Trinity Gen. 1:1-2:4a, 2Cor.13:11-13 5/22/05
“Intelligent Design?”
The Sunday Erie TimesNews carries a cartoon called “Opus”. I must admit I practically never read it, but last Sunday’s caught my eye. The first panel has two young boys in a field of dandelion puff balls with a hummingbird beak to nose with one of the boys. The first boy says, “Pickles, simple chance couldn’t have created a dandelion.” The second boy responds, “Nope. Hummingbirds neither, Auggie.”
The second panel, the one that naturally caught my eye, has them running for the shear joy of it through the field surrounded by butterflies. Boy one says, “Or butterflies.” Boy two: “Rainbows”
In the third panel boy one says, “There has to be an unseen hand of grace and imagination behind everything.” And boy two responds, “It’s called ‘Intelligent Design.’”
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Yes, even cartoon writers admit that there must be a god or something that gave nature its beauty of perfection, even in this less than perfect world.
In today’s first lesson we read of the God who was behind that intelligent design and how He created a world without flaw - a world where, when He was done, everything was good. What God created in those seven days was a community where everyone and everything functioned in unity, love and peace.
Has it ever struck you that in the world as described in this lesson from Gen. there was no killing? As it reads, there were no meat eating animals. It says plainly in vs 30 that God told the animals that he gave them the green plants to eat. And since this world was otherwise perfect, there was no need for animals or humans to be afraid. They could live, and work and play in perfect harmony. They could interact in love as a community just as the persons of the Trinity did. Thus, they lived out the image of God that had been given to humans.
We can’t know exactly what this new creation was like, but let’s use the knowledge we have and our imaginations for a moment. Just lean back and see in your minds eye a perfect world where not only is there no war, no poverty, no crime, no natural disasters,
and no sickness or pain, but also there are no animals that attack each other or humans, and no humans who feel a need to kill animals. There are no mosquitoes or biting flies, no bees to sting, no poison ivy and no sunburn. There are no land disputes or road rage, no “dog eat dog” or corporations outsourcing to keep from having to pay workers a living wage, no political bashing and no back stabbing among members of any group, political or religious.
And God created the perfect community. And it was very very good.
That brings me to the last panel of the Opus cartoon I was describing above. The boys come home to find Opus, a penguin by the way, and two ratty looking characters – a man and a human size cat – dead drunk in front of a TV in a littered living room (you have to see it the really appreciate it). Boy two says to his friend, Auggie, “Somebody’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.”
I’m fully in tune with the boys. When I die and go to heaven, I hope to ask God to ‘splain’ why he let the humans wreck His beautiful creation. Why He gave us free will...or at least so much of it? Why He planted that tree the humans weren’t to touch in the garden? Why He didn’t intervene when the serpent brought Eve the forbidden fruit? Why He didn’t wipe the humans out like a cartoonist would a mistake in his drawing, and start over again? Why He let that perfect community, that was in His image be destroyed?
While it doesn’t answer all my questions (or yours), it may help to understand a little of what scholars have figured out about Genesis. As you may remember there are two accounts of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. They are in Gen. 1:1-2:4a and in Gen. 2:4b-25. If you only give them a superficial reading you might think the second is there to just give a bit more detail, but in reality, there are conflicts in the accounts.
They are, in fact, two different oral accounts brought together sometime during the writing of the Old Testament.
The reason for this is that, like much of what is in the Old Testament, these stories were not originally written down. They were created over many generations and passed down orally as individual stories. The stories in the book of Genesis were only brought together around 400 BC. It is believed that the creation account we read today was from what was called the “Priestly tradition” and was composed during the Babylonian exile. The priests composed the stories of God’s power as a kind of hymn or liturgy. As we see with children and advertising jingles, people learn what they sing more easily than dry facts. The priests knew this and used their Genesis rendering to help the people learn about their God. They wanted to comfort and reassure the people that their God was more powerful than the Babylonian gods, and could be trusted to one day save them.
We need this Genesis account more than ever before. We can easily feel that we are in exile with corporate executives or terrorists or forces of nature seemingly in control of our lives. We can be tempted to bow down to their gods and give up on the God of our fathers.
It’s hard in difficult, evil times to resist the urge to follow the “every man for himself” philosophy of this world. Worse yet, we may be tempted to forget that we were created to live in unity and love as the Persons of the Trinity do. It’s so easy to forget that each of us was created in the image of God, when everyone from your family and friends to the guy in the commercial is putting you down, making you feel inadequate, ugly, stupid and smelly.
I used to argue with my spiritual director about that idea of the image of God. I didn’t have a problem believing that it was true at creation, but when I looked at me with all my faults, weaknesses and outright sins, I just couldn’t believe *I* had been created in that image, much less still carried it within me. Nevertheless, over the years I’ve come to believe it. Even the meanest or least attractive person I know has that image within them. Even I have it. The pain of life or other things may cause us to push it down or cover it up. Our sin may obscure it so it’s hard to see. But, it is there.
When we accept the grace God offers us in baptism and grow in faith through instruction in the word according to the teaching of the disciples, we are enabled to face those parts of us we’d rather not admit to. As baptized Christians we can turn to God for forgiveness. Then we can begin to let go of those walls we build between us and God, and between us and other people. As the walls come down, the image begins to come forth.
And as that image comes forth and we are able to see how living in community with each others in love is what the image is really about. It is living the Trinitarian life that God has within God-self. It is each Person loving, interacting, sacrificing for the good of the whole. As my sem. theology prof. used to say, “When the Persons of the Trinity come together in love, you have God”. This is true for the community of believers as well. When each of us, by the grace of God, allows God’s image to be seen glowing in and through us, and we bring those images together in love, we have God working through us.
All of us would like to see this church packed every Sunday. We’d like to see a Sunday school overrun with kids. We like to have people volunteering to use their gifts in the church. We’d like to grow in grace and be a church that is attractive to all people.
Well, it can happen. All we have to do is start chipping away at the walls we’ve built that obscure the image of God within us. Next we need to focus on that image – let God speak to us about who we are and can be – and let God’s grace make it glow within us. Then we need to come together as a loving community, helping each other grow into a community that reflects the Trinitarian life of God. And finally, strengthened from our lives together in community, we do the hardest part. We follow the command of Jesus and, “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe everything that Jesus has commanded.”
This last part isn’t necessarily a matter of becoming missionaries in foreign countries or even evangelists knocking on doors in our own community. Rather, it is letting that image of God shine forth wherever we are and wherever we go – at work, at the store, in civic or recreational groups, in our neighborhoods and among our family and friends. If we let this image of God in us shine forth, those who see and experience it in us will want to know where we got that glow and will want to be part of our community.
As
I said, this is hard. It means
changing how we think and act. It
means taking risks, especially the risk of being open and vulnerable. It
means accepting change, especially within ourselves. It means we will fail and
others will fail, but grasping onto the forgiveness Christ earned for us/for
them. But if we do it, we can once again, at least taste the beauty of
that original creation – that beauty not just of dandelions puff balls,
hummingbirds, butterflies and rainbows, but more importantly the beauty of
that image in which we were created. And
coming together as
We
can do this because we have Jesus’ last and most important words He spoke to
His disciples. He spoke these
words to us as much as to them, do all this, “and remember, I am with you
always, to the end of the age. Amen.