Scripture: Genesis 1:1 – 2:3
Last night in Pawtucket, a group of nine brave Newmanites ventured out into God’s good creation to see the hometown soccer [slash football] club play their match against a team from Louisville, Kentucky.1 As lightning flashed in the distance and the heavens opened upon us and the rain came down to drench us from the sky, I thought about how rain was the second thing that God created in the Genesis creation story. Before land and vegetation and the sun and the moon, God created the great dome of water in the sky.
As the Rhode Island team struggled to score a goal, the rain helped me think about something I had been thinking about all this week — there seems to be a certain arbitrariness or randomness to the order of God’s creation in Genesis. At the end of each phase of creation, it feels like God takes stock of creation, like an artist standing back for a moment to look at their canvas from a distance to see what color or feature it needs next. I like to think that God didn’t know what the finished product of creation would look like when it was done — God, the creator just needed to get started with something and trusted that the pieces would fall into place. Anything could happen in creation. But every choice of God’s was good.
Friends, we are sending our minds back to the origins of the world in scripture today as we say goodbye to summer and begin to embrace the fullness of September. Many Christian churches treat the month of September and early October as the Season of Creation in the same was that we recognize the season of Epiphany, or Advent, or Pentecost. This season of Creation is about remembering the promising beginnings of our world and embracing the sense of possibility at the heart of caring for the environment, and our planet home.
By setting aside time to remember creation, we get to know and appreciate God in a different and important way — this is not God’s expression in Jesus, or God the burning bush, or God the caller of prophets, but God the creator and center of all things. At the core of God is this act of creation, this origin, this beginning, this outpouring of creative love . . . God is an ancient creator who is creating still.
Change and transformation are at the heart of our faith, which is both a scary and a comforting fact. It’s also a time to productively create space to lament and mourn the degrading impact humans have caused to parts of God’s creation — through the suite of problems humans have wrought by unlocking the power of certain elements.
Less than three hundred years ago, the fastest a human could travel was upon the back of a horse, and the strongest a human could be was by harnessing the muscle of an ox. Then we harnessed the power of carbon in the industrial revolution and humans sent trains and planes around the world. In the 1940s, humans unlocked the power of uranium, and then plutonium, and unleashed a nuclear age. And now we harness silicon in our super-small superconducting. In less than three hundred years we have transformed God’s creation, making incredible discoveries and strides forward in human flourishing, as we have also opened Pandora’s Box of pollution and volatility to the environmental detriment of us all.2
It’s important to have a season to think seriously in a sacred and thoughtful way about what our species has wrought and how we will live into an uncertain future. The simplicity and elegance of the Genesis creation story is an important thought partner for us as we begin the season of creation.
So let’s talk about what we’re missing in this creation story this morning. What’s not in the creation story we just read?
- If you were waiting to hear about Eve and Adam, you would be disappointed.
- If you were waiting to see where the snake comes in, you would be disappointed.
- If you were waiting for some mention of the garden of Eden, you would be disappointed.
It’s an interesting fact of scripture that there are two creation stories that have been sewn together at the beginning of the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve and serpent and garden and the apple are all part of the second story. The fact that we have two creation stories embodies what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called the danger of a single story.3 One story about seven days of God’s creative act is not enough to capture the fullness of creation. There is complexity, and multiple perspectives, and so the compiler of our sacred scripture had God create once, and then immediately start creating again.
The first story that we read shows creation from God’s perspective. This story is about the creation of space so that life can flourish and the chaos of the windy void will not have the last word.
The second story shows creation from the perspective of humans, and shows that there will be a time when God feels far away from us and we’ll have to make creative choices on our own — in this case, whether to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or not.
Hard as we try, we humans cannot always understand God’s ways. The first creation story reminds us that we are created in God’s image — the imago dei — we are inherently connected to God, God’s essence, and God’s substance.
The second story reminds us that we are independent from God, endowed by our creator with the responsibility of free will to make our own decisions, to make mistakes, to seek forgiveness, and to make repair.
Perhaps the search for repair and healing is what the whole Bible is about in different ways.
We are complex beings who come from chaos and we are asked by God to help keep the chaos at bay. On the sixth day, God asks us to be responsible for creation. And on the seventh day, God models the need for sabbath and rest after the effort of creating.
As the scripture says, “God rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.”
The need for Sabbath is essential to creation. Creation cannot go on forever without interruption. We must stop and pause and cease our productivity.
The sabbath is not a fortress of power but a fortress of time. Each of us has the power to make a sabbath space for ourselves where we can be with God set apart from the everyday.
God wills life and will it to continue, and makes sure that the sabbath is at the center of everything. Friends, anything is possible in creation. We have been tasked with helping to keep the chaos at bay. We are free, and we are responsible. We are imperfect, and we live in relationship with the divine. What a wonder we are, and what a wonder we can be.
We are creatures of the sabbath; where will we go from here?
I can’t wait to find out.
Amen.