"Very Good"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE LAW Genesis 1:1—2:4a click here to watch the Sermon "Very Good"

I posed a question on social media this week about things people had come to see differently. A colleague of mine who I’ve known for over 20 years said he’d changed his mind about something called the Revised Common Lectionary. That’s the three year cycle of Sunday readings that we generally use for worship that follow the seasons of the church year. He once, and I’m quoting here, “thought it turned our particular churches into franchises run by middle-management lazy pastors.” Ouch. He’s since softened on the issue, largely because he found that these prescribed readings and seasons that we share across traditions challenge him in ways that he might not challenge himself; which can be its own kind of laziness. One of those challenges is a Sunday like this one. We call it Trinity Sunday. A quick consultation with Britannica online informed me that this feast day on the Sunday following Pentecost has been celebrated by some Christians as far back as the 10^th century. Now when it comes to celebrations and holidays within the church, they’re generally tied to stories of our faith. Jesus’ birth, his time in the wilderness, his passion, crucifixion and resurrection, his ascension and eventual return. Then there is the story from last week about the coming of the Holy Spirit. But the Trinity doesn’t have a single story. In fact, I think it has to be named that not all people who call themselves Christian are fully on board with the Trinity precisely because there is no explicit mention of this theological formulation in the bible beyond Jesus’ Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel to make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Instead of a story, we get this way of naming God that seeks to fit together what we read in the bible about the relationship between God as Father, God as Son, and God as Holy Spirit. A whole lot of time, energy and ink have been spent on that relationship. We have creeds that try to approach what it is we say we believe about this relationship. And we have had schisms over the words in those creeds. Quick side note: one the long-standing theological differences between churches in the west and Eastern Orthodoxy has to do with the word filioque from the Nicene Creed. It means “and the son.” Does the Holy Spriit proceed from the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son.  

Now if, at this point, your eyes are starting to glaze over and you’re thinking about the potluck after worship, I don’t blame you. Theology nerds like me tend to geek out on questions like this, but when it comes to Sunday worship and the life of faith you’d be well within your rights to wonder, “what difference does it make?” And also, what does any of this have to do with the creation story that I just read from Genesis? The truth of the matter is that most people of faith lead very happy lives without giving another thought to the Trinity and all the theological gymnastics the church has done over the centuries to articulate some understanding of this mystery, or why it matters. But it does matter precisely because as those who trust that- as this passage names- we are made in the image of God, how we talk about and understand God is the beginning of how we talk about and understand ourselves. Not just how we were made, but why we were made. This is how John Calvin puts it in the first sentence of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” 

But let’s back up for a second and talk about the opening of the book of Genesis. And since I know you’re hungry and want to get to the food and our mission project, I won’t go line by line. Just the first one, the very first verse. You heard me read from what is known as the New Revised Standard Version of the text, “in the beginning when God created the heaven and the earth.” The old Authorized, or King James Version read, “in the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Five years ago the Society of Biblical Literature reviewed the work of over 60 scholars and editors to approve updates to the New Revised Standard Version of the bible that included approximately 12,000 substantive edits and 20,000 total changes to this translation based on the advances in biblical scholarship since it was first introduced in 1989. The updated version sounds remarkably similar to the English translation created by the Jewish Publication Society and reads, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth.” So here’s something to know about ourselves that should inform how we talk about and what we say we know about God. It changes. God doesn’t. God is God. But what we know about, and how we think about God changes. And it often changes as a result of how our reading of scripture changes as we learn more about ancient Hebrew, and the variant copies of scripture that have been transcribed and handed down over the ages. All of which is to say, that none of this. Not our understanding of scripture, or our understanding of God is static, or set in stone. Perhaps one of the reasons the commandment against idolatry specifies making an image is that that is a one-way street. We may be made in the image and likeness of God, but the inverse is not true and is often the source of our downfall. When we make God in our image, in the image we decide through our theology, or our interpretations of scripture, or our own understanding we mostly just start worshipping ourselves, the country we live in, the ideologies or politicians that we gravitate toward, what we end up worshipping is a lesser god than the one who is at the center of it all. Genesis 1 is the clue to how the whole thing works. Not because it claims to be some kind of scientific, geological, or astrophysical description of the origins of our universe, but because it names that when the work of creation began, God already was. And creation, however it came about over the course of billions of years, is the work of what we call God. When all of it was formless and void, something like the breath or Spirit of God hovered over the chaos brought forth order. 

And here’s why this story is important. Not to make some truly pointless argument about the age of the earth and the existence of dinosaurs, but to offer some assurance that God is at the heart of everything that is, ordering the chaos, bringing light out of darkness and generating life in all its absurd abundance. Since the Enlightenment there has been this fear that if we don’t read this story literally that it calls into question the validity of our sacred texts. But that isn’t really how sacred texts work. This is poetry, not history. And it is poetry that was set down by and for God’s people when they needed it most. When God’s people faced one of the greatest threats to their existence from the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, this story offered a counternarrative to the often violent and destructive creation stories of those more dominant cultures. It formed a unique understanding of who they were because of whose they were and how they understood their relationship to God and their place in creation. At a time when their lives had been turned upside down and their own world had become chaotic and dark as they were violently dragged hundreds of miles from their home. At a time when they had every reason to question who was in charge and whether anything in their lives would be good again, they set down this narrative of creation as a reminder. It’s a story in which darkness and light find their place in God’s order of things; sea and sky, water and land, fish and birds and every kind of animal you can imagine and plenty more that you never could. And at every step of the way, God names it good. Until it comes to us. Until we are made, male and female, equally in God’s image and likeness and gifted all of it by God to be stewards, caretakers of God’s good creation. Not to dominate it and do with it however we like, but to cherish and  cultivate every last bit of it as good. As God’s. This, God calls very good.  

We are made for a creation that is made for us, and that is very good. It is a creation that issues forth from the one who speaks it into being, whose word makes it so, and whose breath gives it life. Each of those three- the speaker, the Word spoken, and the breath that animates it all- are present in the one who began to create when all was complete chaos. And we are a reflection of the dynamic interplay between the three. We, in God’s likeness, are made for connection, for relationship, for collaboration and cooperation not independence and individualism. Like the Holy Trinity itself, we are made for each other. That is what makes it all very good. From the beginning.