Genesis 1 vs. White Supremacy - Two Theologies

Trinity - Cycle A

Are you all heartsick this morning? Exhausted, overwhelmed by the events of the last few weeks, and just heartsick? I sure am. And I come to you on Trinity Sunday, the one Sunday of the church year dedicated to a doctrine.

Does it really matter what we believe about God? Well, the writer of our first reading, Genesis 1, thought so. I’ll get back to that.

First, the way I believe that it does not matter. I believe that at the Last Judgment, we will not be handed a test, a check list: Do you believe this about God? Do you believe that? Do you believe there is one God, three Gods, a whole bunch of gods? – Check one. Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Do you believe that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, or proceeds from just the Father?

I do not believe that our entrance into heaven depends on getting the answers to these kind of questions right. You may disagree with me about the importance of some. I’m just going by what Jesus said about the issue when he separated the sheep from the goats, the day before they strung him up:

“Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.

See, that’s what he meant when he said as in today’s gospel, “Make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” These doctrinal issues don’t matter.

And yet they do. They don’t matter at the final judgment. They do matter, what we believe about God is of desperate importance right now today, because – what we believe about God forms what we believe about ourselves and our place in the universe.

What we believe about God forms what we believe about ourselves and our place in the universe.

Let me sneak up on this. Back to Genesis 1. The priests of Israel wrote this poem, the first chapter of Genesis, to set the record straight.

The people of Israel had been conquered by the Babylonians, who left some of them back in Israel to farm the land and brought others in captivity to Babylon. Once in Babylon they were no longer princesses and rulers, as they had been in their own land, no longer doctors and lawyers and shopkeepers, weavers and butchers and bakers, security guards, clergy, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons.

There was only one thing the Babylonians knew about them, they were different. And all those years of their captivity, the Israelites lived in fear, very reasonable fear that their difference could cost them their lives. They had to be careful how they behaved around the Babylonians. They had to bow to the right people whenever they were told to bow. And the Babylonians thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

See the Babylonians had a view of their place in the universe. It came from what they believed about God and the creation of the world.

Enuma Elish is the Babylonian equivalent to Genesis 1. In the Enuma Elish, there were two gods, Apsu and Tiamat, who rose from the waters before creation. These two gave birth to a bunch of other gods, who turned out to be noisy and ungrateful children. Apsu and Tiamat thought it best to call it a botched job and get rid of them, kill their own children.

But the kids got wind of the plan and fought back. They commissioned Marduk to fight for them. And he did. With a breath like a hurricane, he blew their bodies apart. Then he chopped Tiamat, the Mother god, he chopped her body in two. With one half he formed the heavens, with the other half he formed the earth.

Ah, bad calculation. Then the gods were hungry. They had killed Mother. What’s for lunch? So human beings were created to offer sacrifice, to feed and serve the gods.

The universe of the Babylonians is chaos, it’s bloody, the world is brutal. To survive you have to stay on top. So somebody else has to stay below.

That view of creation and of the world forms what you think is your place in the universe. Do you have your knee on somebody else’s neck? Or does somebody else have his knee on your neck? The Babylonians had their knee on the Israelites’ neck. And they thought they were benevolent. Because a couple hundred years earlier, the Assyrians were on top. And they just killed everybody.

It’s chaos, it’s bloody, the world is brutal. To survive you have to stay on top. So somebody else has to stay below.

Our first canticle this morning, A Song of Praise, or the Song of the Three Young Men was a protest song. It was an act of defiance against the Babylonians to sing “Glory to you, Lord God of our fathers; you are worthy of praise, glory to you.” These three young men were in the fiery furnace. They facing the full force of the law brought down on their heads because they did not bow to the right people, to which they said, “Damn straight.”

So, in response, off on the sidelines, somebody, a priest of Israel it is believed, sat down and wrote a poem to set the record straight.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God, Ruach in Hebrew, or in English, the breath of God, the Spirit swept over the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.

That’s the first stanza. It goes on for seven stanzas. Some are longer, some shorter. Hebrew poetry operates by repetition. So each stanza ends, “God saw that it was good.” God saw that it was good. Every thing, every one. “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

It was not chaos. It was not bloody. It was not brutal. The earth was formed by the breath of God, breathing blessing.

And human beings, made in the image of this God, this creative, breathing, blessing God, were placed here to care for it. If we stand at the head of creation, it is as stewards of its order, its vitality, its goodness. And its blessing.

And so who are we? The Bible told the Israelites that nations would stream to them as witnesses to this God of goodness, of justice and mercy. What does our God require? To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.

Jesus tells us that we are light. We are salt. We are witnesses as he is a witness to God’s love.

And our nation is torn between these views of God, of creation, and our place in the universe. The country was founded on a Babylonian view. The country was founded on the genocide of the people who were here before us and was built by captives, by slave labor. And when the curtain is drawn back, we see the knee of the man in power on the neck of the man who has no power.

But no. No. The President held the bible, and that’s a book that a lot of us read. We read the Bible, and we repent. We read the Bible, and we weep. Because we are not Babylonians. We choose a different way.

We choose to feed the hungry, to give water to the thirsty, to welcome the stranger, to visit those in prison.

We choose to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly. To walk humbly, to join hands, to claim that every thing in all of this good creation is a gift and a blessing from God. And every one is made in God’s image.

We choose to worship this God, to be the people of this God.

My heart broke last week as I watched a video of police officers marching down a street. And one officer, somebody who took an oath to serve and protect, this officer looked straight into the camera that was filming him and flashed a white supremacy sign. He knew he was being filmed. He is on top. And he has the law on his side. He is the law. For him that law is white supremacy.

Our nation is torn between these views of God, of creation, and our place in the universe.

These are words from our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry this week about our current sorry state. The interviewer tried to bate him into a partisan position, to say something negative about our President. But Michael Curry knows who he is and whose side he is on. He did not throw his weight into the chaos. He went to higher ground.

“To be sure, as the old slaves would say, there is trouble in the land. There is no question about that. But there is…” he said, “a fundamental moral order to the world in which we live that has been established by God when God saw everything that God made and said that it is good.

“That was a moral declaration. And I believe that in the end, if people of good will and human decency come together and say, “We’re going to be a people of love, we’re going to be a people of compassion, we’re going to be a people worthy of the name American, then we will be a shining city upon a hill.

“If we, the majority, sometimes the silent majority, stand up, speak up, and join hands together across racial differences, across religious, across sexual orientations, across all of our differences, join hands as brothers and sisters and siblings, and let us stand up and make this nation a loving, decent, freedom loving, justice reigning nation—make America that kind of nation and then there will be peace in our streets.”

And somewhere else this week he spoke more specifically to us, to Christians. And in these words I hear the Way of Love, the Way that calls us to choose to follow Jesus, to examine our hearts and repent of what needs repenting, to read and study scripture and be formed by it, to pray, to worship, even as those young men in Babylon worshiped the God of Genesis 1, to be a blessing to the world around us, to go into that hurting world with the good news of God’s love, and to take our rest, because even God took a day off. It’s right there in the book…

Bishop Curry said:

“We need not be paralyzed by our past or our present. We are not slaves to fate but are people of faith. Our long-term commitment to racial justice and reconciliation is embedded in our identity as baptized followers of Jesus. We will still be doing it when the news cameras are long gone.”

We will still be doing it when the news cameras are long gone.

Amen.

Marduk vs Tiamat - story from Enuma Elish

bas relief from the Palace of Sennacherib, Nineveh, in the public domain

Byzantine mosaic of the Separation of the Sheep and the Goats

from the Medieval collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the public domain

third centry fresco of the three young men from the Priscilla catacombs in Rome, in the public domain

photo of sunrise over the moon, NASA, in the public domain
photo of the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry from Facebook.com