We Got Trouble

Oh we got trouble, right here in America, and it starts with T and it rhymes with tater, and it stands for Traitor Trump.

The latest outrage is the betrayal of the Kurds. When Trump first took office, he began abandoning treaties, loudly announcing to the world that a treaty with the United States isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Now he’s abandoning a trusted ally, loudly announcing to all who don’t know it already that making an alliance with the United States is setting yourself up to be stabbed in the back.

A few years ago, America had a fair reputation worldwide. Now it’s widely considered a rogue nation. It has become one of those shithole countries Trump is always bashing. It makes me feel ashamed.

The Democrat-led House is right to begin impeachment of this immoral con artist. Would that some invertebrates in both House and Senate would step up to rid us of this menace before he announces that Article Two of the Constitution says he can do anything he wants, so he’s disbanding Congress altogether.

You think he won’t try? He has spent nearly three years surrounding himself with amoral yes men who willingly do his bidding, no matter how unlawful it is. And don’t think, my “conservative” friends, that you will be left unscathed. When real elections are abolished and he no longer needs your vote, he’ll grind you underfoot like the vermin he thinks you are.

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

Hot off the press, more or less, is my new book: Keeping Christmas: Finding Joy in a Season of Excess and Strife.

It’s available on Amazon at full cover price ($17) or at Cokesbury.com for $12.27. Go Cokesbury!

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