Bible Text: Genesis 1:1-27 | Preacher: Rev. Jenn Geddes
“You want me to do what?!” I remember saying to the project coordinator of the Bay Area Restoration Council (BARC for short). I was about 15 years old out on a project. For two summers instead of an actual job I volunteered with this organization. Roughly once a week we would head out to a park along the Hamilton Bay front and most often we would remove invasive plant species like English Ivy, Purple Loosestrife or Garlic Mustard. Much like the broom busters here in the valley, those days were spent doing hard labour but the payoff was worth it. After each work party you could see the progress that had been made in removing these plants. This time, however, instead of pulling plants I was standing knee deep in hip waders in the Hamilton Bay planting native species. I was being told to put my bare hands in the dark, muddy and leech and carp invested waters of the Hamilton harbour. “You want me to do what?!”I don’t know if you have ever been to Hamilton, or seen its beautiful shoreline, but thanks to decades of steel factories and other industrial waste being poured into the water, the harbour has been condemned for many years. In my 19 years of living there I had never once seen anyone put any part of their bare skin into that water. So, with my first piece of water-grass in my fist I closed my eyes and plunged my hand into the mud. I expected to see that my hand had turned a glowing green when I lifted it from the sludge, but instead it was just covered in regular looking mud. After an entire afternoon I only had one leech to show for it. But that experience taught me that while creation is often beautiful and wild, it is sometimes gross and basic. Those summers working for BARC taught me that creation is fragile- certainly our relationship to it is fragile. When I realized that this year earth day would fall on a Sunday I was not only reminded of my time volunteering for BARC but I felt called to draw our attention to it and I felt that there were not better verses to hear than those from Genesis.
The first words in Genesis were the first words I ever learned in Hebrew. They are lines that many of us know off by heart בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ.. Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz. “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth”. I have often wondered how anyone can deny the existence of God after they have walked along a rugged coastline or ascended a mountain or bird watched in the Masai Maara. The beauty that surrounds us is just so breathtaking, astounding, humbling, and sometimes overwhelming that mere words cannot describe the feeling, much like one’s relationship with God. But then you spend a couple days in the mud and you realize that creation is not always astounding or overwhelming. Sometimes it just simply is, and maybe it is when we are busy with our hands in the mud that our minds turn from God to just mud. There is nothing particularly remarkable or good about it. Yet at the end of each day in creation it states, “And God saw that it was good.” But what happens when we cease valuing the goodness of creation and see it simply as a resource, or muddy water?
Since the establishment of theology and doctrine, theologians have been trying to define the word “good” within creation. What did God mean when God saw that what was created was good? I have seen too much to know that good does not mean safe or well or OK. In his treatise Nature of Good, Augustine declares that even decay is good as long as it exists, meaning that existence itself is good, because it is made possible by God and upheld by God. Goodness means existence. Just by simply being, creation is declared good. What else did God mean by good? When God saw that it was good, God saw that it was balanced and structured, that everything had its purpose in this balance.
Then God created humanity in God’s image. God even blessed humanity and said be fruitful and multiple, subdue the earth and have dominion over it and even then God saw that it was all very good. I don’t know when it was exactly, some say it was the fall with Adam and Eve, when we discovered shame, some say it was with the ability to control fire, others say it was with the switch from hunter/gatherers to agrarians, but somewhere along the line this balance- what made creation good- was tipped. Instead of acting like reflections of God we decided we could be God. We took the instruction of having dominion over and subduing creation not as members of this created balance but as entities above it. In Genesis, God takes a formless void and gives it shape, or as it says in some translations, turns chaos into order. We took that order and tried to control it.
I am certainly not the only Christian to tie faith and ecology. In fact, John McConnell, a devout Christian and Pentecostal, was the one to propose a holiday to celebrate the Earth at a UNESCO conference in San Francisco in 1969. He later wrote in his autobiography that as a Christian he believed, “humans had an obligation to take care of the earth, and to share its resources”. Incidentally he was also a major peace activist, “he believed that love and prayer could be more powerful than bombs”. His concern for the environment, desire for peace and love for God were not separate but rather intertwined. “He was a lifetime believer in care of the environment which was founded on his Christian passion for peace and love.” While I am always struck with the fact that God declares each act within the creation narrative good, I have always been stunned by the act of creating humanity in God’s image.
What does that mean within the balance of creation? In his commentary on Genesis, Gerhard von Rad explains that humanity, “is placed upon the earth in God’s image as God’s sovereign emblem” meaning that humans “serve as God’s representatives, summoned to maintain and enforce God’s claim to dominion over the earth.” I find this language helpful but also archaic. Even the term dominion is problematic to me- but I also hear the word, “representative”. As images or reflections of God we represent in our behaviour who God is- and I think we often misrepresent God.
In her commentary Valerie Bridgeman writes, “the journey of creation becomes the journey of a people. Genesis does not intend to be a science lesson, not even a history lesson, but rather a theological treatise. “This is how much God loves and wants the world,” is what the words suggest. God delighted…It will fall to humans to live in wonder, or risk creation suffering from human hubris.” We have to note that God does not create humans first nor are humans the crowning achievement of creation. While we might hear that upon creating humanity that God declares it is very good and therefore we think we are the very best thing about creation but in reality the passage says that God saw everything that was made and it was very good. While humanity is made in God’s image it is all of creation that is very good.
I’m not one to get very political in the pulpit and I try not to let some of my environmental bias sneak through my sermons but today is a little different. I won’t tell you want I think about pipelines or oil tankers- in part because I think the issue is far more complicated than a simple for or against. But for far too long we have used up resources as if they would always be available but we can’t ignore the realities that such behaviour is not sustainable. In his article on the climate crisis the Rev. John Holbert says, “We have in fact “dominated” the non-human creation; we have in fact “subdued” the land and all its gifts. And the result has been a disaster: over-fished seas, threatened bees, withering drought, fouled air. It is time for us to end this foolish and incorrect notion that it is our world. It is, and always has been, God’s world.”
If we look to Christ as our example of what a king should be then to have dominion does not mean dominate but rather servitude; to subdue does not mean control but sustain. Celebrating or honouring Earth day is one thing but we who live on this island, in this incredible valley, can see with our own eyes that a glacier is melting away, we can count our stocks and know the salmon aren’t returning, we can be told to boil our water due to over logging, so at what point do we take our role as images of God seriously and take care for God’s world? Amen