Sermon: The Beginning

This sermon is the first in a nine-month series in which we will tell the story of Scripture from Creation to the early Church, using the Narrative Lectionary readings.

Genesis 2:4-7, Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-8

We are beginning our nine-month long journey through our sacred story this morning with, naturally, the story of how it all began — creation. During these nine months, we will get to know our story better. We may be surprised by what parts of this story we like and identify with. We may be surprised by what parts of this story we dislike and don’t want to ever hear again.  When I was talking about this series with Eli Ramer, who is Jewish, he said we need to emphasize a Jewish way to view Scripture, which he summarized as “You get to read this on your own and you get to argue with it as much as you want.” 

So, back to creation.  The children’s story was a retelling of the first creation story, found in Genesis 1. We’re going to be looking at the second creation story, found in Genesis 2, and the story of the “fall” in Genesis 3. Are you ready? Read Genesis 2:4-7, 15.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created (Gen. 2:4).

I want to talk about those generations because we won’t know our place in creation and who we are if we don’t talk about these generations. Because creation didn’t begin with God creating us or the dry land or animals or the plants — these things that matter so much to us. Creation began generations  upon generations upon generations ago, long before humans and the things we tend to care about were created. 

So we’re going to do some deep time work here. So we’re going to do a timeline, using people, to illustrate those generations. The cosmologist Carl Sagan came up with this idea of condensing the entire story of the universe into a year. In this timeline, one month is equivalent to one billion years, one hour is just a bit over 1.2 million years: 

• January 1: The big bang!  Or as one scientist put it, roughly 13.5 billion years ago,“in a cosmic embrace, time and the universe are created.”  The formation of the first atoms comes soon after this, soon meaning about several hundreds of thousands of years later.
• February 1: One million years after the Big Bang, we have the formation of the oldest stars and galaxies. 
• March 1: Roughly 11 billion years ago, formation of the Milky Way.
• July 7: 4.5 billion years ago — Formation of the planets in our solar system.
• August 1: 4 billion years ago — bacteria come onto the planet.
• Nov. 20: 1.3 billion years ago — Atmosphere is created on earth. 
• Dec. 14: 500 million years ago — First vertebrates (fish). This is roughly the start of our creation story.
• Dec. 16: 440 million years ago — The first plants. When do you think we come about? 
• Dec. 31, 23:57: 60 million years ago — The first homo sapiens appear on the earth.

So these are the generations before creation begins.  Let’s keep this in perspective as we go forward: Most of creation existed for billions of years before we ever came on the scene. We are latecomers — the youngest of all creation.  Robin Wall Kimmerer from Braiding Sweetgrass, put its this way:

“In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as ‘the younger brothers of Creation.’ We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”

Then Creator God formed an earth creature (man) from the dust of the ground and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life.  And the earth creature (man) became a living being (Gen. 2:7).

You are probably used to hearing this as “God formed a man from the dust of the ground…” The Hebrew word for ground is adamah: “God formed a man from the dust of the adamah.” And the word for “man” — adam — comes from that word for ground — adamah.  So, God formed an adam from the dust of the adamah. We’ve morphed adam into the proper name Adam, like Adam is the first dude’s name. It could have been Bill or George, but it just happened to be Adam. No, adam is the name for all of us. We are earth creatures, earthlings. We know this intuitively. The word for us in languages derived from Latin—human, hombre—comes from the same root as humus, the word for earth, for soil.

Now it’s true we are more than earth, than dust. The Creator breathed into us the ruah, the enlivening Spirit — the breath of life. The creation story in Genesis 1 says that we are made in the image of the Creator. 

Okay, so now we know who we are, right, according to the story? Now, we’re going to find out why we are here on earth.

Creator God took the earth creature and put them in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it (Gen. 2:15).

Our purpose, our calling, is to till and keep God’s earth.  Those two verbs — till and keep — don’t sound all that meaningful in English, but they are very important verbs in Hebrew. To till — avod — comes from a Hebrew word that means to work, with a connotation of serving.  It could be translated as “serve” as it is many times elsewhere in the Bible. In fact, this is the only place where it’s translated as “till.” When Joshua says, “Choose this day whom you will serve; as for me and my household, we will serve God,” the word “serve” is the same word that is translated as “till” in our story. So, a more helpful translation might be to say that our purpose, our calling, is to serve the earth.

To keep is from the same Hebrew verb used in the benediction “God bless you and keep you.” It has a connotation of guarding, protecting. Indigenous people are often called water and soil protectors — and this is the same connotation as that.  And, in fact, we are all called to be earth protectors — to protect what God created.

Okay, so far, so good. But… Read Genesis 2:16-17, 3:1-8

We knew this was coming, right?  So right off the bat we have to say that this story comes with a lot of baggage, especially for women. For millennia, it has been interpreted as Eve introducing sin into the world — she’s the cause of original sin. No Biblical scholar takes that interpretation seriously. It’s not what they think this story is about.

So what is it about? How much time do we have? Years ago, Bill Moyers convened a group of scholars to talk about the book of Genesis. The show about this story is fascinating — seven different scholars, Jewish, Christian, male, female, more orthodox, more progressive — find so many different shades of meaning in the story, so many different ways that the story speaks to our human condition, so many different things to argue about with each other. Which is exactly what a good story is supposed to do. Good stories don’t have one easy, right way of interpreting them — they are stories you go back to again and again, hearing something different in it each time, in different periods of your life, depending on whom you are listening to it with.  It’s a story you can wrestle with for your entire life. 

Having said that, most people agree that this story is about human freedom. To be made in the image of God means that we, like God, have the freedom and ability to make choices. We have free will.  We can choose our own values, choose the sorts of lives we want to lead, choose the sorts of people we want to be. We are somewhat bound by our biology — our choices are not unlimited, but there’s a lot of wiggle room with us — a lot of freedom — and a lot of capacity for creativity because of that.  But then, there’s also the capacity to choose what isn’t good, what isn’t life-giving. We — alone among the creatures — can choose to ignore the limits that God has put in place to keep creation functioning harmoniously.

In this story, that limit is: Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, we don’t know exactly why this prohibition is given, and it’s been much debated and will continue to be for a very long time. But the limit underscores that human beings are not God. They are the created, not the Creator. They are finite in lifespan and in knowledge; God is not. They may co-create with God, but always within the framework or limits that God has provided.  And, if they don’t, if they ignore this limit, they will die. They won’t be able to make it.

The temptation, as voiced by the serpent, is the opposite of this — it is to not be finite or subservient to the Creator. It is to become a god. The serpent says, “You will not die (if you eat of the tree) for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like god.”  One commentator said that in his tradition, they call this story a rebellion upwards rather than a fall downwards. Humans are given this place in creation, and this purpose of serving and protecting the earth, but they don’t like it. They want to be more. They want to punch up. They want to be like a god.

How are the ways we see this temptation — this wanting to be as gods, to be without limits — happening in our world today? What about developing nuclear weapons so powerful and plentiful they can wipe out all life on this planet several times over? What about consistently consuming and polluting beyond the carrying capacity of our Earth? What about trying to create a new consciousness, a new intelligence that has a 10% chance of wiping out life on earth? What about seeing ourselves as superior to other humans?  What about seeing ourselves as the crown of creation, as Kimmerer said, as superior to, well, everything else in the created world? 

So what do we know?

• We are earth creatures, made from this earth and not separate from it. 
• We have been given a sacred calling to serve and protect creation — the water, the air, and all the creatures that fly and swim in the water and air, the green and growing things that live upon the earth and the two leggeds and many leggeds and no leggeds that move upon it. 
• We have been made in the image of the Creator, and embued with the sacred gift of freedom. 
• We have also been given the gift of sacred limits, as well as teachers who can show us what those limits are and how to live within them. (Kimmerer)

Thanks be to the Gift Giver, the Creator.