June 4, 2023
Look at a Bible today, and you will see it looks different from other books. Has little numbers: for chapters and verses. And the Bible is divided into 66 books. A book made of books. The 66 books and the numbered chapters and verses help us find passages. But they might give you the idea the Bible is something that is little dissected pieces put together. And really, the most important thing the Bible holds is not numbers. It’s stories.
I love stories! As kids, we love stories. When my son Ian was little, one day our family went to the library in Birdsboro. Santa was there! My kids sat on Santa’s lap and told him what they wanted. That was fun! Then they looked for books to check out. Ian loved stories. But he was too little to read yet. There wasn’t a line to see Santa. Kids came into the library to see him in a trickle. Ian saw Santa sitting there with nothing to do, and he brought a big pile of books to Santa, and asked, Santa, will you read to me? And Santa started reading books to Ian. We love stories!
When you get together with your family or friends, sometimes you say, “Remember when….? You have stories you retell. My father-in-law once said we ought to number the family stories, so we don’t have to tell the whole story again. We could just say, “Remember story 27?” So, with just the number we would laugh, or cry, or do whatever we do when we think of that family story. But I don’t want to say a number, I’d rather hear the story again! The best thing about the Bible isn’t the numbers. It’s the stories!
Our world is shaped by the stories we tell. When Abraham Lincoln, during the civil war, gave a speech after the battle of Gettysburg, he told a story, “Fourscore and 7 years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He told a story about who we are as Americans: our country began as a nation of liberty and equality. Lincoln told the story of our nation’s founders and linked their cause to the cause of the civil war and honoring those who died for their country. Lincoln told a story and gave one of the greatest speeches!
Our sermon series for June is “I love to tell the story!” We’ll recall some stories from the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Stories about God and our ancestors and about God and us too. We’ll tell the story that satisfies our longings as nothing else would do.
Today we’re talking about creation.
If you open the Bible, first thing you read is, “In the beginning, God created…” That’s different from all the other religions’ origin story.
The Jews had always believed in ONE God. The Jewish religion was older than the Roman or Greek pantheon of gods: they had many gods such as Zeus, Neptune, Venus, and Hercules. The Jewish God is also older than Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome.
Judaism, a religion older than these others, had recognized only one God from the beginning. Genesis is a worldview unique and ahead of its time. A century ago, the big bang theory arose, and scientist began to believe that the universe had a beginning. Great thinkers since Aristotle had believed the universe always existed. But scientists today agree, in a trillionth of a second, the universe expanded. Genesis, written down 2600-3000 years ago, begins with the words, “In the beginning.” The writers believed there was a beginning to the universe.
Everything that has a beginning has a cause. The debate today is not, did the universe have a beginning. We all believe now that it had a beginning. The debate today is was it a purposeful, personal, intentional cause?
The significance of our creation story in Genesis is lost on us. The creation story of Genesis is NOT trying to explain HOW God created the universe. It is saying that GOD (not the gods) created the universe. Genesis says, “In the beginning, God created…” It doesn’t say Amon Ray, a god of Egypt created, or Marduk, a god of the Babylonians, the god who rode into an epic battle on his two steeds: slaughterer and merciless. Marduk battles and sends an arrow into the goddess Tiamat and splits her body in half! With the upper part of her body, he creates the heavens. With the lower part of her body, he creates the earth. That’s a pretty bloody story the Babylonian children learned in Sunday school!
Genesis is extraordinarily different from the Canaanite, Egyptian, or Babylonian myths. Those Gods go to war with each other, and they create other gods out of body parts. In the Babylonian creation myth people are eventually created. But you are five books into the story before humans are created. Humans are created to serve the lazy gods. In these other religions, in their creation stories, humans are an afterthought. Our world is shaped by the stories we tell. In other civilizations, because of the stories they told of their gods, humans had no rights. The violence and injustice of the gods justified the violence and injustice of their kings and pharaohs. The kings were acting like their fathers, the gods in the heavens.
Genesis is completely different. It says what no other pagan myth says. Genesis says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image.’” In Genesis, the creation of humanity is the pinnacle, the height of the creation story, not an afterthought.
The dignity of humanity is established at the very beginning. None of these pagan religions established the worth and dignity of people. But Genesis did.
We get distracted by a debate about how the world was created. We take the Genesis story literally. And the people who wrote it down? They weren’t Carl Sagan. They wouldn’t know astrophysics to tell how the universe began. But they loved stories! In fact, they loved stories so much, they put TWO creation stories in the Bible! Chapter 1 of Genesis is the first story. In it, God creates plants first, then animals, then men and women are created at the same time. The 2nd creation story starts in Genesis chapter 2 verse 4. Here, God creates a garden, then man is created, then the rest of the plants, then woman is created from man, then come the animals. There are TWO creation stories with different details. But we love stories. So, both of the creation stories are put in Genesis. The details, the how of the stories, didn’t matter as much as the point: that God, one God, loved humans and made them, loved the world, and said it was good. A God who loves us, created us, and gives us worth and dignity! Genesis is NOT trying to explain HOW God created the universe. It is saying that GOD (not the gods) created the universe.
My challenge for you this week is to ask yourself, if you are made in the image of God, how does that change how you see yourself?
Genesis introduced a radically different worldview. God said you are not a means to an end, you are not slaves. You are made in my image. That means every man, every woman, every child you are ever face to face with bears the image of God. So be careful how you treat them! It’s a story that tells us who God is, and who we are. We are introduced to a God who never gives up on you. I love to tell the story, that you are here on purpose for a purpose. You are created in the image of God. Amen.
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