Who Are We?

1st Sunday in Lent, Year B
Texts: Gen 9.8-17; Mk 1.9-15

Noah’s Ark is a funny story, isn’t it? It’s in all the story bibles because we love to tell it to children. We put images of the ark and the animals and Noah on toys and wallpaper and pictures to hang in nurseries, but it’s a story about genocide. As much as it is a story about God saving Noah and his family and all the animals from the flood, it is also a story about God deciding to kill everything God has made because God has become disgusted with it. And we tell this story to children?

It’s no wonder that some people believe that God changes somehow between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Some people don’t even believe they’re the same God. The God of the Old Testament, they say, is wrathful and judging, easily angered and quick to dole out punishment. This story certainly seems to fit that bill—but what if it doesn’t?

Read more: Who Are We?

The book of Genesis was written down during the time of the Jewish Exile in Babylon. The name, “Genesis,” means beginning; and though we might think first of the story of the beginning of the world, the book is really about the beginning of God’s people and how they came to be, all the way from the Garden of Eden to Egypt. Some or all of the stories may have originated before the Exile, but they were collected and written down in Babylon to help God’s people figure out who they were in the midst of pressure to assimilate to a foreign culture; and the stories address that question by exploring first who God is.

As I read the stories of Genesis, I wonder: what if, instead of hard journalism, these stories can be read as a record of people thinking and wondering about God? Here’s what I mean by that: In Genesis, we first learn that God created the world and everything in it, and it was good; but the world in which the story was written was not good. God’s people had been conquered and carried into exile by foreigners who worshiped different gods. Were those gods more powerful than the God of Jacob? How could they explain why this had happened?

The problem, according to Genesis, is sin: our resistance to God’s way. God creates everything good, we learn, but human beings messed it up. The Jews are suffering from the sins of the Babylonians, and perhaps they are in this situation as a consequence of their own sins. So, how should they respond? What did God want them to do in this situation?

One option was to keep to themselves and try to stay undefiled by Babylonian influence. Perhaps then, they could get back to how God created them at first: innocent and pure. But, that didn’t work out so well, did it? Even within God’s perfect garden, sin found a way in. Why would it work any better in Babylon?

Another option was violent resistance, like the French during the German occupation. If Babylon is the problem, the solution is to overthrow Babylon, right? Get rid of the bad guys and everything will be better? Well, God tried that, too. In the flood, God wiped out all the bad people and saved the one righteous man—Noah—and his family. But that didn’t work either, did it? Sin remained, because even Noah—as righteous as he was—was still a sinner. Maybe that’s why God promises never to wipe out the world again: because it doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work when God does it, how could it possibly work when we do it?

It almost seems as if, through the first part of Genesis, God is learning by trial and error how to deal with the problem of sin. Now, I know that doesn’t sound like the all-powerful, all-knowing God we talk about. And that makes me wonder: What if it’s not? What if these stories aren’t about God at all, but about how we are tempted to deal with sin? Maybe God in the stories doesn’t sound much like God because God is sort of acting out our proposed solutions and showing us how they fall short.

In any case, after the failures of Eden and the flood, God responds to the problem of sin with Abraham. Unlike Adam and Noah, God does not threaten or coerce Abraham; instead, God blesses him. God blesses Abraham with the intention that he—and his offspring, meaning the Jews living in Exile in Babylon—will be a blessing to those around them. God’s answer to sin is to answer it with love.

That’s not how the Babylonians would respond. Babylon conquers and defeats its enemies, and their sacred stories reflect that. The Babylonian gods are bloodthirsty and capricious. They have to be bought and bribed with sacrifices and acts of devotion. As I read these Genesis stories, I wonder if they might actually be reactions against the majority Babylonian narrative, imagining how the God of Jacob would respond differently than the Babylonian gods in the same situations. In fact, the Jews may actually have gotten this story of the flood from the Babylonians. It’s very similar to the story of a great flood in the older Babylonian holy text, the Enuma Elish, right down to the main character building an ark and filling it with animals.

Perhaps that is why even in these stories of God’s “wrath,” we can see hints of the grace and mercy of God we’re so familiar with. God refuses to abandon the wayward Adam and Eve, but makes them clothes and packs them a lunch before sending them out of the garden, like a mother sending her children off to their first day of school. Instead of wiping out every living thing according to the initial plan, God waffles and spares Noah and his family and a boatload of animals. This is different than Babylonian gods would behave.

You see what I mean? As these people are struggling to figure out who they are and who God is calling them to be, their origin stories show that they believe that God is love, and God is calling them to be love, too. Perhaps this is why the prophet Jeremiah could write to the Exiles encouraging them to “seek the welfare of the city where [God has] sent you in to exile.” (Jer 29.7) They knew that their God had created them in love in order to share love; that they had been blessed to be a blessing.

I can see the same thing in St. Mark’s gospel story. The beginning of Jesus’ ministry—the “genesis”—is his baptism where he hears God’s voice declaring him a beloved child and heir, well-pleasing even before he’s done anything to be pleased about. It is that declaration of belovedness, along with God’s Holy Spirit that he receives, that drives him into the wilderness in preparation for the ministry that lies ahead—a ministry of overcoming sin and death with love and life, a ministry of bringing God’s blessing to the whole world.

As we enter into Lent, we are especially focused on the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. I wonder what temptations he faced? St. Matthew and St. Luke imagine specifics, but St. Mark leaves it up to us to ponder that. Do you think Jesus, too, might have wondered how best to address the problem of sin in the world? Did he wonder if the best response was to live as a hermit in the desert, keeping himself pure and innocent? Or if he should follow in the footsteps of the other messiahs of his time, trying to organize and armed revolt against Rome? Did he find his way forward by remembering the words he heard spoken to him at his baptism? It seems like this period of temptation and testing was necessary for Jesus to prepare himself for what came next.

For us who share in Jesus’ baptism and in his identity as beloved and well-pleasing children and heirs of God, Lent is our 40 days in the wilderness; a time to prepare ourselves for life in our world, for considering how we will confront the evil of the world. It’s a time for us to ask on the same questions the Jewish Exiles pondered, to reflect on who we are based on who we know God to be. How should we respond to sin and evil? Who is God calling us to be in this moment of our lives? What can we learn from God—and from God’s Son—to help us as we move forward?

As we enter into our own “wilderness time,” I wonder if this story invites us to remember that we do so grounded in our baptism and in the love of God revealed to us there, and we have Jesus as our guide through this wilderness. Like him, we face the temptation to respond to evil by ignoring it or holding ourselves back, or to conquer it with violence; but he shows us another way forward: the way of God’s love and blessing. He shows us what it looks like to love our enemies and to bless the world with the love God freely gives to us to share.

With Jesus’ help, even a story as dark and gruesome as Noah’s Ark can shine with the light of a loving and merciful God who promises at the end that destruction is not God’s Way, and neither is it our Way. And yet, they can also help us to see that when we do find ourselves surrounded by destruction (like Noah, or the Jews in Exile), God promises that the destruction is never total. We can also find in that destruction the seeds of our renewal and resurrection if we follow the Way of our Father in heaven—the Way walked by Jesus. Even a world-ending flood can become a baptism, declaring our belovedness and sacredness in God’s eyes as we look through the lens of the rainbow.

On Beginnings

Delivered at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church, Swift Falls, MN. NL Proper 1, Year 4
Texts: Gen 1.1-2.4a; John 1.1-5

Today begins our entrance into the Narrative Lectionary (NL). I give a brief explanation of the Narrative Lectionary in another post; for more information, visit the Narrative Lectionary web page.

Today we start at the beginning, for that is a very good place to start. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This simple statement seems so obvious to us that it hardly bears repeating. It is also the cause of great debate and contention between people who look to the bible for history and those who look to science. The story of our origin is hotly contested and argued even among people of faith. As we read this story today, these debates should be playing in our heads, because they were playing in the heads of those who first heard them.

Traditionally, the author of Genesis was believed to be Moses. However, scholars have now come to understand that, while some of the scriptural traditions recorded in Genesis and the other four books attributed to Moses may date back to his time, they were not written down in the form we know them until thousands of years later—when the people of Israel were in exile in Babylon.

While in Babylon, Jews would have learned this story of the creation of the world. It is a story called the Enuma Elish:

When the sky above was not named, And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name, And the primeval Apsû, who begat them, And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both, Their waters were mingled together, And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen; When of the gods none had been called into being…

Apsû and Tiamat bore other gods, many of whom lived inside vast Tiamat’s body. In time they came to make so much noise that the babel annoys Tiamat and Apsû greatly. Apsû wished to kill the young gods, but Tiamat wanted to protect them. In order to save her children, Tiamat warned Ea, the most powerful of the gods, of Apsû’s plans. Ea uses magic to put Apsû into a coma, then killed him. The other gods praised Ea, and he became their king.

Ea then had a son, Marduk, who was even greater and more powerful than himself. Marduk was given wind to play with, and he used the wind to make dust storms and tornadoes. These storms disturbed Tiamat’s great body and caused so much commotion that the gods still residing inside her were unable to sleep.

In their anger, the other gods persuaded Tiamat to take revenge for the death of her husband, Apsû. Some of the gods joined her, and she created 11 monsters to help her win the battle. She also made her son, Kingu, her new husband and the Supreme King.

The other gods are unable to withstand the power of Tiamat and Kingu., so Marduk offered to save them; but only if he would be appointed as their leader even after he won the victory. When the gods agreed to Marduk’s conditions, he became their champion against Tiamat, and was even more powerful. Marduk challenged Tiamat to combat and destroyed her. He ripped her body into two halves from which which he fashioned the earth and the skies. He then created the calendar, organized the planets and stars, and regulated the moon, the sun, and weather.

The gods who pledged their allegiance to Tiamat were forced into labor in the service of the gods who sided with Marduk, but they were freed from these labors when Marduk destroyed Tiamat’s husband, Kingu. He then used Kingu’s blood to create humankind to do the work for the gods.

This Babylonian account of the creation of the world is much different than the story we read in Genesis. It is a story in which the heavens and the earth are created in violence and at the whims of petty and capricious gods. Humankind are created as slaves for these gods, to do the heavy work for them so they wouldn’t have to.

In contrast, according to this story in Genesis, the heavens and the earth are created in love, in care, in curiosity and discovery, even in playfulness. Nonetheless, this is no child at play with primeval forces: creation is accomplished by a powerful and organized God, one who can tame the chaos of the waters and create order out of nothingness, simply by speaking a word. It is this God—powerful, creative, and loving—who fashioned humankind, not as slaves, but in God’s own image, to be caretakers and servants of all that God has created.

Stories of origins are created and told in order to help us understand who we are. The Babylonian’s story taught them that they were slaves of the gods, and that because they served the highest god, Marduk, they were beneficiaries of his incredible power. Their enemies would be his enemies, and he would help them defeat all who opposed them; but only as long as they appeased Marduk through sacrifice and worship.

Genesis paints a different picture. Genesis’ account of creation teaches us that we are beloved creatures of a powerful but loving God, and that our relationship to God is not dependent upon how well we perform as slaves. Instead, God has endowed us with some of God’s own qualities—creativity, inquisitiveness, intelligence, humor, and, most importantly, love—God’s own image.

We learn from this story that we are, like everything around us, creations of God. We share kinship with plants and animals, even rocks and sky, as the product of God’s imagination and the work of God’s hands. Yet, because we are created in God’s image, God has given us a share of God’s responsibility and care—God’s dominion—over creation.

The words used in English in our story are “dominion” and “subdue.” However, for the ancient Jews, ‘dominion’ was the same power that parents had over children, that a shepherd had over sheep. It spoke of the power to command, but also the responsibility to protect and nurture. Kings who exercised dominion were meant to serve and protect the people. Likewise, to ‘subdue’ the earth meant to exercise control over it, but also to love and keep it as God does. This is part of what it means to be created in God’s image.

Finally, the story tells us that after working for 6 days, God rested. We, being created in God’s image, are also meant to work and to rest. Even God got a day off, and so should each of us! The story of creation emphasizes that the Sabbath day is holy—special, set apart—because God rested then. It reminds us that our Sabbath day, whether on Saturday, Sunday or even on Tuesday, is meant to be a time for us to rest for a while from our labors and reconnect with our community and with our God who gave us the work to do and gives us the rest from it. This whole story is meant to remind us who we are and whose we are, and to help us remember to worship the God who gives us being, who gives us purpose, and who gives us love.

These are the truths that this story teaches us. Ultimately, whether or not the facts stack up against what we learn from chemistry, geology, biology or anything else is not important. The gifts of curiosity and wisdom, the ability to piece together clues to create theories and deduce facts, these are gifts from God, benefits of being created in God’s own image. They may show us a different means of creation, but the cannot take away the truth that all creation belongs to God and was created out of God’s love, and that it was out of love that God created us to tend, nourish and care for God’s masterpiece.

The story we share today imparts this truth to us. It explains to us our relationship to God and our world. We are created by God through the Word, as is our world and all life. That Word of God—Christ—permeates our entire being, from beginning to end. We are created by, live within, and even die assured of God’s unfailing love. Even when Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden, God went with them. So God goes with us, just as God has done from the very beginning of time itself.

This is why it is important for us to learn and to share this story. It reminds us who we are and whose we are. We are not slaves of spiteful, bickering, childish gods who battle one another for our lordship. We are not consumers, cogs in the great wheel of economy. We are not masses to be deluded, nor votes to be swayed, nor dollars to be earned. We are children of the Most High God, formed in God’s own image out of God’s own love. We have been created by God’s joy and charged with the well-being of all creation around us.

The debates will continue on around us, and facts and scripture verses will be hurled as weapons, but in the midst of it all, we know this: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him, not one thing came into being. What has come into being through him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.