Last week I said that Peter’s line that the disciples aren’t drunk because it was only 9 am was one of my favorite, but the opening line from today’s Genesis passage is one of the most important in scripture, because it proves that baseball is the greatest sport there is, because God starts the creation in the big inning. Perhaps it’s also a sign that maybe the season will start soon. But the opening line here is probably one of the most famous in scripture, although what we have in Christianity, is more than likely a mistranslation. The Jewish Publication Societies translation, as other Jewish translations say, “when God began to create heaven and earth,” which might be more accurate, but it ruins my baseball joke, and so we’ll pretend as if it’s not there. This is the first of two creation stories in the Bible, and they are very different stories, as we will see, and contain different reasons for being and different understandings of God, and we’ll explore some of them over the next two weeks. But the simple fact that there are two different creation stories, telling of creation in different ways, should eliminate most of the arguments that we have about the Bible verses evolution.
But, unfortunately it doesn’t, and I can’t say why, but for simplicity sake, and I know this won’t be a problem for most watching today, you can indeed both be a Christian and believe in evolution. They are not incompatible ideas, and we’ll touch only briefly on this, but the earliest church’s opposition to evolution came not because of contradiction with scripture but because of the idea of social Darwinism, or survival of the fittest in humanity, which still exists today, which argued that he poor, handicapped, criminals, and others deemed unworthy, or unimportant by society should be weeded out, allowed to die, or purposely killed in order to protect humanity as a species. In arguments saying that we should just let senior citizens die so that we can get the economy going again is a social Darwinist argument, and something, I hope, that we find morally repugnant. But, that’s a different message for a different day.
At the beginning of this creation story, there is God, there is a formless and chaotic form of the earth filled with deep waters and darkness, and then there is the breath or wind or spirit of God moving over the deep. Now to help us begin to understand what is happening here, we need to know that the formless void, or what we might call chaos, and the darkness and the deep are all symbols of evil in the ancient near east, and so when God begins to overcome these things, first by calling for light which overcomes the darkness and God then calls it good, and then overcoming the chaos, we are seeing that God is overcoming the evil in the world. This could also be an early explanation for theodicy, which is the question of why there is evil in the world if God is good. And so here, evil is pre-existent with the creation, and contrary to popular idea God is not creating ex nihilo here, or out of nothing. Now it doesn’t answer why evil would be there at the start, because their concern is to say that God is overcoming this evil. And we can see that in one more part.
There is an obvious pattern to this story of God saying let x happen, it happening and then God saying that it is good, and then it was evening and morning and whatever day it is. And that happens every day except on day two. So, on day one God creates light, although not yet the sun and the moon, and then on day two God says “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. What is missing in that pattern? God never says that it’s good. Since the waters of the deep represent evil, God cannot call them good, instead God works to overcome them and to bring order out of their chaos. And so the waters are divided, with waters above the dome of the sky, and also below what we become land. And that makes sense because people know that if they dig a well, dig into the ground, they find water, and there obviously has to be water in the sky because how else do you explain rain? As we’ll see when we get to the Noah story, God opens the windows in the sky to bring a torrential downpour. And so that also means that if we want to take this story literally, we should be adamantly opposed to any rocket launches, like the SpaceX this past week, because they run the risk of poking a hole in this dome and causing all that rain to come down.
We should also notice the other pattern that develops in the order or creation, and that is that on day one, God creates light and then on day four God creates the two great lights, one for the day and one for the night. Now we all know that this means the sun and the moon, but it doesn’t say that, and why? Because in Hebrew the words for sun and moon are also the names of the Canaanite gods of the sun and the moon, and so rather than name them, and bring pagan gods into their monotheistic story, and give them any credence, they simply ignore them and don’t name them. Which then can then use to tell the others around them that not only are the sun and moon not gods, but that our God created them. Pretty good intra-religious smack down. So light and the two great lights are one and four, then day two and five are the separating of the waters and creation of the sky and then creating creatures of the water and the birds of the sky. Then days three and six are first the creation of land along with trees and vegetation followed on day six with the creation of animals of the land, including humans. And so if we are to see God bringing order out of chaos, goodness out of evil, this systematic process matches this story perfectly. But before we talk about the creation of humanity and the ultimate purpose of this story. There is something else important that we hear in what God does and how God works.
The first is how does God actually do the creating? God speaks it into existence. God said, light there be light, and there was light, right? That means that words matter. We should know this because we follow Jesus, the word made flesh, but I think we sometimes forget it. We used to say as children that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can never hurt us. But we know it’s not true. Words can create, they can bring love and joy and happiness, they can construct a different reality, they can bring creation itself and life into existence. Words can also destroy and bring hate and even end life, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally. When we call out for violence, violence tends to happen. When we speak words of hate, acts of hate tend to follow. Our words matter and what we say matters and what we don’t say also matters. When we don’t speak out on wrongs then we say that we support the status quo and have no problem with what is going on. When we allow derogatory language to be used about other human beings, it destroys not just those being attacked, but it destroys us as well. And what we say matters. We can build up people, we can call out injustice, and we can bring light into the darkness, to allow goodness to overcome evil. And so as we hear God creating simply by saying it, we have to remember and live with the reality that words matter.
So, then let’s talk about the creation of humanity. There is not Adam and then Eve in this story, as that is in the second creation story we look at next week. Instead, in this account, man and woman are created at the same time, and that has significant ramifications based on how the Adam and Eve story have been used over time, including in scripture. It is also in this account that God says “let us make humankind in our image.” Now there is lots of speculation about what it means that God is using the plural here. Some say that God is using the royal we here, although that is not found attested in other areas. Perhaps God is making reference to the royal court of God, similar to what we find in the beginning of the book of Job. As Christians, we say that God is referring to the three parts of the trinity, after all the Spirit is there at the beginning as well. And the name being used for God in this passage, although you don’t know it because it’s translated simply as God, is Elohim, which is a plural word by itself.
For simplicity sake, we’ll go with the trinity here, because what’s most important is to know and to remember that all of us are made in the image of God. All of us have part of the divine in us as part of our nature. And what that means, again very simplified, is that we need to see that same divine spark in everyone else and to see them as being made in the image of God, and to treat them as such. If we believe that we are all made in the image of God then we can say undeniably that racism is a sin. If we believe that we are all made in the image of God then we can say undeniably that misogyny is a sin. And when there is sin, we need to work to call it out and change it. And saying everyone is made in the image of God does not mean denying their own unique characteristics. It is to see their uniqueness as the wonderful part of God’s nature. No one has the same fingerprints because we have all been made unique, or as Psalm 139 says, we are all fearfully and wonderfully made. We don’t ignore others attributes in order to be able to love them, we love them because of those attributes and we love them because they are children of God, just like us, and made in the image of God, just like us, and that has a long way to go for what is happening today. As we will cover more when we get to Cain and Abel, when we act out in violence towards another, when we destroy another, or when we deny their humanity, what we are doing is denying the divine that is in them and also the divine that is in us. And that is not part of the created order that God has called good. And as the Most Reverend Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church said this week, God saying the world is good is a moral statement.
There is so much more we could say about this passage, as well as the second creation story next week, but because I don’t have all day, I want to close with one more point. Michael Crichton, perhaps best known as the author of Jurassic Park, or perhaps as the creator of ER, recounts being in the Australian outback after having just completed a film. His aboriginal guide asked him what he did, and when he told him that he made films, the guide told him that he had seen a movie once, and then proceeded to tell him that it was about a man named Hindy and his fear of snakes, and the movie was all about him having to overcome that fear of snakes. It took Crichton a little bit, but he said that he realized the man was talking about Indian Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now I think that most of us would probably agree that that was not what the movie was about, that he was missing some key elements. Often we find out what a story is about by the conclusion of the story, and the same is true here.
At the end of the six days, after God finishes what has happened, we are then told that on the seventh day God rested, and blessed the day and hallowed it, made it holy, and thus, even though the story doesn’t say it, we too are to rest on the Sabbath day. The purpose of the story of this first creation is to tell us the reason why we practice the Sabbath. And this is significant because what God does is not to sanctify space, although the creation is called good, but to sanctify time. This was unique in the ancient near east, first because it said that God was all over the place, which was not normal for gods, and that time itself is holy because God made it holy. The other parts of the story are important because it shows us God overcoming evil and darkness and chaos, but the most important part and the reason for telling this origin story is not the how, but the who, which is God, and the why, which is so that we will rest, because if God rests after doing all that work, then we too need to rest as well.
And so all the arguments we get tied into knots over, to me, miss the entire point, because if this was exactly as how we were supposed that creation happened, we would not have two creation stories. The Bible is not about science, it’s about theology. It’s about God and our relationship with God and our relationship with each other, and this story has so much to tell us about that and how we are to live. To live in enjoyment of the created world, because God has said that it is good, to live in harmony with one another, because we are all created in the image of God, and to live not just to work, but also to live for rest, there is a reason we call play recreation, because we re-create, we recreate ourselves and even the world. So may we learn to live in peace and to rest on the Sabbath. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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