God Creates, We Steward
Genesis 1:26-31 (The Voice); Psalm 8 (NRSV)
For our children, youth, many young adults, teachers and staff, this week has been all about school starting up again. There have been supplies to buy, lunches to pack, new students and friends to meet, orientations to attend, and class schedules and routines to discover and begin to live into. There is an energy and excitement about going back to school, particularly this year when it feels like school is almost back to an in person normal, even if some uncertainty still hang in the air. There is new learning about to happen – the discovery of what our world all has to offer on so many topics if we take time to pay attention and study. It feels creative, fresh, invigorating and full of possibility. I pray for a good school year.
I do personally feel a step away from the immediate realities of school with our children all done University Undergrad, and only Lorena still a student off to North Bay for her second year of Teacher’s College. Yet this week does feel different. You catch the energy in the air, and our congregation does have its own sense of start up with Gathering Sunday, Junior and Senior youth gatherings this weekend, programs and events re-starting and an energy and curiosity of what this church year will look like – particularly after what have been 2 plus hard years of the pandemic. Who are we now as a community of faith and what does the future all hold?
Part of going back to school is digging in again into courses and study and research and new learnings – opening one’s eyes to see the world around you with a fresh perspective. Sometimes it involves some re-learning, some deconstruction of what has been commonly understood, to allow for a new understanding. It is this aspect of school that I identified with this week as I did my sermon prep, and particularly as I studied the Biblical texts for this morning, and went way way back to seminary s school days and studying the Bible in its original languages – in this case, some of the Old Testament Hebrew – more on that in a few minutes.
At St Jacobs Mennonite, we are beginning a new worship theme for the early fall – ‘Holy Gifts: Caring for Creation’. (As Kevin said), This comes out of a broader ecumenical movement to have a ‘Season of Creation’ in the early fall, just like there is a worship season of Advent or Lent or Easter. Churches are encouraged to read and reflect on Biblical texts and themes in light of God’s creation. A letter to faith leaders reads ‘The Season of Creation is the annual Christian celebration to listen and respond together to the cry of Creation: the ecumenical family around the world unites to pray and protect our common home… Our common prayer and action can help us listen to the voices of those who are silenced. In prayer we lament the individuals, communities, species, and ecosystems who are lost, and those whose livelihoods are threatened by habitat loss and climate change. In prayer we center the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor.’ (https://drive.google.com/file/d/11fJcWoPZOT9ohANju2n6V3Cms0_4Yt39/view)
Within the larger theme of Holy Gifts, we begin this Sunday with ‘God Creates. We Steward,’ and we begin at the very beginning – with the Creation Story, with Genesis and the first words of the Bible. It is a very good place to start. But it is also a problematic place to start. There are whole histories of how Genesis has been interpreted and how it has shaped, sometimes in very destructive ways, everything from an understanding of gender roles and sexuality to how one approaches science to how we relate to the earth and the environment. It is a Scripture that we keep returning to in many of our worship series, often on the first Sunday, including the most recent one this summer on Creativity. I want to focus this morning on that last point – our treatment of the earth – on how Genesis has sometimes contributed to the environmental crisis we find ourselves in, but also its potential to lead us into a healthy new care for creation. Before we can do anything else in this series, we need to tackle our origin story, our Creation story.
Genesis 1 has over the centuries of the Christian Church, been used to justify an exploitation of the resources the earth provides. The line goes something like this: Humans have been created by God as above the rest of Creation. As it says in Psalm 8 ‘You have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.’ Humans therefore have dominion or mastery over all other creatures and therefore can do whatever they want with the earth for their own purposes. We can use, develop, manipulate, extract, exploit, monetize, and pollute the earth to our heart’s content, no matter what the environmental consequences. That is our right. It’s all there in the Order of Creation. That sounds extreme, but in various forms and language, that basic interpretation has been there and played itself out over the centuries, and we are reaping its consequences.
I have been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013), an indigenous writer, scientist and professor, who works at integrating Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Her opening chapter tells the Skywoman Falling Creation story of Turtle Island, a story filled with thanksgiving and the sharing of gifts and how that story of co-creation has shaped a healthy life-giving, reciprocal, caring-for Indigenous relationship with the living world. She contrasts that with what she has seen out of Christian theology and history and its Creation story. She writes ‘Cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a co-creator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven…We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn – we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance… In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top – the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation – and the plants at the bottom.’ (p. 7-9) Her critique is valid and we have much to learn from Indigenous wisdom. Yet we must face and examine our own Biblical Creation story, that is a part of our history and identity. Is this historic interpretation what it actually says, and what we are bound by, or are there other authentic and faithful readings that can also be life-giving and move us towards the care of God’s good creation? Before we can move onto more practical consideration of how we care for the environment, we need to go back to and deal with that early consciousness and shaping from our Creation story.
That’s where my back to school moment came for me. I decided to do some research and go back and read this early Genesis text in its original Hebrew. Okay, that is giving me too much credit. There is little I remember from those early 90’s Hebrew AMBS lessons of the actual language. Talk about dusting off some old rusty skills. But I can use the on-line tools – the Interlinear Hebrew Old Testament (Bible Hub – https://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/1-31.htm) where you can see each Hebrew word in a text, written of course from right to left, in Hebrew script, with its literal English translation below. You can also click on the Hebrew and link to all the occurrences of that word in the Bible, and all the possible meanings of the word. It is a fun tool. You recognize pretty soon that all Biblical translation comes with interpretation, you can’t get away with it, and much can be lost in translation. But it does give you a basic plain reading of the text that opens up possibilities and helps you notice things. So I carefully read Genesis 1:26-31 with this Hebrew Interlinear tool, paying close attention and looking up the meaning of key words. I was struck by 10 key Hebrew words – and how they might enlighten and enliven this passage. So bear with me in this little academic pursuit of understanding. I decided this morning that all of us will go back to school for a little bit. (Screen 1 – Genesis 1:26) I am putting up on the screen some of these Interlinear Hebrew verses. This is what it looks like on the website – remember it reads from right to left. I feel like am going to be a teacher this morning as much as preacher – no little stories, but rather some careful Biblical work, appropriate for this back to school Sunday. If you want to look closer at the actual Hebrew and their Strong reference numbers, you can check the sermon online afterwards on our SJMC website.
(Screen 2 –with 4 red boxes) So verse 26 starts, and I will reference the root words: And God said, let us make (Asah – עָשָׂה – 6213) man/humans (Adam – אָדָ֛ם – 120) in Our Image (tselem -צֶלֶם – 6754), according to our likeness (Demuth – דְּמוּת – 1823). The word ‘to make’ is very simple and functional – to make, to do – It is used later in Genesis that God ‘made or established’ a covenant with Israel. (Screen 3 – Genesis 1:27) In the next verse it is the more poetic ‘create’ or ‘shape’ (bara – בָּרָא – 1254) of Adam, the word used through Genesis 1 of God speaking and imaginatively creating out of nothing good things. God is the source. God creates Adam, literally something of the earth, an earth creature, an earthling – it is not necessarily a gendered term – and then God created them male and female, and in the very image or likeness of God. So humans are of the very earth – part of the dirt of Creation as we see in Genesis 2, part of a created world and not separate from it. And Yes, also created in the image of a God who creates what it is Good, as a gift. Does that not encourage us to also be creators of good things?
(Slide 4 – One word – to rule) Verse 26 continues, and here is where we run into historical trouble. And let them rule (radah – רָדָה – 7287), sometimes translated ‘have dominion’ over the fish and birds and livestock and everything that creeps over the earth. In verse 28 it is ‘to subdue’ (kabash – כָּבַשׁ – 3533) the earth and then this same word Radah, ‘to rule’ over every living thing that moves upon the earth. It is from here that this whole history of humans dominating and controlling the rest of Creation comes from – this subduing and ruling and having dominion over. I want to come back to this word radah/rule in a minute and do a bit more of a word study on it that maybe challenges some of this, but first the rest of this passage.
(Slide 5 – Genesis 1:28) Verse 28 begins, And God blessed them (barak – בָרַךְ – 1288), this word ‘blessing’ appearing all over the Bible – Already in Genesis 12 where God blesses Abraham to be a blessing to others. A blessing is this promise of goodness and bounty and the sharing of abundance. Blessings work our world towards good, and are given in the context of relationship, within covenants with God and people and God and the very earth. Bless the Lord O my soul, and all that is within me Bless God’s holy name (Psalm 103). (Slide 6 – Genesis 1:29) In a similar way, in verse 29 God said, behold I have ‘given’ you everything (nathan – נָתַן – 5414) – to give. Life and breath and all that we have are gifts, not possessions. They come as part of the gift of Creation itself, ‘Holy Gifts’ as our worship series title proclaims. (Slide 7 – Genesis 1:30) The gifts given in the following verse 30 is everything that has the breath of life (nephesh – נֶפֶשׁ – 5315) – literally a soul or living being – these are the creatures that creep on the earth remember – they are the ‘nephesh’, the living beings. But in Genesis 2:7, this same word is used of humans themselves – God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, breathed the breath of life into nostrils and Adam became nephesh – a living being. There is no difference in status here between the animals and creatures of the earth and human beings – they are all living souls, living beings given by a generous creating God. Again, humans are not separate from the rest of creation. (Slide 8 – Genesis 1:31) The passage ends with its repeated refrain, God saw everything God had made and indeed it was very good (towb, טוֹב – 2896), God savoring its beauty and appreciating its goodness, and there was evening and morning, the sixth day. This world was created good, both the creatures and plants and all creation, and Adam, human earthly creatures – all living beings gifted by God to be a blessing. That is the message and theology of Genesis 1. (Turn off Slides) Maybe this is enough Hebrew on the screen for one morning.
So what now about this ‘ruling and having dominion over’ word, this piece that doesn’t seem to fit the spirit of the rest of the passage? I wonder about the influence of Bible translations. Our earliest and most famous English translation is the King James Version, first published in 1611 and used for centuries. It was written in a time of monarchy and hierarchy, commissioned by King James himself. This week we are thinking lots about the monarchy with the death of Queen Elizabeth. The King James Version used the word ‘dominion,’ and at the time would have had all those connotations of a feudal monarchist society and the domination and control that are a part of that. But is that what the word originally meant? The people of Israel had kings too, after the judges, but they did not come right away in its history, and came with a warning not to be like the other kings and kingdoms of the world. Might dominion or rule over come with a different nuance and understanding? One of the first uses of this word ‘radah’ after Genesis is in Leviticus 25, well before the time of the Kings, and it is in reference to the Year of Jubilee – where owners who have hired or bound workers who had become impoverished and sold themselves to survive, ‘shall not rule over them with harshness’ (25:43) and they are to be returned to freedom in that 50th Jubilee Year. My Hebrew Word search then brought me to Psalm 72. It is a Psalm about the nature of Kingship and begins ‘Give the king your justice, O God’, and goes on to talk about righteousness for the poor and defending the cause of the poor, deliverance to the needy and crushing the oppressor. Then there are all these natural images, from Creation itself – May the King live while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations. May the king be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth. May righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more. (verses 5-7). And then immediately this word ‘Radah’ in verse 8 – ‘May the king rule or have dominion – radah – from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.’ Later it talks again about delivery of help to the poor and needy, redemption from violence, abundance of grain in the land, waves on the tops of the mountains, fruit like Lebanon, and may people blossom in the cities like grass of the field. This is hardly the dominion of control and power over, but more about stewardship, blessing and ensuring the good of all. If this is how ‘radah’ is used in Psalm 72, what might it say in reading that same word back into Genesis 1? Walter Brueggemann writes in his Commentary on Genesis (Interpretation, John Knox Press, 1982) ‘The image of God in the human person is a mandate of power and responsibility. But it is power exercised as God exercises power. The image images the creative use of power which invites, evokes, and permits. There is nothing here of coercive or tyrannical power, either for God or for humankind…. Thus the task of ‘dominion’ does not have to do with exploitation and abuse. It has to do with securing the well-being of every other creature and bringing the promise of each to full fruition. ‘(p.32). This problematic Hebrew word Radar maybe has more to do with being responsible stewards of God’s good earth. We chose The Voice translation for worship this morning that says ‘I make you trustees of My estate, so care for My creation.’ A trustee is someone who does their very best to take care of what has been entrusted to them, to be fair and responsible and ensure the well being of all. I think about the Trustees of our church building and what a great job they do taking care of it. Or being the trustee of a will, or a trustee of a trust fund or charity. Trustees are put into a position of trust and work for the greater good of what has been entrusted to them. Can you imagine what it might mean for our environment and world if we all saw ourselves as trustees of this gift? It is this understanding of this Hebrew word and phrase ‘Radar’ that fits with all of the other Hebrew words and phrases around it, that fits with this Genesis theology of gifts and blessings and being created in the Image of God.
This whole extended Hebrew word search and study, this first week going back to school exercise, starts to make sense to me, and offers a life-giving way of understanding Genesis and our own Christian Creation Story. And perhaps there are some parallels to the Turtle Island Creation story of this place and geography where we live, and it allows us to learn from and talk with our Indigenous Neighbours. Or Creation Stories matter. Perhaps this also gives us a good and healthy starting point to enter this worship series on Holy Gifts and Caring for Creation. God made, created humans and all of the earth as living beings, as a gift and as a blessing. Humans are not separate from the world and its creatures, but very much a part of it, and given the responsibility and honour to also bless and care for and steward and become trustees of this beautiful Estate. For the rest of this worship series we want to explore these Holy Gifts, to take seriously this Season of Creation and ask how we might begin to live as Co-Creators, stewards and trustees of all that God has given us. And God said that this was very good. Amen.