Good morning.
Well, for the next month or so, we'll be making our way through Genesis chapters 1 through 3.
So Wednesday morning, I was sitting on my porch.
I was working on the sermon.
I was in my comfy chair, and I could hear birds chirping and see ferns and azaleas and oak trees, and there's water falling from the sky.
We call it rain, providing for these creatures and these plants, and inside, just behind me, Christy was talking with Rachel Sam's wife, who at the time, because this was on Wednesday, she had a baby in her body.
A human being inside of her body, her being a human being, and a human being inside of a human being.
And this human being, she had been growing it inside of her body for the past nine months.
There was a tube connecting, it's crazy connecting this human being to her.
And then this little human being came out of her body on Friday and was born into the world.
And in an instant began to breathe oxygen.
And in an instant needed to begin to be fed through its mouth.
I mean, what an amazing world we live in.
And it's all around us.
How did all of this begin?
These babies, and did you know, by the way, 350,000 species of beetles.
Of beetles! Who knew?
Who knew?
So maybe you have read Genesis at some point about all this creation, about these creation of babies and animals and beetles and all of this.
Maybe you have read Genesis at some point, or heard someone tell the Genesis story, and you just did not buy it.
Or you bought it.
And then over time you began to think and you just said, ah, that just doesn't add up for me.
So maybe that's you.
Or maybe you're all into it, you love it, you've always loved it, or you've come to love it, and you're in it, you believe it, you're for it.
And I just want to say, great, great.
I'm glad you're here.
No matter who you are or where you are on this, I'm glad you are here for this theological conversation.
Because I got a bunch of questions.
Like, why this creation story written like this?
And does anything about this creation story written like this tell us anything about God?
And if it tells us something about the core of who God is, is it possible it could tell us something about the core of who we are?
Now, it's not groundbreaking news, but Genesis 1 is a poem.
We see it and we feel it in the structure, those repetitions.
God created this and he created that, and it was night, it was day, day one, and it was good, and he saw it was good.
All those repetitions, that feeling of repetition in the text.
And so with any poetry, you got to do some digging.
You remember that?
You remember that when you were reading Shakespeare and you're in the 11th grade, and you're sitting in the back of the room, and the teacher, she was gonna call on you, and you were so nervous.
And the reason why you're so nervous is because the answer was not clear, like two plus two equals four, because it was poetry and it was gonna take some digging to get to an answer, and you didn't want to get called on.
Well, we're gonna have to dig some this morning.
It's sort of like a good Matlock episode.
Remember, remember Matlock?
I used to watch the reruns on TBS in the afternoons.
It was CSI before CSI, but like take away the gore.
That's what Matlock was.
There was this one show where a guy was dying.
He's on the floor, he's dying, he's laying on his back.
And above him, kind of kind of behind his head and above him, there's a T VR and there's a VCR tape.
A VCR tape is running, and the counter on the VCR is running.
And just as he dies, like his last breath, his last movement, he reaches up and he hits stop on the VCR.
So Matlock comes on the scene and the VCR, the counter says 337.
And so the whole show we're trying to figure out who killed this guy?
What happened?
And then Matlock figures out at the very end of the episode, he figures out, well, if you're dying and you're lying on your back on the floor and you're looking up at a VCR counter that's going by 337 spells Lee.
Lee was the killer! Amazing, amazing.
Ben Matlock, amazing, amazing.
Well, that's a long way around to say that I wanted to plug Ben Matlock, but also we have to dig a little into the poetry to understand what the author is saying.
We just gotta work a little to get to the answer.
So, Genesis 1:1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now remember, the Old Testament was not written in English, but in Hebrew.
And that word for God is the word Elohim.
So this Elohim created the heavens and the earth.
This Elohim created, that word created, he barod, so this Elohim barod the heavens and the earth.
He, that word barod means he made things out of nothing.
Elohim made things out of nothing.
So with the gift of science, we know this is even more true for Elohim.
That the gift of science shows us, yeah, okay, some things made some things, but what we know Elohim did is he made the things that made the things, and the things that make the things, he made those things, he made them out of nothing.
He was there at the beginning.
Verse 2.
The earth was without form and void, meaning it was wild and waste, is what that means.
So the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Oh, interesting, interesting.
So this Elohim who creates this Elohim has some sort of spirit.
So now we have Elohim and we have spirit.
This word spirit in Hebrew is the imagery of wind, and it's in the feminine.
The gender of the word in Hebrew is in feminine.
Now in the New Testament, the word for Holy Spirit is neuter in gender, but not here.
Here in this Hebrew word and this poem in Genesis 1, she is there.
The spirit, she is there, and she's sort of warming the unseen creation like a mama with her baby.
Okay, so if you track with me now, we have Elohim, and we have spirit, and we move to verse 3.
And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.
So God spoke, he said a word, the word, he spoke a word, let there be light, and there was light.
And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light day, and the darkness he called night, and there was evening, and there was morning the first day.
So God, out of speaking, out of his word, he created.
I went and I visited three babies this week.
Apparently, something good was going on around our church folks around last Thanksgiving.
Some real gratitude was being shared amongst marital couples, and we are, hey, I am proud of that gratitude.
Hey, good job.
Good job.
So all these babies are being born.
I went and saw three babies this week, and these babies they got me thinking about the first word a child speaks.
You know the storyline.
Dad's working with the kid to say dada, and mom's working with the kid to say mama, and then meme or grand or ya, whoever shows up.
And they're pleading with that little one-year-old, like, oh, you know, say ya, say grand, say dada, say mama.
And we all want that first word, and then it comes, baby Janet says mama, and it's amazing.
And we post it online and we FaceTime her relatives and we say, Janet, say it again, mama, mama.
And it's like it's never been done before.
And we throw a party and she's brilliant.
We give her presents.
I mean, she's gonna go to Harvard, she's brilliant.
Now, two years later, her little baby brother Larry does the same thing, and he just gets like a cheese stick or something.
But that first kid, that speaking of a word, it's amazing.
This being has created something into this world.
See, a word is an expression of yourself to be known by someone else.
Creation.
Elohim's creation is an expression that comes out from himself, out from Elohim, and this creation comes by means of the word.
Now, what is this word?
Well, John helps us make sense of it in John 1, 1 through 3.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.
Now we know John's whole narrative, his gospel is about Jesus, and so then verse 2 he says, He, meaning Jesus, he was in the beginning with God.
All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
So this is about the Christ, the word in the beginning.
See, the Christ has always been there.
The creation came from the Christ.
And in the incarnation, we know the Christ as Jesus the Christ.
So now, here we have in Genesis 1, verses 1 through 3.
We have Elohim, we have Spirit, and we have the Word or the Christ.
So we get a hint of this plurality.
Not three gods, one God, but three parts of God, three persons of God, for us to begin to understand who God is.
One God, three persons?
Elohim, spirit, the Christ, and then in day six, after five days of creation, day six, Elohim, he created living creatures like cows and lizards and for some reason stuff like hairless cats.
And God saw that it was good.
And then he says in verse 26, then God said, Let us, let us, us, let us make man in our image after our likeness.
Oh, plural.
Elohim and the Spirit and the Word.
Verse 27, Elohim created man in his own image.
In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them at the highlight of creation.
Elohim creates you.
At the highlight of God's creation.
You show up.
And then day seven came and got arrested.
Okay, all of that digging, what does that have to do with you?
Well, point number one, you were created out of love.
Maybe you have only heard in your own mind and heart, and maybe out of the words of your parents, or maybe from somebody else, that you need to be a little bit more, you need to be a little bit better.
But listen, listen, listen, that is a lie you can now leave behind.
You were created in the image of God out of love.
And this doesn't discount the reality of your imperfection or my imperfection or our sin or our brokenness.
It rather gives us hope of who we are while we are still sinners.
Now back to these days of creation for us to make sense of this.
Hang with me here through this.
There's two groupings here in these days of creation.
This is taken from the JPS Torah commentary.
The JPS Torah commentary says group one, day one, day two, day three.
These are the resources, day one, day two, and day three.
The resources, day one, light, day two, sky leaving the waters.
Day three, dry land and vegetation.
These are all resources.
And then group two shows up in day four, day five, and day six.
These are the utilizers of the resources.
Day group two, the utilizers, day four, day five, and day six.
Day four, the luminaries.
Day five, fish and fowl.
Day six, land creatures, humankind.
So what we have here is we have that day four goes with day two, meaning the luminaries, like the sun and the stars, they go into the sky.
Day five and day six, the fish and the fowl, land creatures, they go with day three, dry land of vegetation, as do we.
Now, for some, this presents a problem.
For the way that we measure a day, the sun does not arrive until day four.
Yet the language and the framework of days that exists from the very beginning, day one, day two, and day three.
They assume that days are occurring.
But the sun hasn't existed yet.
And then vegetation is created before the sun, but vegetation needs the sun in order to have survival, all of which are literal problems.
But not poetic problems.
And this is where I get to point number two.
Point number two, the poetry gives light to the Trinity, and the Trinity gives light to your identity.
Let me say it again.
The poetry gives light to the Trinity, and the Trinity gives light to your identity.
So here we have Elohim, Spirit, the Christ.
They're all here.
Now the historical Greek word for Trinity is paracuresis, and it's a good word.
It means to go around or dance around.
Some say it means the dance of love.
I think that's what was going on last Thanksgiving when those babies were coming.
Our family has a little dance party in our den a few evenings each week.
Probably talked about it before, probably because our family loves it, because I love it.
And then what we'll do is we'll get into the evening, and the evening is kind of slowing down.
It's after dinner, we're in our den and we blast the music, and there's lots of twirling and jumping.
We had to outlaw cartwheels.
Cartwheels are out, too many injuries.
But we dance.
Sometimes we dance as a group, sometimes we dance by ourselves, sometimes there's a line dancing going on, and every once in a while a circle forms.
You know what I'm talking about.
You've been to a wedding.
That circle forms, and you go out in the middle of the circle and you dance.
You know, there are a lot of days I drive along the expressway, maybe put my head on the pillow at night and sort of relive my mistakes a lot.
Maybe doubt myself.
Maybe just wonder if I need I need to be something more.
But I never do it in that setting.
Not in that circle in my den with those girls.
Not with my family.
Not inside that dance of love.
And I as a dad, trying to love unconditionally, I enjoy nothing more than watching one of my children get inside that circle and be free and get embarrassed and make a mistake and realize it doesn't matter.
That I don't care.
Their mom doesn't care.
Their sisters don't care because they are safe and secure inside the dance of love.
See, this is the image of Paracaresis, the Trinity, Elohim, the Spirit, the Christ that was there from the very beginning, the dance of love, of which created you and defines you.
Last point, point number three, the poetry leads us to Jesus.
The poetry leads us to Jesus.
God creates, and on day seven, he rests.
He rests in the loving community of the Trinity.
He rests in his own being.
And we wonder where we might find some rest from self-justification, performancism, or just pretending.
Feeling ashamed or guilty or the endlessness of trying to self-redeem.
I mean, is there a place?
Is there a place for your inner being to understand its origins and to finally be at home where you could be free from religious and secular demand?
Well, in the New Testament, we learn how God takes this loving dance that we see from the very beginning and through the Christ incarnates the love for us to know in Jesus, where our imperfection and sin is put upon him and his righteousness and perfection is placed on us.
So we are God's beloved living and the dance of love securely forever.
So you aren't perfect.
I know you're not perfect.
I'm not perfect, but you were created out of the loving dance of God and are redeemed by Him and His work for you, not your work for Him.
So, my brothers and sisters, may you know you are beautifully created.
And while you are far from perfect in the Christ, you are redeemed and you are made whole.