Trinity Sunday
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
May 18, 2008Hymn to the Creator
I am grateful to Michael Corzine, the biblical exegete on the other end of this room, for the organ improvisation that accompanied the first reading. I had hoped that, by joining text and music, we might release for you just a portion of the profound beauty and power of the first creation story in the Book of Genesis.
We preachers are so limited, you see. All we have is words. My words have to pass through your minds on their way to your souls. Musicians, on the other hand, use a language that, when skillfully employed, goes direct to the soul. That’s why so many preachers are so profoundly jealous of musicians, and do their best to keep them reined in.
Every now and then, however, a preacher encounters a musician who is also a servant of the Word. Such creatures are rare indeed, and, like red cockaded woodpeckers, are fast becoming an endangered species. Blessed is the congregation that manages to catch one and keep him in captivity.
Of course, even Michael on his organ bench cannot do justice to this text. Nobody can.
No one knows for sure how long it took this magnificent creation poem to take its final form. Round about 2,500 years ago, however, the priests in the temple of Jerusalem wrote in down, so that it could be passed forward to the generations. Scholars have been studying it ever since. They’ve laid it out on the examining table and labeled its constituent parts. They can tell which phrases came from this or that strata of Israel’s history and where the editor’s red pencil is evident. But this hymn is not a corpse on an autopsy table. It’s the living, breathing Word of God, meant to be read out loud before a living, breathing assembly of God’s people.
This is poetry. More than that, it’s doxology in seven stanzas. This is a hymn to the creator God, the same God who calls human beings into service and clothes them with grace and mercy. The same God who came among us in the flesh of Jesus Christ. This text is a work of inspired imagination and profound testimony, and if it weren’t the fact that ham-fisted Bible thumpers and disingenuous power brokers keep using it as a means to an end, I wouldn’t presume to preach on it at all. I’d let it speak for itself.
But this is Trinity Sunday, and one of the best ways to encounter the Triune God is to explore this sacred poem. The best approach would be for me to sing you this sermon, but that would take the kind of talent that resides on the other end of this room. The best I can manage from this end is to ask you to listen as carefully as you can to the text.
First, listen for the song that’s playing in the background – the one this poem is meant to replace. This poem has its origins in the period of Babylonian captivity – in the bad old days when God’s chosen people lived in a foreign land as a defeated and humiliated race.
The Babylonians had their own creation story, you see, and it got all the air time. According to the Babylonian creation story, the world wasn’t formed by God’s gracious word – far from it. The world was formed when the storm-god Marduk fought a cosmic battle with Tiamat, the sea-dragon -- goddess of primordial chaos. Marduk killed Tiamat with an arrow from his bow, smashed her head with his club, and split her carcass in two with his sword. With half of the dragon’s carcass he made the earth and with the other half he hammered out the heavens.
That is the song that is playing in the background as our poet is composing this hymn to the one God, the God of all creation. The cosmos did not begin as a battle between two deities, the poet sings. Instead, God’s word brought forth order from a formless void. God’s Spirit hovered over the water like a mother dove, and God simply spoke.
God does not do battle with sea monsters. God makes sea monsters by saying "Let there be . . ." The heavens and the earth are not the byproducts of a wrestling match on Babylonian cable TV. No, the heavens and the earth were brought forth with a word from God.
Do you hear the difference? One song is a heavy metal band tuning up. The other is a fugue. First the theme, and then the counterpoint. With layer upon layer it builds until the exposition is complete in a mighty fortissimo, and then, in the seventh stanza on the seventh day – a delicate coda. God rests from God’s labors, and the whole creation enjoys a blessed Sabbath.
Those two songs cannot be reconciled. They are saying very different things about the world, how it came to be, and our place within it.
We human beings, the poet sings, are not an accident. Instead, we are God’s purposeful creation. We are made in the image and likeness of God. Notice, too, that there is nothing in this poem about the superiority or inferiority of either sex. "Let us make humankind in our image . . . in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them . . . And it was so. . . And it was very good."
(You might remember that there’s another story in Genesis – just a few verses after this one – that takes a different tack. Different poet. Different poem. Different way of talking about the majesty and mystery of creation. How boring it would be if the Bible had only one account of creation.)
There is another thing I’d like you to hear when listening to this poem. Hear how the note that accompanies the passage about our being made in the image of God is tied to the note that accompanies our role in God’s creation. Our refection of God’s image and our role in creation are tied together. We are given "dominion," but "dominion" does not mean "tyranny." We human beings are to live in the world as those made in the likeness of God, showing the same delight, the same pleasure, the same meticulous care, that God showed from the beginning.
No one can deny that humankind has botched God’s assignment to us. We’ve made a proper mess of God’s command to "have dominion" by treating the earth not as viceroys, but as owners. We should have listened more carefully to this poem. The creation isn’t ours. It’s God’s. We ourselves are creatures among the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the creeping things, and the sea monsters.
We don’t own anything. It’s God’s world. Our task, first of all, is to live under God’s dominion. If we had listened more carefully to this poem, if we had not distorted its meaning and altered its melody, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in today.
But we can change. While there is still time, we can change. We don’t have to keep doing "the same old same old" until the polar ice melts, the sea level rises, and the sea monsters take our place. We’ve lost our way – it’s true. That’s an "inconvenient truth." But there is still time to change.
I suppose I should point out one last thing about this glorious doxology. It’s not modern science. It’s not even pseudo-science. It’s not Creationism. It’s not Intelligent Design. It’s not a vehicle for re-introducing God into the public schools (because God, being God, is already there).
This is a poem that tells the truth about you and me, about who we are and whose we are, about the world and everything in it. It’s theology, not science – and it’s the best kind of theology there is – the kind that sings.
There’s a wonderful passage in John Calvin’s Institutes in which he explores the idea of sacrament. He uses the rainbow from the Noah’s ark story to illustrate how sacraments work. He talks about how God put the bow in the cloud to seal his covenant with Noah and all the creatures of the earth. Right up to this day, Calvin says, a rainbow is a witness to us of that covenant. Then Calvin writes,
Therefore, if any philosophizer, to mock the simplicity of our faith, contends that such a variety of colors naturally arises from rays reflected upon a cloud opposite, let us admit it, but laugh at his stupidity in failing to recognize God as the lord and governor of nature, who according to his will uses all the elements to serve his glory. If [God] had imprinted such reminders upon the sun, stars, earth, stones, they would all be sacraments for us. (Book IV, Chapter 18).
Calvin, writing in the 16th century, was not a modern scientist any more than the poet of Genesis One, who wrote around 500 B.C., but Calvin knew better than to read the Bible as a science textbook. If God can use the "reflection of light upon a cloud opposite" to make a sacrament, God can certainly use evolution to make human beings in his likeness and image.
If you’re looking for ammunition in the tired old fight against Charles Darwin, don’t look for it here. This poem is not a strongbox full of ammunition against modernity; it’s a treasure chest of wisdom and imagination that transcends modernity. To treat this text as something less is to dishonor the Word of God.
So here’s an invitation. Sometime before this day is over, sit down with your Bible and read this poem again. Ignore for a moment the song that is playing in the background today – the song this poem also refutes. Today’s song is different from the one that played in Babylon, but it’s no less distracting. Listen for God’s charge to you and me to exercise dominion as those made in God’s own image. Listen for the joy the poet finds in being a creature among creatures.
This is our song, our hymn to the Triune God. May God be honored by its hearing, and may God be honored by our living in covenant with the One who made the heavens and the earth.
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