The Tie That Binds: Creation
Genesis 1, Psalm 8
June 14, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
The worship service in which this sermon was delivered may be viewed at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwwIxgIqK4Q
This is the second week in our worship series called The Tie That Binds. Some of the ideas for this series came from an intergenerational conference held at a national retreat center where a whole lot of people were very much occupying the same places together for a whole week. I chose to lift up the idea of connections in this time when we cannot be together physically so that we might appreciate the other ties that bind us to God and to each other.
Last week we talked about the goodness of unity when members of households and members of nations can dwell together in peace. Today, we step back from our roles as family members, from our roles as citizens, to consider the bigger picture – what is our place in creation?
We began with reading from Genesis 1. We often hear familiar Bible passages as if they were written for us, which in a way they were, and in a context similar to ours, which they were not. The stories in the book of Genesis were particularly shaped in the time when the people of Judah were in exile. Living far from home, missing the places where they had worshipped God, they drew from a deep well of sacred memory. Most scholars believe that Genesis was written down after they returned to their homeland. The stories of beginnings – the creation of the world and the creation of a covenant people – were necessary to help them begin life together again. Genesis began to be a written book some 500 years before the time of Jesus. That means we are 2500 years from those who shaped these stories. For thousands of years before our time, millions of people read the same words we read now and wondered. They wondered at the power and order present in the world they observed. They marveled at beauty and diversity and abundance of color and shape and sounds. They shrank before the sheer might of wind and water and earthquakes and wild animals.
Imagine the expanse of history that separates us from those before us. Imagine that people told the stories of Genesis around campfires in the times when there was no light pollution to dim the stars, and when they believed the world was flat and if you travelled too far you would fall off, and before anyone understood anything about genetics or germs or gasoline. When I try to imagine times like that, I just can’t hold the thought in my head for very long. But for a moment, I have a sense of being small, of being not very significant in the grand scheme of things. And that’s not necessarily bad. It really is not all about me. It really is not all about you either.
But there’s also wisdom in the other direction. A professor who was also a clinical psychologist taught that the church gets it wrong when it starts with a confession of sin. Instead, he said that worship should begin with an affirmation of human dignity and honor and promise. “You should tell people that they’re almost angels before you tell them how flawed and hopeless they are,” he said. [1]
“A little lower than the angels” – that’s how Psalm 8 puts it. Genesis 1 asserts that humans are made in the image of God. Remember that first audience of this book, remember that they have survived the destruction of war, the loss of their loved ones to death, the humiliation of captivity. This opening chapter invites them to remember who they are, to accept their worth and dignity as human beings. [2]
On the sixth day of creation, we were made in the image of God, according to Genesis 1. But before our sense of self-importance gets too big, we might note that we are created on the same day as the other land animals. We don’t get our own special day -- a signal that we are part of a larger community. We are created after the birds and sea-life. In fact, the animals of the sea and the birds of the air are told to be fruitful and multiply first, before that instruction is given to humans. And before humans ever appear, six times it says “God saw that it was good.”
We are not the best thing in creation; we are not even the only good thing, But according to Genesis, only humans are made in God’s image. And only to humans does God give dominion.
This word dominion has been so abused, that we must pause here for a moment. In giving dominion, God confers responsibility on humans. God chooses not to be the only one who exercises creative power in the world. God shares that power with people. God entrusts the good and precious creation into the care of human beings.
In the very next chapter of Genesis, it says that Adam and Eve were put into the garden with instructions to till and to keep it. To till and to keep – to tend, nurture and protect.
Leviticus 25 and Psalm 24 proclaim that the earth is the Lord’s. God is the landlord of creation; humans are the tenants. We who bear God’s own image are to use the power entrusted to us to preserve and enhance the life of God’s delightful world. We are not to exploit or destroy it. It is not all about us.
Genesis 2 says that God formed the first human from the clay and when God breathed into his nostrils, the human became a living being. We are made from the earth and given responsibility for it. We are joined to God by our very breath.
This is a tie that binds. This is a connection to which we can attend even in the midst of sheltering in place during pandemic. It can begin with wonder, with noticing beauty and delight and goodness. I’ve heard that hiking is on the rise. Lots of people are taking to the woods and trails, even walking through our own neighborhoods, noticing with a new appreciation the daily changes that signal the arrival of spring. This connection to God and to the rest of creation also expresses itself as co-creating, exercising the gifts of shared power with God. This may be the particular vocation of farmers and scientists and engineers and artists, but tending the creation is everyone’s work. It means caring for other humans as friends, neighbors, family members, as teachers, therapists, nurses and doctors. It means loving this world that God so loves by preserving rainforests and fragile ecosystems and endangered species and watersheds.
It is as if someone has pushed a giant pause button. For weeks, humans slowed our activity, we quit travelling in our cars and planes, and turned off the machines in our factories. That giant pause has allowed us to see more clearly our interconnections with the created world. When humans paused, air pollution was dramatically reduced. People in parts of India could see the Himalayan mountains for the first time in decades. Animals started showing up in places where humans would normally be. Mountain goats wandered through a town in Wales, a puma was seen on the streets of Santiago, orcas have come closer to Vancouver because the industrial activity which usually keeps them away has quieted. In America’s National Parks, fox, deer, bears and bobcats have been seen in larger numbers at lower elevations closer to roads and areas usually occupied by human visitors.
If walking is gaining in popularity as a hobby, so is gardening, a very local way to nurture our connection to God and the earth. And humans are also tending to domestic animals with new care. In Spain, Ismael Fernandez was separated from his donkey Baldo for 2 months. Baldo was under the care of his sister while Ismael had to stay in his home in another city. When Ismael was finally able to travel, he was afraid Baldo wouldn’t remember him. The video of their reunion shows otherwise. It’s in Spanish, but I think you will understand it anyway.
After the video went viral, Ismael said, “I am not ashamed that you hear me crying [in the video] because it was a demonstration of unconditional love.” That kind of love is a tie that binds.
Rabbi Irving Greenberg is an Orthodox rabbi who seeks to promote greater understanding between Jews and Christians. One of the things we have in common, he says, is an overarching purpose in joining God in healing the world. In the grand scheme of things, our lifespan is short and our perspective is limited, but Rabbi Greenberg says
“we are to find our place in a world that was created eons before we came into being, by a Creator who existed eternities before this universe was shaped; a world whose idealized perfection may well be realized ages after we are gone from the scene. If humans can see the world even a little bit from this perspective, they will recognize their modest place; . . .They will be more able to find their proper role in the . . . world. They will act closer to the norms of love, justice, and dignity, which are the proper responses to the value of their fellow creatures.[3]
Beloved ones, we are created in the image of God, gifted by God with power and responsibility for the creation, formed from the dust of the earth, connected to God by God’s own breath/spirit. Made for communion with God, a little lower than the angels. Thanks be to God.
[1] As described by the Rev. John Buchanan in his sermon “Almost Angels” https://fourthchurch.org/sermons/2009/012509.html
[2] Kathleen M. O’Connor, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary: Genesis 1-25A, (Macon, GA: Smyth& Helwys Publishing, 2018) p. 43.
[3] Irving Greenberg For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2004), pp. 49-50