Scripture: Genesis 1
Much of what I have to say today may sound familiar to people who have been around Sojourners for a while. I hope it sounds familiar because if it doesn’t it means that I haven’t been doing my job or making myself very clear. I hope what I have to say sounds at least somewhat familiar even to people who have not been around that long because I hope what we are about at Sojourners comes through without its having to be put into words all the time. But I do want to try to put into words some thoughts about this Christian community, its nature and purpose, its forming and continual re-forming.
It’s important to do this from time to time, so that we don’t get lost in the details or specifics of church life, so that we don’t come to take things for granted, so that we don’t fall back unreflectively into what seems easy or familiar. So I want to think with you this morning about the life of Sojourners from a “big picture” perspective, offer a few thoughts about what we’re up to here at Sojourners. Any organization needs to do this—keep the big picture clearly in mind and its core values clearly in focus—but churches perhaps especially need to do this, because churches after all are supposed to be all about the “big picture” and “core values”. But when we return to those kinds of issues, as we should…often, it’s good to look at them from different angles, try to bring in some different perspectives on important but also very large, and somewhat vague questions like what it is we think we’re up to here at Sojourners.
Today, that different perspective is provided by the creation story of Genesis 1. Martha has already given us something of a different perspective on that story itself by presenting it to us in a non-standardized format. She and I were talking about possible worship themes and also talking about all the changes going on in the church, one of them being the new Christian education program, and how in a way the church is being re-created all the time and how that feels especially true for Sojourners right now and how she would be telling the creation story to the children, which she has now done last week, and how maybe bringing that story into adult worship would be a way of acknowledging again that particular change in our church life, of connecting what happens there with what happens here on at least this one occasion, and that the story might offer some help in reflecting on the process of creation and change and birthing that Sojourners is going through right now—first that it might suggest to us that that is a helpful way of describing what is happening at Sojourners right now and then help us to reflect on that process. In any case, that is what I intend to get to this morning, to reflect on some of the dynamics of our church life from the perspective provided by Genesis 1. I intend to get to doing that eventually. But first let me reflect just for a moment on the creation story of Genesis 1 just in itself, without trying to tie it immediately to life at Sojourners.
Of course there are all sorts of things that can be said and all sorts of issues to explore with regard to the first chapter of Genesis. I’m going to limit myself today to just one thought that may seem somewhat obvious…or not, I’m not sure. And it has to do more with how we treat the story than it does with the story itself.
We often talk about and think about the story of creation as though that story is contained in the first chapter of Genesis and then the Bible goes on to tell other stories about other things. We often talk about the creation story as though it were complete. We often talk about creation as though, in the story, it was something God did in six days and then was done. Having brought into being all of the natural world, all of the animal world, and then finally human beings God looked around and said something to the effect of “I guess that takes care of it” and decided on the seventh day to rest. Some people, lots of people actually throughout history, have even imagined God as this source, this fashioner of everything that is but that once God finished with this act of creation God essentially ended any active involvement in the life of the world. Sometimes this view of God is referred to as the idea of a watchmaker God, who produces this wondrous thing, makes creation like a watchmaker makes a watch, and then steps back from it and lets it run on its own without any more active involvement from beyond. In this view of things, worshiping God then becomes a kind of paying homage to this divine creative force that set everything in motion, but who we don’t really expect to play an active role in our lives.
You may have guessed by this time that what I have been describing is not my own point of view, though I hasten to add to make sure no one has a false impression that I also do not subscribe to what might be thought to be the natural alternative point of view, namely that God is actively involved in our lives in an ongoing way, day by day, moment by moment, and is all the time choosing which strings to pull or not to pull, like some cosmic puppeteer controlling the drama of human life from behind the scenes. The God I believe in, the God who is my heart’s desire, is not at all like either of those metaphors, the watchmaker god or the puppet master god. And I believe the opening chapter of Genesis can be read in a way that gives us an alternative way to begin to imagine God.
In my reading the first chapter of Genesis does not tell the story of creation. It tells not even a chapter, it tells a tiny fragment of the story of creation. In my reading the title of the book, Genesis, refers not just to the fact that it begins with an account of the origin of things but that it is just the bare beginning of the creation story, and it refers to the notion (this is just my private meaning) that we gain from it a first glimpse of who this holy, mysterious, unfathomable God is. In my reading of it, God rested on the seventh day, that is God rested from the process of creation. God did not resign from the process of creation. God did not quit creating. In my understanding of it, creation is not something that happened once upon a time, but is an ongoing process in which, yes, God is very much involved.
Often, I think, in Christian tradition, the story has not been read that way. It has been read more this way: that God created the world, including human beings in six days—literally, symbolically, metaphorically, it doesn’t matter—in some limited amount of time God created the world, declared that the work was done, declared it to be good, and with satisfaction rested. Unfortunately, the human beings God made didn’t know a good thing when they saw it, proceeded to make some bad choices, choices that they had been expressly forbidden to make, and the whole rest of the story of human beings’ interaction with God is an attempt to undo the damage done by our wrong choices, which we continue to make, to get us to realize and act upon what the right choices are, and to try to recover that paradise that God gave us in the first place, which is creation as it was meant to be, or since this earth has been spoiled beyond repair by human sin, to offer individuals a way to gain entry to a heavenly paradise instead.
Now, I realize that it is just incredibly arrogant of me to think that I can reduce a major branch of Christian theology and all the thought that has gone into it into, let’s see, about 12 lines of 12 point type. It’s ridiculous and outlandish, and for this morning’s purposes I can’t help it, because I want to contrast that general approach with another approach that may be a minority report in Christian tradition but which is certainly not just my own eccentric approach that I have somehow managed to concoct.
In my understanding, the first chapters of Genesis do not contain the story of creation; they begin it, just barely begin it. In my understanding what God does in the story is not present us with a finished version of creation but just the first step. In my understanding the human project is not about trying to undo our sinfulness or recover some lost state of perfection or innocence. In my understanding when human beings in the story exit the Garden of Eden that represents not a punishment for sin and a banishment to some awful place we can only endure, but the beginning of a long, troubled, sin-filled, joyful, hopeful journey toward a new creation that Eden only hinted at. In my understanding what God has in mind for us is not a return to some state of innocence, not some few of us who believe the right things being whisked away rapturously to heaven, leaving the rest of humanity sadly behind, but rather God envisions for us an unfolding creation, the fulfilling of the promise of Eden, the result of a process that is still going on, some great profusion of life and love that is no more imaginable than God herself. Paul calls it a new creation and says that the whole present creation is “groaning in labor pains” as he puts it in Romans 8, straining to give birth to something way more extravagant, way more vibrant, way more diverse, way more filled with people and with life and with love than Eden ever was or was meant to be. In my understanding this something that is the ongoing dream of God, the ongoing act of God’s creating, this something that all of creation is straining toward, in my understanding this is what Jesus referred to when he spoke of the kingdom of God or the realm of God, and he never spoke of Eden but he spoke instead of lilies of the field and of reunion banquets and parties and people finding each other and oppressed people being free and people being recognized as bearing the image of God.
I don’t know if I’ve said all this that I’m trying to say adequately or expressed it the way I would like, but I realize I need to stop trying and ask for just a few moments today what this has to do with Sojourners.
It may seem way too fancy and grandiose to describe what daily life is like in any church day by day, week in and week out, Sojourners being no exception, but one way of putting what we are up to it seems to me is to say that we are trying to participate in that process of creation that God is involved in, that we are engaged in trying to imagine what God imagines for us and, however imperfectly, to try to make that vision real. We strain toward that vision, trying to share in that birthing process that is God’s very nature. And we try in some very small, very human, very imperfect way to embody some small reflection or echo of what a new creation, or a reign of God, would look like. As I say, it may seem grandiose to suggest such a thing, but on the other hand if something like that—we may come at it different ways, give it different words—but if something like that is not what we are about then all the work of making budgets and munch bunch lists and even having Christian education and worshiping God seems somehow less significant. And religion is not about so much the following of God’s rules or being obedient to God’s will but catching a glimpse of God’s creative, loving energy and letting it guide us.
And this also means that there are some things we are not about—adding one more Christian church to the world, for instance. We are not about trying to define very carefully who is a Christian and who is not, doctrinally or any other way. It is not our job to set boundaries that place someone inside or outside the fold of faith. It is not what we are up to argue for the truth or the necessity of the Christian faith. It is not the goal of creation’s God to make Christian institutions, to increase the count of Christians in the world, or to strain toward a Christian society. It is what we are about—at least this is the way I am thinking about it today—to join hands as we strain to try to give birth to a new creation, a creation God has begun but has not yet fulfilled. We promise in the meantime to do our best to care for each other along the way. And in all this to look to the spirit of Christ to guide us.
I have a few more things on my mind to say in this connection. They’ll have to wait till next week. For now I’ll just suggest that the story of Genesis doesn’t so much tell us the story of creation as offer us an image of the God who is present in every creative impulse of the universe and whose image we each do bear and who is involved always in the process of bringing into being new miracles of life. That image needs to lurk not far below the surface of our lives in the church. May it stir us and sustain us in all that we do. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 22, 2006