Easter 2
27 April 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
CREATION: IN THE BEGINNING
From Creation to New Creation: The Biblical Story #1
Genesis 1.1-2.4a
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. So begins the greatest, most glorious, most life-changing Story ever told. It is ancient and new all at once. It is the wildly mysterious and at times complicated Story of God’s never-giving-up-no-matter-what kind of love for all humanity.
The Biblical Story is the story of us all. And for the next three months we are going to take a pilgrimage through the entire Biblical Story from God’s act of creation in Genesis to God’s vision of a new creation in Revelation. Each week we will enter a portion of the Story connected to the one preceding it and leading into the one that follows.
The great invitation of Scripture is to make the Biblical Story our own story and to join our lives in covenant relationship with the God of Israel made known in Jesus Christ and with God’s people formed as the Church. This is a Story centered, rooted, and grounded in Jesus of Nazareth, the One sent from God to be God’s definitive Word on who God really is, what God desires for this world, and what God desires for every human person to be. It is also the invitation to claim your identity as a member of the broken human race, loved and treasured by God, each and every one of us in the process of being redeemed.
So open your heart, your mind, and your life and take an eternal adventure into Infinite Love and be forever changed. From Creation to New Creation. Let the journey begin.
We start in Genesis and the story of creation. The creation story in Genesis 1 is told in the inspired language of poetry, seven verses with a repeated refrain. This is poetry set to music played by a symphony filled with the sounds of all creation: Ocean waves crashing on the shore. Fruit trees bursting forth from the ground. Sun, moon, and stars filling the sky with song. Creatures of the sea and birds of the air, cattle and deer, puppies and pigs – together making music that leave Bach, Beyonce, and Billy Ray Cyrus weeping with envy. All of creation blessed by God, infused with God’s goodness.
Once God has filled the earth with beauty and all living creatures, the crowning climax of creation is you and me, male and female, birthed in the image of God, blessed as very good in the eyes of God.
The creation story sings throughout the biblical witness in endless doxology: God is the Maker of all that is. God takes delight in creation. We and all creation are good. And for God’s pleasure all things were created.
This is where our story begins. We often talk and think as though our Bibles begin in Genesis chapter three with “the Fall” and that fourth century theology coined by St. Augustine as “original sin.” Twentieth century theologian Matthew Fox calls us back to the story of creation, reminding us that the universe and the story of each of us begins not in Genesis chapter three but in chapter one not in original sin, but in “original blessing.”1
We are created, the Bible tells us, “very good” in the image of God. In our humanness we bear and reflect God’s image to the world. What an astonishing thought! The biblical psalmist stands amazed and sings those beautiful words: You have given us a crown of glory and honor; you have made us a little lower than the divine.
With apologies to post-biblical hymn-writers, the Bible does not declare us totally depraved worms and wretches. No. We are God’s blessed and beloved creations made in the image of God. As human beings we partake of the divine. The divine image is in us all. But we are not in and of ourselves divine. The Quakers speak of the “inner light of God” that is in all people – a way of saying that something of God lives in the human soul of every person.
It is also significant to note that both male and female are created in God’s image. We have forgotten this throughout history, casting women as the lesser gender. But that’s not what the biblical story of Creation tells us. Men and women, girls and boys, equally reflect the image of God.
What does it mean to reflect the image of God? We catch a glimpse of insight in those strange sounding words coming from the lips of God in this text: Let US make humankind in OUR image.
It is perhaps a foreshadowing echo of what the Bible never explicitly mentions but what the church will refer to centuries later as the mystery of the Trinity: God the Creator, revealed in Jesus, God’s Son, living within us as God’s Holy Spirit. The one God in three – the three in one. The mystery of Trinity and this Genesis language suggests to us that the image of God has something crucial to do with relationship, with communion and community. It seems that in some way, deeper than at least my mind can understand, God’s own being, God’s very essence, is relational. So to be created in God’s image means that we are created for relationship, for community. It is not good that we be alone, we will soon be told. To be formed in the image of the God who is Love means that we best reflect God’s image in our capacity to love and to live in loving communion with others.
This relational God calls us into relationship with God and one another. Created in the image of God, we are called to be partners with God in the ongoing work of creation. We do this in a couple of ways:
One, God tells humans: Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. Who said God’s will was all work and no play? We are called to the beautiful and delightful communion of conceiving children. Then to the loving and critical and sometimes seemingly impossible task of rearing them. Having children is not required of us. We are free to decide for ourselves. Jesus, after all, had no biological children. But in the beginning it was essential for the perpetuation of the human species to “be fruitful and multiply” as one part of humanity’s divine calling.
Part two of our partnership with God is to tend to the earth and take responsibility for every living thing that moves upon the face of the earth. In other words, God gives up control of the world and shares it with us! Humanity continues to abuse this calling in order to justify our exploitation and desecration of God’s creation. To “have dominion” means to “put in order and care for.” We are responsible in making sure all people have clean water to drink and fresh air to breathe and healthy food to eat.
And then after six days of creation, when everything had been put into place for life to flourish, there is a seventh day on which God says: “I think I’ll sit and rest for awhile.” Thus the creation of Sabbath, the day we stop and rest from our labors. One rabbi says it is the day we hand life back over to God and remember that life is not our own.2
To be made in the image of God means we take time to rest. Hard work is necessary and honorable. But the refusal to rest is idolatrous and dishonors God. Unceasing work is often an escape from other important responsibilities or an unhealthy effort to earn God’s approval or the approval of others. To rest is to honor the way God made us and to acknowledge that we are not God and the world, at least for a day each week, can go on without our help. A Sabbath rest gives us the opportunity to renew the gift of our bodies and to bask in the pleasure of God’s good creation.
So this is how the biblical story begins – with the astonishing notion that this vast universe is not the random act of blind molecules or “the theater of the absurd.” Creation is the good act of a gracious and loving God who provides for everything God makes.
When my daughter Kristen was six years old – (she is now 31 and preaching at her church today) – but when six the two of us were sitting in the shade on a bench at Six Flags having a cold drink and looking around she said: “This place has everything we could ever need.”
Well, on a slightly larger scale, and yet with a six year old mind full of wonder, we can say the same about the universe: “This place has everything we could ever need.” This wondrous story of creation declares that God gave us this world and said, “Here is your home.” (Not our final home, of course, but while we are here this earth is our home and home to billions of others, and we must treat it as such.) God says, “This earth has all you need to flourish as my children. So take good care of it. I made it for you.” This marvelous and beautiful Creation is a gift of God to us to be honored and enjoyed. And since God has given it to us, we must take care of it. So says Genesis.
And so says an imaginative retelling of the creation story found in a children’s book by Rabbi Mark Gellman entitled Does God Have a Big Toe? (With a title like that, I had no choice but to buy the book! You understand.) The rabbi’s retelling goes like this:
Before there was anything, there was God, a few angels, and a huge swirling glob of rocks and water with no place to go. The angels asked God, “Why don’t you clean up this mess?”
So God collected rocks from the huge swirling glob and put them together in clumps and said,“Some of these clumps of rocks will be planets, and some will be stars, and some of these rocks will be . . . just rocks.” Then God collected water from the huge swirling glob and put it together in pools of water and said,“Some of these pools of water will be oceans, and some will become clouds, and some of this water will be . . . just water.”
Then the angels said, “Well God, it’s neater now, but is it finished?
And God answered . . .“NOPE!”
On some of the rocks God placed growing things and creeping things and things that only God knows what they are.
And when God had done all this, the angels asked God,“Is the world finished now?”
And God answered: “NOPE!”
Then God made a man and a woman from some of the water and dust and said to them, “I’m tired now. Please, finish up the world for me . . . really, it’s almost done.”
But the man and woman said, “We can’t finish the world alone! You have the plans and we are too little. “You are big enough,” God answered them. “But I agree to this: If you keep trying to finish the world, I will be your partner.”
The man and the woman asked, “What’s a partner?”
And God answered, “A partner is someone you work with on a big thing that neither of you can do alone. If you have a partner, it means that you can never give up, because your partner is depending on you. On the days you think I’m not doing enough and on the days I think you are not doing enough, even on those days we are still partners and we must not stop trying to finish the world. That’s the deal.”
And they all agreed to that deal.
Then the angels asked God, “Is the world finished yet?”
And God answered, “I don’t know. Go ask my partners.”3
So that’s the deal. God has made us a world so amazingly wonderful and surprisingly fascinating. And we get to enjoy the unspeakable gift and profound privilege of being here, of being alive, of being partners with God in this venture called Life. It’s what the Bible is all about. It’s what your life and mine is all about. So whadda you say? Are you in?
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- Matthew Fox, Original Blessing, HarperOne, 1991
- Cited in Bill Moyers, Genesis, Doubleday, 1996, 14
- Marc Gellman, “Partners,” in Does God Have a Big Toe?, Harper Collins Children’s Books, 1986, 1-3