Creation Myth Busters
This week’s bible text that goes with this sermon can be viewed at https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=498546547
"The Creation of God" by Harmonia Rosales
On my birthday every summer, after we’ve had a good meal, and as the queso and strawberry pie has us feeling content and full… the celebration usually settles into family and friends lingering over stories and laughter. You know…that space where the party is kinda over, but those closest to you aren’t really in a hurry to leave and you just get to lounge without any pretention and just BE together. It’s usually in that space that my parents inevitably get to talking about the story of my birth. Does anyone else family do this? But the story never really starts AT the moment I’m born, most of it is about what came before. I was my mother’s first pregnancy and by the time July in Houston came around, she was ready for me to be outta there. One time she thought she was going into labor, so they hustled to the hospital only to be sent home to wait a bit longer. To try and encourage labor, but also get out of the summer heat, she’d walk laps around Northwest Mall. When she again felt as though the time had come, dad drove the car to the hospital and playfully says that the city’s potholes offered a few more encouraging bounces. And this time, they left the hospital with little 8 lbs, 6 oz. me.
Mine is not a particularly incredible birth story, but we still tell it year after year. The telling is almost a ritual of sorts. We’ve become parents who do the same thing with our child, telling Marley Rose the story of how we got the news she would be arriving a bit early, a bit small.
The doctor was ready to induce that afternoon, but we asked to have one more day…so we could make one last Target run for teeny tiny diapers. We tell her how the name of our delivery nurse – Karley Rose – seemed like a divine sign that settled our back and forth about the choice of middle name. We tell her that she was born an hour before game 5 of the first world series in Texas, when we were hoping the Rangers would clench it but it was not to be. We tell her about all the people that came to see her and hold her in those first hours.
Why do we tell these stories? Sure, I’m fairly sentimental and it’s a day I enjoy remembering, but I wonder….why do we tell it the way we do, choosing the highlights that we do? What purpose does telling this story serve? What would I hope my child gets out of this story? Perhaps I hope she sees the humanity of her parents who were nervous. I hope she notices that the people who help you, like nurses, matter and a worthy of notice and gratitude. I hope she hears the satisfying crack of a homerun baseball and it makes her heart leap like ours do. I hope she can feel the embrace of the wide community, blood family and chosen family, beloved cousins and honorary aunts that have cared for her since the beginning and supports her still.
It’s actually not a bad approach for reading the bible either. When we hold this library of stories, millennia old, that have passed through so many voices and hands, gone through a plethora of translations…this imperfect yet holy manuscript that has somehow made it through time and place…
As we approach any part of this sacred story we can ask, why is this here? Of all the things to include, why this? And why has it lasted generation after generation? What purpose does it serve? What does it tell us about who and how and why God is?
Family systems therapy knows that the stories told about our beginnings continue to shape us, consciously or unconsciously. They affect how we see ourselves and the world. Whether our family origin stories are positive or negative, it sticks with us. It’s important work to know what they are and how it impacts us because we’re likely retelling that story to ourselves in some way or bound to repeat the elements of that story for better or worse if we’re not reflecting on it.
Superheroes and villains always have origin stories that don’t just explain HOW they came to be, but also WHY they are the way they are. It’s not always a birth story, but some threshold moment of beginning that also reveals aspects of their values and motivations and functioning.
Genesis is the origin story of creation, including humanity, but also the origin of God’s role and identity among these things. We aren’t going to have time to get into ALL the things this story may point to, but there are a couple core things I want us to explore.
The first, is that to better understand any story we have to know what KIND of story it is. We don’t read a news article the same way we read a romance novel and we don’t read poetry the same as a history textbook. The bible is a library or various books and authors, and has just as many sections and literary tools. What we heard today in Genesis 1 follows the pattern of poetic lore. It’s written in the style of epic myth. The rhythm and imagery and language and scale…it’s not the kind of thing that makes up historical record. It’s not trying to be a scientific explanation for the cosmos and so isn’t actually at odds with what science has and is discovering about our universe.
But these elements and even some key similarities existed within other creation myths from the time and place that Genesis comes from. The Mesopotamian creation myth called the Enuma Elish also tells of giving order to chaos, separating earth and sky and waters, where the very body of the Goddess Tiamat is divided to form the fertile landscape of creation. However, in the Babylonian tale, the story of creation is tied up in a story of the pantheon of gods conniving against and harming each other, where creation is born out of cosmic animosity and humanity’s purpose is pretty bleak.
The way that these stories are both similar and distinct is part of the story Genesis tells. What’s different about the way THIS creation is formed and relates to God as opposed to other stories that make claims about who we are, how we are related to the earth, its inhabitants, and to the divine? Not only back then but also now?
We know that it’s not the one and only ultimate story of beginning even within Christian tradition because immediately in Genesis 2, we get another telling of creation that has a significantly different perspective. I put this out here first because for some folks these differences are grounds to discredit every other word that comes after. The modern worldview has convinced us that the only thing that ultimately matters is empirical data, but I think in our bones we know that theirs is also substantial meaning in things beyond what can be contained by facts and figures.
Just because it is understood as a myth doesn’t make it untrue or untrustworthy. In fact, insisting that it function as something it’s not…as historical document, does more to discredit the story than most anything else. Embracing this word for what it is can actually enrich our faith, not because we put our trust in something that doesn’t make logical sense to explain unexplainable things, but because it allows us to navigate something deeply true.
The poet, pastor, and theologian Frederick Buechner wrote that:
“the raw material of myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oediupus – they do not tell us primarily about events. The tell us about ourselves. In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking, that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.”
One purpose of this mythical style of writing is to point toward something, some truth, even more expansive that what words can hold. Again, this text is so rich that there are a great many things to reflect on in this way. But there’s one that that gets repeated over and over in this story, so it must be particularly important. The refrain at the end of each stanza, the mantra that establishes the rhythm of creation is this: God speaks into being, God looks at the fullness before her, and God knows “it is good.” It is good. It is good. It is good. It is good. It is good. It is very good.
God enters as a wind hovering over the waters. The feminine Hebrew word ruach which can mean wind or spirit or breath, the kind of deep breath that comes from the gut which is necessary to even say this creative word. God is enveloped in with even more feminine imagery as She hovers which is also translated as broods like a mother, nesting over waters at the birth of the world . It begins with an expression of the feminine within the divine and it is good. God creates and looks at distinct parts of the whole and says that difference does not inherently destroy, it too is good. God creates both never-ending sky and the intimate swirls of human skin and says it is good. God creates shoreline and twilight, spaces of existence between and beyond one distinct category and says it is good. The act of rest is set as a holy one. It isn’t a sign of failure, but an essential part of this narrative of goodness. It is good. It is good. It is good. It is good. It is good. It is very good. Not perfect, but good. God’s primary and persistent way of speaking about creation, about us, from the beginning….is one of blessing.
There is another mythology of creation which is in contrast to this. One that says our brokenness is more prevalent than our blessing. That our starting place is depravity. That we, as humans, are fundamentally at odds with goodness. THIS story, called Original Sin, does not show up in Genesis, but in the 4th century from a man named St. Augustine, who was faithful and good and gave significant wisdom to the early church, but also struggled with his own seemingly insurmountable temptation. That story can sometimes feel like truth when we get stuck by what we fear are the worst parts of ourselves. It’s what the disease of depression and addiction and shame try to scream over the voice of the One who first and foremost and forever declares us good.
Which is perhaps an even more compelling reason, alongside therapy and care and appropriate medication, for us to tell this story of Original Blessing, this story of Genesis again and again and again, and to wonder at our place within it. This is a story of the holy which extends throughout an expansive creation. It is a story of goodness that grounds all things. It is a story that lives in us, as close as our very breath – a ripple of the first holy breath, still creating.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.
Fruit and seed and well-being. God created a world in which, inside every living thing is the potential for further creation and care. This isn’t just about the procreation of babies, and cycles of agriculture. That seems too narrow for a God who has already shown an expansive way of being. Perhaps it points to holy creation that isn’t only something that happened once upon a time, but is still unfolding and invites US to be a part of this nourishing work. God speaks and in so doing, creates new possibilities. What then, do our words create? How do the stories we tell ourselves and others, the language we use, and the landscape they set…. shape a world in line with this ancient truth of expansive, enduring, and intimate goodness and blessing?