Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”
27 God created humanity in God’s own image,
in the divine image God created them,
male and female God created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.” 29 Then God said, “I now give to you all the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit produces its seeds within it. These will be your food. 30 To all wildlife, to all the birds in the sky, and to everything crawling on the ground—to everything that breathes—I give all the green grasses for food.” And that’s what happened. 31 God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good.
1 The heavens and the earth and all who live in them were completed. 2 On the sixth day God completed all the work that he had done, and on the seventh day God rested from all the work that he had done. 3 God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work of creation. 4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.(Common English Bible)
“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week One
In that same living room where I told you last week I had learned of Chadwick Boseman’s untimely death, Carrie and I spent one evening recently watching the movie Footloose after Sadie went to sleep. Even though the movie came out before I was born, it still really took me back. My high school put on the stage musical version of it my senior year, and that came in the wake of my classmates and I likewise feeling a bit like putty in the hands of the adults in charge of our education.
It was just a few years earlier when the Kansas State Board of Education decided that we were getting a little too much science in our public schools and stopped requiring the teaching of the theory of evolution in our science classes. I didn’t end up reading anything from Charles Darwin until I was a junior in college, and it was for modern European history, not biology.
Where I’m from in Kansas is still the Bible Belt, but it’s not the Deep South, and that experience gave me a taste (of many) of having to explain yourself for where you’re from, when stories like that lead to stereotypes in other peoples’ minds of what where you’re from must be like—and, by extension, what you yourself must be like.
But just because I wasn’t fully taught science doesn’t mean I don’t believe in or appreciate science. Indeed, I think in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic especially, scientific and medical expertise are genuine blessings from God because that know-how acts to save life, and God is the author of life. So it serves to preserve that which God has written, or, more accurately in the Genesis creation story, what God has spoken into existence. And that is the real beauty for me in this text, not whether or not God spoke all of creation into being in six literal twenty-four hour days.
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith. And today’s question, “What about the literal 24-hour days?” can act as a bit of a stand-in for the sentiment of “Well, what about science and medicine, do you even believe in that?” Plus, fresh off the heels of my first sermon with y’all about laboring for love, God’s example of taking the seventh day for rest offers us an important image of divine balance between working for creation and resting from creation.
It feels appropriate to be starting my first sermon series as your minister with the Genesis 1 creation story, and as much as possible we will be working through this sermon series sequentially through the Bible—beginning here in Genesis and ending in late November in Revelation. The two books mirror each other in several ways, not the least of which is the creative power God demonstrates through the act of speaking, of taking words and turning them into real, tangible creations.
Here in Genesis 1, God speaks our world into being. The act of communication is the act of creation. It differs significantly from the other creation stories of many ancient Near Eastern religions, because while the deities of those religions would often use other tangible items for the act of creation, God needs only words with which to create. Words are very real, but when spoken they are also fleeting and intangible, landing on the air and, hopefully, into our ears, but not the same as being able to pick up a staff or a branch.
I see in that creation-through-speech a common theme that runs throughout the Tanakh, or the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible—a demonstration of God’s supremacy over the gods of the other ancient faiths. This is perhaps most explicit in the story of Elijah, where the prophet repeatedly, and at great length, goes to demonstrate God’s superiority over King Ahab’s patron deity Ba’al. But we also see it in the Exodus story, which we will visit in brief next week, with the ten plagues. If you ever wondered why, for instance, a plague of frogs, it is because each of the plagues represented a domain of a particular Egyptian deity, and by sending a plague of that thing, God is demonstrating supremacy over that particular deity. This culminates in the plague of darkness, showing that God is capable of blotting out even Ra, the Egyptian sun god and its chief deity for much of its history.
But here, in Genesis, God being capable of creating with only words shows God’s supreme nature in another way—God needs no external props or trappings in order to create. God needs to simply be God, and to communicate creation to itself.
There is a lesson in that for us, I think: when we communicate knowledge, whether scientific or otherwise, we are mimicking that divine act of creation, and make creation into an ongoing endeavor. That is why it always saddened me, even as a youth, to see this text used as an anti-science polemic. If science exists as a source for knowledge for us, it is because God has ordered it thusly, and by sharing such knowledge, we are mirroring God’s communication that created us.
At its core, though, the Genesis story is not so much a science textbook as a worship textbook, and it has been for millennia. Jon Levenson, in his commentary for the Jewish Study Bible, explains that these verses from Genesis 2 included in today’s passage “serve as an introduction to the kiddush, the prayer over the wine to sanctify the Sabbath…It also appears in the traditional Friday evening service. The passage is characterized by the type of repetition that suggests it might have served as a liturgy already in antiquity.” We see that call-and-response in Genesis 1 as well, in the “There was morning and there was evening, the Xth” day, signifying the end of that day’s creative activity. As a general rule, I think it would behoove us as Christians to take more seriously how the Tanakh is read in Jewish communities, and in that context, the creation story has been, and is, a worship text.
That refrain, “There was morning and there was evening” is not present for the seventh day, however. The Sabbath day does not end in this telling of the creation. While there is a firm boundary delineating each of the other epochal days, there is not for the seventh. What if this seventh day, as such an epoch, continues to be ongoing? That, I admit, may ask us to pose some uncomfortable questions about the nature of a resting God, but when every other word of the creation narrative is spelled out with precision and purpose, it would seem a mighty oversight to neglect an ending to the seventh day. Just as we mirror God in using speech to communicate and create, so too can we mirror God in honoring rest, especially the Sunday after we talked together about the importance of labor, and especially of laboring for love.
I do not ask that question to diminish God in any way, either. God cannot, will not, and refuses to be diminished. God uses words to create, and yet God is too big even for our own words. In 1:26, God uses the first-person plural “our image” rather than the first-person singular “my image.” While the singular would, I think, have been perfectly fine here to emphasize God’s uniqueness, I confess that I rather like the plural, because in our language, plural can be potentially infinite—just like God.
So, what about the literal twenty-four days? I get asked about them, and I say that a reflection of my faith in so big a God is for me to not pigeonhole God into my timetable. Could God have created everything in six literal 24-hour days? Absolutely. But if God didn’t, could every other word of Genesis 1 still be true? Absolutely.
Anthony Robinson, a writer, leader, and consultant in the United Church of Christ, wrote recently that he sees churches who think that God needs them. The flip side of that coin, though, is the truth that we need God. We need God to create us, save us, deliver us from the very worst versions of ourselves. We do not get to just skip over to that part, not with so big and majestic a God as ours. Wondrous and beloved creations though we are, we need God much more than God needs us. Or, to put it in the context of Genesis 1, we need the story of God’s creation far, far more than God needs it to have been done in literal 24-hour days.
God works according to God’s own time. This has always been thus and will forever be thus. God does not us to tell God what time it is. Bidden or unbidden, God’s presence, existence, and significance is always real. God is far bigger than you or I could possibly imagine, God is far greater than you or I could ever be, and God alone is the One capable of saying, “Let there be light,” creating light, and seeing that it was good. Not just average, or adequate, or mediocre. Good.
These were the words and deeds of God before any of us, in all our brokenness and beauty, our sin and splendor, came to be.
Who are we to say that so good and great a God must build up creation according to our timetable?
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
September 13, 2020