Trinity Sunday
Texts: Genesis 1:1-2:4a;
Matthew 28:16-20
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/live/KPloCIyAcj0?feature=share&t=708
“DOMINION” OVER CREATION AS CHRIST’S CALL TO SERVE IT
I have a friend, Brian McLaren, who was a parish pastor for more than 20 years, beginning in the 1980’s. During that time, he began to write books on the challenges of being church in our time and place. Increasingly, he became a sought-after speaker on these topics, and in 2006 he became a full-time author and presenter. In more recent years, he has been addressing — the elephant in the room across the modern church (though, not as much here, thankfully) — namely, why the youngest generations are mostly absent from our churches.
In his book Faith Beyond Doubt, for example, he tells the story of Charis, a young woman who invited him out for coffee after one of his speaking engagements. She told Brian that she’s almost 30, in a seriously relationship, and beginning to think about raising children. Although unchurched at the time, she hoped she might raise her children in church but had serious issues in finding a church home.
“Look,” she said to Brian, “I do all the [trendy] stuff. I do yoga. I go to therapy. I do these online self-awareness-unleash-your-inner-goddess courses and stuff like that. But I’m not an idiot. I know about climate change and nuclear war and economic inequality and all that. The world is in such a mess! I don’t just want to be a good, happy, fulfilled, spiritual consumer while it all goes down the toilet. I want to be part of a group, a movement, that’s trying to . . . you know, save it. There. I said it. I want to be part of a community that isn’t obsessed with just saving their own damned souls, but that actually wants to try to save this world that we’re on the verge of destroying.”1
In my time here as your Bridge Pastor, the concerns of young people that Charis articulates will be in the background of all my preaching and teaching. Full disclosure: my sons are Charis’ age and mostly don’t go to church. I firmly believe that our basic Gospel message needs a substantial revitalizing. The message I grew up overfocused on the afterlife, on saving people’s souls. And in the process we’ve neglected the overall message of the New Testament that God’s reign is coming into this world precisely in order to save this world that, in Charis’ words, we’re on the verge of destroying.
Yes, the message of hope for life-after-death remains very important. But the full Good News in Jesus goes far beyond that! The promise of eternal life can begin now! The very good Gospel in the New Testament includes the hope of God’s project to bring new life to the whole world, not just a few souls for the afterlife. As we read this morning, God the Creator looks at the creation and declares it to be “very good”! Can we imagine that such a God would then abandon this very good creation to human sinfulness? No! God so loved the world that God sent the Son to save it! Any hope less than that is selling short the power of God’s love to save the creation.
So let’s spend a few minutes this morning considering a larger Gospel that includes the mess that our children and grandchildren see when they look around them. One of their favorite genres these days is the zombie apocalypse. It’s their metaphor for how they see the world. The living dead. There are so many things which face us right now that are crucial. And they would love, as Charis articulates, to gather in community to do something together to save this world. To turn things around. To follow someone like Jesus who’s showing us a better way to be human, so that we take care of each other and this creation.
How does the ascending Jesus launch that project of saving the world? How does the ascending Jesus to launch the project of New Creation address the mess our human sinfulness has created? By showing us how to properly understand the story of creation.
In fact, Jesus shows us how to understand all our stories of faith. In today’s Gospel reading, Matthew ends his story of Jesus with the Great Commissioning, Jesus sending us out to “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). Luke’s Gospel ends with Jesus on the road to Emmaus with two disciples, and Luke tells us that, “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:27). In my time here as your Bridge Pastor, I will propose to you a certain way to understand how it is that Jesus helps us to better understand all our stories of faith — how it is that Jesus ‘interprets to us the things about himself in all the scriptures.’
It begins by understanding something we know more about today from the modern study of human anthropology: namely, that most or even all religions across the earth began with gods who command ritual blood sacrifice. In short, we human beings seemingly evolved with false ideas about God or the gods who command us to kill as part of our worship. The Christian Bible gives us a story about how the true God of Abraham and Jesus leads us to discover that the Creator God is quite different. In fact, the opposite. In Jesus, we have: instead of us offering a blood sacrifice to the gods, we have God offering God’s very self to us. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, who takes away our false notions about who God is. God or the gods do not demand various kinds of blood sacrifice offered to them. God in Jesus enters into our world of blood sacrifice and becomes the blood sacrifice on the cross in order to show us a completely different God, a God who is self-giving love and has a justice for us based on loving service and self-sacrifice, never on killing anything or anyone. The gods of sacrifice that evolving with our ancestors are false gods.
I’ll need to unpack that a bit each week while I’m here. This morning I can give you clear examples around how to understand the story of creation for our lives today. It begins by comparing the story of Genesis 1 not to the story of science today, which is completely different way to tell the story, but to compare it to other such stories of its time. When Genesis 1 was written, every other culture told its story by telling the story of creation in a different way. In Hindu culture for example, they tell the story of creation in terms of the gods sacrificially carving up the body of the primal human being into all the parts of creation. This included the symbolism of using the head to create the ruling class, the arms to create the military class, the torso to create the general populace, and the feet to create the lowly servant class, the so-called untouchables of Indian society. In other words, they told their story of creation in order to justify, among other things, the four-tiered caste system of their society that kept the servant class in its place as untouchables.2
Even more poignant is the creation story of the Babylonians. Genesis 1 was written in the time after returning from exile in Babylon, so they would have had that Babylonian story of creation jammed down their throats for several decades. The Babylonians call their story Enuma Elish, and it features a war between the gods in which one of the gods conquers the other and uses its body to create all the parts of creation. It is a story, in short, used by the Babylonians to justify their own violent nature as a conquering nation.
Now, consider the Genesis 1 story anew in that context. What do we notice? First of all, God uses no violence, sacrificial or otherwise. God simply speaks the universe and all its parts into existence. Second, human beings are created in the image of God. If the Hindu and Babylonian stories of creation justify people being in charge and those who are enslaved in servanthood, Genesis 1 does the complete opposite by saying that all human beings, male and female, are created in God’s image. This is a revolutionary idea that didn’t really come into history until the earliest church communities, and then at long last as the basis for the United States Constitution, the principle that all human beings are created equal and deserve an equal opportunity at flourishing. Genesis 1 was way, way ahead of its time in declaring that all human beings are made in God’s image.
But there is still an element of Genesis 1 that might lead us astray, and in fact has led us astray. When in verse 28 God commands human beings to fill and subdue the earth and to have dominion over all the creatures, does this now set up a system of servitude of human beings having charge over the rest of creation such that we can do whatever suits our needs with the rest of creation? Genesis 1 has been misread and misunderstood precisely in this way, that we human beings have carte blanche over the rest of creation, resulting today in the mess we created throughout much of our environment — so many spoiled landscapes, vanishing species of flora and fauna, and global warming. Genesis 1 is more true than the Hindu or Babylonian stories of creation, but it can still lead to environmental injustice unless we also learn to read it in light of Jesus.
What does it mean to have dominion over the earth, for example, if Jesus teaches us disciples this: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:42-45).
Do you see? If Jesus came to teach us that having dominion most truly is expressed and lived out through loving service, then how are we to understand our dominion over the earth? Aren’t we commanded to teach others all that Jesus has commanded us? How do we have dominion in light of Jesus? By serving. By serving.
So in John’s Gospel, he even begins with his own story of creation in light of Jesus. That from the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and there wasn’t anything in the universe made without the Word. God’s Word in Jesus Christ, God’s love, God’s way of serving by calling us to serve each other and creation.
In short, isn’t a crucial part of our discipleship today to teach our fellow citizens to relate to our environment in ways of loving service? That creation isn’t ours to do with as we please? But that instead it is our calling to serve creation in ways that help all life to flourish? What if environmental justice were a central part of our mission and message? Do you think young people like Charis might find that more welcoming?
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Lutheran Church of the Resurrection,
Racine, WI, June 4, 2023
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/live/KPloCIyAcj0?feature=share&t=708
Notes
1. Brian McLaren, Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), page 134.
2. See my webpage on the Hindu creation story: https://girardianlectionary.net/learn/hindu-creation-myth/
