life.

Flooding creates life and the preconditions for life. The prophet of secularism and its first saint the Unitarian Charles Darwin supposed that aquatic life emerged from the waters and then learned over many generations to adapt to land but of course its likely that really the very first life forms to emerge from the waters didn’t emerge as such, rather the waters withdrew from them at high tide and they were left, high and dry, to adapt or die. The forms that died fertilised the land and the forms that adapted grew limbs and lungs and so on. I heard an interesting and, I found quite persuasive idea, that as mammals evolved and primates developed some returned to a semi aquatic livelihood and these water apes, sea apes or river apes lost their fur and became the fore runners of homo-erectus.

Millennia pass and the hunter gatherers of the river plains find that learning to predict floods mean they can determine when to plant and harvest – and when to leave the valley altogether because the tides would be too high. it was the need to record by marks and scratches that would be comprehensible not just to your own mind but to others of your species, which predicated written language, the calendars of such flood events are the earliest marks that can be referred to as writing and Eventually these same plains become known as the cradle of civilisation,  [In more recent times we’ve taken to carpet bombing the region obsessively but thats progress for you].

The flooding that strands dead bodies of swimming creatures leaves land that is fertile and productive, the waters support life, we ‘walk on water’ and in baptism we recognise this relationship as we ritually touch water at the start of life. The flood is a symbol of deluge but also of creativity.

It cant be said to be true now as it was then. We saw a pvc sofa carried a quarter of a mile down the Kirkstall rd. And some disused factory doors. A lot of domestic rubbish, none of which is likely to contribute to the fertilisation of the area – or the development of any language worth having or hearing.

Except the reminder that it gives us of our mortality and our fragility.
except the possibility that we realise our hubris and complacency for imagining that our meager forces are stronger than those of nature, or that our human nature is more important than that which is greater than human.
Except the opportunities to learn of small but important acts of human kindness and human decency.

And the possibility that we again take stock of the damage that we are doing to our environment at a time when hurricane winds from the south drive wet weather north taking polar temperatures for the first time above freezing in winter.
To make our imaginations fertile to the possibility that we are capable of great good as well as great damage and that as we pause at the threshold of the year it is our own potential that we brood over, our own faith rising which may be able to support us as we walk over the Jordan to the promise of spring.