Subversive Creation

Propers: Holy Trinity Sunday, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It’s good. It’s good. It’s good. It’s good.

This is the refrain, over and over again, as God creates our world in the Book of Genesis. He makes light and separates it from darkness, and it is good. He divides the waters above the sky from the waters beneath, and it is good. He gathers the seas and raises the land which puts forth life in abundance, and it is good. And then all of this is populated: wings for the skies, fish for the seas, and beasts for the land, including at the last humankind, and it is good.

All of it is good: earth, wind, water, fire, birds and beasts and angels and men. Everything about this first Creation narrative is generosity and joy and gift. God makes everything freely out of love—and loves freely everything He has made.

Now you and I, having been raised on this story, may take all this for granted. Of course the world is good. Of course God is good. That’s the first thing they teach us in Sunday School, so basic as to be mundane. Yet at the time that this was written—or before that, recited by heart around a fire—the opening narrative of Genesis would’ve been shocking; scandalous; perhaps even satirical. Genesis 1 took the world and turned it upside-down.

Imagine yourself thousands of years ago in the middle of the Bronze Age, as shepherds and traders traipsing across a narrow neck of rivers and mountains with impassible desert to the east of you and the wild White Sea to your west. To the south would be Egypt, ancient and eternal; to the north the Mesopotamians and the Hittites; great empires, all of them, with great armies animated by the mad whims of their god-kings and their priests.

They had magic and myth and mighty tales from of old: some unique, some oddly alike. But all of them agreed on the structure of the world. They all knew their place, and more importantly yours, within it. Here’s how they’d tell it. In the beginning there was chaos: the dragon, the serpent, the mother of all monsters. And chaos birthed horrors, the giants and titans of a primordial age.

But then arose a hero—Marduk, Zeus, Odin—who defeated the monsters, dismembered the giants, slayed the dragons, and from their sundered corpses built up a world of order, through sweat and blood and raw brute strength. And that order must be maintained to this very day through strength of arms and firmness of law, forever striving to keep that primordial chaos at bay, to keep it from seeping back in through the cracks in our world.

And so regardless of the specifics present in any one given iteration of the myth, the bones of the story remain the same: the gods clawed their way up and out of nature; the world is a hostile or at best an indifferent place; and human beings are little more than an afterthought—created accidentally, or to serve some simple use for the gods.

That’s how the world was understood by the great and the powerful thousands of years ago, and how it is often still understood to this day: with petty gods arising from blind natural forces; with a world that seeks to consume you; and with people holding little purpose and no intrinsic value. This is the pagan understanding of the cosmos. And it is this that Genesis flips squarely on its head.

In Genesis, the gods do not arise from nature as children of chaos. Rather there is one God beyond all gods—One not even properly called a god—who alone is infinite, almighty, eternal, beautiful, all-good and all-true. And this God, this One God, created with but a Word the world and nature and life along with this universe and all possible realities, effortlessly, joyfully. He need slay no chaos-dragon, no sea serpent: rather He Himself creates the monsters of the deep, as the Psalmist will later say, “for the sport of it.”

As for human beings, well, we are the capstone of Creation, the stewards and sub-creators tasked with cultivating all the wonders God hath wrought. We are given dominion not for selfish exploitation but for guidance, protection, provision, and wonder. The world is made good at every stage, at every level. And it is ours as a garden, as a gift, as a joy to be cherished and cultivated and shared. Now that’s a heck of a story.

Imagine living in that little strip of land, that little Israel, 3000 years ago, sitting around a fire, gathering as a clan, and sharing this alternate account of Creation, this playfully subversive inversion of all that the mighty and powerful hold dear. Imagine being a shepherd, a farmer, a caravan trader, smiling to yourself, knowing that you are beloved by God, by a God far beyond all the gods of Egypt or Mesopotamia, Germania or Greece. Imagine looking at a world that others see as fearful, as threatening, and knowing it instead for a garden and a gift.

God is in control; the world is good; and people are worthy of love. This goes against the ruling doctrine of every empire on earth, past, present, or future. Instead of a small, defensive, frightened world, Genesis invites us to a global garden of delights and of wonders, a feast of learning, a banquet of joy. And yes, it has fallen rather far from that initial grace—a tale told more fully in another chapter of this same book—yet never once has God forgotten the original beauty of this world, nor ever abandoned His conviction to make it good again.

To that end, of course, God chose to become a human being, to enter as a creature into His own Creation, to redeem, repair, and resurrect this fallen, broken world through the very same agents which set about to break it in the first place. Such is the story of Jesus Christ, founder and object of our faith, who came to heal this world and save us all by entering into our wounds, then to defeat sin and death and hell by drawing them into His wounds.

Thus is Creation Resurrected, made whole, hallowed now not once but twice: first hallowed by the Word which called it forth into being from nothing; then hallowed by the Word made flesh, who became part of it, to die and to rise. The world was made good in the beginning; and by the Blood and the Spirit of Jesus the Christ, it will be remade good in the end. This is the promise of God. And God does not break promises. Our victory in Jesus is won.

Yet here we are now in the meantime, the in-between time, surrounded it seems by the valley of death, betwixt two distant mountains of glory, one ancient and one yet to be. And here and now, in the meantime—I’m afraid this world is quite a mess. You know the headlines as well as I do. Pandemic. Recession. Brutality, racism, and riots. 100,000 dead in the last three months, just in this country alone. And political divisions so bitter and so deep that we’ve stopped hoping and trying to make things better, and just pray every day that they won’t get very much worse.

It’s paralyzing. It truly is. The challenges appear so enormous that we hardly know where to begin: healthcare, education, economics, criminal justice, environmentalism, the military-industrial complex—we’ve got to overhaul the whole thing. We’ve got to come together, as a people, as a planet, or a lot of us will not survive. At times like these I need the Bible: not just to show me that history has always been a mess, with monsters and morons in charge; but to remind me of the greater story, the true myth which transcends history, the Greatest Story Ever Told.

And I stop, and I breathe, and I pray. And I remember: God is eternal; the world is good; and people are made to be loved. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son … not to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.” We know how the story began; we know how the story will end. All we have to decide now is what to do with the time that is given us. We were born into this time, into this generation, in order to be Christ for this world, Christ for this generation.

And with all that’s going on out there—where men are crucified in the street on camera and cities burn as a result—we need Jesus now more than ever. We need to find the Risen Christ in the suffering of our neighbor, to heal us, to forgive us, and to guide us into His peace; a peace in which perfect justice and perfect mercy forever come together as perfect and infinite truth.

There’s good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.