Sermon for Sunday, March 9, 2008

GENESIS AND EVOLUTION

9^th and final in a series on Confronting the Controversies

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

 Scripture: Genesis 1:1-2, 4A

¹In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, ²the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

⁴And God saw that the light was good;

Last week we looked at how the Bible had been misused and misunderstood over the centuries and today we are adding to that conversation by looking at the first chapters of the first book in the Bible, the book of Genesis.

Let’s begin with a question: How old is the universe? Most of us would look to the scientific community for that answer—to a resource by the new book from the National Academy of Sciences which says that the universe itself is 14 billion years old and that the earth is 4 or 5 billion years old.

Other people would look to different sources such as a study done in the 17^th century by a bishop in Ireland, Bishop James Ussher. He took the Bible as a science book, counted the numbers of generations listed in the Bible and proclaimed that the earth was created on October 23, 4004 BC.

Now some conservative church members may not use his exact approach but still claim that the earth is very young, perhaps only about 10,000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs co- existed at one time—VERY different from what the scientific method tells us, and there is even a new museum in Kentucky based on the belief about a very young earth and universe.

The problem with taking the Bible as a source for science and geology is that the Bible is not a science book. The Bible is valuable for theology, not geology—it helps us with questions of why we are here and not how we got here.

And people who know their history can see how the conflicts have occurred when the Bible has been misused. We don’t teach the scientific beliefs of the Bible today because the science of the Bible is 2500 years old. The people who wrote the Bible believed the earth was flat. They believed the sun revolved around the earth. You remember what happened to people like Copernicus and Galileo when, through their first hand observations, they taught the opposite—that the earth revolves around the sun? Their lives were threatened and they were told never to teach scientific truth again.

The Bible is not authoritative on science and geology and math or we would teach in math classes that the formula for pi is 3 because that is what I Kings tells us in the construction of the temple in Jerusalem.

The medical science of the Bible says that epilepsy is caused by demons. We usually don’t teach that in medical school. Most of us don’t rely on the Bible for truth about science and geology. We use it for theology.

But some people misunderstand and say that we should teach the creation story from Genesis in public school classrooms along with teaching that people have evolved over thousands of years and that species adapt and develop and that humans and chimpanzees likely have a common ancestor because we share 99% of the same genetic material.

If we were to consider teaching Genesis as a scientific text instead of a religious text and try to use Genesis as an account of how we got here instead of why we are here, do you see any problems with that? One problem is that we would be teaching a religious text in public education, which the supreme court over the years has rightly said is unconstitutional in our country. It violates the first amendment which prohibits favoritism toward one religion or another. Other religions have their stories of how the earth was created. The school system cannot favor one over another. 

The more basic issue for thoughtful students of the Bible is that there is not just one creation story in Genesis, there are two. The one we read from Genesis 1 is very familiar: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep and the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.”

In Genesis, what existed at the beginning was watery chaos and darkness. Chaotic water was scary and foreboding in the Bible and what God does is calm the waters—and what Jesus does in the storm on Lake Galilee is calm the waters and even walk on those waters and even invite us to walk on the waters of chaos with him. Those first lines of Genesis get echoed in stories about Jesus and the chaos and dark waters that threaten him and his friends and even us.

If you listened well, you heard the sequence of events in Genesis 1: God created light, the heavens, dry land, plants, sun moon and stars, fish, birds and animals. Then day six, the last day of creation, God creates human beings—male and female together, and tells them to care for the creation. Here is the Biblical basis for caring for our planet. On day six, God looks at the creation and says something different from what God says on day one through five. At the end of day one through five, God says, “This is good.” At the end of day six, God says, “This is very good.”

Chapter two of Genesis is a different story! In Hebrew, there is a different word for God and there is less majestic picture of God. When God began to create, there were no plants and no rain but there was water bubbling up from the ground. What is the first thing created in this story? God formed a man from the clay, the dust, and breathed into him the breath of life, and with that breath the man became a living being. The next thing God creates is a garden. God puts the man in the garden and gives the man the rules of the garden. And then God sees something is wrong.

God saw that the man was lonely and God saw that loneliness was bad. So far in Genesis what has been created is good—even very good. But the first thing declared bad is loneliness. So God creates a helper, a companion for the man. So the next thing God creates is a----giraffe!

God creates the animals and brings them to the man for the man to name and thus have dominion over—but no suitable companion for the man was found. So the last thing God creates is woman. After all those attempts, God got it right, and the height of the creation is woman!

These are two wonderful and very different stories and they have different versions of the sequence of events but they are not important for geological truth but for theological truth. They tell us the creation is good. The first story was written at the time when the Israelites were held captive in Babylon and the religion around them has creation stories involving violence and destruction and male and female gods in competition. The first Genesis story says there is one God and that God has mastered the chaos and that men and women are created together to be in partnership.

The second story says that God has set some ground rules and that when we live by those things go well for us. It says loneliness is bad, that we are meant to be in relationship and that we are accountable to each other and to God. The rest of that story says, in Genesis 3, that when we live outside the guidelines and instructions God creates for us that we get ourselves into trouble and we typically don’t even take responsibility for what we have done wrong—we blame someone else. Remember what the man says to God when he is asked if he ate the forbidden fruit? “It is not my fault—it was the woman that you gave to me—she made me do it!”

These are powerful stories about what God wants for us and about how we can best live in relationship to each other and to God but they are not good for telling us how we got here but why we are here. Science can tell us how we got here. Genesis tells us why we are here.

And I believe there is no conflict between the Bible stories and evolution. We are not here by accident, Genesis says. And we probably took a long, long time to get here, science tells us.

Let me end by looking at what we have done together the last few weeks. We have looked at some controversial issues: the book of Revelation, religion and politics, evangelists and evangelism, the problem of suffering, Jews and Christians, abortion, homosexuality, the inerrancy and truthfulness of the Bible. I don’t recall a recent series of sermons that have gotten more positive and appreciative comments than this series. I think we are all wanting to know that there is a centrist and balanced perspective instead of the right wing religion we hear in the media.

That is one of the reasons I chose these topics: If we listen to the media, here is what “Christians” are: they rely on the book of Revelation to talk about the eminent destruction of the world and the destruction of people not like themselves, they automatically follow right wing politics and are only concerned about sex and reproduction as ethical issues, they believe in a predestinarian God who causes all the suffering in the world, they relate to Jews only as objects of conversion, they practice manipulative evangelism, believe all abortions should be criminalized, believe gay persons are inherently more sinful than anyone else, believe in the literal inerrancy of the Bible, and believe there is a conflict between Genesis and evolution.

Now, none of those statements represent me and I think they probably don’t represent you as thoughtful mainstream Methodists. But so many people have seen what I just said as exactly what it means to be Christian and they say, I can’t do that, I can’t be part of a church if that is what church is about so they stay away. I would stay away also if that is what Christianity is about. But it’s not.

Christianity is about following the Christ who teaches compassion and justice and teaches us to love God with our hearts and our minds—to think!

And most people still don’t know there is a spiritual community, a faith community, that is open and welcoming and not doctrinaire or judgmental, a place you can bring doubts and questions, a community that believes in a God who accepts us where we are and loves us too much to leave us where we are. Most people don’t know about that and they need a faith community that will help them deal with questions of meaning and purpose and belonging and will give them a place to serve and to make a difference. Your friends and neighbors need to know from you that there is a church like this! Do you believe that?

If you do believe that what we have is worth sharing and welcoming others into, then that makes you evangelists, and you remember what evangelism is??—one hungry beggar telling another hungry beggar where to find food!! Will you do that with me—share that spiritual food with others?

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