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Third Sunday in Lent
March 12, 2023 | 10:00 a.m.

I Believe in God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth
A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
Selections from Genesis 1

I believe in God, Maker of heaven and earth. Today is the third Sunday in our intentional communal walk through one of the most ancient and ecumenical creeds of the Christian tradition: the Apostles’ Creed. And I imagine that if our children had stayed in the sanctuary for this part of the service and listened to this text, especially if they are in elementary school, had we asked them if they had any questions about it, they might have asked things like “What day were the dinosaurs created?” “And did dinosaurs die before the humans were created only a few days later?”

In another few years, were we to ask them again, perhaps their questions would have become the ones the late biblical scholar Sib Towner asked in his commentary on Genesis: “How did God go about the work of creation? Was there a Big Bang? How did life begin on earth? Did God call on an asteroid laden with amino acids or even with living cells from Mars or Krypton or some other corner of the universe? Is there life elsewhere in the cosmos as well?” (W. Sibley Towner, Genesis, pp. 13–14).

I know those questions because I began to ask them in the seventh grade. I was sitting in my earth science class when I heard for the first time about the moment called the Big Bang. All of a sudden, in my twelve-year-old mind, the claims of my faith, the words I had digested from this part of Genesis since before I could remember, seemed to start colliding with all of the “new to me” science that I was learning. I was perplexed, to say the least. And I imagine I am not the only one who had a moment like that. Perhaps you have too. Perhaps you still do. Yet those questions about “how” creation came into being are never going to be answered in this poetry from Genesis.

Now, you will notice I use the term poetry very intentionally, for that is what this text really is designed to do: it is designed to be multivalent, symbolic, an act of art. As a colleague has written, “Genesis 1 is not a physics lesson, and it was written before science had awakened in the mind of humanity. Genesis 1 is a bold proclamation of Who is the author of the universe, the force that makes it all happen, nurturing the astonishing explosion of life on this planet and the artistry of light in the farthest reaches of space. The world is not here by chance. The universe has a purpose” (James Howell, The Life We Claim: The Apostles’ Creed for Preaching, p. 26).

That is basically what my preacher father told me the day I came home from earth science and interrogated him on what I perceived as this major battle between the biblical text and the scientific text. “Shannon,” he replied, “the Bible is not a scientific textbook. It was not written to tell us ‘how’ things happened, but to tell us the ‘why’ and the Who behind and beyond it all.”

Again, Towner: “Genesis is a theological work in narrative form. It comes to render to us a picture of the author of our existence at work” (Towner, Genesis, 13–14). I believe in God, Maker of heaven and earth. In our Presbyterian Reformed theological tradition, when we make that claim, we are not making the claim that we are literal creationists. A literal creationist (usually a loud voice in our marketplace of ideas) adheres to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1. They disregard the science of evolution and the study of geology and archeology and believe that God brought the earth and all the rest into being in seven distinct days.

And if you ever challenge someone who adheres to that worldview, inevitably you will be told (at least I have been) that clearly, you do not take the scriptures as seriously as they do. “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it”: a popular bumper sticker in my old hometown of Waco, Texas. The late Rachel Held Evans might have had that kind of a bumper sticker on her car when she grew up. She grew up in Tennessee as a part of a fundamentalist Christian tradition. But as she became a young adult, she experienced her own earth science existential moments out of which she realized she needed to find a way of being faithful that felt more expansive and made more room for mystery.

And as she looked back on why that theological shift was such a critical one for her to make, she wrote,

“The problem with fundamentalism is that it can’t adapt to change. When you count each one of your beliefs as essential, change is never an option. When change is never an option, you have to hope that the world stays exactly as it is so as not to mess with your view of it. … For fundamentalists [literal creationists], Christianity sits perpetually on the precipice of doom, one scientific discovery or cultural shift or difficult theological question away from extinction. They are so fearful of losing their grip on faith, they [have a tendency to] squeeze the life right out of it.”

I would add to her statement that part of what we see and hear, not just in the witness of Genesis 1 but throughout the witness of scripture, is that change, creation, re-creation, new creation, is an important part of all the life that the One we call “Maker of heaven and earth” has breathed into being. So when we call God the Maker of heaven and earth, we are claiming that the one we call God is a God of creative power, creative activity, Creator of all that is — seen and unseen.

Again, the gift of science is that it can help us understand more deeply the how of our material world. And the gift of our faith can help us realize more profoundly the why of all of it, the why of all of us, in the first place. Furthermore, the gift of our scripture, through the power of God’s wildly creative Spirit, can help us catch glimpses of the One behind it all.

So what does Genesis 1 help us glimpse about the Maker of heaven and earth? One insight comes from a Jewish friend of this congregation, the Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, a Judaic scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. Once when we were in a conversation about this particular text, he pointed out that from his orthodox Jewish perspective, what I was calling the first creation narrative was actually not written as a story about how God brought creation into being, how God was the Maker of heaven and earth.

Rather, the beginning of creation, the actual unfolding of God’s creating something out of nothing, is too awesome, too full of the sacred mystery, to be contained in a story, in our words, Poupko told me. From his perspective, the poetry we read from Genesis 1 is actually a story of God bringing harmony out of chaos. And this is why the seventh day, the Sabbath, was proclaimed as holy and a day of rest, the rabbi concluded. It was the first day without chaos. On the seventh day, God’s creation of harmony was finally complete. Rabbi Poupko’s insights help us to understand that one phrase we could mentally add to Maker of heaven and earth is the phrase Creator of harmony out of chaos.

Another thing we glimpse in this poetry about our Maker of heaven and earth is that the Holy One does all of it through invitation. Did you hear that in the text? “Then God said, ‘Let there be light.’” “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters.” “Let the waters be gathered together and let dry land appear.” I could keep going, but I imagine you hear the repetition. Let, let, let. Each time God creates, God uses invitational language. And that tells us so much about the One we call Maker of heaven and earth.

God could have just simply worked independently and in a way that is domineering, that is about power over. But that is not how the one we call God does it. The way this poetic text reads, we see this picture of a Creator who chooses both to initiate the creative process, as well as a Maker of heaven and earth who chooses to invite that which is created into the ongoing work of creation (Terrence E. Fretheim, “Creation in Community: Faith and the Environment” in Creation on the Cross, Mark Douglas and Kathy Dawson ed., Columbia Theological Seminary). “Let the earth put forth vegetation. Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures.” There is this interesting partnership going on. God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth could have gone about the work of creation differently — working on and over. But according to the poetry of this scripture, God chose to work with and in.

Genesis 1 offers us a picture of God as the Maker of heaven and earth who purposefully chooses not to act alone, but only in relationship — even in relationship with us, something we would have heard if we had kept reading in Genesis. The text gives us this strange glimpse of a God who chooses divine vulnerability by involving those who are finite, those who are creature, in the whole process.

But that is not all. Do you know what else we discover about the Maker of heaven and earth in this text? We discover that not only is this work of creation done through invitation, but it also has delight at its very core. Delight is inscribed in the very character of creation. We read how, beginning with the very first act of God’s creative activity, the Maker of heaven and earth assesses what has just taken place and declares it was good; day after day, it was good; and after day six, it was very good. In Hebrew, “it was good” does not indicate a mere kind of dispassionate evaluation. Rather, in Hebrew the phrase “it was good” is meant to signal pleasure and joy.

It is a phrase meant to convey delight (William Greenway, “To Love as God Loves: The Spirit of Dominion,” Review and Expositor, 108, Winter 2011) — the kind of delight we feel as the days begin to grow longer again; the kind of delight we feel when we get to welcome newly baptized babies and adults into the family of faith; the kind of delight we feel as the energy within the sanctuary continues to build and grow; the kind of delight we will feel over seeing all the different kinds of people with all their diverse colors and cultures and languages as they pack the sidewalks and beaches here in Chicago the moment warmth takes hold.

That kind of delight that fills our spirits in these wondrous moments is more similar to what “it was good” is meant to connote. And according to this story God, the Maker of heaven and earth, feels that way each day of this creation narrative. It was good, our text says. God delighted; we can interpret. Seminary professor William Greenway claims that this language tells us that as God brings each creature into being, God is immediately awakened to being seized by love for what God just made, seized by love for every creature, every created thing. God simply delights in it.

What might happen, do you think, if every time we professed “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,” we remembered these three glimpses — that God is the One who creates harmony out of chaos; that God chooses to do God’s work in a way that is invitational and vulnerable, inviting even us and all of creation to participate; and that at the core of God’s very being is a delight, a seizing love, for all of us and all of the cosmos? Do you think remembering some of the gifts that emerge from the poetry of Genesis 1 could start to shift the way we picture our Maker of heaven and earth? Do you think remembering these glimpses could make our own faith more expansive, offer more room for mystery, help loosen our grip on needing to know all of the hows so we might be able to rest more deeply in knowing some of the whys?

I kind of wish all our kids were still in here so that as families made their way home on this day, or as you moved from virtual worship to lunch, we could let them know that the One we call the Maker of heaven and earth promises to keep at the work of creating until all manners of things are finally made well. That the One we call the Maker of heaven and earth wants them to be a part of that re-creation of the world. That the One we call the Maker of heaven and earth absolutely delights in them — not because of what they do, but simply because they are who they are. And that science and faith can be partners in the conversation, not enemies, and they don’t ever have to choose one over the other.

I believe in God, Creator of harmony, Invitational Partner, Mystery defined by delight and seized by love, the Maker of heaven and earth. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church