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Why This Beginning
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 24, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 1, selected verses Colossians 1:15-20
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth….” Why this beginning—this Bereshith in Hebrew—this genesis? According to one midrash, the Scriptures necessarily begin with the letter bet (which looks, when printed, like an upended staple ]) because: “Just as bet is closed on three sides and open only in front [that is, to the left, in the direction of the ensuing text, Hebrew being written from right to left], so you are not permitted to investigate what is above [the heavens] and what is below [the deep], what is before [the six days of creation] and what is [to happen] after [the world’s existence]—you are permitted only the time the world was created and thereafter [the world we live in].” Citing this midrash in a footnote, Leon Kass (Professor of Social Thought at the University of Chicago) wonders why a religion so interested in matters ethical and political would begin with cosmological and metaphysical answers to questions not yet asked. Why not begin instead in the Garden of Eden, say, or with the call of Abraham? Kass goes on to suggest, following the lines of the midrash, that the majestic prose of Genesis 1 was written to address our “curiosity and wonder about the world [we live in], as well as [our] anxiety and our restlessness about [our] own existence in it.” Perhaps he is right. Yet for the last two hundred years, or ever since the publication of The Origin of the Species, our curiosity and wonder has devolved into a contentious debate concerning what is above and below and especially before. “My brother,” writes novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, “confided in me that there was no god. The earth tore itself away from the sun, he said, and it took millions of years before it cooled and began to produce bacteria, plants, animals, birds, insects. My brother Joshua used such odd words as ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ ‘accident.’ He told me that all creatures were born with a survival instinct and had to fight for their existence. The stronger ones were always victorious and brought up new generations, while the weak ones perished and were lost forever.” Singer counters that his father and mother always told him God was a “god of justice, on the side of the weak, not only the strong….But I heard my brother remark,” he goes on, “that nature does not know any compassion; it acts according to eternal laws….How,” wondered this child, “can we love something or someone who knows no pity and perhaps does not love us?” Fundamentalists and Darwinians aside, it seems to me that Singer’s question may be the question addressed by this majestic beginning, a question that shifts the debate from the geological dating of rocks to the generative love of the One who has chosen not to be alone, from the beginning, our Rock and our Redeemer. At the start, therefore, two important distinctions must be made concerning what the first chapter of Genesis is not. It is not, according to Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann, a myth. That is to say, Genesis breaks with the mythological understanding of reality which assumes all the real action has to do “with the gods…and [that] creation in and of itself has no significance or value.” But Genesis also resists a scientific worldview, a view that assumes “the world contains its own mysteries and can be understood in terms of itself without any transcendent referent.” Rather in this beginning, Israel affirms that the creator and the creation “have to do with each other decisively…and that…neither can be understood apart from the other.” For God, the theologians say, this is a free choice of God not to be God without us; for us, they say, our humanity rises or falls, literally, upon our having to do with the God by whose hand we were made. All of these claims, let me hasten to add, are and can only be articles of faith, a faith that need not contradict human reason but a faith that does not issue from human reason. Rather we are in the realm of revelation this morning, as we are every Sunday morning: the realm of God’s initiative, God’s choosing to be known by us. You may choose, for your part, to put your enlightened blinders on, admitting to the one sure and certain way of knowing and dispelling mystery that is science. Or you may, by God’s grace, be given to take a leap, the same taken from the beginning by every witness who once was blind and now sees through a glass darkly. What we see in the first place, says Genesis, is God. In the beginning, God! Begin, says Scripture, with God. This will make all the difference in the world. Do not, the text by inference commands, “presuppose the reality of the world and then ask whether there is also a God.” For always when human beings have tried to “read the truth from sun, moon and stars or from [our] selves,” [Barth] we end up bowing down to things that were not made to disclose life’s meaning and purpose, worshipping things that can only point to themselves. Begin, says Genesis, with the God who has begun a good thing in you. This, say so many today, is precisely what human reason cannot do, and they are right. Hard as we try, the distinction between our mind and God’s is vast…and that is what, in the beginning, we see in the second place. By and large, when it comes to the possibility and plausibility of a God who created, what our minds propose is a First Cause or a wild chance or a Big Bang which, we speculate, may not preclude the possibility of a Higher Being, but cannot prove the existence of such a Being either. Or again, beginning with the God the human mind can conceive, we come up with a hypothesis, Intelligent Design for instance, that may go up against other reasonable hypotheses, leaving us at the end of the day or our lives with an opinion. “We are in a sorry state,” writes Karl Barth, “if we are compelled to think and finally to live and die on the ground of [a] hypothesis.” Hence to our every idle speculation about God that begins with the evidence of creation, God juxtaposes a Word, in the beginning, spoken into a world. And the Word, says John’s gospel as if writing a midrash on Genesis 1, was not first “Let there be light” but was God’s Word. The Word was with God in the beginning and yet destined in the fullness of time to be the Light of the world God was about to make. The Word, said John, was God. On the one hand, all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. On the other hand, he shines in the darkness of all that God did not make or will from the beginning: disease and Tsunamis, violence and hatred, murder and anarchy. He comes as Light to expose the chaos that still threatens the edges of our human existence. Moreover in Him, says Scripture over and over again, we see the face of the God who began to create the heavens and the earth: it is the same God who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are one. Begin, then, with the God who has come to you beyond your wildest speculations in Jesus Christ and see in his life, death and resurrection the God who created you and also cares for you; the God who made you and also has mercy upon your transgressions; the God who formed you in God’s image in your mother’s womb and will redeem you on the far side of the grave; the God who fashioned you in freedom and who will uphold, govern and sustain you; the God who began a good thing in you and will bring it to completion in the Day of Jesus Christ. This is not human supposition. Neither is this rocket science. This is the love that chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world and destined us from the beginning for adoption as God’s own. So that in answer to Singer’s childhood question—how can we love something or someone who knows no pity and perhaps does not love us—we have only God’s Word: in Jesus Christ, we say, behold the God who has loved you from the beginning. But in him we also behold the face of our humanity. As God, revealed in the law and the prophets to Singer’s parents, led them to tell their children that the God who created the heavens and the earth was a God of justice, on the side of the weak, not only the strong, so we see in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection the meaning and purpose of God’s redeeming love in our creation. And I must say that “survival of the fittest” would not be a fair characterization of that meaning and purpose! In a scathing essay intent on making this point, novelist, essayist and Calvinist Marilyn Robinson judges Darwinism to be “harsh and crude in its practical consequences, in a degree that sets it apart from all other respectable scientific hypotheses…. It had its origins,” she notes, “in polemics against the poor, and against the irksome burden of extending charity to them. [To wit, writes Darwin in The Descent of Man with a distain not unrelated to eugenics and later to Hitler, “We civilized men…do our utmost to check the process of elimination: we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone at the last moment….Thus the weak members of society propagate their kind.] Whereas, Robinson counters, “the Judeo-Christian ethic of charity derives from the assertion that human beings are made in the image of God, that is, that reverence is owed to human beings simply as such,…that their misery or neglect or destruction is not, for God, a matter of indifference, or of merely compassionate interest, but is something of a sacrilege.” This complicates our own distain for Creationism because, as Robinson says, “To be free of God the Creator is to be free of the religious ethic implied in the Genesis narrative of creation. Charity…[is] a burden under which people never stop chafing—witness,” she concludes, “this unfathomably rich country now contriving new means daily to impoverish the poor among us.” And suddenly we begin to see how curious the bedfellows are in this debate between evolution and intelligent design. “People who insist that the sacredness of Scripture depends on belief in creation in a literal six days seem never to insist on a literal reading of ‘to him who asks, give,’ or ‘sell what you have and give the money to the poor.’ In fact,” Robinson says, “their politics and economics align themselves quite precisely with those of their adversaries, who yearn to disburden themselves of the weak, and to unshackle the great creative forces of competition” while Social Darwinists quietly line up in every age with the proponents of genocide! All of which returns us to the question with which we began: Why this beginning? In a word, apart from the God for whom all things made, our earthbound reason and our high-minded ethics will come to naught. “No matter how the human brain might [evolve],” answers Singer, “it will always come back to the…God [who] has created heaven and earth, [mortals] and animal, with a will and a plan, and that, despite all the evil life undergoes, there is a purpose in creation,” a purpose revealed in these latter days in him who, from the beginning, was and is the love for whom all creation is destined. Thanks be to God! |