Genesis 1:1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11
Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Two giant angels clothed in white danced in front of me, as I
watched clouds of stars swirl in the empty darkness of space. As the angels
moved, my seat shook, and I heard a loud boom like a jet engine. As the waves
of the primordial sea crashed all around me, strong jets of cold water squirted
into my face, as if they were aimed right at my glasses. Was I dreaming? Caught
up in an ecstatic vision of the creation of the universe? No, I was watching an
interactive show at the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky, and I was very
unhappy with this baptism into the mysteries of creationism. There was
something about this film presentation, with its condescending argument for a
literal interpretation of Genesis, that made me feel as if I were being spit
upon and purposefully blinded by this water, rather than drawn into the reality
of the creation story.
Yes, last Saturday, I accompanied my curious
adult children to the Creation Museum. The multimillion dollar museum is the
brainchild of “New Earth Creationists.” They believe that the universe was
created in six literal days and is only about six thousand years old. They
believe that Adam and Eve lived with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, and that
dinosaurs accompanied Noah on the Ark. They believe that Charles Darwin and,
really, most modern scientists, are deluded at best. Most of all, they believe
that holding fast to an unyieldingly
literal interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis is the only way for
humans to keep a strong faith in Jesus Christ and to live as true Christians.
Their organization is called, “The Answers in Genesis,” and it is indeed in
Genesis that they find all of the
answers to life’s questions.
I could spend my whole sermon time
today mocking the exhibits at the Creation Museum. It would be an easy way to
get some laughs, and it would certainly make us feel superior and happy with
our own enlightened minds. I am going to try to resist the temptation, however,
even if the lectionary did hand the reading from Genesis 1 to me today on a
platter. I don’t think that it hurts me
to remember that, with these Christians who built a showpiece to “New Earth
Creationism,” I actually do share a love for the creation story. I believe that
it can speak to us today. Instead of totally poking fun, we could perhaps try
to find some common ground.
First, we both believe that Genesis 1
tells us that God creates order out of chaos. Hear a close Hebrew translation of
the first verse of our scriptures: “When God was about to create heaven and
earth, the earth was a chaos, unformed, and on the chaotic waters’ face there
was darkness.”[1] We
human beings can all relate to chaos and darkness. The ancient Israelites wrote
down this account of creation during the chaotic years of the Babylonian exile,
after the tumultuous and frightening destruction of their city, of their
Temple, and of their whole way of life. “At least the orderly succession of day
and night remains the same,” the priestly writers must have thought in their
exile. “At least the order of light and dark, winter and summer, land and sea
can’t be taken away from us.[2]”
Today, too, as we face chaos in our lives and in our world, there is something
about the rhythm of the days and the seasons the comforts us. There is
something about sitting at the sea shore and watching the waves touch the sand,
or counting the rings in the trunks of a tree stump, or tracing the symmetry of
a seashell or a butterfly wing, that brings order to our anxious minds.
It is reassuring to trust in the
mighty ordering power of God. At the Creation Museum, they too make a big deal
about the chaos of the modern world. As visitors walk through dark tunnels
filled with grim images of crime, drugs, murder, pornography, abandoned church
buildings, and unruly teenagers, signs preach that all of this disorder has
come about through the specific abandonment of a literal belief in the story of
Creation. For these Christians, the first chapters of Genesis are somehow the
firm structure that holds chaos at bay. They cling with all their being to the
black and white words on the pages of the Bible.
While I fear chaos as much as anyone,
I find my comfort, instead, in God’s ongoing
creation. For me, Creation was not something that God did once 6000 years ago in
the short span of six days. What is important to me is that God continues to
order and sustain creation, even now. God continues to send God’s strong,
ordering Spirit into our chaotic world. Indeed, in Mark’s Gospel, we see God’s
Spirit come down to earth again at Jesus’ baptism. Mark is deliberately echoing
Genesis when he describes Jesus going down into the dark, chaotic waters of the
Jordan and emerging into the order of the light of day. In Jesus’ baptism, God’s
loving and creating Spirit also swoops back down to earth from the heavens. I
was interested to learn that the “tear” in the heavens that Mark describes is
not, in Greek, a dove-sized door of some kind that will close up again as soon
as the baptism is over. The Greek word refers to an opening that will keep
heaven and earth in permanent communion.[3]
In Jesus, God begins God’s “new creation:” A creation in which God has permanently
joined heaven and earth. Our Christian struggle is not to fight reason and
scientific discovery in order to remain true to an ancient story. Our Christian
struggle is rather to fight our own despair and apathy in order to keep alive the
promise of our Christian hope: hope that
the continued ordering power of God’s justice will one day put an end to all of
the disorder in our world.
Secondly, the Creationists and I
would agree about the importance of God's Word. In the creation
stories of Israel’s neighbors, the world comes into being through warfare among
the gods. The Babylonian creation story, for example, describes how the goddess
Tiamat is brutally slaughtered by her rebellious children in the process of
creating the world. The Hebrew
Scriptures, in contrast, tell us that God peacefully speaks the world into
being. Made in God’s image, we human beings create with language, too. We
give birth to beauty and wisdom with our words. And yet we create hurt and destruction,
as well. I couldn’t help but think about the recent terror attacks in France as
I reflected on the power of language this week. Human fundamentalists of all
kinds will fight to the death to defend the holiness of divine words on the
pages of a book. Other human beings can throw sharp words around like knives,
with careless and hurtful abandon. Our God, however, creates and preserves not
with violence, but through the deliberate use of the
rational structure of language. In Genesis and again at Jesus’ baptism, God
speaks, and that loving speech transforms. Today, God speaks through and in us.
When the twelve new Christians were baptized in Ephesus, our reading from Acts
tells us that the Holy Spirit gave them, too, the gift of words. At their
baptisms, they were not given swords with which to conquer or super-powers with
which to bring about instant change. They began to speak in tongues and to
prophecy. Their new relationship with Jesus Christ opened their lips to speak
the Good News of God’s love and justice: the Good News of love and justice that
transforms creation.
One of my favorite poems is Christian
Wiman’s “Every Riven Thing.” Wiman turns the phrase, “God goes belonging to
every riven thing he’s made” in several different ways, emphasizing God’s
presence with us in creation. That’s the ultimate answer to the chaos and
tragedy of our lives, isn’t it? That God is with us. That God is with me and
you and every living plant and creature on “this fragile earth, our island
home.” That God loves every blade of grass and sustains every human breath.
That God became flesh so that we might understand God’s love and join with God
in tending God’s beloved creation. I believe that even the folks at the Creation
Museum would probably agree with me in the truth of Wiman’s last stanza:
“God goes belonging to every riven
thing. He’s made
The things that bring him near,
Made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
Apart from what man knows,
[1]
Translation taken from The Torah: A
Women’s Commentary (New York: Women of Reform Judaism, 2008), 5.
[2]
Richard Boyce, Genesis 1:1-5. Found in Feasting
on the Word, Year B, Volume 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,
2008), 221.
[3]
John Shea, Following Love into Mystery:
The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Teachers and Preachers (Collegeville,
Minn: Liturgical Press, 2010), 65.
[4]
Christian Wiman, Every Riven Thing, (New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2010), 24-25.
