{"id":5142,"date":"2025-01-19T08:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-19T13:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nccumc.org\/christian-formation\/?p=5142"},"modified":"2025-01-21T14:33:56","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T19:33:56","slug":"week-of-prayer-for-christian-unity-day-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nccumc.org\/christian-formation\/2025\/01\/week-of-prayer-for-christian-unity-day-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Week of Prayer for Christian Unity &#8211; Day 2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\"><em><strong>An Offering from the Christian Unity and Interreligious Relationships Team<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-theme-light-gray-background-color has-background\"><em>The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity takes place this year from January 18-25. The theme is \u201cDo You Believe?\u201d and is based on Jesus\u2019 conversation with Martha in John 11: \u201cI am the resurrection and the life.\u00a0Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?\u201d<br><br>The theme was chosen in recognition of the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea (325), at which the words \u201cI believe\u201d were chosen to anchor the Creed as an instrument of universal Christian unity. <em>For each day during this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the members of the Christian Unity and Interreligious Relationships (CUIR) committee will share a series of devotions based on the statements in the Nicene Creed.<\/em><\/em><br><br><em>You can sign up to receive these devotions each morning in your email or view them <a href=\"https:\/\/nccumc.org\/christian-formation\/unity2025\/\">on our website<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\"><strong>Day 2:&nbsp;<\/strong>Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\"><em>&#8220;In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, \u2018Let there be light\u2019; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.&#8221;<\/em><br>Genesis 1:1-5<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to the Book of Genesis, the creation of heaven and earth&nbsp;begins in darkness, the kind of darkness that defies being named. It is the darkness before darkness, a darkness without form or substance, a fathomless deep, a cavernous void that doesn\u2019t know whether it is or it isn\u2019t. The historic doctrines of the Church insist that God created the universe out of nothing. In good Latin fashion, we call it <em>creatio ex nihilo<\/em>. Far be it from me to argue with the theological luminaries who formulated the belief, but&nbsp;the opening verses of Genesis give me pause. In reading the text, I do not see \u201cnothing,\u201d but nor do I see \u201csomething\u201d (at least in the usual, material, sense of the word). There is a chaos, a defiance of definition, a crashing of tides, as reality attempts to become real, as the incoherent attempts to cohere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In our daily living, we do not so much fear the primordial darkness or even the physical darkness. After all, we imagine ourselves too enlightened to fear the first, while a good light bulb vanishes the latter. What we truly fear is non-order and disorder. We live under the creeping suspicion that the forces of chaos, both seen and unseen, lurk just on the edge of our carefully constructed lives, awaiting an opportunity to unmake us. Like the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, writing at the conclusion of the First World War, we fear the \u201ccenter will not hold.\u201d We fear that we will not hold or be held. Yet, in the wind sweeping rapturously over the face of the waters, in the defining word of \u201cLet there be light,\u201d we encounter a God not subject to chaos, but a God who gives order, meaning, and function. We encounter a God who is in control, orchestrating the vast symphony of the universe, ensuring that discordant cacophony resolves into magnificent harmony. To profess, as the Nicene Creed states, that God is &#8220;maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen,\u201d is to say that all being (or at least, all that we know of what it means to be), including the chaos that more than occasionally creeps in, is within God\u2019s good order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><strong>Prayer: Maker of heaven and earth, composer of all that is, tamer of tumbling chaos, we praise and thank you for giving order to our existence and helping us make sense of our lives. By your defining word, guard us from that which would unmake us, allow our centers to hold even in these unsettled times. We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, One God, forever and ever. Amen.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rob Licht is the Pastor of&nbsp;First UMC of Sneads Ferry and a member of CUIR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\" \/>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Photo by Albin Hillert, 4 October 2019, Geneva, Switzerland: Ecumenical Centre, Geneva.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rob Licht, Day 2:<br \/>\nAccording to the Book of Genesis, the creation of heaven and earth\u00a0begins in darkness, the kind of darkness that defies being named. It is the darkness before darkness, a darkness without form or substance, a fathomless deep, a cavernous void that doesn\u2019t know whether it is or it isn\u2019t.  The historic doctrines of the Church insist that God created the universe out of nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":5180,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_tec_requires_first_save":true,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_tribe_blocks_recurrence_rules":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_description":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_exclusions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[25,58,185,143],"class_list":["post-5142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-christian-formation","tag-christian-unity-interreligious-relationships","tag-cuir-devo","tag-unity"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Week of Prayer for Christian Unity - Day 2 | Christian Formation | North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nccumc.org\/christian-formation\/2025\/01\/week-of-prayer-for-christian-unity-day-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Week of Prayer for Christian Unity - Day 2 | Christian Formation | North Carolina Conference of The United Methodist Church\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Rob Licht, Day 2: According to the Book of Genesis, the creation of heaven and earth\u00a0begins in darkness, the kind of darkness that defies being named. 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