“How did we come to be? How did we come to be this way?”

Let’s review what we know about creation.****Stop when they don’t know the answers****** On the first day, God said, “Let there be [light.}” On the second day, dry land. God separated the waters from the land. And then God created on the third day vegetation. Day 4 brought the sun, moon, and stars. Day 5, God created creatures to swim in the seas and fly in the skies. Day 6, brought forth all of the terrestrial animals, everything that lives on the land, including human beings. And how did God create them? At the same time? Or man first and then woman? Genesis 1 says at the same time. Genesis 2 tells the story a little differently. Was the earth covered in water? Genesis 1 says God created boundaries for all the water on the second day. Genesis 2 says there was water, like a mist, rising from the earth, but there were no plants because God hadn’t caused it to rain yet. God formed man first, then vegetation, then animals, then woman.

The details of the stories are not the important lesson for us to remember. These stories were not given to us so that we would know the mechanics, how creation was made, but so that we would know how we came to be.

Some of you know that I was a biology major in college. I find the theory of evolution and chaos theory fascinating. Did you know that our human DNA is made up of about 3 billion base pairs of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine? And that 99.9% of your DNA is exactly the same as the person sitting next to you. Most of your DNA is the same as other animals. Over 50% is the same as this banana. Science studies how creation is ordered. “How” is not the question Genesis is answering. Genesis teaches us who ordered creation.

These stories were first oral tradition, passed from generation to generation in stories told as parents and children worked side by side, as the community gathered around the fire. These stories answer “Who created us? Where did we come from? And why?” Old Testament scholar John Goldingay writes, “God inspired the author of Genesis to paint a picture that is a kind of parable. It says, picture God creating the world as someone doing a week’s work….” We are not supposed to understand the story as an explanation for how creation was formed. God is not answering the question, “How?” God is answering the questions, “Who? And Why?” about Creation. Who created and why? God created because it is the nature of God to bring order to chaos, to bring forth life, and to form communities and relationships.

Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are two separate, complementary stories of Creation. Another Old Testament scholar, Peter Enns, helps us reframe our reading of the two stories. Rather than reading from our 21st Century perspective, he encourages us to listen and hear what the Israelites heard. Archaeologists have found a number of creation stories from different Near Eastern peoples that help us understand the uniqueness of the Biblical stories of creation. Every nation known to the Israelites worshiped multiple gods, every other culture in that time taught that creation was the work of many gods. Dr. Enns writes that “Where Genesis 1 stands out is in its insistence that Israel’s God alone created the world through God’s spoken word….It was written to declare to the Israelites that their God was responsible for everything that existed and that God was the one, therefore, who was worthy of their worship.”

Taken as a whole, Genesis 1 is, in effect, a call to worship – The One True God spoke and invited all things into being. God’s final creation was human beings, made in God’s own image to have dominion over all of God’s creation. When God was finished and observed all of creation, God declared all that God had created very good.

Who created? God

Why? Because where there is chaos, God offers order.

Who are we? God’s ultimate creation, the capstone, the crown. We are made in God’s image to reign over all of creation.

And all that God created, God has declared very good.

Genesis 1 tells us about the nature of God. God speaks and it is so. And rather than brusquely ordering and coercing things into being, God graciously invites things into being, “Let there be….” There is a certain balance of closeness and freedom offered. The story is told almost like a hymn with verses. “Let there be…and it was so…and God saw that it was good…and there was evening and there was morning, another day.”

And then we get to Genesis 2:4, and suddenly the style and the setting change. We go from a hymn-like account of the actions of God speaking into the void of chaos over the course of a week to a story-like account of God molding the earth in a garden on the day God made the earth and the heavens.

While in the first creation story, everything was covered in water, in the second the Lord God had not caused rain yet, so everything was dry except for a natural spring. In the first story, male and female are formed at the same time as the final creation. In the second story, Adam, whose name is literally dirt, is formed first and then the plants of the garden and trees. God then decides it is not good for him to be alone and makes animals and birds, but none is a suitable partner for him. So, God forms woman from one of his ribs.

And in the second story we not only learn how we came to be, but how we came to be this way. The first human beings disobeyed God. They chose to sin. Presbyterian pastor, Rev. Dr. Mark Roberts wrote a devotion on this passage, and it really resonated with me, “As soon as the first human beings rejected God’s gracious guidance…the key relationships of human life became distorted and disheveled….Though God had created the man and the woman so that they might enjoy the freedom of full openness with each other, sin wrecks this freedom. The man and the woman no longer feel free to be fully and completely who they are with each other. Rather, because of sin, they must hide their bodies, and, implicitly, their souls. From this point onward, human beings will not experience relationships in the way God had intended. When we hide our true selves from each other, loneliness and isolation become all too common.”

So, let’s review what these stories teach us about creation.

They don’t teach us science. God doesn’t put together a time lapse video of the project of creation. These stories don’t answer “How” creation was formed. Instead, God tells us two stories of how we came to be, and how we came to be the way we are: to assure us when everything around us seems to be chaos that God is not in the chaos, God brings order out of chaos; to teach us that we were meant to live in harmony with nature and that we need one another; to teach us that we are free to choose whether or not to live the way God has instructed us, but there are consequences to choosing to live another way; to teach us that we are the ones who hide from God, not the other way around. God comes looking for us. Amen.