Partners

The first two chapters of Genesis tell of the glories of God creating the world. Chapter three is a tragedy.

Or maybe it’s a coming of age story. Or maybe it’s both. Maybe it sounds like a tragedy to us because we mourn the loss of those carefree days before we grew up, just as the first humans must have mourned their loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden.

Most often you’ll hear what happens here described as “the Fall.” But it’s more than if you merely tripped on a tree root and took a fall while walking in the yard. This is “the Fall,” with a capital F. It’s usually called “the Fall of Man,” meaning “the Fall of Humanity.” Women are included, it’s not just men, though women usually get blamed for it.

“In Adam’s fall we sinned all.” That’s what the New England Primer of 1777 says. There may be some truth in that, or maybe it’s just bad poetry expressing theology that’s not much better. Let’s try to scrape off a few centuries of theological barnacles so maybe we can look at the story with fresh eyes.

The man and the woman – they have no names yet – live in what can only be called Paradise. They have been placed in this garden to till it and keep it. They labor six out of seven days and rest on the seventh day, as commanded by their creator. And their labor is rewarded with an abundance of good food.

Conditions are ideal, and all forms of life flourish to their fullest. Later generations will invent a word to describe this idyllic state of life. The word is shalom.

In this state of shalom, all creatures live in right relationship with one another and with God. As one commentator says, the environment of Eden is “so ecologically ideal that in no instance does life feed off the taking of life. Animals eat grass, not each other.” Humans, too, are vegetarian. (Paul Borgman, Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard, 27)

No living being has to die for another to survive. Every living creature that is animated by the breath of life from God respects the life of all other creatures that are animated by the breath of life from God.

The two humans, so obviously made for each other, are naked and feel no shame. They have no secrets from each other. They are innocent lovers. Yes – lovers.

Some early Christian commentators – and some still today – maintain that sex is shameful and evil, so the man and the woman could never have had sexual relations at this point in their relationship. Sex had to come after the Fall, they say, because sex is sinful. I think that attitude is hogwash, and it is not supported by this or any other biblical text.

The man and the woman have nothing to be ashamed of, and they are lovers. They feel no shame in their nakedness not because they feel no sexual desire for each other but because their desire has not been corrupted by sin. Yes, that will come later, after the Fall, as it were. But now their desire is healthy and good.

It’s natural for us to interpret this story in light of our own stories, and our own attitudes toward sex. We can’t help but do that, because part of what this story trying to do is explain our story. It explains, for example, that when a man and a woman come together, they become “one flesh.” Not literally, of course, but they are so close sometimes that they feel as if they were one.

In this story, they once were one, of course. Before God separated them as male and female, they were what the narrator simply calls “the human.” God concluded that it was not good for the human to be alone.

We should all remember that. All of us go through periods of aloneness and loneliness; times when we feel disconnected from others and unable to relate to them. As long as these are relatively brief occasions, they can be healthy, because they remind us how valuable connection with others is to our total well-being.

Long-term, though, it is not good for any of us to be alone. I’m an introvert. Where extroverts need time with people to re-energize, I need occasional time away from people to re-energize. But after awhile even introverts know that they need the company of others. Long-term, I am not my best friend. Too much time alone leads to self-destruction.

Remember the wisdom of Ecclesiastes.

“Two are better than one … For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone?” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-11)

Having once been together as one, maybe the primordial duo yearns for their original oneness. Maybe they can say to each other, “You complete me,” as if each lacked something that only the other could provide. Or maybe it’s not a lack of something to receive from the other, but rather something each wants to give to the other.

God created humans in God’s own image and likeness. Did God do this out of a desire to be revered by humans? Or did God do it out of a desire to expand the sphere of God’s love to include humans? Didn’t God create simply and freely out of love?

It wasn’t good for the human to be alone because the human needed someone to stand opposite him and be his partner. So God separated man and woman to stand against each other and with each other as partners and as lovers.

Is it so hard to accept that they are lovers? Is it so hard to imagine that they are in love with each other and in love with life itself? For their love surely extends beyond just the two of them. Not only do they get along great with each other and with all other of God’s creatures, they also get along great with God. God shows up early in the evenings, when it’s breezy and cool, and they go for walks in the garden, and they talk. They talk easily, for their relationship is open and easy.

What do they talk about? Well, what would you talk about on a long walk with God? Would you pepper God with questions about why things aren’t perfect in your world? Would you ask God all the “why” questions you could think of? “Why are there wasps? What were you thinking when you created them?” Or would you just open your mind and spirit to God and together discover where a conversation without an agenda might lead? Some people still do that today, by the way. It’s called contemplative prayer.

For the man and the woman, each day ends with a walk with God in the cool of the evening. Each day is a beautiful day in the neighborhood that God created and called Eden.

But the seeds of trouble have been planted. In the center of the garden is a certain tree.

Before God separated them into man and woman, God told them: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

If you’re a stickler for annoying details, you’ll see a discrepancy here. In the great hymn of creation from Genesis 1, God 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.”

But this version of the story comes from a different hand, and the editors who set these two stories side by side are not bothered by discrepancies in detail. Whatever God may have said before, in that other story, God now says, in this story, “Don’t eat from this tree. Do it, and you’ll die.”

Well, what do the man and the woman know of death? Have they seen any animal die, of any cause, even old age? Having little or no first-hand experience of death, they have no understanding of what death is. They are so innocent in so many ways. They are so naïve in so many ways. They are about to grow up fast.

Each of us has a coming of age story. One day, I am a child, an adolescent. The next thing I know, I’m a grownup, an adult. Maybe I could see the change coming from a long distance. Maybe it took a full season for me to feel the full ramifications of it. Or maybe it just happened, all at once, in one event that was both wrenching and exhilarating, horrible and wonderful at the same time.

Everybody loves a good coming of age story. They are among the most popular stories of all. Think of such movies as “The Lion King” and the Harry Potter adventures, such TV series as “Happy Days” and “That ‘70s Show,” such novels as Catcher in the Rye and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

We relate to these stories because we’ve all been there. We’ve gone through some of the same agonies. We’ve known some of the same triumphs. These stories may be about others, but at the same time they’re also about each of us.

That’s one reason the story of these two lovers in paradise engages us so much. We know that we’re part of their story. This story is out story, too. Maybe it happens just this way in each of our lives. Or maybe it happens in other, similar, ways with the same effect. Whatever the chain of events, we see ourselves in it.

Well, why can’t they eat from this one tree? What’s wrong with it? Why does God forbid it? As we’ll see in next week’s installment of the story, they both eat from it, willingly, knowingly, standing side by side. Having never known temptation before, not even knowing what temptation is, they are easy prey for a tempter. The results are tragic.

Some years ago, a writer named Judith Viorst wrote a book called Necessary Losses. It’s about the losses every person encounters while growing to maturity and how, as painful as they are, each of these losses is necessary if we are to achieve maturity.

Was what happened at this tree in the Garden of Eden a necessary loss? Did it have to happen so that humans could advance in knowledge and in their relationship with God? Do they have to lose their innocence before they can grow up?

I have a pill bottle that I got from my pharmacist. It has a special screw-on cap that works two ways. One way is child resistant. To unlock the cap, you have to push down a tab with the thumb of one hand while you unscrew the top with your other hand. It’s tricky enough for an adult. It’s unlikely a child could do it. But flip the cap over, and it simply screws on and off the bottle with little effort. Any child could do it, it’s so easy.

The Tree of Knowledge did not have a child-proof cap. I wonder why it didn’t. I think that if I were God, and I didn’t want people messing with that tree, I’d put something like a child-proof cap on it, or a big fence or something. But God didn’t do that. Were the man and the woman set up for a fall? Did God make it so easy to disobey that they almost had to do it? Was it necessary for them to disobey so they would grow up?

I raise that question not necessarily because I think that’s the case, but because it’s one of the many possibilities that this story raises, one of the many intriguing things that make it as relevant today as when it was first told many hundreds of years ago.

Today we’ve set the scene. Next week we’ll see the story play out. It starts, amusingly enough, with a talking snake. Does that catch your attention? It catches the attention of the man and the woman, too. And once they’re hooked, they’re easy prey for the catch.

“Partners” is a message in the series “Genesis: In the beginning…” preached Oct. 6, 2019, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgerton, Kansas, by the Rev. James Hopwood; Psalm 19:1-6, Psalm 33:6-9, Genesis 2:16-17, 3:1.

My New Book

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It’s about how we’ve used and abused the birthday of Jesus for 16 centuries, and how you can still find meaning in the story despite those who want to hijack the holiday for their own agendas.

Paradise

The first chapter of the book of Genesis tells the story of creation as a grand hymn, a great liturgy, a song of doxology, praising the majesty and wisdom and power of God. The second chapter tells the story much differently. From a high view of creation, almost a view from outer space, we move to a close-up view that’s firmly planted on the ground, literally in the dirt.

Yes, there are two creation stories, and, they don’t come close to agreeing on details of how it came about. I could run through the differences with you, but you are certainly capable of doing that for yourself if you think it’s necessary. I don’t think the differences should matter much to us, because they clearly didn’t matter to the people who put Genesis together.

I’ve seen many efforts to reconcile the differences, and they all involve either dangerous mental gymnastics or serious violence to the text. Best we should accept the attitude of the Genesis narrator, who essentially says: “Wow, Genesis 1 was a great story. Here’s another great story.”

The stories are complementary. Placed side by side, they silently comment on each other and complete each other. We shouldn’t focus on the differences, but on the similarities. We should listen for the echoes – and of those there are many.

You can tell that the two stories have different authors, though, because they refer to God differently. The creation hymn of Genesis chapter 1 refers to God as Elohim. It’s used as a name for the God of Israel, but it’s actually a generic name for deity, the way our English word “God” with a lowercase “g” is a generic name for deity. But God has a personal name, too, that’s used here for the first time.

We don’t know how to pronounce it. Many centuries ago – so many centuries that we really don’t know exactly when it was – Jews deliberately forgot how to say the name. That way, they could never inadvertently misuse God’s name. All we know are the consonants: YHWH. No one knows the vowels.

One attempt to reconstruct the name in English is Jehovah. Much more likely is Yahweh, which in Hebrew means “the one who is.” That’s one meaning of the name that God gives to Moses at the burning bush, so any use of the name before that time actually is an anachronism, something that is out of place in time. It’s used here to reinforce the assertion that the God of Israel is the creator of all that is.

When they’re reading the scriptures aloud, Jews don’t pronounce the personal name of God. Instead, since at least the time of Jesus, they substitute the word Adonai, meaning “Lord.” That’s why, in printed Bibles, you’ll find the word “Lord” printed in small capital letters more than 6,000 times. Whenever you see that, know that the personal name for God is being used.

Anachronism or not, the personal name for God is used here in the second creation story because this is a much more personal story than the one told in Genesis 1. This story demands a more personal name for God. Where Genesis 1 takes a cosmic view of creation. Genesis 2 literally gets down in the dirt.

In Genesis 1, God creates by verbal command: “Let there be…” In Genesis 2, God gets dirty hands. God forms new life by playing in the dirt. God creates the human from humus, from organic dirt, by molding him into shape and breathing life into his nostrils.

I say “he,” and the text says “he,” if only because Hebrew lacks a way to refer to someone as an “it.” This clay doll that God molds may be an “it” rather than a “he.” As we saw in Genesis chapter one, the text uses the term “ha adám,” meaning “the human.”

In these days of fierce debate over sexual identity, it may be helpful, or maybe not helpful, to suggest that “the human” may be androgynous, without gender, or combining the characteristics of both genders.

That suggestion is not modern, by the way. It’s at least a thousand years old. In his authoritative commentary on Genesis, the 11th-century French rabbi Rashi says that God created the human with two faces, one male and one female, and later separated them. (Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, 14)

Scholar John Goldingay translates the passage this way: “Yahweh God shaped a human person with dirt from the ground and blew into its nostrils living breath, and the human person became a living being.” (John Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone, 39)

Goldingay’s translation does obscure a fun play on words in the Hebrew. God creates “ha adám” from “adamáh,” meaning fertile dirt. In English we keep the play on words by saying that God creates the human from humus.

God places the human in a garden called Eden. We’ll return to that in a moment. First, let’s jump to the place where, for the first time, it is said that something in God’s creation is “not good.” Remember the litany from chapter 1: Light – good. Earth – good. Plants – good. Sun, moon and stars – good. Birds and sea creatures – good. Land animals – good. Top it all off with human beings – now it’s very good.

Now God says: “It is not good that the human should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner.” Only now, according to this version of the creation story, does God create birds and land animals. And God parades them, one by one, before the human, giving the human the authority to name each one. To the ancients, naming something gives you power over it. So in naming the birds and animals, the human claims power over them.

You can’t help but see this as a comic scene. God creates each critter, one after another, and brings it to the human to name and to see whether it’s a fitting companion. “What do want to you call this one? Giraffe. Hey, great name. What do you think about a giraffe as your partner? Too tall, you say? OK, we’ll try again.”

One by one, God creates and the human names, and the verdict is always negative. “No, no, that one will never do. Now that one – eh, close but not quite right.”

Never deterred, God has a plan. Before we talk about the plan, let’s talk about these animals. First, notice that when God creates “every animal of the field and every bird of the air,” God creates them the same way God created the human: “out of the ground.” So humans and animals alike are of the same substance. We all come from the fertile earth.

Here I cannot avoid thinking of the classic depiction by cartoonist Gary Larson. He shows God making snakes by rolling them in his hands out of clay, the way any kid would do it And God marvels, “Boy, these things are a cinch.”

But having rolled a snake out of clay, how does God give life to the snake? By breathing life into it, the same way God breathed life into the human. Genesis 1 tells us what this breath of life is called. It’s called nephesh.

Nephesh is frequently translated as “soul,” but that term is fraught with layers of misunderstanding. For the moment, suffice it to say that both humans and animals were created out of the dirt and animated by God’s breath. All humans and birds and fish and land animals have nephesh, or soul, or life from God. Of all living things, only plants don’t have nephesh.

This nephesh, or soul, is not just a part of you; it’s the whole you. God forms the human out of humus and makes the human a living being by breathing soul into it. Nephesh is a gift from God. As we’ll see in Genesis chapter 3, it does not make you immortal. The notion of an immortal soul comes from Greek philosophy, not from the Hebrew Bible. Immortality also is a gift from God, but it’s a separate gift from nephesh.

The major difference between humans and other creatures is that though we are all made of the same stuff and we are all animated by the same breath from God, only humans are made in the image of God, and only humans are given dominion over all other creatures.

Here’s the way the Genesis 2 talks about dominion: “The Lord God took the human and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” The command is the same one you’ll see on many police vehicles and badges: “to serve and protect.” In Genesis 2, we are given power and authority not to abuse and exploit but to serve and to protect.

We are servants of the earth from which we were created. “Humanity is made to serve the ground,” Goldingay says. “Humanity is both master of creation and servant of creation. Humanity and creation stand in a symbiotic relationship, a relationship of mutual dependence.” (Goldingay, 31)

So also is the relationship of male and female. A couple of weeks ago I said that Genesis 1 talks about the majesty of God’s creation rather than about details such as plumbing. Genesis 2 gets into plumbing, or at least one of the building trades.

Having failed to come up with an appropriate companion for the human, God causes a deep sleep to fall on the human. Then God removes one of the human’s ribs, and from it God fashions woman. In Genesis 1, God is a distant creator. In Genesis 2, God creates with hands-on intimacy.

When God created the human, God acted like a potter, molding the human out of clay. Now God constructs the woman, builds the woman, using material taken from the human. Only now, for the first time, can we properly speak of male and female. The human becomes a “he” only when God makes a “she” from part of the human.

As Goldingay says: “He becomes a male as opposed to female only when there is another person who stands over against him.” That’s the more literal reading of the phrase “suitable for him,” Goldingay says. She is suitable for him because she is so much like him and yet so much not like him. (Goldingay, 41)

The man is delighted. You might imagine him leaping for joy as he shouts: “At last, this one is just like me! She’s made of the same flesh and bone!”

It’s like the moment when you were certain that your spouse was the one for you. Didn’t you want to leap for joy and shout, “At last, she’s the one! At last, he’s the one!”

That’s what the man senses now – and, presumably, the woman, too. They were made for each other!

Hebrew designations for the pair work the same way they do in English. He’s ish and she’s ish-shah. He’s man, and she’s woman. No subordination is implied, though many men have tried to read hierarchy into the story.

God creates woman as “helper” and “partner” to the man. She complements him, making up for any deficiency in him. “Helper” in no way means inferior. If it did, the Bible would not so frequently refer to God as our helper. The biblical “helper-partner” is a strong arm you can rely on to stand with you when you get in a jam.

As Psalm 121 says: “I lift my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

In the New Testament, the first letter of Timothy has a very puzzling passage that advances a most curious argument. It implies that women are inferior and men have priority because the man was created first. If you refer to the order of creation from Genesis 1, you could use the same argument to say that all humans are inferior to birds and fish and insects and mice because they were created first, at least, by that account.

A lot of commentators, and not just feminists, see a different meaning in the creation order here. They say that if the woman is created after the man, that makes her, not him, the culmination of creation, the highest expression of what it means to be human. (Terrence Fretheim, God and the World in the OT, 60)

All such arguments are specious at best. There is a wide strand of patriarchal prejudice throughout the Bible, but from beginning to end, the strongest witness is egalitarian. As Galatians 3.28 attests, in Christ there is no male and female; we are all one in Christ. That’s not a statement about biology. It’s a statement of our standing before God and one another.

As people of God, we have yet to take that to heart. In many churches, for example, women pastors are routinely subjected to verbal harassment and worse by women as well as men – and the #MeToo movement has only begun to ferret out offenders in the secular world.

A couple of loose ends: The author of Genesis 2 uses the creation of woman to explain marriage customs. “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Well, that’s usually not the way it works, is it? In most traditional societies, the woman leaves her family, and she and her husband live with his extended family working the family business, whether it’s farming or carpentry or whatever.

The point must be that the man and the woman are so committed to each other that they are like one flesh, perhaps as the human that God first created was male and female in one flesh. And yes, they’re naked and not ashamed. They’re innocent. They’re lovers. They have no secrets from each other.

Lastly, there’s this business with two special trees that are smack dab in the middle of the garden. We’ll learn more about them in the next two weeks. God tells the human not to eat from one of the trees. Because the human only later is separated into man and woman, we must assume that they both hear the command. Soon we’ll see them standing side by side while they eat the fruit of the one forbidden tree.

In other words, the creation story we’ve just heard is a setup for tragedy.

“Paradise” is a message in the series “Genesis: In the beginning…” preached Sept.29, 2019, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgerton, Kansas, by the Rev. James Hopwood; Psalm 100.1-5, Psalm 95:4-6, Genesis 2:4-9, 15-25

Image

My grandson Theo lives in Omaha. His family has an annual pass to the Henry Doorly Zoo, and it’s not far from where they live, so they go often. Already at age five, Theo has an appreciation of, and real-life experience of, the scope and wonder of animal life that I got only from books until I was two or three times his age.

How creative is our God who gave us such a kaleidoscope of animal life: antelopes and zebras and giraffes and elephants and dolphins and whales and eagles and elk and moose and lions and tigers and bears – not to mention cattle and horses and pigs and dogs and cats and mice and guinea pigs and hundreds more I could name, and thousands more I could barely pronounce.

The Omaha zoo has nearly 1,000 species on exhibit, and that’s but a tiny percentage of the number that exist, even though we humans are busily rendering animal species extinct almost as fast as you could name them.

God created this vast collection of life and pronounced it all good – and God was just getting warmed up. This morning we continue to explore the hymn of creation from the first chapter of the book of Genesis, starting at verse 26.

Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, according to our likeness…”

There is so much going on in those few words. Starting with: “Let us…” Who’s us? So far, God is the only actor in this drama of creation. How is God an “us”?

We Christians, of course, automatically think of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Israelites who first heard this story and the Jews who heard it for centuries afterward had no knowledge of God as Trinity. To them, there is no “us” in God. For them, as for the human author of Genesis, God is a singular presence.

They might assume that God is consulting a council of heavenly advisers, a team of angels or the like, the way God does later in the Bible in the book of Job. Or perhaps God is using the royal plural, famously employed by kings to make themselves feel more regal. “We shall dine on the veranda.”

However you explain God’s use of the plural, God says, “Let us make human beings.” Some Bible translations, get it way wrong here. I’m talking about the King James and older editions of the New International Version, among others. They say, “Let us make man” – and that is precisely what the text does not say.

The Hebrew text says “ha adám.” The “ha” is a definite article, like our word “the.” So “ha adám” means “the adám,” the human. “Ha adám” is a generic term for humanity. If the writer wanted to specify that “ha adám” was male, the writer could have used a different word. “Ha adám” is generic. No gender, male or female, is specified or necessarily implied.

(Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary, and other works)

You might argue that when the King James came out, the word “man” may have been considered generic. Perhaps, but it was a sexist generic in which being male was considered the norm and females were strictly tag-alongs. Other terms could have been used besides “man” but were not.

Ha adám” also is not a name. Later, it will become a name – Adam, without the article “the” in front of it, for a male individual – but right now it means simply “human being.” Actually, in this context it means “human beings,” plural, because soon the story will say that God creates “them,” both male and female. So when God says, “Let us make,” God definitely does not say, “Let us make man.”

But you can see, can’t you, how that bit of mistranslation really changes the meaning of the story? God does not make man. God makes human beings, male and female. That’s the truth. Anything else is a lie. We’ve been fed a lie for centuries, and there are forces in all the churches that want to keep telling that lie because it keeps them in power, in control of others, specifically and especially women.

God says, “Let us make human beings in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion” over all the fish and birds and animals.

Whoa. Whatever does that mean? How are we made in the image and likeness of God? Some interpreters draw a distinction between the two. They say that we are made in the image of God, but we must live into the likeness of God. That is, we have to grow into the living likeness of the one in whose image we are made.

Terrence Fretheim, one of the great contemporary interpreters of Genesis, puts it this way: “Human beings are not only created in the image of God (this is who they are); they also are created to be the image of God (this is their role in the world).”

(Terrence Fretheim, God and the World in the OT, 49)

I appreciate what he’s saying. Our lives have a purpose, and sometimes we don’t live up to it.

At the same time, I agree with those interpreters who say that image and likeness are the same. Hebrew poetry works through repetition rather than rhyme. For example, Psalm 8 asks God, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8.3-4).

That’s poetic parallelism. Image and likeness are, too. They’re the same thing, poetically expressed twice. So what are they? Specifically, what is the image of God, the imago dei, that theologians have obsessed over for centuries?

Straightaway, note that it cannot be a physical likeness, because God has none. We don’t image God by looking like God, because God cannot be seen. Michelangelo and others frequently portray God as a male, and that’s colorful picture language, but it can’t be taken literally. God is above and beyond sexuality, so, to be blunt, God does not have the proper equipment to qualify as male.

The imago dei also is not an ability or capability you can name, such as intelligence or reason or will. “Image” refers to the entire human, not just some part. Therefore, it most likely refers to the relationship we have with God. Our relationship with God is such that this relationship authorizes us to represent God to the rest of creation.

We are created to mirror God to creation, to reflect God’s image to creation. We image God when we act the way God would act, if God were in our shoes. We image God when we accurately represent God and when we act on God’s behalf in the world.

(Douglas A. Knight & Amy Jill-Levine, The Meaning of the Bible, 206)

This is a radical notion that we’ll return to in a moment. First, let’s ask: how do we act on God’s behalf in the world? Verse 27 lists two ways. First, God gives us “dominion” over all living things. Second, God commissions us to “fill the earth and subdue it.”

“Dominion” is the authority to rule over and determine the fate of those dominated. There’s an interesting translation debate here. Some translations give humans dominion not only over all living things, but also over the earth itself. Others limit human dominion to the animals.

Either way, we are to exercise this dominion in a Godlike manner. We are to act as God would act. As Fretheim says, dominion is nurture, not exploitation. We do not have permission to rip things apart willy-nilly and wantonly destroy the planet. We are supposed to use it, not abuse it.

(Terrence Fretheim, The Book of Genesis, New Interpreters Bible, Vol. 1, 346)

The shepherd is the best illustration here, according to scholar Walter Brueggemann. He says: “…the task of ‘dominion’ does not have to do with exploitation and abuse. It has to do with securing the well-being of every other creature and bringing the promise of each to full fruition.”

(Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation commentary, 32)

As for “subduing” the earth, Fretheim says that basically means to cultivate it, to make it grow food. If you think that’s a stroll in the park, ask any farmer how easy it is.

“Be fruitful and multiply,” God tells the first humans, and God blesses them. All who are stuck on the concept of “original sin,” please note that sin is not original. God’s blessing is original. Sin comes later.

Also not original, according to this account, is the eating of meat. God gives humans and animals alike “every green plant for food,” But no meat. Yep, humans are intended to be vegetarian. Animals, too, apparently. Humans don’t get permission to eat meat until chapter 9 of Genesis, in the account of Noah and the great flood.

What is original, and revolutionary, in this account, is the idea that every human being is created in God’s image. Racists and nationalists still deny that truth today. Historian Jill Lepore makes the helpful point that patriots love their country, but nationalism is “less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries” and their people.

(Jill Lepore, This America, 23)

Both nationalism and racism are systems of hate, and hate flourishes best when you deny that those you hate are fully human. Genesis affirms that all humans are blessed by God and bear God’s image.

When Genesis was written, the idea must have been mind-blowing. People were used to saying that kings were created in a god’s image. That’s how kings claimed authority to rule. They represented the gods. But Genesis says, no, no. Every human being represents God.

That’s huge. Ancient Sumerians believed that the gods created humans to be their slaves. Ancient Egyptians believed that humans were the not even slaves of the gods; they were more like cattle. Genesis firmly says, no! Humans are of great worth because they are made in God’s image.

And not just some humans. All humans. And not just men, but male and female alike. And neither of them individually, but only together. Read it again: “So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them.” That can be understood to mean that God’s image is never present in a male alone, or a female alone. God’s image is present only in men and women together. Exclude one sex or another from your group and you also exclude the image of God. If we really believed that, wouldn’t that change the way the world works?

Having created the world, and animals and humans to fill it, God closes the sixth day of creation by announcing that it’s all very good. Not just good, as God said already several times, but very good. So on the seventh day, God rests, and God blesses it and dedicates it as a day of rest. That’s a Saturday, by the way, and that’s why Jews and others make Saturday their day of rest. Understand, it’s not just God who rests on the seventh day. All creation rests.

God does not rest because God is worn out from creating everything. God rests because it’s the right thing to do. Rest is God’s shalom. Shalom is the state of peace and fulfillment that God wishes for all creation. To rest means to stop work and enjoy yourself. God models it for us from the very start.

It’s another radical idea that Genesis gives the world. Quit working one day out of seven to do nothing? You’ve got to be kidding! What kind of craziness is this?

How does God rest? Isaiah 66.1 gives us a wonderful image. “Thus says the Lord: Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool.” You can’t take it literally, of course. But let your imagination savor the image of our creator, feet propped up on earth, leaning back to admire it all.

And, oh, there’s so much to admire! And, yes, it’s very good.

Next week we’ll hear another version of how God created things. Yes, there are two versions of the story, and if you mix them up, or get the details entangled, you’ll misunderstand both of them. Before we go to the second story, be sure to take delight in this one. The hymn of creation in Genesis 1 is one of the great marvels of human literature.

“Image” is a message in the series “Genesis: In the beginning…” preached Sept.22, 2019, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgerton, Kansas, by the Rev. James Hopwood; Psalm 104.24-33, Genesis 1.26-2.3

Creation

“Creation” is a message in the series “Genesis: In the beginning…” preached Sept.15, 2019, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgerton, Kansas, by the Rev. James Hopwood; Psalm 104.1-5,10-15, Genesis 1.1-25

In Hebrew, the first word of the first book of the Bible is Beresith, meaning “beginning.” So that’s how the book is titled in the Hebrew Bible. The first Greek translation preferred another word, meaning “origin” or “generation,” and that’s how we get the English title “Genesis.”

The first chapter of Genesis is poetry and liturgy. It’s a hymn of creation. It’s doxology. It’s a proclamation of faith in the God of creation and a declaration of the good of God’s creation.

Throughout this account, God is the leading actor, the prime mover. Genesis confidently asserts that God created all that is. The Hebrew word for “create” is bara. It always refers to an act of God. It never refers to an act by anyone but God. Only God is creator.

Throughout this account, God is called Elohim. Just as God is a generic name for deity, so is Elohim. Still, Elohim is commonly used as a name for the God of Israel. By using the name Elohim, Genesis is telling us that the God of Israel is creator of the world, and only the God of Israel, not any other gods you might name. Elohim has a personal name, too, that we’ll encounter later in Genesis.

Many of us are used to hearing the opening words of Genesis as, “In the beginning, God created…” There’s great gravity in that. “In the beginning, God…” How else could it be? God is the prime mover, so it all begins with God.

However, most modern translations word it differently. They say, “When God began to create…” The Hebrew allows for both translations, and there’s debate among scholars as to which rendering is best.

The question is whether God creates the universe out of nothing – ex nihilo, as the Latin has it – or perhaps God makes it out of something that already exists, though you might presume that God created that, too – perhaps right before this story starts.

The New Revised Standard Version tries to have it both ways. It says: “In the beginning, when God created…”

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the 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.

The word when does seem to imply that God starts with something. That something is a formless void. In Hebrew, that’s tohu wa bohu. That expression is so much fun to say – tohu wa bohu – that the English language has taken it in as a loan word, tohubohu. It means chaos or confusion. Work it into a party conversation, and you’ll amaze your friends: tohubohu.

When God starts to create the earth, it is a formless void: a vast, bottomless, expanse of water called the Deep. Hovering over the Deep is ruach Elohim – a wind from God, the breath of God, the Spirit of God. Commentators say it broods over the Deep the way a hen broods over her eggs; it flutters over the Deep the way an eagle flutters over her young. There is tension implied, a sense of expectation and anticipation. Something big is about to happen.

God says, “Let there be light.” And there is light. Just like that. God’s word is that powerful. God speaks, and it is so. But God’s word is more than speech. God’s word is person.

The gospel of John tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and “All things came into being through him” (John 1.1-3). This is the Son whom the Apostle Paul says “is the image of the invisible God, the one who is first over all creation, because all things were created by him … and through him and for him” (Colossians 1.15-16, CEB)

God sees that the light is good. God does good work. It’s exactly what God intended it to be. Now God separates light from darkness, calling them day and night. Because night came first, the people of Israel have always marked the start of each new day in the evening, at sunset rather than at sunrise. That first evening and morning complete the first day. It’s a Sunday, by the way.

You may ask, “How can there be day and night when the sun hasn’t been created yet?” Genesis does not say. Nor does it seem to care. Poetry has its own logic.

God says, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And it is done.

Instead of “dome,” some translations say “firmament” or “vault” or “expanse.” The word “firmament” comes from Latin and is the least descriptive of all the terms. What God is doing here is inserting a hard dome into the waters to create space between the waters above and the waters below. The Hebrew word suggests a hammered-out metal bowl. Think of this dome as a big metal mixing bowl turned upside down.

God calls the dome Sky. In other accounts, we’ll learn that the sky has slots or doors in it that swing open to let the waters above fall down as rain. But there’s nothing solid for the rain to fall on yet, so on the third day, God rolls back the waters under the dome so that dry land can appear. God calls the dry land Earth and the waters Seas. God declares these things to be good, too.

Having prepared proper space for life, God creates life, starting with vegetation of all kinds. God gives these plants and trees the freedom to reproduce after their own kind through seeds. They now become God’s sub-creators, subcontractors in creation.

On day four, God hangs lights in the dome of the sky. The two great lights – the sun and the moon – separate the day from the night. They travel across the dome of the sky and return, day after day, night after night. Lesser lights – planets and stars – rule the night. The movements of these celestial objects mark the passage of time and are signs of the passing seasons as well.

Thus Genesis declares that all the sun gods and moon gods and planet gods of other nations are nothing but lights in the sky, created by the one and only true God, Elohim. They’re not even creatures with a will or consciousness. As the Isaac Watts hymn says, “The moon shines full at God’s command and all the stars obey.”

This isn’t the first time the Genesis story pushes back against the religions of other nations. Israel shares with all ancient nations certain beliefs about how the universe is put together, including the sky as an inverted bowl and waters above and below it. But Genesis offers a different take on how the universe got this way – specifically who did it and why.

The word we heard earlier translated as Deep is in Hebrew tehom. It’s not so much a description of something as it is a name of someone. Her name is Tiamat. In the creation myths of many ancient peoples, she’s a primordial sea monster. She is slain by a young god who’s variously named Baal or Ba’al or Bel or Hadad or Marduk. Whatever his name, this god splits her watery corpse in two and places the dome of the world in between to create the world.

Not so, Genesis says, without bothering to even mention the other stories. God created all this by God’s powerful Word. Still, references to other creation stories occasionally creep into the biblical accounts, where Tiamat is given the name Rahab. Isaiah 51.9 says, “Was it not you, Lord, who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?”

Now you see one of the reasons some scholars insist that God must have created the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing. They want to avoid the idea that creation involved God slaying a sea dragon. On the other hand, some scholars want the sea dragon to be there, because they can then argue that God didn’t create evil; it was there all along.

One off the things that makes theology so fascinating, and so frustrating, is that not only are there layers of meaning in the biblical texts themselves; there also are layers of intent and mistrust and deception in each interpreter. Including, of course, you and me.

On the fifth day, God fills the seas with swarms of living creatures and fills the skies with flocks of birds. The sea creatures include sea monsters, though not the primordial kind, like Rahab or Tiamat. These are ordinary sea monsters like the whale and the shark and the octopus.

Other biblical texts give some sea monsters names: Leviathan and Behemoth. It’s uncertain whether these refer to a primordial sea monster or your ordinary sea monster. The popularity of the legend of the Loch Ness Monster testifies that a couple thousand years after these texts were composed, we’re still fascinated by the idea of mysterious dragons from the sea.

Anyway, having created fish and birds and sea monsters, too, God blesses them all. “Be fruitful and multiply,” God says, again giving them freedom to reproduce after their kind.

On the sixth day, God creates land creatures of all kinds: wild animals that can’t be tamed and creeping critters and cattle and domesticated animals, too. And God announces that it’s all good. That doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. It means that it’s what God intends, what God had in mind in creating it.

Everything has a purpose. Everything works together the way God purposed. And, as Hebrew thinking will later tell us, everything is connected. Everything is related. And all things are supposed to work together in harmony, in shalom.

But God isn’t done creating yet. Next, God will say, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness…” Very soon, things will start to get sticky.

That’s where we’ll pick up the story next Sunday. But before we leave today’s account, there are likely some stray thoughts we ought to corral.

First, what can we make of this story? It has great beauty and spiritual power. It declares emphatically that God is creator. God created all there is, obviously with great care and love. But…

Is it true? That’s what we children of the Enlightenment want to know. That’s the question we’ve been trained all our lives to ask. Is the story true? Well, true in what sense? This is not a scientific account of creation. If you insist that it is, please explain to me this business with the metal dome and waters above and below the earth. Call it a metaphor, if you like, but you can’t take it literally.

No, Genesis has other things on its mind. When we ask it to provide a scientific explanation of the way things are, we’re missing the point. Genesis wants to talk about the majesty of God’s creation. We want it to talk about plumbing and wiring. About those things, this creation hymn cares very little

There are ways you can harmonize Genesis with the science of any age at any time – and they all involve standing on your head while performing great feats of mental gymnastics and the kinds of contortions that you normally see only at a show by Cirque du Soleil.

Still, consider this thought. Today we think the dome is a fantastic notion. We know there’s nothing hard and metallic up in the sky because we’ve been up there many times. We’ve gone to the moon and back, and we’ve sent satellites far beyond. There is no metal dome.

But have you ever seen pictures of the earth from space? There is a domelike thing that’s very visible. It’s called the ozone layer. It protects us from harmful radiation from the sun. Alas, our use of certain chemicals and gases have poked holes in the ozone layer. An international treaty in 1987 greatly cut back the use of one kind of fluorocarbon gas. But we’re replacing it with another kind of fluorocarbon gas. This one doesn’t destroy ozone, but it does trap heat.

So we’re living in this greenhouse, where heat can’t escape, and now we’re threatened by global warming that by the end of this century could kill half the world and make the surviving half wish they were dead.

God created the world, and God called it good. God’s creation is still good. But we’re destroying it. As we’ll see next week, we are commissioned to preserve it, not destroy it.

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! When I look at the sky, the work of your hand, and the moon and the stars that you have placed there, I wonder how it is that you care so much for me and others like me. But I am so thankful, Lord, so thankful that you do care.

Amen.