This reflection was split into four parts, with songs and time for children’s activities between each. The readings (in bold) are all re-stated segments of the New International Version’s translation of Genesis 1:1-2:4.
Te Panui Tuatahi (The First Reading): The Cosmos
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness was called “night.”
And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.”
And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.
These ancient words and images attempt to make sense of the cosmos, a concept that is far better understood now than it has ever been but which has simultaneously become more difficult to comprehend because of the imponderable vastness and complexity that has been revealed by science.
If we are but an isolated speck around our star, but our star is but an isolated speck within our galaxy, whilst our galaxy is but an isolated speck in our local supercluster, which is itself dispersing into expanding space along with all the other superclusters … well, as Psalms 8 says:
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is humanity that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
For the ancients, the skies were the chief way to comprehend time, that other fact of our universe to which we are irrevocably bound. Our understanding of the vastness of time is also better understood now than ever before. Yet, simultaneously, it is also more difficult to comprehend than ever. Science has revealed the scale of cosmic time to be unthinkably colossal and the scale on which quantum and even biochemical events occur to be imponderably miniscule.
We feel as if we know the days and the years, yet we can barely comprehend the span of three or four generations, beyond which the ripples cast by our lives will be unable to be traced back to us; let alone grasp the hundreds and thousands of years that take us back to our species’ arrival in the Pacific, or in Europe; let alone the several billions of years required to trace the birth of our star or of all stars.
These are epochs that can be measured with increasing precision but the resulting numbers are essentially meaningless from the perspectives of our brief, transitory minds.
This fist story of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures speaks to us now, much as it likely did several millennia ago, of some particular understandings of creation. The first, it seems to me, is that we are to understand that all this vastness and all this nearness, all this foreverness and all this here-and-now, all this transcendence and all this imminence: is all meant to be. It is intended. It is ‘right’.
This creation story goes further. Right from its beginning, it dares to relate all the cosmic dimensions of creation to a human, local, time-bound way of thinking. To day and night. To our life-giving sun, our dignified moon, our watching stars. This story tells us that the creating acts of God, whatever else they are for, provide us with a place in which we can be. A place in which we can be. Because, well, here we are.
This creation account is a tale. We are its tellers and its listeners, much as versions of it have been told for several thousand years. What was formless and void has become a localised moment in which we can gather and wonder at it all. Most especially, we can wonder at our place in it.
Can you recall a time when you were struck by the immensity of the time and space of creation? What sensory impressions can you remember? What responding emotions were birthed in you?
Perhaps you recalled something belittling about this experience, as well a contact with the cosmos might. A reaction to immensity that reduced you and your problems to insignificance.
However, this rendering of the creation story is humanistic. It invites us to relate the vast cosmos to ourselves and to place ourselves in relation to it, and to do so in a way that leaves us saying, in tandem with the story, “it is very good”.
Te Panui Tuarua (The Second Reading): The Biosphere.
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters were called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”
And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
We are not the only passengers on this ark. For every stunning encounter with the cosmos, there are more pedestrian moments when we might notice a bumble bee concentrating on its precise landing on a tiny flower, or hear a korimako hidden somewhere in the leafing trees at the edge of the section, smile at the warm smell of hay, taste the freshness of a new-picked carrot, or feel the warm nose of a friendly dog pressing insistently into our hand.
This section of the first creation story deals not with the cosmos but with the biosphere. Intricate, varied, pulsing, teeming. An amazing, stunning network of interdependent life, where all things strive to grow and everything is preoccupied with being itself. It is very, very good.
This aspect of creation exists separately from us and most of its members live out most of their lives separately from us. The biosphere predates us by hundreds of millions of years; it extends out into every nook and cranny on this planet, beyond anywhere we can hope to survive; and it collectively carries on whether we are present or not.
Have you every stopped to consider how the insects and birds in your garden hardly know or care if you are there? They are so busy being themselves! Or have you ever considered the mighty trees and young saplings in the bush that we notice when we stop for scroggin and a break? Those forest beings were there long before you arrived and will be there long after you have collected your car and driven home, not to mention the bush behind those trees that impressed you, and the bush behind that section, and behind that … This type of life is not only too busy being itself to take much notice of us, but it operates on a timescale in which our fleeting pauses are less than a breath, less than a rumour.
Have you ever looked through a microscope at the myriad of life that sits in a drop of puddle water, or under your fingernails, or in fragment from a plant pot? This tiny but frenzied universe can never know about you, cannot know anything, yet on and on and on it goes, whether we subject it to our gaze or not.
All this wildness and complexity has a separate existence from us. And yet, it is deeply connected to humanity and we are to it. Proud as we are, mighty as we are, we utterly depend on it just as it is all utterly entwined with us and our choices.
The tellers of this first creation tale are able to say of all this that “it was good”, “it was good”, “it was good”. Like Saint Francis, they could say:
Praised be You my Lord with all Your creatures …
Praised be You my Lord through our Sister,
Mother Earth
who sustains and governs us,
producing varied fruits with coloured flowers and herbs.
But the first Creation storytellers and even Francis inhabited times when the world was always bigger than people could imagine and its forces always dwarfed humanity’s strength. Plague, stampede, a barren winter – the human race to which these storytellers belonged was very much a junior tenant within this biosphere Eden.
The balance of power has shifted now. Our current human strength and will is distorting and disrupting the whole of the biosphere – with the gathering tide of anthropogenic climate change across the whole globe, the power of the chainsaw and the bulldozer at the level of forest, and the antibiotic redirections of evolution itself in the microbial domain.
How would we characterise humanity’s relationship to this Spaceship Earth in this first third of the twenty-first century? How would you describe how you relate to this precious biosphere?
There are words in the next segment of this creation story that speak to a very particular view of this relationship – much abused words that have been translated into English as “dominion”, “lordship”, and “rule”. Whether or not these meanings were what the ancient storytellers took to be self-evident, how do we understand that today?
Te Panui Tuatoru (The Third Reading): Humanity
Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image, in our likeness, so that they may have guardianship over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created humanity in their own image,
in the image of God they were created;
in different genders God created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and have custody of it. Exercise care and protection over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
I wonder if we keep missing some obvious messages in this part of the creation story because of the poison that has spread from the arrogance and narcissism and violence embedded in our traditional translations of this section? Do you hear, as I think I used to: ‘God gives the whole earth up to serve humanity’?
Or do you hear: ‘Stop! Humanity is God-breathed, and in all its variation, at that!’, and: ‘Go! You are embodied beings and your bodies are intended to flourish on this Good Earth!’
Such different messages. What if ‘God gives the whole earth up to serve humanity’ is a sinful lie? Something a snake might whisper?
What if ‘Humanity is God-breathed, in all its variation’ and ‘You are embodied and your body can flourish on this Good Earth’ are important doctrinal statements of holy truths that can set us free, and all Creation with us?
The first of these messages, that I think are key to this section of the first creation story, is echoed in the message of Jesus’ life itself. That is, the teaching that God is able to be fully present in humanity. More than that, the gospels suggest to us that God is most clearly to be perceived in the very least and the most outcast of us: imprisoned gang members, overstayers marked for deportation, frail elderly living in dementia units, angry young people addicted to methamphetamine, hungry homeless people who ask us for some change as we walk by, family members that we find rude and disagreeable and whom we only see once a year, people with worldviews that we simply can’t fathom or agree with.
But all humanity is God-breathed. As the Qu’ranic statement on the banner gifted to our congregation when this building opened says:
O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may (get to) know one another.
So all of humanity, in all of its splendiferous variation, especially its least respected members, are indwelt by the Spirit of God.
The second message that I read as being central to this segment of the creation story is that each of us is a truly embodied being and our bodies are intended to flourish on this Good Earth. Our senses are holy. Our bodies are sacred. Each of us is some-body. You are here to grow and to experience life in all its fullness. We are not disconnected from this creation, we are firmly embedded in it and that is good. The gnostic heresy is a lie – we are not to aspire to transcend our earthly existence but we are created to fully inhabit it, as Jesus did: with tears and fatigue and pain, but also with the embracing arms of friends, the taste of fresh cooked fish on a Galilean beach in the morning light, and the smell of fine perfume massaged into skin.
Can you think of a time when you found yourself aware of the delight of truly meeting another person, without artifice or barriers, perhaps to your surprise, perhaps to your great and recurrent contentment? Or when you experienced the pain of separation?
Can you recall a period when you perceived that you were growing more deeply into yourself, capabilities extending like tendrils into the world, capacity deepening like roots into the soil, your personality becoming clearer and stronger? Or when your growth was thwarted?
Thank God for this on-going work of creation, with the Spirit tending and watering, pruning and nourishing, connecting and protecting!
Te Panui Tuawhā (The Fourth Reading: Sabbath
God saw all that they had made, and it was very good.
The heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
By the seventh day God had finished the work they had been doing; so on the seventh day they rested from all their work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it they rested from all the work of creating that they had done.
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
As a young person, I always ‘heard’ this part of the passage to be about Sundays and about God. God, it seemed, wanted us to have a day that was ‘set apart’ each week. Firstly as a day of rest, just like God rested, feet up on a gigantic footstool, strong hands folded over a mighty chest, with a weekend newspaper and a flat white within reach on a celestial coffee table. Secondly, I took from this story that Sunday was to be set aside as a day to do – you know – God stuff, like going to church. Perhaps that is exactly what the tellers of this first biblical creation story intended.
But what if that also misses the main thrust of this section of the story? What if the key is not the resting but the completion, not a feature of the Creator but of the creation?
Creation, we have repeatedly been told, is very good. The heavens and the earth are very, very good. They are complete in themselves. It is all so good that the whole endeavour can be seen as being holy. Which is to say, set apart. Which is to say, beyond our ken, even as we are intimately a part of it all. I suggest that another lesson we should take from this creation story’s telling it is that Creation itself should be understood as an extension of a Holy, Holy, Holy God, over which God declares “sabbath”.
What would it mean to declare “sabbath” over ourselves in response to this kind of complete, holy creation? “Sabbath” implies ceasing and desisting, looking up from the press and tumult and preoccupation of our human existence to notice and respond to the holy that has been set before us, which is one way to experience the holiness of God.
Psalm 19 begins:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
Gerard Manley Hopkins says:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.
e.e.cummings says:
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
What aspect of creation has brought you up sharply in surprise? Made you do a double-take, take a sharp intake of breath, breathe a sigh?
The mystics have repeatedly told us in their various ways that it is very helpful to practise deliberately ‘ceasing and desisting’ and by doing so to notice what is around us, especially what surrounds us in the natural world and is offered to us in the people around us. By developing this simple discipline, we can become aware of this holiness, glimpse again the holiness of God, and find ourselves entering our humanity more completely.
I wonder if this is the most fundamental of the messages that this ancient first creation story gifts to us.
So stop what you’re doing. Declare sabbath on yourself and upon your life. Take off your sandals. God blesses your seventh day and makes it holy too. Be quiet, and later, perhaps be loud! We are on holy ground indeed.