Seventh / Last Sunday after Epiphany, February 23 2025. Sermon preached at 4.00pm Evensong in Exeter Cathedral. For the Old Testament reading: Genesis 1.1-2.3. “Creation”

04 Mar Seventh / Last Sunday after Epiphany, February 23 2025. Sermon preached at 4.00pm Evensong in Exeter Cathedral. For the Old Testament reading: Genesis 1.1-2.3. “Creation”

I would like to spend a few minutes with you thinking about the creation story from Genesis which we heard in our first reading—the first of two creation stories with which our Bibles begin.
I intend to do this, not by wasting time in discussion as to whether the Genesis creation story can or cannot be reconciled with modern theories of evolution—theories that would not emerge for another two thousand years and are therefore unlikely to have been in the minds either of those who first told this story or of those who first listened to it—but rather by looking at the story itself, at what Genesis 1.1-2.3 evidently does say, and asking what it may have been intended to convey, and what it may perhaps mean for us.
If the broad consensus of biblical scholarship over the last century or so is to be trusted, the first chapter of Genesis as we have it was created by priests who had been forcibly exiled to Babylon after the Babylonians had crushed Israel in the 6th century BC: which means, in effect, that it was composed by a group of men who had been faced with a shattering challenge to their faith. Jerusalem, their holy city, had been overrun. The Temple, where God had promised to dwell in the midst of his people forever, had been destroyed. They themselves had been sent into exile. Everything that had once given their lives meaning was in pieces. Surely they must have been tempted to believe that their God had been defeated by the stronger God of the Babylonians and that life itself was pointless, a plaything of the violent and the powerful? The Babylonians themselves told a creation story that said just that: Enuma Elish. You can read a rendering of it on Google, if you are interested, although I wouldn’t recommend it for children. It’s a story full of violence, battles between gods and terrible cruelty. And since the Babylonians had conquered Israel, perhaps their view of the world and the gods was right? Perhaps the final truth about life really was that might is right, and thugs and gangsters rule? Surely such thoughts must have entered the minds of those exiled priests? 
If so, then they did not succumb to them. Why? We may say, the Holy Spirit continued to inspire them. But that does not really answer the question. We may still wonder, how did the Holy Spirit do it? What happened in the exiles’ experience that kept them faithful? Of course we can only surmise. Perhaps in time they began think about the fact that even in exile, the sun did still rise each day and the moon and the stars pursued their courses. Birds still flew and the fish swam. Perhaps the Holy Spirit worked through their awareness of things like that.
Then again, they were surely rallied by the prophet Jeremiah, who wrote them a letter. Look in your Bible if you would like to read it—at Jeremiah 29! It’s really rather an amazing document. Were the exiles tempted to hate their Babylonian captors? Then don’t, says Jeremiah! On the contrary, “seek the welfare of the city where God has sent you, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (29.7). Did they think God had forgotten them? By no means, says Jeremiah: God has plans for you, “plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (29.11).
However it happened, the undoubted fact is that those exiled priests came up with something that defies everything we might have expected: they came up with the passage from Genesis that we just heard. Instead of succumbing to the hopeless and cheerless Babylonian view of life as represented in the Enuma Elish story, they took an ancient story of their own—a story that appears to have been among them at least as long as Moses giving them the Ten Commandments, since the fourth commandment refers to it directly (see Exodus 20.11)—a story about God creating the heavens and the earth in Seven Days. They took that story, and offered through it a vision of life and the world that is in just about every way totally opposite to the Babylonian view.
It begins, to be sure, with a token glance at the universe of Babylonian imagining. When God begins to create, we are given a momentary glimpse of a world “without form and void, and there was darkness”—but it is there surely only to show us that such a world is by no means good enough for the God of Israel! The Spirit, the living and dynamic breath of God is already moving over it, and God speaks: “‘Let there be light!’ And there was light. And God saw that the light was good!” (1.2-3).
And that’s just the beginning! Throughout the story of God’s “week of work” (so to speak) that these priests have inherited, they see God continuing to speak into being a world of order and fruitfulness. Light and dark, day and night, times and seasons, lands and seas, sun, moon, stars, all have their place. So too with the creatures that are set in this world: birds, fish, beasts and humankind, all have their place. And all, even the smallest and wildest, are in a direct relationship with God. It is God who “calls” them into being and God who wishes them to flourish. How do we know that? Because God says so! “Increase and multiply!” is His gracious word to every living thing!
Of humankind, however, God says more. Humankind, “male and female”, is “in the image of God” (Genesis 1.27). What does that mean? It surely means at least what immediately follows: “let them have dominion”—dominion over everything that God has made. Humankind is God’s vice-regent in earth. Humankind has this role, of course—and this is something that the second creation story will make clear (Genesis 2.4-25)—not to exploit the creation, but to serve it, as God’s steward. And this office, we should note, is not limited to Israel. It is the mark of humanity—which means, presumably, even those in humanity whom we like least: even, perhaps, to the surprise of the exiled Israelites, their Babylonian captors!

So God offers a world of harmony, a vegetarian paradise in which there is enough for everyone. And God “saw everything that God had made, and behold, it was very good!” That is the story. That is God’s plan, as the priests understood it.

And oh dear, what a dreadful mess we have made of it!

There is, however, one thing more: a Seventh Day, the Sabbath: Shabbat. “And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had created and made.” Moses had long ago told Israelites that this day holy because God had blessed it (Exodus 20.11). Now the priests in Babylon spell it out. What the rabbis will later refer to as Shabbat Shalom means a day of joy and peace, a day to drink wine and be with loved ones. And as the Genesis story presents it, it is, like all creation, a gift, perhaps even a bit of a joke—a divine joke! For it is only God who has actually laboured for Six Days and arguably earned a rest. For humanity it is their first day–and they have done nothing! So they receive the day of rest, the day of joy and peace, as a gift, as sheer grace, without having done anything at all to deserve it!

It is one of Israel’s glories that amid all the chaos of the world and the horrors that we human beings continually devise for each other, faithful Jews throughout history have continued to keep the Sabbath holy, thereby witnessing to the grace, harmony and peace which is God’s design for the world. May we Christians, who inherit not only the wisdom of those exiled priests but also, through our science, a knowledge of the harmony that underlies the entire physical universe [1], and through the preaching of the gospel, a knowledge of God’s grace in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus—may we also and in our own way bear witness to God’s call to harmony and peace. The world has surely never needed to be reminded of it more. Amen.

[1]The basic physical building block of the universe is the atom. And every atom is a tiny system, a miracle of harmony. In other words, the ultimate and scientifically observable foundation of our entire physical reality is things that work together with each other. It is NOT things in conflict. So, while it is true that predator-prey (e.g. a lion eating a zebra) is hardly a manifestation of co-operation or harmony: it is also true that neither lion nor zebra would exist without the co-operation or harmony that is involved in the millions of atoms of which each is composed. As David Haskell points out, “Even piracy requires co-operation.” I am struck by the fact that, however far we actually are from it, it is perfectly possible for us to imagine a universe where there is no conflict at all, where every thing is in harmony. Isaiah imagined it centuries ago—“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11.6-9). And of course painter Edward Hicks imagined it in his “peaceable kingdom” paintings:—surely not among the greatest of the world’s paintings, but one can see what they are trying to express.
By contrast, it is completely impossible to imagine a physical universe where there is NO harmony at all and ALL is conflict—because there can literally be nothing (no thing) to imagine. Biblical Hebrew has an expression for it— “tohu va-bohu (תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ)”—“without form and void” (Gen. 1.2). Such a universe would be just a swirling chaos of—of atoms, I was about to write: but of course if there were no harmonies there would be no atoms. I find that fact rather striking. At the Eucharist, when the priest (even if it’s me) says the words “heaven and earth are full of your glory” I find myself almost invariably looking at the walls round me and remembering all those virtually countless millions of atoms, each a separate harmony, and I am awestruck.