Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
June 19, 2011 Trinity Sunday
Genesis 1:1In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
3Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
6And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." 7So 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. 8God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
9And God said, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11Then God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
14And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. 16God made the two great lights--the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night--and the stars. 17God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
20And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky." 21So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 22God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." 23And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
24And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind." And it was so. 25God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
26Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." 27So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
29God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.
31God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
2Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
4These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,
I must beg forgiveness for even bringing this up on a weekend when my friend, Jeanmarie, is in town, but I have to tell you a quick story about a bad dating experience I had many years ago, fifteen years....twenty, thirty, maybe a hundred years ago.
Honestly, my daughter was very young and I went out a couple of times with a woman who was also a single parent with a young child. On our second date she brought up the subject of marriage.... She brought the subject up in a way that made it very clear that it was not a hypothetical conversation.
This is one of those moments when the very evolutionary forces of "fight or flight" kick in for a man and I began listing all of the reasons why I believed that we would not be getting married. She replied, "Oh no, we will be getting married and we'll have two children together."
Further conversation revealed that she had come upon this very important piece of information through the services of a psychic whom she had employed to investigate our relationship.
Now, that sounds funny when you just say it like that here in this place filled with generally cynical intellectual types but in her world view, a psychic is a perfectly reliable source of useful information. So, though I know that preachers should always be careful about telling personal stories in public, I mention this one as an illustration of how people can have a communication problem. In this instance, I was approaching our relationship from a rational and analytical perspective and she was totally crazy.... You see how that can be a problem.
We were two people, seated together at the old Clary's restaurant, on a particular night, many years ago, but we saw and interpreted that objective reality in totally different ways.
And that, I would offer, is why getting people of different religious traditions to agree on a single interpretation of any passage of scripture remains very difficult. If you read scripture analytically, it reveals a particular world view and if you read as if it is a book of magic, it seems to mean something else altogether.
The first book in the Bible, Genesis, contains two creation stories. They are very different in nature. One is a sort of theological poem and the other comes in the form of a narrative replete with anthropomorphic images of God waiting until the cool of the evening to take a walk, a conversation with a snake and trees with magical powers. That the two stories are very different is not surprising when you realize that even though they are pressed up against one another in chapter 1 and chapter 2 of the same book, they were written in different countries and in different times. There is as much difference between the creation narrative we read today and the Garden of Eden text which follows as there is between this morning's edition of the NewsLeader and the works of William Shakespeare.... Shakespeare wrote plays in another country 400 years ago and the Garden of Eden story which follows the creation narrative we read today was about 400 years older than Genesis 1.
Though the two accounts differ in almost every way, from the order in which the world came into being and the ways the accounts are told what they share in common is that neither was ever intended to be an account of either history or science. If you read this narrative at face value and construct a world view based on creation as it is described here, what you see looks something like this:
http://biologos.org/uploads/static-content/OTcosmos.jpg
As people in the 5th century BCE believed, Genesis describes the creation of a flat earth which rests upon pillars which hold the earth up out of the waters of the deep.... Don't ask what those pillars are resting on because the only answer from the ancient world was something like the back of a giant sea turtle..... very unsatisfactory.
You heard Jill reading about a firmament in the heavens which is like a large solid mixing bowl turned upside down over the flat earth. Windows in the firmament sometimes allowed water to flow through as rain. The sun, stars and moon were affixed to the firmament and they moved through the heavens as the bowl was moved by the hand of God.
Bill Maher is fond of saying that the Bible was written by ancient dessert dwelling nomads who didn't know where the sun goes at night. As rude as that sounds, what we have to acknowledge is that this account was written by ancient Jewish slaves in Babylon who, did not know where the sun goes at night.
Jeanmarie teaches cellular biology in a university in Oklahoma where she is surrounded by people who are desperately afraid that she might try to convince her Phd science students to believe in evolution and not in a literal interpretation of this description of a flat earth covered by a solid dome..... which is part of why scientists in Oklahoma can often be found driving great distances to date someone who is not from Oklahoma.... But I digress.
It is difficult to imagine that anytime since Columbus sailed from Spain to the new world that anyone would try to take the Genesis account literally.
And yet the debate, to call it that, rages on. But it is something like trying to reason with someone who thinks that a psychic is a good source of information. There is no real conversation taking place between these two opposing world views which often feel like trying to reason with a crazy person.
There are times when we simply have to accept that we are not speaking the same language as some of our religious peers. There is no science in the Bible for exactly the same reason that there are no phone numbers in the Bible.... It wasn't written for that purpose and so there is no reasonable Biblical debate about evolution or creationism, we just don't need to try to reason with the flat earth society.
So, when we have jete'd back from the edge of the cliff over looking crazy town, and we come back to this account written by Jewish slaves living in antiquity in Babylon, what does it actually have to say?
On the face of it, Genesis gives us an account of God entering the chaos of the universe and bringing order into it and blessing each aspect of it, calling the day and the night, the earth and the sky, the waters and all of earth's inhabitants "good." And that, as it stands, is an assuring testimony. Not that Mecca and Jerusalem are the holy land but all of the earth is holy and precious to God. Not that one religion is better than another but all people are made in God's image.
But I would like to go a bit further with this text and suggest that what we have here is like hearing one side of a conversation, like listening to a person seated at the table next to you talking on their cell phone.
For many years Old Testament scholars have been convinced that the creation account in Genesis 1 is a Hebrew response or, you could say, a correction of the Babylonian creation myth that is known as the Enuma Elis.
The two accounts have a lot of similarities in their assumptions about a flat earth, a firmament and the pillars in the waters of the deep but they have a fundamental theological difference. The Babylonian account says that the earth was formed, not by a single God who created and blessed the creation in the process, but rather the Enuma Elis tells us about a violent creation coming about through a battle among the gods.
The earth, according to the Babylonians, was formed from the slain body of the evil and chaotic dragon, Tiamat, and that human beings were formed from the blood of Tiamat. Now, if you were to believe that people were made from the blood of an evil dragon, that would explain a lot of human characteristics which we don't like to talk about. The Babylonians were realistic and practical in their theology.... The world is full of suffering and evil and people produce a lot of that suffering and evil so the body and blood of a dragon theory explains a lot about why life is so hard.
But even as slaves in a foreign land, the Jews produced a version of the creation that contradicted those dire beliefs. They affirmed that the universe was chaotic, a void, without form or shape.
The Hebrew word for this chaos, "tehom" even sounds like that Babylonian name for the dragon, "Tiamat." But rather than a battle with the dragon, the Hebrew story tells us that God.... Literally, God's breath.... The ruach elohim, entered the chaos and brought about a good earth, and good animals and good people.... Which, if you think about it, accounts for a lot of what we experience in life... because just like we can see the world through the eyes of the Babylonians because life can be ridiculously hard and people can be just awful, we can also affirm this Hebrew account because the world can be beautiful and magical and people can be loving and forgiving and generous and wonderful.
The two accounts remind me of an image which is much older than either the Babylonian or the Hebrew creation narrative. The psychology scholar, Karl Jung, noted that virtually every civilization on earth has an image of a dragon even though no such creature has ever existed.
Jung suggested that the dragon is a creation of the human psyche... a kind of symbol of human potential. A dragon is a worm that can fly. Deep within each of us there is an awareness that we can be a real snake in the grass and we are simultaneously aware that, if we try, we can rise above our base instincts and we can soar. That the image of the dragon is so prevalent both in ancient societies and in the tattoo parlors of the present day is a point of significant importance. At the deepest level of our primeval awareness we know that we could be absolute monsters or we could become angels.
I know from my old homiletics professors that really great sermons only have one unavoidable point but I've broken several homiletical rules today, so I'm going to run with it. I have two points I really want you to leave with here today: The first is that the bible and no other holy text is or was ever intended to be a science text book and anyone who tries to insist otherwise is doing a violence to scripture and to science.
My second point is that the creation narrative in Genesis is a spiritual story, a story best understood when read along side the other creation narratives of the ancient world. Taken together they form the yen and yang of our spiritual self-understanding. Lots of religious voices want you to feel like a worm, like a hopeless sinner and this text wants you to understand that the earth you walk on is a good earth, the air you breath is good, as is the sun and moon which warm you and light your way. And you..... you..... you are made in the image of almighty God. The earth is good and you either are or could be holy, the choice is yours.
