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.
