sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 10/20/2013
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Everything starts with a poem. With rhythm and the melody of breath and tongue and voice.
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, first day.
Genesis 1:1-3 (Translation by Robert Alter)
This is an extraordinary poem, the first chapter of beginnings. No need to remember all this, but just notice some remarkable rhythms built into the writing (Thanks to Rob Bell for his summary of these in “Everything is Spiritual”)…
Elohim is the first word for God.
Elohim bara – God creates
ruah Elohim – spirit or breath of God, hovering
Elohim amar – God speaks
In the first three lines, already there is a community of creativity suggested in Elohim. Creator, Spirit, Word. Three in oneness, perhaps?
Create / Bara shows up in 3 places – the heavens and the earth, the living creatures, and human kind. The last time it is used, it repeats 3 times.
The first verse is seven Hebrew words.
The second is fourteen.
Earth appears twenty-one times, seven times three.
The seventh paragraph has thirty five words, another multiple of seven.
God / Elohim? Thirty five times.
“It was so…” – seven times.
“And God saw…” – seven times.
“Made…” – ten times, seven plus three.
“According to their kinds…” – ten times.
“And God said…” – ten times. Three times in reference to people. Seven times in reference to creatures.
“Let there be…” – ten times as well. Three times referring to things in the heavens and seven times things on earth.
Do you think the writer knew what he was doing? Do you think he knew what he was trying to convey through this epic poetic narrative?
Of that, there can be no doubt.
Maybe the better question is this:
Do we know what he was doing?
And can we hear what he is trying to say to us?
It is not uncommon in Christian circles to treat Genesis, chapters 1 & 2, as historical narrative. As if it is telling us a story about a sequence of historical events, so that we get the chronological facts straight in our heads. And from there we wield it as a weapon in a misguided culture war, arguing the merits of young earth creationism, or intelligent design, or whatever, over and against evolutionary theory.
That’s not what Genesis 1&2 are about.
The questions we ask of it when we come to it looking for ammunition are not the questions it’s answering.
No. Genesis 1&2 are trying to do what the best poems are always trying to do:
arrest our assumptive plodding along,
wrest our attentions from the numbing distractions of this world,
and draw us into beauty and truth that can transform us at the deepest levels, quickening our hearts and minds to re-enter the world
invigorated by our encounter with it.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
Genesis 1:1-3
Genesis is about something more, something more important, more profound, than the creation of matter. We’re going to explore what that something is this week and next. What is Genesis saying to us? What does it have to teach us? How might we respond to it?
If you aren’t a Jesus follower, perhaps part of the reason you’ve been hesitant to more seriously consider the merits of faith is the expectation that to do so would require you to accept some perspectives on the origins of the creation of matter and earth and human life that seem, at best, silly to you, and at worst, contentiously ignorant. I hope you’ll discover in Genesis 1&2 a way of seeing where we started and where we might be going that opens the door to a whole new future for you, one with more hope and anticipation and goodness than you ever expected.
If you are a Jesus follower, perhaps you’ve never let these ancient, foundational words carry the Spirit’s breath to the remotest parts of your soul that have long needed a fresh breeze to blow. Maybe because they’ve been a tool in your hand instead of a tool in God’s. Or maybe because they’ve been something of a source of confusion or even embarrassment to you, and so you’ve kept them just out of view as often as possible. Or maybe simply because you’re busy, and it’s always felt like there were more fertile fields to plough for wisdom and help with your day to day life than Genesis 1&2. My hope for you – whoever you are – is that you’ll discover in Genesis 1&2 a way of seeing where we started and where we might be going that opens the door wider to God’s good purpose for you, a purpose you can embrace with renewed faith, courage, enthusiasm and creativity.
Let’s begin with an academic word:
Ontology // (n) the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.
There are different ways of understanding what it means to be or exist.
Material ontology is the ontology we are most familiar with. Things exist because they take up space, because they are particular arrangements of matter. I know this building exists because it takes up space, displaces other physical things, I can see it, touch it, interact with it with my physical body. Something exists by virtue of its physical properties.
But there is another, even more important kind or way of being, existing, and that is functional ontology. Things don’t fully exist until they are functional, until they can do something. In fact, until something is integrated into a working, ordered system, it does not really exist according to functional ontology. Something exists by virtue of it having a function in an ordered system.
Think about a school. Its creation involves a lot more than its material creation. Sure, you have to build the building. But you also need teachers and curriculum and furniture and administrators. And it’s not really a school until there are students attending it and learning things. Because it doesn’t fully exist as a school until it is functioning as a school. There is an eerie scene in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men” in which the main character walks through a school building that has been vacant for years, because no children have been born in the world for a whole generation. It was less a school and more a haunted house. In fact, if someone is creating a new school, the building of the facilities might be the least significant part of the school’s creation.
We could think about the church this way too. Does the church exist because it has a building and pews and Bibles and even members? Or does it exist when it starts being the church? When it starts doing what churches are supposed to do?
Genesis 1&2 are about functional creation, not material. They are about God creating an ordered system, and creating function and functionaries within it. They are about God giving purpose and function to functionless things that seemingly already have begun to exist, at least from a material perspective. It starts with “welter and waste”, “formless and void,” “darkness over the deep,” the suggestion of things which are already present when God begins to create (bara) the heavens and the earth.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s my perspective that the material of the universe does in fact have owe its origins to God’s creativity and power. God is personally responsible for the matter, the stuff, of the universe. And at some point along the way, he must have made it ex nihilo, out of nothing, as the saying goes. It’s just that that’s not what this epic poetic narrative is telling the story of.
Genesis 1&2 is telling the story of God entering into creative relationship with existing chaos and bringing order and purpose to it, dividing it up and giving it function.
John Walton, a professor at Wheaton College, says:
“In the ancient world, what was most crucial and significant to their understanding of existence was the way that the parts of the cosmos functioned, not their material status.”
I’d highly recommend Walton’s “The Lost World of Genesis One” for anyone interested in the scholarship behind this understanding, but for our purposes, suffice it to say that bara – the word used for create here in Genesis, and throughout the Old Testament – and the words used for create by all the people of the ancient Near East are nearly always used to suggest functional creation, not material.
In other words, Genesis is about God methodically forming something out of the chaotic, orderless cosmos; something like a school or a church. We’ll talk next week about what it actually was that God was creating in Genesis when he began to bring form and function to the formless void, light to the darkness.
This, not incidentally, is why there are two separate orders of creation in Genesis one and Genesis two. (In Genesis 1, human beings come last, male and female together; in Genesis 2, the male human comes before the plants and the animals, and the female human later). If bara is about material creation, we have a serious problem here. But if it’s about functional creation, it simply shows the author (or authors) telling two different stories about different aspects of the functioning and purpose of the world, of how everything is integrated and working together. For example, in Genesis 1, extraordinary freedom is given to human beings in order that they might fulfil their purpose as image-bearers of the creator God. Freedom is a badge of distinction. In Genesis 2, we see that that same freedom might actually be the source of trouble for us, revealing the dangerous downside of using our freedom for a purpose other than image-bearing.
Ok, so that’s some basic groundwork – functional creation, not material – but what is Genesis 1&2 actually saying?
Some really, really important things, actually. Maybe most importantly, that the world and us and God have a purpose unlike any ever conceived before in human history. You might say, in fact, that Genesis 1&2 are good news.
The Sumerians, the Egyptians, and the Babylonians all had creation accounts with remarkable parallels to the Genesis account. The stories started in chaos and moved to order (see Leon Kass’ “The Beginning of Wisdom”) . In some of those accounts, the gods arose out of the chaos, procreated, and their offspring became the lesser gods. Harvest gods, river gods, fertility gods, etc. The Babylonian creation accounts show the gods going to war with chaos (a chaos storm monster, in fact – depicted behind me) and conquering it. All of these stories leave the world as a place inhabited by spiritual beings who had made the world for their own benefit. These gods had needs, and human beings existed – were created – to help fulfil these needs.
So along comes Genesis into the same part of the world, but telling a very different story.
There’s only one God, not lots of them. And he is way more powerful than they are.
Imagine you were an ancient person, with a primitive understanding of the natural world. It’s easy to see why the sun would be highly revered. It gives light to see. It marks the time. It’s crucial for vegetation, and therefore, our food. So much essential to our lives depends on the sun, so the sun gods were of course among the most powerful in the ancient Near East.
But in Genesis, the world has light, time, and vegetation before the sun is even created. Before we need the sun, we need God.
And speaking of needs, God’s creativity has different motivations than those other gods. He doesn’t have needs, he’s not selfish, he’s not like those other gods who made human beings just to serve their own needs and whims. In Genesis, God made the world with our benefit in mind, not just his. In the first chapter, just after the climax, when God has made people, he shows them the vegetation and says to them, look, I’ve have given all this to you, and to these animals for food.
Not only did the God of Genesis not make his creatures to exploit them, he actually blesses his creatures, first the sea creatures and birds, and then human beings.
This is a far cry from the other gods who use sex or violence to bring order to the chaos. The kingdom of the God of Genesis is not a product of sex or violence. Genesis’ God goes about bringing order and functionality to the chaos in the most extraordinary way.
He does it through invitation / command and blessing. Both of which are, at root, acts of vulnerability.
In a non-Genesis created world, to be vulnerable is to be in terror of violation and scarcity. The whole idea of vulnerability is terrifying in the world of the other stories, because those gods have needs and humanity is there to be used by them. And those gods create through sex and violence, which, of course, is the means by which all the most vulnerable in our world are violated and exploited.
Because broken sexuality and violence always involve taking, not giving. They are violation of freedom, of sovereignty, of selfhood.
But in Genesis, vulnerability is a completely different story. Vulnerability opens the door to communion with a God whose only needs are the needs of one who loves, the need to celebrate and create and join in true intimacy (which is always non-violent intimacy) – that which comes from invitation and response.
Let there be.
Let there be light.
Let there be an expanse.
Let the earth sprout.
And on and on.
Let there be is a vulnerable statement – will the creation respond? This is why I called it invitation / command. Yes, God is commanding. But he is commanding a creation which he has imbued with freedom, it seems, at its very core. Humanity is the freest of the free, his image-bearers. But even the basic building blocks of matter itself seem to have some measure of freedom, science is discovering. And to command someone/something which is free is to keep open the possibility that the answer will be “no.” (interestingly, only the light responds perfectly…)
And that’s why his commands are also invitations. God is vulnerable before us. We – and all of creation, at some level – can say no. All true obedience in this universe, it seems, is based on love and love alone. Because the one that loves God, obeys God freely, out of that love and the trust it gives birth to.
Of course, creation does say yes. Light is. The expanse is. The earth sprouts. And so forth.
And then his commands come to us, in our freedom. We know what we did with his commands at first. And we know what a vulnerable place that put Elohim in, having to become a vulnerable human being like us, and suffer, and die in order to live out the loving obedience we did not chose for ourselves, so that we could be set free from the slavery we used our freedom to enter into.
And blessing too, God’s other creative tool, has vulnerability at its core. The word for blessing in Hebrew, barak, is also translated as kneeling. Because to bless is to make oneself vulnerable before the other. It is giving one’s favor to another as a gift. Will it be received? Will the freest of God’s creation receive his blessing? Will we receive him as he gives himself to us in blessing?
The image of the breath of God hovering over the waters is powerful. The word for hover is used elsewhere for an eagle, hovering over a nest of chicks hungry to be fed, needing protection. This is where creation begins. Chaos like a child in distress, God like a parent longing to bring provision and protection.
What an extraordinary world Genesis reveals! One that the most powerful being in the universe makes himself vulnerable towards, inviting it into the love out of which it is created, offering us all that we need to thrive.
In this world, we see ourselves, the freest of the free, invited ourselves to trust this good God who has made the world for our benefit. We see a world in which we are meant to cooperate with, and participate in, love through acts of courageous vulnerability, a world designed to be the canvas upon which such acts function as a cooperation with, and participation in the creativity of, the divine artist, Elohim.
Think about what this says to us about our purpose as image-bearers. Are we bringing functionality to the chaos of people’s lives? To schools, to workplaces, to healthcare systems, to businesses, to families? Are we using the tools of Elohim, invitation and blessing? Or are we using the tools of Marduk and others, violating the vulnerable for our gain wherever we find them?
More on all of this next week. But for now,
Practical Suggestions:
1. Read Genesis 1&2 imaginatively. Read Genesis 1 & 2 again (or for the first time), imagining at each point creation having the option to resist or cooperate. Place yourself in the scene as the one choosing on behalf of creation. At the end of chapter 2, imagine yourself as the man and his wife, naked and not ashamed and note what kind of world it is, and what kind of God you see that God is, and what kind of person you are, in that scene. Then choose your answer to this question: Would you give your life to be part of a new creation that restores that reality?
2. Enter some chaos with invitation and blessing, and see if God joins you in bringing about some new creation. Or if you feel the pain of rejection God ultimately experienced in Genesis 3. And if so, ask yourself if you’d have the courage to do it again. And again. And again.
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