“Church Words: Creation”
Reading: Psalm 51:10-17; Isaiah 45:8-22
Written and preached by Luke Richards
We are starting a new sermon series today that I have called “Church Words.” Words, of course, are extremely powerful. If you need evidence, just open up the political section of a newspaper sometime and you’ll probably see a selection of articles detailing how such-and-such a public figure has put their foot in their mouth because of a careless word. We usually want to choose our words carefully, because I’d bet every single one of us has gotten into trouble at one time or another because we didn’t say the right thing. And even more than that, we’ve all probably gotten in trouble for not saying the right thing well: you can use all the right words, but if you use them sarcastically or bitterly, they can cause problems. Our words are extremely important.
There is an ongoing debate in the church about the words we use. There are all sorts of words out there that have their root in the church and have either gained use outside the church or have never caught on outside the church at all. We therefore have all these “church words” out there that have become confusing: for some of them, it’s because they’ve gained such a widespread use that their original “church” meaning has been diluted by their use outside the church, and for other words, they have a specific meaning and you only occasionally hear them used, and maybe we don’t take the time to stop and think about what they mean. One example: the word “bless.” You sneeze out in public somewhere, and a stranger says, “Bless you,” and then we come into church and start talking about the blessings of God; what does the word “bless” mean? Or an example on the other extreme: the word “Trinity.” It’s a word that you will almost never hear used outside of its very specific and very complex theological meaning, and so the average person on the street is not likely to have anything other than a vague notion of what the word means. And so we have all these church words that some Christians say we should simply do away with and find new words for them, because the original meaning has been lost and we want to communicate our faith in a language people can understand. Let’s get rid of these church words, they say, so that we can replace them with more relevant ones.
Maybe that needs to happen sometimes. But at the same time, when we talk about God and the things of His kingdom we are often delving into matters that go much deeper than everyday language can handle. We’re talking about things, in other words, that deserve their own language, and there is a richness and depth and history in many of these church words that would be difficult to reproduce with other words. Therefore, for the next several weeks, we will be digging into some of these church words to rediscover their meaning and explore how we can use them well. We want to make sure we can say what we’re trying to say and that we’re saying what we think we’re saying.
And we’re beginning at the beginning, so to speak. Our first church word is creation, a word that some people use to refer simply to the universe. Creation is sort of a poetic way of referring to the world that exists, as far as some people are concerned, and they don’t really intend to be making any sort of claim about God when they talk about creation. But when we use the word creation in the church, we’re not only making a reference to the world as it is, we are also making a claim about how it got here, we’re making a claim about the God who created it, we’re making a claim about what it is now, and we’re making a claim about where things are going. It’s a loaded word in the church; let’s make sure we’re using it well when we use it.
Of course the basic biblical text dealing with creation is the account in the first few chapters of the book of Genesis of God creating the heavens and the earth. We didn’t read that passage for today, partly because it’s a fairly long passage, but also because those words have become so familiar to many of us that it can be difficult to read them in a way that lets us hear what the words are trying to say instead of what we’re used to hearing. Genesis 1 tells of God crafting the world and its inhabitants using highly structured, very carefully chosen words. You’re probably familiar with at least part of it: it tells of God crafting the world and giving it order and complexity over the course of six days, and then He rests on the seventh. After each act of creation, God declares it good, and when it’s all done, He says it’s very good. He gives His new creation to the man and the woman He has made, telling them to take care of it and give it more order, and then they promptly mess everything up by trying to take God’s place and exceeding the authority He has granted them.
People respond to this account of creation in a number of different ways. Some people call it nothing more than a story, no different or more accurate than any of the other ancient myths of gods creating the world. Such people need to take a closer look. Other people claim that the Genesis account is a step-by-step physical description of how God created the world, as though Genesis were a technical manual or scientific textbook, and those people regularly come into conflict with many scientists. But people who make this claim miss the fact that Genesis 1 is written in very, very careful poetry, and if, for example, you want to write a technical manual describing how to build a car, you don’t ask a poet to write it. There is meaning in Genesis 1 that goes far beyond a mere description of how and when God created the world. And then there are other people who draw a theological lesson from Genesis 1: they look at God’s sovereignty and power in creation, and they look at how He granted some authority and responsibility for creation to humanity as His stewards, and then they derive from that the doctrine that creation is ours to do with as we please. We can use it up, burn it, pollute it, and foul it however we want, because it’s ours, and besides, it’s fallen and it’s going to burn in the end anyway. This is usually used to justify a lack of self-control leading to abuse of God’s creation. These people ignore the fact that they are continuing the very sin that Adam and Eve committed that messed everything up in the first place: they are exceeding the authority God gave us; they are trying to take God’s place by claiming more power than they should.
When we in the church speak of creation, we have a much greater meaning in mind. The creation we have in mind is an exercise of God’s creativity. Those two concepts go together. Creation is something new, something exciting, something beautiful; it is creative. Genesis 1 is written poetically to give the story of creation a sense of the structure and beauty and care that God put into the actual act of creating. It’s poetry because only poetry has that ability to stretch words beyond their literal meaning and hint at the greater beauty beyond them. The poetry evokes the structure, the order, the craftsmanship God put into His world, craftsmanship that comes only out of love for the thing created. It’s significant that Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, has a word that is specifically reserved for God’s act of creating. The Hebrew verb bara’ is what Genesis uses to talk about God’s creation of the world; it’s a word that can only be used for things God creates. If you or I were to create a painting or something, Hebrew would have a different verb to describe that; God gets his own verb because His creations are special, they are new, they are unlike anything that has existed before.
In other words, God’s creation is truly creative in a way nothing else can be. Anything anyone else creates will somehow be derivative. There is nothing new under the sun, as the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us. Any art, any literature, any music we create might be great, but it is not truly creative like God’s creation is. Our creations are only reflections, modifications, variations on the truly creative creation of God. Creation, this church word, speaks of God’s original creativity.
We might ask, then, what is the point of God’s creation? Does He create out of boredom? Some of the ancient creation myths tell stories of gods who created the world more or less on accident: such-and-such a god did something without realizing what would happen, and the world was the result. Did God create His creation accidentally? Other creation myths involve a cosmic battle: one god had to defeat some other gods or monsters, and sometimes the world would sprout from the defeated gods’ blood. Did God create through violence and battle; did he have to defeat some primordial force of evil first? Did He create out of some macho desire for power? Is He such an angry, petty God that He wanted a world full of people to control? Why does He create?
Of course, God does not create accidentally, thoughtlessly, carelessly, violently, or angrily. In Genesis 1, God creates with a word. He intends to create, He wants to create, and He calls it very good when it’s complete. He creates omnipotently; there is no other power or force that He has to contend with to carry out His will. In short, creation is an expression of God’s joy, His delight, His love for the things He makes. The story of creation could only be told by a poet, because only a poet could begin to approach the beauty and the wonder of what God has done. The unique, poetic, delightful creations of God should therefore motivate us to awe. Just as God delights in His creation, so should we, who are a part of that creation, delight in it and in our Creator.
And yet the daily miseries of life coupled with our wonder and awe at God’s creation lead us to lament the creation as it currently is. Yes, there is still great beauty in our world, but there are also many things that remind us of how far this creation has fallen from what God’s original creativity intended. People toil and suffer and die fruitlessly, the world can be bitter and cruel, brothers and sisters hurt and kill one another, and every part of creation we touch feels the effects of our choice to sin. As if we needed an example, consider the hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil polluting vast tracts of ocean, forever damaging families and livelihoods, threatening entire ecosystems, all because of our collective greed, shortsightedness, and lust for convenience. God’s magnificent creation, which should be a source of joy and delight, calls us to mourn and repent of what we’ve done to it and to one another. This church word, creation, calls us to remember a world that has not been seen in living memory, to imagine the world as God intended it, a world that would delight even God Himself, but is now fallen.
But even as we lament how far creation — and we as a part of creation — have fallen, this church word leads us to hope and expectation. Our readings for today dealt with creation, but not as obviously as Genesis 1 does. Both of our passages make use of that word bara’, that Hebrew word that is reserved for God’s creating acts. In Psalm 51, it is David repenting of his adultery and conspiracy to murder, and his song is a prayer that God would create (bara’) a clean heart within him, that God would perform that act of creative creation that only He is able to do, and that He would create a new David out of the old, fallen mess. God is still creating. Creation continues, and He can create a new heart in you, too. In Isaiah 45, the prophet is informing the people of Israel that their salvation will come from an unexpected agent. It’s a passage filled with creation (bara’), God doing what only He is able to do, taking the disaster of his people’s ruin and using King Cyrus, a pagan king who was the last person they expected to be their savior, to bring restoration and hope out of the calamity. And throughout the passage, God reminds His people, His creations, that He is about the business of creating new and unexpected things, truly original things, and He will surprise them in how He chooses to re-create His fallen creation. And He just might surprise us in the creating He does among us.
Creation continues. This church word calls us to fall on our faces in awe at what God has done, it calls us to lament what we have done to His very good creation, and it calls us to call out to Him in hopeful expectation of what He will do in His continued efforts of creating. We can join in what He is doing. We can be a part of His creation of a new kingdom, the re-creation of the world. As we enjoy the beauty of what He has made, as we stand in awe of what He has created, let us commit ourselves wholeheartedly to participating in what God is doing.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.