Remarks for Shared Homily at the 5:00pm Mass
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Trinity Sunday (Year A)
June 4, 2023
Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.
The Trinity, by Lance McNeel
Creation stories are on my mind this evening. We hear Genesis chapter 1 with its “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” read each year at the Easter Vigil. But the Sunday lectionary offers us just one opportunity every three years to engage this Hebrew creation story as a 5pm community and share our reflections. Let’s take advantage of our opportunity this Trinity Sunday in Year A.
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Creation stories are ancient. Ancestral. Passed down across centuries, carrying the wisdom of our elders. Creation stories reach back to a primordial past to account for the present. Creation stories try and explain why things are the way they are here and now in light of how they came to be back in the beginning. But creation stories always narrate their “in the beginning” from a particular historical and cultural vantage point. We humans create creation stories in our own image to explain a way of being in the world.
Take the creation story of the Dunne-za, an aboriginal people from the subarctic region of western Canada – a hunting culture. In the beginning, their story goes, things were different from the way they are here and now. Roles were reversed: giant animals hunted and killed human beings. Until Saya, mythic hero of the Dunne-za, steps on to the primordial scene – the first person to follow the trails of animals, the first person with knowledge, the first hunter. Saya boldly stalked the giant animals who had been preying on humans. After slaying one enormous beast, Saya scattered its flesh in all directions and called out the names of the wild animals that populate Dunne-za lands to this day, and brought them into being: rabbits and deer, weasels and wolverines, lynx and cougar. The giant animals Saya did not kill, he pursued relentlessly until, in their desperation, they sought refuge under the surface of the earth. There the great beasts rested. You can still see the contours of their bodies in the hills and valleys and mountains of Dunne-za lands.
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Now I know the historical and cultural context of Genesis 1 differs dramatically from that of Saya the first hunter. In fact, the Dunne-za narrative might remind us more of that other Hebrew creation story in Genesis 2 and 3, with its God who walks in a garden at the time of the evening breeze and has hands to form the first human being from the dirt and then take one of the man’s ribs to make the first woman. The God of Genesis 1 is less anthropomorphic, more cosmic, and, well, up there. The story itself is so neat and symmetrical; so logical and step by step – six days of creation, evening and morning. Light. Sky, seas, and dry land. Plant life. Sun and moon. Water creatures and air creatures. Land creatures and human beings. And then God rested on the seventh day. So familiar. Still, with my ears tuned a bit differently by the story of Saya, I hear three intriguing ideas in Genesis 1.
First, God creates by separating. God allows, no encourages, mandates even that each element, light and darkness, waters above and below the dome of the sky, be itself, fully, unique and not diminished or coopted by another. As if God said, let there be variety and difference. Dignity in diversity. Diverse dignity.
But second, God also creates by gathering together – the seas in their own place and the dry land in its. As if to proclaim: all that make up these particular aspects of the world are richer in solidarity than if they remained scattered; more productive and abundant together than apart.
And third, the God of Genesis 1 creates by creating co-creators. Yes, let there be light, God says, and there was light, just like that. More often in the story, however, God says things like: let the waters bring forth great sea monsters and everything with which the waters swarm; and let every winged bird of every kind fly above the earth and across the sky. Let the earth bring forth green plants and trees, cattle and creeping things and wild animals – and let them all, the creatures of land and air and water, continue and expand God’s creative work by being fruitful and multiplying. So, too, God’s human co-creators, who are singled out in the story for special attention: created in the image of God with dominion over the other creatures, told to fill the earth and subdue it, whatever those words meant to the ancient Hebrews or might mean to us now. After all, this is a human creation story, told from our vantage point. I wonder how the cattle and green plants, or the sea monsters and birds, would narrate God’s creative work?
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Creation stories are ancient and ancestral. But they can grow old and tired and out of touch with the times. Creation stories try and explain why things are the way they are, but often end up reinforcing social, political, and economic structures that elevate and privilege some people, while oppressing others. So creation stories sometimes need to be questioned and critiqued – even turned back upon themselves. An extreme example would be Jim Jones, founder and cult leader of the Peoples Temple. Jones used to preach a parody of Genesis 2 and 3 every six months to get his people, 75% of whom were black, to laugh at the cruel and dominating “Sky God” of the King James Bible and break free of “Him.” In Jones’ version, the serpent is not the tempter of the first humans but one who brings revolutionary knowledge of liberation from slavish obedience to racist and capitalist authority. Of course, Jones led the Peoples Temple to communal suicide, rather than salvation, becoming himself an image of the tyrannical god he originally critiqued. More helpful are the generations of activist leaders who insist that the Genesis 1 story of God creating humankind in God’s own image enshrines the truly revolutionary idea that all human beings, not some, possess equal divine dignity despite the racism, patriarchy, and homophobia of the established order. I’d love to add to the warning of centuries of Christian wedding ceremonies: “those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder” (BCP 428), an alternate and liberating affirmation of Genesis 1: what God has separated in order to give each their unique dignity in diversity, let no one join together, let no one incorporate and dilute to the advantage of men over women, white folk over people of color, straight over queer.
Because, even at its best, no creation story ever tells the whole story. There’s always something left out – like, where did those giant beasts that hunted and killed human beings come from before Saya the first hunter reversed the roles? Or there’s something left over and above or hidden behind and beneath every creation story. A wild card. A surplus of meaning. Something excessive and maybe transgressive of the dominant narrative the creation story means to tell. For me, it’s those lines early in Genesis 1, before the six days of separating and gathering together, bringing forth and multiplying, that are most suggestive. “[T]he earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” The word our Hebrew ancestors used was ruah: wind, yes, but it also means breath and spirit. What if we imaged God not as subduing and having dominion over darkness and the formless void but accompanying them as partner. Before God speaks God’s Word and creates the new, the ordered, God is already present and active in other guises. A wind sweeping over deep waters, energizing them. The breath of God sighing gently in the darkness, stirring life. God’s spirit hovering over the void like a mother caressing the unborn child in her womb.
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But I wonder, for you, what does the creation story of Genesis 1 still help explain here and now? And what does it fail to explain?
What social, political, and economic structures might Genesis 1 reinforce that ought to be questioned and critiqued? And does this ancient, ancestral story nevertheless hide an alternate narrative that could help point us toward liberation?
I invite your responses.
Resources
For the Dunne-za creation story, see David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson, “The Wisdom of the Elders” (Bantam Books, 1992), pages 38-39.
And for Jim Jones and his parody of the Genesis creation stories, David Chidester, “Salvation and Suicide” (Indiana University Press, 1991), page 106-109.