Genesis
1:1-2:4(a)
Trinity
Sunday
June
15, 2014
William G. Carter
“I’m
lonely. I’ll make me a world…” That’s how the Harlem poet James Weldon Johnson
imagined the voice of God. He pictured a Creator who could do anything, a
Divine Artist who took delight in every new project and said, “That’s good!”
And yet for all God’s joy, there was still a hunger for relationship, to
fashion creatures who have the capacity to know God and enjoy him forever. So
here we are. That’s how our story with God begins.
The
Bible begins at the beginning. Where we there to record it? No. What we have
are a few accounts, all faithfully written and inscribed, as a guide for us to
understand where we come from, and to teach us what kind of God is the Source
of all things.
One
of the accounts is Psalm 104, which we sang last Sunday. In Hebrew, there are
seven stanzas, one for each day of creation. With creative wisdom, God makes an
abundant world. All of it is found by the faithful as a gift. We didn’t make
any of it, God did. The primary noun is “You” – You, You, You – “You ride on the wings of the wind, You make
streams gush forth in the valleys, You bring forth food from the earth and wine
to gladden the human heart.” Everything comes from the joyful heart of God.
In one of his Narnia books, C. S. Lewis imagined that God sang everything into
being. I like that; I believe it to be true.
Another
account of Creation comes in the second chapter of Genesis. This story portrays
God as close at hand, able to walk in the garden on two feet. God creates
everything “in a single day.” In a single day! Genesis 2 says, “In the day that
the Lord God created the heavens and earth…” It must have been some day, not
that the Eternal God ever wears a wristwatch. God is free to define “a single
day” however God chooses. No human begin was present to see God punch the time clock.
This
second account declares that the earth creature “Adam” is created from the dirt
and given the job of taking care of the garden. If you came to church today with
potting soil under your fingernails, you know this is noble work. And it seems
Adam was only the rough draft for Eve; as a second earth creature, she is
created as helper and partner, the two of them to live in harmony without
shame. As you know, that’s just the beginning of the story. Adam and Eve mess
up the Garden, and their children don’t turn out so well either.
As
the Jewish sage Elie Wiesel said about this second story, “God created people
because God loves good stories.” Again, here we are.
But
it is this opening account in Genesis One that finds its way into our ears this
morning. We read it as a litany because that is how it is put together. There
are lines repeated, stanzas enlarged, words like “TOV!” (“good”) which echo
again and again. This cannot be a scientific account of the world’s beginning.
It is a worship account, a declaration of purpose and intent. Everything begins
in God’s creativity. The world and everything in it proceeds from God, who is
present but mostly stays hidden.
I
have a good friend who calls himself a burned-out Methodist. He doesn’t go to
church any more. We were talking one night, and he trusted me enough to confess
some doubts about God. “I don’t believe there is a God,” he said. I pushed him
a little bit and said, “Where do you think all this came from?” He smiled and
said, “It’s just a happy accident, I suppose.”
Well,
I knew enough about him that I wasn’t going to push. A hard-edged Sunday School
teacher had turned him off in grade school. His mother told him he had to go
anyway. Along the way, he ran into people who wielded the Bible as a club,
insisting he was wrong and they were right. They told him that he shouldn't think, that he shouldn't honor God with his mind. And now I thought, you know, it takes a
lot of courage for someone to tell a Presbyterian preacher that he thought the
whole God-thing was manufactured by uptight people who wanted to control others
so they could get money out of them.
So
I told him about my experiences in biology class. It was during my brief college
career in pre-med. We were dissecting lab animals, learning how all the parts
worked, memorizing all the terminology, observing all the delicate systems that
work together. It was amazing, and I couldn’t believe any of it was an
accident. There was such an elaborate design behind it all. It was far above
anything I or anybody else could imagine.
But
that wasn’t all. During one lab period, a wisecracking classmate pointed at our
lab specimen and said, “That little bugger didn’t have much of a life, did he?”
It was like I was smacked awake. I mean, what’s the purpose of it all? We could
analyze deceased animals and determine how they functioned – but what
fascinated me, then and now, is what happens to creatures when they are alive.
How is it that they live and flourish? What are they here for? These weren’t
the kinds of questions anybody could answer in biology class. Thus began my
stirrings to a call to ministry.
I
had no interest in convincing my friend of what he didn’t want to believe. But
I guess I could invite him to pay a little more attention to world and all its
splendor. In fact, I just talked to him the other day. He’s getting ready to
head off for a week in the mountains. “There’s a place where the hawks circle,”
he said. “I can sit and watch them for hours.”
What’s
behind all of this? Genesis says it’s not a What but a Who. God creates it all.
Genesis does not try to prove this; it simply starts with God, because
everything starts with God.
One
of the interesting details about this text is when it may have been written
down. It could not have been an eye-witness account, of course. Some scholars
listen to the syntax and vocabulary, and suggest it was composed during the
Babylonian Exile. That was one of the most disruptive seasons in Israel’s
history. The temple of God had been smashed and torn down, the brightest and best
of the nation had been deported and enslaved. The faith of the faithful had
been splintered.
And
a group of Jewish priests countered all the spiritual chaos by stating in a
litany, “God said, ‘Let there be light,’
and there was light, and God saw it was good. There was evening and morning,
the first day. And God separated the sky from the water, and it was so. There
was evening and morning, the second day.” And so on. They countered the
chaos by worshiping a God who created everything in an orderly way.
What
a remarkable thing to say! Behind all the Babylonian gods was the real God, the
God of Israel, the Creator of the whole world and all the worlds we cannot even
see. Beyond the disruption of every institution that the Jewish people counted
on for hundreds of years, or the shattering of every human relationship that
mattered to them, there is the Lord God who rules over everything that he made.
Even when the world seems turned upside down, it is still God’s world; it
always has been, it always will be.
It
all comes from God. The Spirit of God was brooding over the waters, ready to
bring everything to life. As the Gospel of John will add, it is Christ the Word
of God who is the means through which everything is made. The Word speaks holy
wisdom – and it creates the very thing that is spoken.
And
the Word keeps creating. It is not finished. There is a Lutheran theologian
named Ann Pederson who teaches at a college in South Dakota. She says it is
tempting to think like Aristotle that once the world is made, it really is
fixed, kind of like a classical composer who writes down a symphony. All the
black dots are fixed on paper, right where they need to be, never to be
changed. But contemporary physics suggests that this is not quite how the world
really is. Dr. Pederson says God is more like a jazz musician, able to create
something out of nothing, so it can live and breathe and grow and change.[1]
Not so much fixed, as alive!
Creation
has a past: the world was created. But the creation has a present: the world is
alive. And I’ve noticed the people who speak of creation only in the past tense
seem very concerned with control. They want everything fixed and settled. There
are rules to follow and standard operating procedures to observe. I know such
matters give great comfort to many, many people.
I
will simply counter by saying there was a black bear cub loose in Clarks Summit
the other day. It was two blocks down the street at the Abington Heights office
building, trying to enroll in kindergarten, I think. A living creation doesn’t
always stay where people want it to stay - - because it’s alive.
So
I’m suggesting that perhaps we Christians lighten up, let the Spirit refresh
us, and that we not take this ancient creation litany as a science textbook. It
is not a statement to be defended as it is an invitation to praise our Creator,
and to pay closer attention to diversity and vitality of life. It’s an
invitation to go outside and admire God’s handiwork, as opposed to staying
inside and fussing about what gets taught in biology class.
I
confess my weariness at good-hearted Christians who fear that they have to
defend God from his detractors. God is going to outlive us all, so God is perfectly
capable of self-defense. When I hear fearful Christian people insisting that
God had to make everything in six twenty-four days, or that dinosaurs and
humans co-existed, it saddens me. It is Science and Faith that can co-exist, and
they can keep one another honest. Science can observe the “how” while Faith
speaks of “why” and “Who.” And all of it really ought to point us to a God who is
a lot greater than any one of us can imagine.
To
set that in context, I think of a little joke that has made the rounds:
A man prays and says, “God,
what is a billion dollars to you?” God says, “To me, a billion dollars is but a
penny.”
The man thinks for a minute,
and says, “God, what is a billion years to you?” God replies, “To me, a billion
years is but a second.”
The man smiles and says, “Lord,
can I have a penny?” God says, “Sure, just a second.”
For
my money, it is really arrogant to reduce God to our size, to presume to
dictate only how God works, to once again, perhaps inadvertently, put ourselves
on the throne at the center of the universe. Sorry, but we really haven’t
evolved that much.
No,
what we have here in Genesis One is that God chooses to make a world. Perhaps
the Creator wants our friendship, perhaps God likes good stories, perhaps God
is just really, really generous -- joyfully generous! This is the God who claps
the hands and says, “Tov! Tov! Good! Good!” For that is how everything is made,
and how it is initially assessed. “Tov!
Tov! Good! Good!”
And
this is also the God who is so secure, so settled in his own sovereignty, that God
doesn’t need to hover over everything and control it – but rather God is free
to spend a day in rest, enjoying the beauty, the intricacy, the interplay. If
God can lean back and take a Sabbath, so can we. We can rest in the assurance
that this weary world is God’s, that God has loved it since the beginning, and
that God is still working to make all things new through Jesus Christ, our
Savior.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] Ann
Pederson, God, Creation, and All That
Jazz: A Process of Composition and Improvisation (St. Louis, Chalice Press,
2001).
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