Genesis – Peculiar Faith

This past Sunday, Christians observing the Season of Creation heard from one of the classic creation stories in Genesis (2:4-22). Here at All Saints’ Parish in Saugatuck, we heard Robert Alter’s translation of that passage, a “tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”

That passage, in other words, and just like the one in the first chapter of Genesis, is a legend, a myth, a story. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, but it is not a scientific account of how things came to be; it’s a spiritual account of who we are and where we belong in relation to each other, to the wider world of nature, and to God.

This is precisely and tragically what we have forgotten as modern Western people.

The Season of Creation this year begins where the Bible begins, with this powerful reminder from an ancient storyteller of who we are and where we belong.

Notice just a few of the features of this tale of belonging, beginning with a forest.

I’ve read this story from Genesis many times over the years, and for some reason I never before imagined the Garden of Eden as a forest.

“Natives Playing on the Land,” Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Creator God makes the first human from the dirt and then causes the soil to bring forth every tree that is lovely to look at and is good for food. That’s where God places the human—in a forest.

And just like Saugatuck and Douglas, where I work and live, a river was running through that ancient forest. I started to pay much closer attention to rivers when I was living in California and how important they are on a drought-prone landscape.

Soil, water, plants, food—everything that first human needed for life, except for one thing: companions.

As a spiritual account of who we are and where we belong, this ancient story suggests quite directly that companionship is not optional but actually essential, it’s mission-critical for flourishing.

In this era when the Centers for Disease Control has identified loneliness as an epidemic in this society, with a whole host of health consequences, in this era when so many humans feel so isolated, even alienated from the wider world of God’s creation, let’s notice that the first companions of the first human were other animals.

“Adam Naming the Animals,” Barbara Jones

These other animals were not merely resources or commodities, or just a bunch of livestock; these were companions. The first human even gave them names! I don’t mean taxonomic classifications into distinct species, I mean names, like my dear Aussie shepherds Judah and Tyler, and my beloved golden retriever Sydney, and the beagle I grew up with, Ginger.

Perhaps now more than ever, the world today needs a spiritual account of who we are and where we belong with all the other creatures of the same Creator God.

This first week of the Season of Creation draws our attention in that regard to the forest where the first humans began and, I would suggest, to where we must now return—a long overdue homecoming, as it were, to the many forests where we belong.

Back in the 1980s, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture began studying a popular cultural trend of spending time immersed in nature—and especially in forests; people were doing this as a way to address high levels of burnout in the technology industry.

The researchers coined a term for this practice—“forest bathing”—and the results of that study were remarkable. Among people spending even short periods of time in forests, they documented significant improvements in immune system function, notable reductions in blood pressure, accelerated recovery times from surgery, measurable gains in the ability to focus, even among children with ADHD, and also reams of anecdotal evidence about increased energy levels and better moods—and all of this thanks in large measure to the quality of the air generated by the trees, the insects, the fungi, and the mosses.

Having just celebrated Labor Day, giving thanks for a social movement of human beings that vastly improved the conditions for the working poor, among others, let us also give thanks for the shared labor of trees that makes the conditions for life itself on this planet possible.

Trees perform this amazing feat in many ways, not least for the air we breathe in that magical process called photosynthesis that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Air, breath, breeze, wind—these are all equally suitable ways to translate the word we see rendered in the Bible as “Spirit.” John loved making that theological pun, as this season invited us to hear on Sunday from John’s account of the Gospel (3:1-16). “The wind blows where it wills,” Jesus says—that’s the Spirit, the very breath of God, the source of life everywhere on this planet.

It’s the same pun, by the way, made by the ancient storyteller in Genesis. That story begins with the Spirit of God moving over watery chaos like wind—it’s the very same word used to describe God’s own breath filling the nostrils of the first human who then resides in a forest.

As part of this spiritual account of who we are and where we belong, we might take note of what scientists have been learning about trees for several decades now—and it’s mind-blowing.

In his 2015 book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben, a forester, summarizes beautifully what we have come to understand about trees as truly social beings.

A forest, for example, is not just a collection of individual trees; it’s a community, with older trees supporting younger ones by sharing nutrients. Trees can actually count, learn, and remember. They care for and tend sick members and they warn each other of danger by sending messages through fungal networks—I saw this happening in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains back in California: when one tree succumbed to the drought-driven bark beetle infestation, nearby trees started to produce more sap to protect themselves.

We stand today as a society in need of profound change, a dramatic reorientation of how we see ourselves living on this precious Earth and with her many creatures, including trees and forests. The change we need is so pronounced we should probably borrow the now-classic image from John’s account of the Gospel: we must be born again.

“But how can this be?” Nicodemus says to Jesus. I can’t crawl back into my mother’s womb and start all over. We can’t possibly retool our electrical grid, redesign our whole transportation system, re-evaluate our entire food supply, or reconsider how we live with other species—plant and animal. How can we possibly do all that?

How? By falling in love.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould once noted that “we will not save what we do not love.”

For God so loved the world…

God saves the world not of anger but only and always out of love. Always and forever for love.

And so the stories we tell about who we are and where we belong must be stories filled with wonder and amazement and gratitude—stories told by people who have fallen in love with the world of God’s creation.

We must tell the kind of stories that sound like we have just been born all over again…

And it was good.
And it was good.
And it was very good.

There are still four more instances of that declaration of goodness in the first account of God’s creation of the world in Genesis, and many Christians heard all seven of them this past weekend when we celebrated Trinity Sunday.

What does it mean to call something “good”? What makes something “good” and how can we discern when it is? And why would it matter so much to repeat this refrain of goodness so often in the story of creation?

I’m guessing that human beings have not changed so terribly much over the last few thousand years. Just like today, humans in the ancient Mediterranean world likely thought something was “good” when it was good for them; something’s good when we can use it, or sell it, or trade it for something else; we become the standard for what’s considered “good.” I cannot help but think of how often I called my dear dog Judah a good boy simply because he obeyed me!

So perhaps it’s time to notice again (or for the first time) that all but one of the declarations of goodness in the first chapter of Genesis occur before humans even existed. Six out of seven times, God’s creation is declared good without any reference to human beings.

The whole creation itself is thoroughly good—whether it’s useful to us or not.

Well, that’s rather rude, isn’t it? Don’t we count for anything? Yes, we do, and much more so than most of us have dared to imagine—and sometimes more than we want to believe. To be described as “very good”—as humans were in that story—comes with some responsibilities.

John of Damascus, a monk and theologian of the seventh century, was embroiled in what came to be known as the “iconoclast controversy.” This was a vigorous debate about whether it is appropriate to have icons, or visual images, in churches.

John was an ardent supporter of icons and actually cited a familiar verse from Genesis to support his case: “And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image…”

John would have been reading the Greek version of that passage, and in Greek that phrase—“in the image of God”—reads as the icon of God.

The human face as an icon of God! Shouldn’t this take our breath away? My face, and your face, and every single human face we see, all of them, icons of the God who made us!

And so, John of Damascus says, if you degrade and denigrate and reject visual images, you offend the artist—and in this case, the artist is God.

I think a lot these days about the visual arts, living and working as I do on what many call the “arts coast” of Michigan. We Christians actually have a lot to say and to offer, from our own Christian traditions, about the importance of visual images, the spiritual depth of art as it connects us to Creator God, the very source of creativity itself.

We might also note, rather urgently, that the stakes are rather high in this shared artistic endeavor with God. John of Damascus goes on to note something else about that familiar passage in Genesis. We are created not only in the image but also the likeness of God.

Those are not the same words; in fact, in Greek the word “likeness” is not a noun but a process, not a state of being but a state of becoming.

We are created in God’s image, yes, but we’re still on the way toward God’s likeness.

To be human is to be engaged in a profound process of assimilating to God, of resembling the One who made us, of being constantly formed and transformed into the divine creatures God intended to make from the very beginning.

The choices we make in this life shape the course of that journey; that’s why the stakes are so high, and that’s why visual artists can help us.

Visual artists can help us see at least a bit more clearly the imprint of God not only in our own faces, but also in the faces of those who are different from us, even different species, and in Earth herself. And by seeing more clearly the presence of God all around us and among us and in us and in each other, hopefully we will act and live differently.

As we launch into June, LGBTQ Pride Month, we need to see just exactly how high the stakes are for the varieties of gendered sexualities in the human race. Beyond the usual platitudes—“love is love” or “we embrace diversity”—we need to see much more clearly that those who do not conform to the standards of White Patriarchy are increasingly at risk of serious physical harm, especially with easily accessible firearms.

This risk pertains no matter where we happen to live or work or play in this country, from shopping malls and suburban streets, to national parks and urban office buildings—and this risk continues for black and brown people, just as it always has been present for women.

And still, it was good.

Everything depends on the goodness of God’s creation, and therefore on the goodness of God—a divine goodness in which we are invited to participate ever more fully.

That’s a key word—participation—for a celebration of the Trinitarian character of God. Rather than some abstract metaphysical doctrine, affirming God as Trinity is meant to draw us ever deeper into the never-ending mystery of God’s own life of self-giving, reciprocal love.

Returning to John of Damascus for a moment, he used a mostly untranslatable Greek word to describe this Trinitarian mystery of God—the word is perichoresis.

Some scholars have noted that there is at least a trace of our word “choreography” in that Greek term. John apparently was inviting us to think about the Trinitarian relationships of God like a cosmic dance—and if you’ve ever been swept away by the alluring rhythms of a tango or the gracefulness of a waltz, the energy often spills off the dancefloor and you can feel it pulsating across your skin, rumbling in your muscles, your heartrate rising.

And that, John of Damascus said, is how God creates. The creative energy and fertile relationality of God’s own life just spills over, as it were, and the whole Universe comes into existence—the whole cosmos itself as an unimaginable dance of evolving, changing, glorious life.

That mutual and eternal exchange of divine energy among the divine persons makes it impossible to tell the dancers from the dance and the dance itself is endless, deathless love—that’s the Holy Trinity, a doctrine that could actually change the world!

The very source of creativity itself is swirling all around us and in us and among us—our very faces the ikons of Creator God as we journey into God’s own likeness, from one degree of glory to another—world without end!

Now…let’s live as if this were true.

Tag: Genesis

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