I still remember that early summer evening years ago when I was driving home through the rain. We were still living on Wortham then. I made the final right turn and parked the car at the end of the driveway just after it had stopped raining. Then I sat there for a moment, listening to the rest of a story on the radio.
Eventually, I pulled the key from the ignition and opened the door. It was late in the evening, the sun was low, light pouring through the trees, drops of water sparkling in the grass. I was about to open the back door of the car to grab my bag from behind the seat, when there was this hint of sweet fragrance rising from the freshly-bathed world. Suddenly nothing else mattered. I just stood there. Then I slowly turned toward the tall magnolia tree in our neighbor’s yard, quietly breathing in so as not to startle its graceful blooms, I guess, hoping the breeze would carry one more wave of scented air to me – and there it was. Such goodness. Such generosity. I still didn’t move, and for that moment, I was completely at home in the world; my whole being was a thank you to the giver of life and delight.
Didn’t cost me a penny. All I had to do was be there. All I had to pay was a little attention. Our days are full of these wonders. Honeysuckle. Watermelon. Peaches. Such goodness. The porch swing. The hammock. The beautiful noise of children playing at the pool. Such goodness. The joy of noticing all the places where the Wrens love to stop before they fly to the nest to feed their young. The wonder of a Great Blue Heron gliding across the river with such grace and nary a sound. Such beauty.
This morning, we listened to the entire first chapter of Genesis and then some. Some of you may have thought, “Really, the whole chapter, all seven days? How about one day at a time? He could have done a seven-week sermon series, complete with a couple of Wednesday nights on Faith & Science and a couple more on climate change and sustainability. Why waste it by pouring it all out at once?”
Why pour it all out in one reading? Because it’s the story of life in one chapter, from first light to God’s rest. Because it’s poetry that wasn’t written to be chopped up into lectionary sections, but to be spoken, read and heard with at least a small measure of the Creator’s extravagance in creating. And we listen to the whole poem because God takes time creating. God doesn’t just snap the divine fingers and immediately bring creation into being. God speaks. God makes. God orders. God invites the earth to bring forth. God names. God observes and delights. “And God saw that it was good,” is one of the refrains of this grand poem.
The first day. The second day. The third day. God is not in a hurry. Like an artist who steps back from the detail, again and again, to behold the whole as it is taking shape, God pauses to observe closely how the earth brings forth plants yielding seed of every kind and fruit trees. The fourth day. God notices how the waters swarm; God sees how birds fly across the sky and where they build their nests. God lingers with delighted attention over every movement of every wing. The Sparrow, the Mocking Bird, the Barn Swallow. The fifth day. God speaks. God makes. God observes and delights.
“Why so many forms?” Annie Dillard asks in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork – for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl – but that it all flows so freely and wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.[1]
Humans have a special place in creation, but we’re not that special. We don’t even have our own separate day set aside for us, you know, for the “crown of creation.” We are latecomers to the miracle of life, creatures of the sixth day who arrive in the afternoon, as it were. The waters were already swarming with living creatures of every kind, and birds of every kind were flying across the vast expanse of the sky and nesting in the trees along the banks of the rivers, and the land was filled with animals of all shapes and sizes—let us make humankind, God said, in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over all this, as far as the eye can see.
Yes, we are latecomers to the miracle of life, but the only creatures made in the image of God, the ones entrusted, honored with the sacred responsibility of representing God’s dominion in how we live with each other and with all of God’s works. We are the first creatures who not only participate in the miracle of life, but who have been given the capacity to see the commonality of all life; the first ones to see how fearfully and wonderfully made all creatures are and how each is connected with the others in a single web. We are the first creatures who don’t just float along with the current in the river of life, but delight in naming every creature swimming with us. We are the ones who observe the motion of the planets and in endless wonder explore the depths of the universe and the grammar of the genome. We are the ones gifted with the capacity to see everything that God has made and how very good it all is, and to say so.
When Carl Sagan came up with his now famous model for the age of the universe, he didn’t count days, but he arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the late arrival of humankind. He first popularized the idea of squeezing all the time of the universe into not seven days, but a single year, beginning with the Big Bang on January 1. On March 15, the Milky Way galaxy was formed. Our solar system came into existence on August 31. The first multicellular life on earth appeared on December 5, fish on December 18 and birds on December 27. Human beings arrived on the scene about 8 minutes before midnight on December 31. And we started writing down our stories and songs only about half a second ago in cosmic time.
“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” one of us asked in awesome wonder many centuries ago, and the question still resonates. All creatures praise God by simply being what they were created to be. We were created in the image and likeness of God to represent God’s dominion, to participate in the unfolding of God’s creation, and there was great joy in heaven when the first human beings looked around with awe and delight and said, “Thank you.” Frederick Buechner wrote,
Using the same old materials of earth, air, fire, and water, every twenty-four hours God creates something new out of them. If you think you’re seeing the same show all over again seven times a week, you’re crazy. Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the you that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same again, either.[2]
Morning by morning, new mercies we see. All we have to do is be there. All we have to pay is a little attention.
We listen to the entire opening chapter of Genesis on a Sunday morning in June, because it invites us to step out of our little boxed-in worlds and to live amid the unfathomable splendor of a gazillion creatures great and small, each vibrating with the love of God, and giving that love a shape that changes from moment to moment and yet remains one for as long as God speaks. We listen to beautiful scripture to better remember who we were made to be; to remember that dominion has nothing to do with feeling “superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.”[3] We were made to be, not autocratic despots, but representatives of God’s dominion – seeing, hearing, tasting, delighting, making, naming, caring, resting, and praising the One whose love is expressed in all of it.
Summer, of course, is the perfect season for us to fully immerse ourselves in God’s delight in life’s unfolding. So have a full, slow, free, and wild summer, filled with wonder and praise.
[1] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1988, 137.
[2] Cited by Debie Thomas https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20140609JJ.shtml
[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Dominion of Love,” Journal for Preachers 2008, 26.