Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 19, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In the beginning was Tiamat, the goddess of the oceans and of chaos. She mated with Apsu, the god of fresh water, and gave birth to the gods, who gave birth to other gods. The gods became noisy and unruly, and Tiamat plotted with Kingu, her husband, to kill them. The gods learned of their plan. They commissioned the god Marduk to kill Tiamat. Marduk killed Tiamat. He used her body to make the watery deep and the dry land. Then the gods killed Kingu, and from his blood they made human beings to serve the gods as their slaves.

And you probably wonder what in heaven’s name I’m talking about. What I just gave you is a very much shortened and simplified version of an ancient Mesopotamian creation myth. It’s called the Enuma Elish. In one form or another, the myth of Tiamat and Marduk is probably at least five thousand years old. It is a typical creation myth in that it expresses the people’s understanding of their own nature and the nature of the world in which they lived. It depicts nature as essentially evil, or at least as the product of evil. The earth is created as the result of an act of matricide, the killing of Tiamat by Marduk. People are created as the result of an act of patricide, the killing of Kingu by the other gods. The gods do not create human beings out of an act of grace or to be in constructive relationship with the gods but in order to have slaves to serve them. It’s a pretty ugly picture of reality, made out of chaos after an act of murder with human beings as slaves to the heavenly beings.

This was the creation myth of the Babylonian Empire during the time of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews in the sixth century BCE. The leaders of the Jews who were held in captivity in Babylon heard this creation myth, probably over and over again. They certainly didn’t think that it was a factual account of the creation of the world. Only we modern people would hear it that way. Our ancient Jewish forbears would have heard it for what it was, a myth, a story about the gods, that functioned to describe the nature of the world and of human beings.

In 539 BCE the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonian Empire and allowed the Jews who had been held captive in Babylon to return home to Jerusalem. When the Jews returned home to Jerusalem and Judah they realized something rather startling. They didn’t have a creation myth that explained things the way the Enuma Elish did. O sure, they had the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They’d told that story for a very long time by the end of the sixth century BCE, but it doesn’t deal with the things the Enuma Elish deals with. It doesn’t say anything about the nature of reality, whether it was good or evil. It doesn’t say anything about human nature either, or at least the Jewish tradition has never understood it as being about “the Fall” and the corruption of human nature the way western Christianity has understood it for the last 1,600 years. The Enuma Elish was known throughout the ancient world, and the Jews had nothing like it.

They had nothing like it, and they didn’t much like what it said about the gods, about the earth, or about human beings. So following the practice that anyone in the ancient world would have followed in such a situation, they wrote their own creation myth. We just heard it. It is the seven days (often erroneously called the six days) of creation story from Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Notice the similarities between that myth and the Enuma Elish. In the beginning there is a watery chaos. The Babylonians called it Tiamat. The earth and the universe are made out of or in the midst of watery chaos. Divine beings create human beings. That, however, is where the similarities end. The Genesis story paints a very different picture of creation than does the Enuma Elish. In Genesis God creates not from the body of murdered gods but simply by edict, simply by calling the different parts of creation into being. In Genesis creation isn’t grounded in and founded upon evil as it is in the Enuma Elish. Instead the Genesis myth says over and over again that God saw that what God had created was good, indeed was very good. Then comes the biggest difference of all. In Genesis God does not create human beings to be God’s slaves. Instead God creates human beings, both male and female, in the image and likeness of God. God doesn’t make humans God’s slaves, God virtually hands all of creation over to them to rule on God’s behalf. Psalm 8, which we also heard, echoes this view of humanity when it says that God made us little lower than angels. Another translation of that line reads a little lower than gods. It seems clear to me, and more importantly to scholars who know a lot more about it than I do, that the seven days of creation story in Genesis 1 was intentionally written to be a response to the Enuma Elish, the creation story of the Babylonians.

If any proof were really needed that the seven days of creation story from Genesis is a myth and not an accurate historical or scientific account of the beginnings of creation, the clear parallels and differences between that story and the Enuma Elish should provide that proof. Written by a priest—hence the culmination of creation in the Sabbath—not a scientist, there being no such thing as a scientist in ancient Israel, the story clearly has a mythic, not a scientific intent. Its purpose is to present a contrasting view of the nature of creation and of humanity than the one the Hebrews had found in Babylon, not to present a factually accurate account of creation, something of which no one in the ancient world had any real knowledge.

OK, so it’s a myth. That doesn’t mean it’s not true. It means that it’s a story about God and God’s relationship to the world and to us. So what? Does it matter? Does this ancient story have any meaning for us today? Well, yes, I think that it has a great deal of meaning for us today. The seven days of creation story from Genesis 1 has become not just ancient Israel’s creation myth but our creation myth too. Every culture has one. This one is ours. It tells us some very important things. It tells us that God’s creation, all of God’s creation, is, as far as God is concerned at least, good. God’s creation is not something God wants to destroy as evil, which makes you wonder why so many Christians can’t wait for it to be destroyed so they can leave it and go to heaven. Maybe they haven’t read Genesis 1. It tells us that God has given us “dominion” over at least this part of God’s creation that we call earth.

Christians have for far too long understood our “dominion” over the earth to mean that we can use it however we want, we can exploit it however we want, we can deplete and destroy it however we want. But consider this. The word “dominion” comes from the Latin dominum. Dominum means lord. It is the first title Christians applied to Jesus Christ, the earliest Christian confession being “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Dominion means lordship, so if we want to know what God intends our dominion over the earth to look like we should look to our Lord, Jesus Christ, for a model. When we do, what do we see? We see that Jesus Christ does not exercise his Lordship for his own benefit, he exercises it for our benefit, for creation’s benefit. The Lordship of Jesus Christ is a Lordship of service not a Lordship of exploitation. Jesus Christ is Lord precisely because he serves not because he commands and certainly no because he exploits.

We Christians must model our lordship, our dominion over creation, on the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That means that we cannot exploit the earth selfishly for our own gain. It means that we must preserve the earth so that all may benefit, both today and in the future. In Genesis 1 God gives us dominium over the earth, but God doesn’t give us unrestricted ownership of the earth. Many biblical scholars have understood what is meant by dominion here to mean something more like stewardship. A steward is one who manages property for another who is the actual owner. Seeing our dominion over the earth that way certainly is more consistent with Jesus’ model of lordship than is the rapacious exploitation of the earth without regard for the consequences that we humans are so engaged in today.

So, what do we learn when we see Genesis 1 as a myth, as a story about God and God’s relationship to creation? We learn that creation is good not evil. We learn that humans are made free and responsible for their actions and not as God’s slaves. We learn that we are stewards of God’s good earth and we need to treat the earth as God’s good creation made for the benefit of all. People get all hung up on whether or not creation really happened the way it says in this story. The simple answer is no, it didn’t. The story isn’t science. It isn’t history. It is myth, and it is as myth that it has power. It is as myth that it teaches us about God and about ourselves. We don’t have the Enuma Elish as our creation myth. We have Genesis 1. It’s a much better myth. It’s a much better truth. Thanks be to God. Amen.