GOD: CREATOR
Genesis 1: 1-12; John 1: 1-14
Today let me let you hear something that I’ve only told to a
few: there is a program that soothes me for a half and hour if I’m home for a
late lunch that drives my artistic wife crazy.
Now I know you’re thinking its Andy Griffith. No; I like Andy when I
need to find my smile again. But I like Bob Ross, and “The Joy of Painting.”
There, I said it. Perhaps I should join a support group of some sort! But what is in the head of the man with the
paintbrush? Why, he gets to take a blank canvas, add any colors of the rainbow
or mixtures of hues, and he, in thirty minutes, creates something out of nothing.
Of course, it is not the way God did it; God really created something out of nothing! Bob Ross is more like an editor,
isn’t he? The entire pallet of his mind is the nature that God has already created; if it was a
painting on a computer screen, he could simply click on a tree and drag it
over; or on a mountain or a brook and drag it over. But he looks at a canvas
and still gets to decide what will be painted on it, and what scene will come
to life before the viewer’s eyes. It’s just that Ross creates a picture from
the images in his mind. But creating something from truly nothing: that magnificent, glorious, vast, and humanly
overwhelming task belongs to the Holy One we call Creator. God looked into the
nothingness, the “void” as it is sometimes called, and had to decide
EVERYTHING! And what was God’s
paintbrush: the Word! With a Word,
remember: “God said,” there shall be brightness
to be called “light;” and darkness to be called “night.” Did you notice that,
because God can do what God wants to do, night and day were created even before
the sun and the moon? Interesting …. How
long do you think it took to decide what to call “day” and “night” and how to
divide them? It boggles the human mind, but we are told, perhaps in comforting
human terms, that it took a day. Wow! That’s either exact or a metaphor, but we
will always come back to Scripture’s caution “With God, nothing is impossible!” Then God, with a word, called forth the
colors of blue with white clouds, and gray with black clouds, and called them
“sky.” And looking at our planet that perhaps did not yet have water, God named
a liquid that gives us life and beauty “water,” and let its color be clear so
that it could, a little like humans, reflect and refract God’s creation around
it. What genius! Day two. And you think
your days are full! Did you catch the sense that creation, when properly seen,
can cause awe and celebration? Mary Ann
and I, who were originally from the north, marveled at our children’s reaction
to seeing snow for the first time! What was it like for the Apollo 11 crew to
touch and see the moon up close with their own eyes for the first time? What is
it like when a mother or father sees their baby, their creation in a matter of
speaking, for the first time? These experiences are new and powerful! And you
may have experienced a child’s squeals of delight upon seeing a squirrel in her
backyard for the first time, or the yearning a child has when passing a pet
store window! At Creation on the third
day, God continued to create a playground for us, and it was one without the
need for human concession stands. There were apples and nuts; brooks of water
and bunches of grapes; there were animals that gave milk and some with fur that
could be cut to keep us warm. What a giving God we have! God finished out the
creation week with things we love and on which we depend: earth and the sea,
plant life and fruit; trees and seeds; seasons that bring warmth and cold and
rain and snow and sometimes colorful leaves; and so we wouldn’t have to invent
flashlights (even though we did), God gave us the sun as a bright light for
when we would most naturally work, and a night light called the moon for when
our bodies would naturally want to sleep and the plants could collect needed
moisture. What an ecosystem! Then came the day when God got to play the most: a
day of naming amazing long necked yellow animals, “Giraffes;” large, trunked
gray animals “elephants,” huge water creatures called “whales” that weighed a
fraction of their land weight because they were in the sea; and then God
created other strange creatures: purposeful to the Creator, later questionable
in the mind of the public: hornets, piranha, fire ants, the duckbilled
platypus, the gooney bird, and the like.
We’ll have to ask God about those when we get to live above the dome, so
to speak! And you’ll notice that the first blessing of the Bible is not on
people, it is on God’s creatures. As the verse veterinarian James Herriot loved
to quote says: “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small;
all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all!”
But then came God’s most complex creation: beings that in
some ways reflected the nature of their Creator. The Bible text is quite
interesting at that point: let us make humankind in our image” it says in verse
26. Was God talking like a nurse in a
doctor’s office who once asked me, “And how are we feeling today?” “We? I don’t know about you, but I feel lousy
and that’s why I’m here!” I once replied in a not too polite and cranky kind of
way. Why does God speak in the
plural? Some have suggested, thanks to the powerful reminder in John chapter one,
that the Living Word traditionally known as the “Son” or the “Redeemer” was
also in the Godhead, along with the “Ruach” or “Spirit” that was also present (claim
Trinitarian scholars). Others have noted that since God is eternal, like a
ring, rather than with a beginning, like a starting line, God had other
heavenly beings that were consulted: perhaps angels, perhaps of both genders,
that pleased God and encouraged the Creator to make mortals in similar pleasing
forms that inhabited divine space. Again
make your list to ask when you cross over to the other side! This magnificent
creation story doesn’t explain itself, but leaves us to abide in its wonder
and, yes, its mysteries! So, perhaps in the likeness of angelic beings,
God created ones like the ones that already were pleasing: male and female they
were called. And to these beings (not creatures) God actually spoke; and
remember, it was through speaking (voice and breath) that God brought life to
what we call Earth.
Finally God, in a divine act of CPR, created eternally interesting
bodies and then breathed life into them and chose to abide with them in a spiritual
way. Only later, we find out in John,
does God unselfishly come down in a mortal body, to empathize with, hurt with,
laugh with, and suffer with us. But God uniquely kept a foot in what was divine,
and another in what was mortal so God could experience how we hurt, why we sin,
and why we fall. In speaking to
humans initially, God gave instructions saying they were to be caretakers of the
earth and the creatures and (perhaps implied) of one another. Human failings were better addressed in the
second creation story in chapter 2. But isn’t it likely that life on and care
for the Earth has not gone anything like life in and care of Heaven must be
like? Certainly Heaven is not falling
apart or being corrupted by dirt, pollution, or sin? But here
we have responsibilities. I have gone
back to children’s playgrounds I enjoyed as a child and been proud of how well
some of them had been kept, and saddened by the sight of others. I have gone
back to houses where I used to live and felt the same way. Does the home called
Planet Earth need a little TLC? We are the managers of these apartments that we
named
Friends. today we have been reminded of the precious
playground we have been given; a place where animals, plants, and people are
meant to live. And the only one capable of sinning is the one for whom a Savior
was sent; for we- you and I and our forebears- are the ones who are to care
for, protect, and farm the earth. God’s weeps in wrath over arsonists who
destroy acres of forests; and over melting ice caps that make some places too
warm or too wet for habitation; and over skies that get clogged with smoke and
lakes that get polluted with sewage. But
as much as that affects the Holy Heart, God seems to spend the most time
attending to the fickle and the funny; the philandering and sometimes faithful
human beings who were made in the image of what was Heavenly. Awesome; God cares that much, showing us how
to care. May we reflect our Creator’s care with what, and who, has been
entrusted to our care. In the first
book of Scripture for Christians and Jews, God looked at a black canvas, and with
the paintbrush of the word, began to create. It was very good. With our renewed
care, it still can be so.
Jeffrey A. Sumner