Responsibility and response ability

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for May 18, 2008

Read: Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a

The text from the book of Genesis which we read today appears to have an agenda. It is the first of two creation stories in the book of Genesis. The second creation story, which is largely chapter 2, focuses upon the creation of humankind as the pinnacle of God’s work. But this first creation story in Chapter 1 seems to aim to put us in our place. We are just one species among many others. Our origins are just part of a sequence of bifurcations, a chain of divisions and subdivisions through which God creates: light separated from dark, sky separated from waters, land separated from ocean, and so on, until we get fish distinguished from birds and domestic livestock separated from wild animals, and only then human beings made distinct from other animals, and within our species males distinct from females.

The agenda in this first chapter of Genesis, and it’s a good one, is to make us human beings more humble, placing us in our proper position within the entire order of creation. For that reason I don’t accept the critiques that have been made by some scholars and thinkers who hold that the biblical account of creation has been largely responsible for our destructive attitudes towards the ecosystem. Quite the opposite. Genesis chapter 1 advocates responsibility for the ecosystem. It offers exactly the kind of creation myth we need to live by today. That is, it expresses in symbolic and metaphorical form exactly the right kind of responsible attitude towards nature that we must foster if our civilization and perhaps our species is to survive the effects of our destructive behaviour on this planet.

That more responsible attitude is in this text, but it is obscured by past translations that have bent things the wrong way. Here is the King James version:

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth... 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over [all the creatures].

“Subdue nature”, is how the King James translation hears God’s mandate to us, “subdue it and have dominion over it”. The connotation is that nature is wild and needs to be tamed and dominated by human activity. And, yes, if that’s what the Hebrew words mean here, then the book of Genesis is indeed guilty of promoting the rape of the earth.

But scholarly study of the meaning of the Hebrew words here prompts more recent translations to be more subtle, such as in the New Living Translation:

28 Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over [the creatures].

Notice – to “govern”, to “reign” is not the same as to “subdue”. When we are told to govern nature, we are given a kind of authority over nature, but not unbridled license to destroy. Just think of what is connoted by that verb “govern”. Every ruler has authority; yet with that authority goes responsibility.

This is drawn out even more clearly in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message:

26-28 God spoke: "Let us make human beings in our image, make them

reflecting our nature

So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea,

the birds in the air, the cattle,

And, yes, Earth itself,

and every animal that moves on the face of Earth."

Now we could stop there. We can now speak to our society with integrity, out of our faith, pointing to the humble attitude of responsibility for the ecosystem which Genesis advocates. In that way and despite the bad press it has received, the book of Genesis contains the seed of a powerful ecological theology. Our responsibility before God is to take responsibility for God’s creation. We have great powers to affect the natural world upon which we depend, but therefore also great responsibility.

But let us not stop there. Let’s press a bit further. Let’s recognize that the book of Genesis not only calls us to be responsible. It also promises that we can fulfill that responsibility. For we have the power of creativity.

Consider how amazing is the act of creation by God. Genesis presents the metaphor of God’s Spirit brooding wind-like over the primal watery chaos. There was “a soup of nothingness”, and impenetrable formless “something” – and suddenly there is form, there is order. Unimagined possibility becomes actual reality. The fact that contemporary scientific cosmology doesn’t tell the story like that any longer, the fact that we now use a different metaphor, the metaphor of the Big Bang, doesn’t really change anything. The Big Bang metaphor imagines that there was nothing, literally nothing, except an infinitely small and infinitely dense something called “the singularity”, which suddenly inflated and expanded as our “universe”. But whether we are going with the Big Bang metaphor, or the Genesis metaphor of the Spirit disturbing the waters of chaos, the wonder of creativity is the same. Everything that exists does not have to exist – and yet it does! Does not that fact tweak your soul with amazement? The fact that there is anything at all just begs for explanation. How come there is anything at all? Because God wills it.

God’s divine act of creation elicits our amazement, for in creation unforeseen possibility becomes actual reality. Now here is my point: every act of creativity by any human being echoes with that same quality. Unforeseen possibility happens. A new thing occurs. Einstein’s great flash of creative insight, for instance, was that space and time are two sides of the same coin. No one had thought of that before. And then suddenly Einstein unfolded for us whole new way of looking at and exploring the nature of the universe. Another example, more mundane but equally marvelous. Two human beings conceive, bear, and raise a child. That child is unique, unpredictable, someone truly new, someone who did not have to be, except that his or her parents have acted to create. In sum, every creative act is godlike.

God mandates us to be co-creators of the world, joining with God in the project of developing this planet as a place for life. This is a daunting gift with which God has blessed us. We’re accountable for the planet’s health! But if we are thus responsible for the ecosystem, we are also response-able, that is to say capable of responding, capable of being creative. God has granted us the gift, a portion of the divine power, to be creative, to imagine something heretofore unimagined as a way of meeting the challenges of our past mistakes.

We may fail to use that gift. We may fail to exercise our creative capacities to restore our relationship with nature to appropriate balance. But as Genesis says

28...God created human beings;

he created them godlike,

Reflecting God's nature.

The gift is there in us. Let us use it.

May it be so.