. . . And God made . . . And God saw that it was good . . . Did someone say that the sun and moon and stars were gods? Pooh! The God of Israel’s ancestors made them—the stars that shine over Babylon as well as the stars that shine over Israel! Did someone say that animals and trees exist just for pleasure and exploitation? Pooh! God made them, too, each one a handiwork of God and therefore a treasure, not for mindless waste but as an integral part of God’s creative purpose. Did someone say that humankind exists as merely the playthings of the gods, or that one race is superior or that one nation is supreme or that one sex is more important? Pooh! God created humankind without passports and without flags, and both men and women are equally the image of God, which means that God must be just as feminine as God is masculine. Did someone say that one day is just like the next, an endless repetition of what has been, without meaning and without destiny? Pooh! As part and parcel of the creation itself, “on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation” (Gen 2:2–3 NRSV). And on every eighth day, God continues to move purposefully toward the perfection of the creation, in partnership with what God has already made.
And so Israel declared its faith that the god it worshiped is the God who created everything that is, the God who is sovereign over everything that is, the God who will bend everything and redeem every situation so that it fulfills the loving purpose God had from the very moment of deciding that it was not good for God to be alone. God will not let the chosen people wither away. God will not let destruction and dismay be the last words. God will do whatever is necessary, and God can do whatever is necessary—the same God who delighted to put the stars in the sky and the water in the ocean and the grass in the field will not let chaos again take over the universe or even your world or mine.
Any army, any party, any class that thinks the world is its oyster to pry open and snatch the pearl while God looks the other way either does not understand or does not care that God is the Creator, made everything that is for the purpose of loving communion, and wants every creature to have its own share of the fruits and potentialities of creation. When the people of Israel forgot that—when they began to take pride in their own accomplishments, their own technologies and their own schemes; when they began to exploit the poor and abuse the powerless; when they began to trust in their military might and their economy; when they began to neglect worship and turn their sabbath into a day for profit—then the collapse of their nation was assured. Drawing on the limited science of the times and the character that God had always shown, and remembering the promise, the writer of Genesis put Israel’s faith in context. He reminded the people dejected and bewildered in exile that the God who loved Israel into being was the God who loved the whole world into being for a purpose that no army could defeat and no sin could spoil. All of creation and each person in it is the Creator’s own delight. How could King Nebuchadnezzar and all his Babylonian idols match the Truth that made the universe with a word? How could any army, how could any illness, how could any deed of injustice or instance of oppression, how could any cruel word or act by any human being defeat someone who knows that he or she has been wonderfully loved into existence by the same God who made the earth and the heavens?
We don’t know exactly when Matthew’s Gospel was written, except that it was probably a few years after Jerusalem had again been destroyed by a foreign army from a pagan land—this time, Rome—and the temple that King Herod had built had been toppled. Again, the unthinkable had happened. Again, there must have been faith-testing and gut-wrenching questions about where the God of Israel was when it was all happening, whether this God had lost power even to save the great house of holy worship. Some people might have remembered wondering, many years earlier as they watched Jesus die on the cross, where God was that day, that dark and gruesome Friday, and whether this God had lost power even to save his Son.
The evangelist was writing his Gospel for people in exile—Christians of Jewish background living in Syria after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. In his faith community, there was probably a fair amount of bewilderment and uncertainty about God’s seeming powerlessness to stop the pagan rampage. But the evangelist reminded his Christian readers that what had appeared to be powerlessness on Good Friday laid the necessary foundation for God’s mightiest act of redemption on Easter Sunday—the redemption of his own Son from the grip of death. The creative power that by a word brought forth life on the face of the earth with all its variety and all its complexity and all its amazing interdependence, had also brought forth life from the grave. The God who made a precious promise to the people Israel long ago now, in Christ himself, made a new promise just as precious: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20b, NRSV). Creation was still the Creator’s delight. The people would still not be abandoned, though nations and even temples might fall.
And the comprehensive breadth of the promise became newly apparent in the words of the risen Christ himself to his followers: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19–20a, NRSV)—they were to make known throughout the world the commandments about love of God and love of neighbor and who God is and who our neighbor is, the commandments about trust and dependability, the commandments about witness and devotion, the commandments about forgiveness and self-sacrifice. And all of that was for the Creator’s loving purpose of restoring creation to the fullness that the Creator intended, the Creator’s absolute delight. God’s creation is not a place where humankind and other creatures exist to be abused by a cruel and capricious tyrant, but a place where the Creator freely shares creative power and responsibility. God’s creation is not a place where the Creator might shut us away when we bore or tire or exasperate the one who made us, but a place where every conceivable measure has been taken for our permanent joy and well-being. God’s creation is a place where there is sufficient for all, if it is shared and not hoarded. God’s creation is a place where no one and no thing feeds to the detriment of another, if pride and greed yield to forgiveness and generosity. God’s creation is a place where every creature, animate and inanimate, is dear to God, rather than a place to be exploited and despoiled ruthlessly and without thought to future generations of all living things. God’s creation is a place where the rhythms of creation itself are received as a gift of God, rather than something to be schemed around. God’s creation is a place where truth is spoken in respect and love, rather than allowing fear and falsehood to work their destructive disharmony. Far from allowing them to feel defeated, and that creation was out of control and that life was without purpose, the risen Christ gave his followers a new commission in God’s ongoing task of bringing creation to perfect fullness. On God’s very own authority, Jesus declared that God still loves this creation, and all of his disciples are to testify to that boldly and continually in our words and in our actions toward all people everywhere. Creation is not God’s whim. It is, and it will remain, God’s delight.
Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada
June 2, 2002
Genesis 6:9–22; 7:24; 8:1, 14–19
Romans 1:16–17; 3:21–31
Matthew 7:21–29
“The Faith of God”
Of all the stories in the Bible, I suppose that none is more well-known than the story of Noah and the flood. Certainly, no other biblical story has so captured the popular imagination and been turned into product lines from children’s bedding to Bill Cosby records. But as often happens when a Bible story becomes public currency, details get lost, plot becomes simplified, and, in the process, the reason that the story is even in the Bible becomes obscured and its message becomes garbled. It becomes “de-biblified,” if you will. So the vast majority of people who “know all about” Noah and the flood could not even tell you where to find it in the Bible. Like another story
