A funny thing
happened on the way to this sermon ... Last week, not having a to prepare one, thanks
to the choral reading Dot put together for us, I began to look forward to this
week's sermon, thinking "What
a luxury." So I went to one of my favorite commentaries
which follows the lectionary, as I usually do, and read all four articles on
this week’s passage, and sat back to let it percolate in my brain over the
weekend. On Tuesday, I tried to get down
to brass tacks write the thing, and discovered that the commentary had the
wrong passage. It looked like the right
one, it was close, but not close enough to get a cigar. And all the prep work I did last week was
wasted, and I emailed the publisher, and they said "oops, sorry! We corrected that in the print version, but
forgot to correct it in the electronic version" which, of course, being
the very model of a modern major minister, I was using.
And the moral of this
story is either "trust ye not in the mechanisms of Amazon.com" or
" trust ye not in the handiwork of humankind,” and I'll assume it's the
latter, because I like Amazon.com and my Kindle, and besides: say thank The
Lord that it is God who is creating
everything, and not us, 'cause we'd just mess it up. And that
is the number one affirmation of this passage: it is God who is in the creation
business, not us. It affirms it at the
very start of our passage in that most famous of lines "In the beginning
when God created the heavens and the earth ..." It is God who creates, not humans, and
furthermore, modern scholarship has worried over the translation of these first
few words like a dog over a bone, but for our purposes, all we have to
establish is that God is doing the creating, and not us.
Further, God creates
everything, the heavens and the earth, the whole shootin' match. Not just Israel, not just the United States
or Christians or Muslims, but everything, no special favors, no separate
creations of only folks God likes. God
created—and is still creating—the whole thing.
Period, end of story
And when God began this creative effort, there was
nothing here. It was a formless void,
and because formlessness is infinite and void is emptiness, what we're talking
about is a whole lot of nothing, which we sometimes label chaos, but this isn't
the temporary chaos of a street riot or a overenthusiastic crowd at a soccer
match, but absolute nullity, nothingness beyond change, and in fact that's why philosophers
and theologians have called God the prime mover, because the formless void
could not have changed without an initiating nudge.
But whatever you call
God, a wind from God swept over the waters -- water is an ancient symbol
of chaos -- and the wind is God's spirit, in Hebrew God's ruach, and God's ruach
blew across the waters, and what began to happen? The chaos began to disappear. "God said let there be light," and
lo! There was light! And God saw that the light was good, and it separated
the night from the day, and with that, time was born, or at least a way of
marking it, because without day and night, how can you tell? If it always looks the same, time might be
passing, but you wouldn't know it ... And there was evening and morning, the
first day.
Next, God separated the
chaos on earth from the chaos in the sky, creating a vault for the sky. This reflects the ancient world-view of the
sky as a dome above the earth, with the chaos of the universe heavens on the
ore side. And the stars at night were
holes through which the celestial light poured, and that was enough for the second
day, which, of course, one couldn't have known if God hadn't created night and
day on the first day.
Well. The third day was a biggie, a whole lot of
creatin’ going on, as God first creates the dry land, separating the waters,
which in turn became the seas – and which he called good -- and then all the
plants and everything tasty to munch and that you could make fritters out of,
if there were anyone to make fritters, that is, which of course there wasn't,
and God saw that it was good, and it was evening and morning, the third day.
And by now, you
should be able to discern some pattern,
some method to God's madness. First, each day's activity builds on that
of the day before. Without the creation
of time—by creating night and day—nothing else could've been done, cause it
takes time to do anything. Without the
separation of the earthly from the heavenly, there would be no earth, no
differentiation from the rest of the universe, and without that dome, the earth
would be exposed to the heavenly glory -- which we moderns would call U.V. radiation—and
life couldn't exist, which God began to create in the third time interval.
And as a matter of
fact, without time, there is no order,
decent or otherwise, because how can there be an order to anything without an
ordering principle, which is the passage of time. There would be no way for the dry land
necessary for plants' and animals' existence to come before them because there would be
no before, and no after either. And that goes for the rest of creation, too: God
creates vegetation first so there would be oxygen -- remember, plants take in
carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- for the animals -- and us -- to breath,
and munchies for the animals - and us -- to eat.
In fact, that is one
of God's modus operandi, creating stuff we need before we need it, otherwise,
what would be the point? God would say
"let there be humans," and one would appear and immediately suffocate
or die of starvation. God loves his
creation so much -- and that includes us, of course -- that God created
everything we need, and includes everyone, the whole creation, regardless of
species, mineral composition, or indeed presence of a life force. Rocks are creation too, you know . . . And God
created it all, and saw that it all was good.
And by the way, this
all goes to what God means by "good:" as God's creation builds, one
thing appearing just before it's needed by the next, we can see that
"good" is not just a quality—though I, for one, think water buffalo
are pretty cool. But each stage of creation
is good relative to its purpose -- land is good for being a place where plants
and animals live, plants are good for producing nourishment and the very air we
all breath. God creates each day’s
stuff, and calls them good for a purpose:
the well-being of all creation.
And by now, maybe
those of a more scientific bent may begin to see an even larger pattern in our
narrative, in our ancient writer’s poetic rendition of creation, and that is
that it isn’t just a poetic rendition of creation, though it most certainly is that.
Here is the biblical, poetic version of the web of life: everything is
dependent upon everything else, everything is linked, everything is in
relationship, and that’s the subject and object of the modern science of
ecology, and maybe that ancient writer isn’t so primitive after all, huh? Maybe this ancient thinker knew a bit more
than who begot who and why, didn’t he?
Anyway, who is to
care for that relationship, who is to safe-guard this delicate balance of
creation? Why none other than little old
us, humankind, who alone of all creation, are created in God's image, and to
me, that image has nothing to do with what we look like, whether God has a
biological sex or not, or whether God has two feet and a head, but that we are
self-conscious, we know about existence, we know that things begin and end,
because if we did not, how could we help God care for creation? Animals have no knowledge that they exist,
they are the original practitioners of in-the-moment, and they have no
knowledge that they are finite, and so they
couldn’t very well care for creation, could they? How does a creature that doesn’t know it is a creature, with a birth and death
and biological needs, take care of creation?
In whatever manner—whether we evolved that way or it was turned on in
us, like a switch—we have a consciousness, which is required if we are to
cooperate with God in the care and feeding of creation.
Because that’s what
we’re called to do, folks: dominion doesn't
mean "using," it doesn't mean exploitation, it doesn’t mean taking, it
means caring for one’s subjects as a
good king or queen does, indeed as God,
the good sovereign, does. A good sovereign doesn't use her subjects
up, a good sovereign doesn't poison
their environment so they sicken and die, and that is what we are called to be:
good sovereigns—in today’s egalitarian language, good managers—over God’s good creation.
Just like the rest of
creation, we are intrinsically and basically good, do not ever let anyone tell
you otherwise. Fat or thin, white or
black, gay or straight—you were created good.
As one of my mentors in the ministry always put it, God don’t make no
trash. But like the rest of creation,
God called us good for a purpose as well . . . plants are good because they
provide food and oxygen for animals, animals are good because they provide food
for themselves, their waste fertilizes the ground, they provide food and
transportation and companionship for us. And in the same way, we are created good for
the rest of creation, for caring for God’s good creation, not for poisoning the
seas, or driving other created beings to extinction, or stripping away that
very heavens that God created to protect us all from harmful radiation.
But if Genesis speaks of creative control, of
the foundation of the world and its overwhelming goodness, it also speaks of the
awe-inspiring nature of God, which can be summed up in one word: love. For God so loved the world, that he created
it and sent it spinning around on its axis.
God so loved the world that God created the sun by day, to warm us and
grow the plants that feed us, and provide shade and beauty and oxygen. God so loved the world that he created the
great sea monsters to astound and amaze us, and the tiniest shrimp and krill so
that it is teeming with life. And God so
loved us that God sent his only
begotten son to redeem us and show us the way of love and beauty and
righteousness, of right relation with the amazing, loving creator of us all.
Amen.
