Day 1

I've always loved the creation accounts. They're full of vivid imagery and powerful language.

Many Bible scholars suspect that the creation accounts in Genesis were intended to argue for one Creator God against the pagan world view of the ancient Near East. I think you can surely read them this way, but to see them strictly in those terms is to miss out on some important truths about God and about human beings.

In chapter one, God speaks to create. But when it comes to people, he slows down. He "creates...in his own image." He "formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." I love the old poem by James Weldon Johnson that describes God's creation of human beings:

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;

I never really paid attention to this before, but Genesis 2:5 says that Eden wasn't part of God's creation of trees and bushes and plants. The text says that God planted a garden "when no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up." God plants Eden specifically to provide a hospitable place for Adam to live. "The LORD God planted a garden" - imagine God rolling up his sleeves, getting his hands dirty, carefully digging in the soft, new dirt and planting the bushes and trees that will sustain this new creature, this man!

And when he notices the man's alone-ness he fashions a custom-made helper from the man's body, and the man calls her "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." When each gender can harbor such deep-rooted hostilities against the other, this is a powerful theological statement about who were are and what we share as God's creation.

All those verbs: "created," "formed," "breathed," "planted." God the surgeon takes one of Adam's ribs and "close(s) up the place with flesh." He "made" the woman and "brought" her to the man - who recognized her immediately. All those verbs leave us breathless. God, who spoke and the universe came into existence, creates human beings with such care and labor.

We must matter a great deal to him, don't you think? We're not, as the ancient Near East creation myths said, made to be servants of petulant, petty, angry tyrant gods. We're made to live in the world God has given us in his love and grace as caretakers of his creation.

Centuries later, God's work in the world revolves around another man and another woman - Joseph and Mary. And God's work in bringing about the birth of Jesus is summed up in the Hebrew phrase "Immanuel": "God with us."

Just like he's always been, ever since he formed us and provided for us and obsessed over our happiness, all those countless millennia ago.