We Are Responsible

Genesis 1:1-2:4

So, I want to be completely honest: the Genesis creation story is not a video recording of the first days of the earth. (The second creation story isn’t a videotape, either. That’s right. There are two!) This truth makes some people uncomfortable. This truth makes other people angry. Truth has a tendency to do that these days, right?

Understand clearly though…when I tell you that this text is not a videotaped account of the beginnings of the earth, I am not saying that this text doesn’t speak truth. It just speaks a different truth than that literal truth to which so many people like to cling. In fact, the first creation story of the Book of Genesis tells us three truths, all of which I think we really need to hear today.

First, you should know this. This text, even though it appears at the very beginning of the Bible was actually written fairly late in the life of our ancestors in faith. It was written during the exile. The people had been dragged from their homeland into a foreign place. They were prisoners in someone else’s land. It would not be an understatement to say that this would have been as shocking to our ancestors as it would be if we, as Americans, were overrun and carried away by our conquerors. The unimaginable had happened. Just accepting that truth would have been brutally difficult. (Think of 9/11 and how many people just stood there with slack jaws and thought, “This is impossible!”) Our ancestors were sure that they were God’s chosen people. They were absolutely convinced that God would never allow this to happen to them. Then, it did.

What followed was an immense period of chaos. They were strangers in a strange land. They woke with the daily question, “Where am I? What is happening here? How can this possibly be the case? Where is God?” These are exactly the kinds of questions that the writer of the first creation story in the Book of Genesis wanted to take up. I, for one, consider these questions to be just as relevant today as they would have been in the 8th century B.C.

So, the first truth is that this story is not for people who want to know a literal account of the creation of the world. I’m going to be honest with you there. In my opinion, talk to a good scientist if you want to understand that! However, if you are even vaguely familiar with the feeling that the world is not what it should be, that things are out of whack, you may want to listen to Genesis, after all. This story is for any of us who want to figure out where God is in the midst of chaos and what in the world we might be called to do.

The people were literally living in a dark time in their collective life. So, the Genesis writer begins with darkness. Everything is formless and void—“a big soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blankness,” and yet, even then, the Spirit of God was present, moving across the face of the earth. In other words, before there was anything, there was God. And the very first thing that God did was call the light into existence: “And God saw that the light was good!” There was day and night. Day one.

Can’t you remember the time, literally, when you, as a child were afraid of the dark and someone gave you your very own flashlight? How grateful were you? Didn’t that change everything? The basement wasn’t nearly as scary with the lights on, right? The flashlight when you shined it under the bed or into the closet guaranteed no monsters!

Can’t you remember the times when the darkness wasn’t in the basement but was inside of you, instead? It was the cumulative force of a series of losses and changes and horrors that didn’t even have to touch you directly but, in fact touched you anyway, because you are a feeling, caring human being. You just absorbed so much pain that the light inside you flickered and then went out. And sitting in that darkness, the silence was deafening. That darkness overwhelmed you until someone whom God sent (in my experience) called the light into being again. They sat with you. They held your hand. They comforted you with a terribly bad joke that made you smile despite your best efforts. And God saw the light and that light was good!

If the first order of business in the midst of chaos is to turn the lights back on, then the second order of business is to repopulate the world and bring order back to the way things work. So, there is not just day, there is also night. There are not just seas, there are also dry lands. There is every kind of plant—some that bear seeds and some that bear fruit and some that just make shade for the day when you’ve overheated. There are stars and a moon and a sun. There are animals of every shape and size on the land and fishes and all sorts of other creatures in the sea.

God looks and sees that the whole blooming creation is good. So, God tells every living creature to reproduce, to prosper, to fill the earth. Understand, the second great truth that God tells is that everything that swims in the seas or the lakes, every animal that walks the earth, every bird that flies through the skies, is fundamentally and undeniably a sacred creature. God’s glory and grace and life-giving force are reflected in the diversity of living things that populate this earth and in the order with which all those living things exist. There is an essential harmony to the world—an order of things—a shalom. That harmony is God’s work in the world.

So, not only has God been present from the time before anything existed, God has always been working on the side of order in this world rather than chaos. That order comes not from everything being like everything else. That order comes from all the diverse creatures of this world working together in harmony.

I remember the place where this truth came to life for me. I was standing in the rain forest in Brazil. As a child of the midwestern United States, I was used to a fairly narrow set of species of birds and animals and fish around me. I remember learning about the thousands of species of living things which could exist in a single acre of rain forest. That was the moment for me when I concluded at a gut level that God’s great delight in this world is not in everything being homogenous but in just how amazingly and wonderfully different things can be. Maybe God thinks a praying mantis or a three toed sloth or a blue booby bird that cannot even fly are “the bomb.” Maybe the fact that people can look and think and feel differently, and love differently, and even call God by different names is a part of what God loves best about this world.

So, God has been a part of this world forever. And, everything that is, is good in God’s eyes. On the sixth day, in the story of Genesis, God creates human beings. Again, I want to say to you, loudly and clearly, that in my opinion, the point here is not that these were literal days. Rather, I think of them as verses in this lyrical song or even love poem about God’s relationship to the world. The point is that human beings were the last thing that God created in this world. Now, we can debate whether this means that human beings were an afterthought or were in fact God’s crowning achievement. I happen to lean on the side of thinking that we were God’s greatest hope.

What I think that God hoped for was that we would be a part of maintaining the shalom—the harmony—of creation. In the King James version of the Bible, (the one that sounds really nice and Shakespearean but has done some serious damage over the years), God creates human beings and gives us “dominion” over the earth and all it’s creatures. That word, “dominion” is such a dangerous word. It feels like God is telling us to dominate things. And, a lot of folks who have profoundly destroyed the harmony of this world have acted with such a view.

There is a way to farm that can be a source of harmony. That way is not to create giant corporate farms that produce boneless chicken breasts like a factory, pumping them full of chemicals, too.

There is a way to harvest the fish of the sea. However, like a good farmer, the good fisherman cares as much about preserving the fishery as he or she worries about today’s catch.

There is a way of developing land in which human beings can live in a place without destroying it. This involves actually caring about what we do with our trash. (Here’s a hint folks—stop throwing your Starbucks cups in the prairie at Open Lands!).

There is a way of life in which the things around us are something more than just resources to be plundered and sold. There is a way of life in which the thought that we actually have to breathe the air that’s around us might shape the choices we make about what we put into that air. There is a way of life in which we look at fellow human beings in less developed countries and we figure out how to help them develop without having to make every mistake that we have made and harm the earth in the ways that we have harmed it.

All of this is the third great truth of the creation story. God is still present in this world. God is working on the side of diversity and harmony. And, God, created us…but not to dominate the world. Rather, God created us to be caretakers and stewards of creation. If there is chaos, we are responsible—with God’s help—to bring that chaos back into order.

How do we do that? We do it, like most other things, by starting with ourselves. We make our homes and our cars more energy efficient. We choose to eat in sustainable ways and to support people who farm in sustainable ways. We care about how much trash we produce and we try to recycle. We have a pet or two or three because nothing teaches us or our children about responsibility and care and harmony in quite the same way.

And then, we turn our eyes to the larger world. Air quality standards and gas milage guidelines and wilderness protections are all being decreased. Whole species are disappearing. The climate is changing. We are responsible. God made us that way. What do you think that God is calling us to do?