In the beginning…

That is where any good story starts…at the beginning.

Many of us grew up with the traditional “In the beginning God created…” The Bible…scripture…is a love story. It started with God. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The love of the God poured out of that triune relationship into creation. God spoke into the chaos that was the earth and things started to happen. God began to create the heavens and the earth, light and dark, day and night, evening and morning.

A creation story is told to explain how things came into being. Each one is unique to the culture and the people that are trying to understand their existence and the world. The Biblical story of creation is unique in that it sees the Creator and Creation as intertwined. Both intrinsically important. Both with responsibility. All in a valued and loving relationship with each other. The Creator creates, but as Walter Brueggemann writes, “The creator loves and respects the creation. The freedom of creation is taken seriously by the creator. Therefore, his sovereign rule is expressed in terms of faithfulness, patience, and anguish […]” “Creation…has freedom to respond to the creator in various ways.”[1] As we are well aware, those various ways can be faithful and loving, or rebellious and harmful.

What is also interesting is that we often forget that there are two creation accounts in the Book of Genesis. There is the one that we hear first. The “in the beginning” one, that is found in chapter one, but there is another in chapter two. This is the one where God creates a partner for the human by taking a part from the human to create another one. These two stories are to be taken together to give us more complete understanding of what God was undertaking as creation came into being.

God called everything into being. This is a creation story, so not to be taken literally. God spoke, but a day for God was not likely the twenty-four hours we like to think of as a day. God spoke and more shape was given to creation. God spoke and the earth brought forth living creatures of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

God spoke and there were stars, the sun, and the moon, and God saw that it was good.

God spoke, and said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness.” Did you happen to notice the plurality in this? God did not say, “I will make humans in my image, according to my likeness” but rather let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness.

There are two points to make here. The first is that unlike the other living creatures that were brought forth from the earth, humans are made in the image and likeness of God. However, the second creation account also reminds us that “the Lord God formed a human from the dust of the ground and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being.”

So, we are made in the image and likeness of God, but just as the living creatures came from the earth, we too come from the earth. At an Ash Wednesday service you may hear the words, “you are dust and to dust you will return” or at a burial you might hear, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” It is a reminder that though we are made in the likeness and image of God were are not God, our lives are finite. It means that we have a connection not only to God but to all living things. It also means that we are vulnerable.

We are created. From the beginning we were created. We were created to be in relationship with one another, with the rest of creation, and with God. Which brings us to point number two. The “let us” part of the statement where God spoke and said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness.” The “let us” is about the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are made in their likeness. In part, their likeness, their image, was love and relationship. Take that in as you ponder the ways people treat each other. We were made for love.

Scripture is filled with stories of how we fall short of that love. Remember we can respond to love with faithfulness or we may choose to rebel. When we rebel, we call it sin. The sin is that we don’t live into the image of God, the image and likeness of love that we were created for.

And this is only part of the story. We were and are given responsibility for the well-being of creation. Which means we should be attuned to the world around us. We are connected to creation. All is formed from the earth. We are given life, given a place, and we are given a vocation to care for the life and lives that surround us, even in a global sense, because this planet, this creation is our place and it is a gift.

Put that into today’s context and one has to wonder if we have been the good stewards of the earth we were called into existence to be. When we extract oil, pollute the waters, have overflowing land fills, species that are threatened or extinct, when we see the effects of climate change with more and more severe weather, are we understanding our responsibility, our vocations as the ones called to care for the life and lives that surround us?

We are pointed to Genesis chapter one where it says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” We have taken that to mean that we get to take and use whatever we want, but that is not what the earliest theologians of the Israelites understood. This was about care, about serving creation, and preserving creation.

Our creation story is about care and relationship. It is not about exploitation of people or planet. And this is what makes the Hebrew and Christian faith so unique. This is relationship about love for and the well-being of life. This is about a God who created, but hasn’t stopped creating or interacting with creation. This is a story of beginnings. Throughout the Old Testament you can read stories of God’s faithfulness, patience, and anguish as humans turned their backs on the relationship, and then God beginning again and again to find ways to build and restore the relationship.

This story of beginnings culminates with Jesus becoming the very flesh that the Son was a part of when the Holy Spirit first swept over the face of the waters as the heavens and the earth were created. John 1:1-4 starts with those very words, “In the beginning.” “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”

Jesus was the Word that was there right from the first beginning and Jesus was the Word made flesh that we rejoice in every Christmas, every Easter, every Sunday, and if we are paying attention, we are rejoicing in Jesus everyday. Our God is a God of beginnings. Jesus was there from the beginning. These beginnings have a past, a present, and a future.

This beginning from John 1 assures us that God’s love continues. As many of us learned in our first Sunday school lessons, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17)

God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world.

Jesus coming in the flesh was about a new beginning, one that would demonstrate God’s eternal, and unyielding love for humanity and all of creation. The gives us the hope that we can have multiple beginnings. Our past continues to shape and mold us, but we can start again with new understanding, new experiences, and new hope for ourselves, those we love, and for this planet. It does mean that we can’t continue to lives as we are. Beginnings signal a change. It may be change from one good thing to another. It may mean leaving behind parts of us, our life story, that we will grieve or that we needed to leave in order to be and do better.

As a global story, it may mean that we need to look for solutions to global problems, political, environmental, and social. If we truly are made in the image and likeness of God, it means that we have the capacity to figure it out while at the same time remembering our connection to the earth.

God is not done with us yet. God’s love still flows for the created and creation. May we live into our calling as those who take responsibility for the wellbeing of the lives and life entrusted to our care.

We ask it in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit who have been there since the beginning. Amen.

[1] Brueggemann, Wlater. Interpretation:A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching - Genesis. Series Editor, James L. Mays. Old Testament Editor Patrick D. Miller. John Knox Press. Louisville. 1982. P13.