The Genesis Creation Account as Liturgy

The Genesis Creation Account as Liturgy

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I am writing on the eve of a milestone day. Tonight I write as a middle aged man living in my fifties. Tomorrow I will wake up as an old man celebrating my sixtieth birthday. The change is not perceptible from one day to the next, but the milestone reminds me that I am aging and passing from a middle aged life perspective to that of an older person. As the years have passed my relationship to truth has changed through the varied stages of life. I was once a young man in his twenties earnestly seeking the ideals and principles that would guide my way through life. I had lots of ideals and principles and not a lot of experience though the principles I had were so strongly felt and believed I imagined myself as having figured it all out even if I surmised that later I might discover I didn't. As the years passed I discovered my principles were never as objective or clear as I had idealistically thought in my twenties. But by then I was middle-aged and was part of the generation leading churches, governing nations, and raising children. But now, although never married and without children I am reaching a grandfather’s age. People younger than I are my bosses, leading nations, and raising families. In old age I am more content to be like a Staupitz who watched with interest as one of his pupils, Luther led a Reformation. Staupitz understood that the Luthers of this world were changing the world for good or ill, so he was content to try to give Luther something of a legacy to perhaps speak gently to the ones now in charge as in our elderly years we are reaching the evening of our age and will go to sleep with the coming night. The grandfather in me knows that the fathers younger than me will not, nor should they even try to listen to everything I have to say, but maybe they will hearing something of wisdom to be cultivated in their life and passed on to those living after them. So it is I imagine that in my lifetime of thinking about the Genesis creation account I hope that I have learned something worthy of being considered and maybe one or two things worthy of surviving my life to be a legacy for lives who will still be laboring under the daylight sun when my life has taken its rest in the darkness of the night.

            I have thought in many differing ways regarding the Genesis creation account in my life. I think of it now in a way that corresponds with my having become an Anglican. Being an Anglican is something of a two-edged sword. We have had our moments of glory, but we have never been the sort of church that can claim infallibility. We are rather like Israel of old, which had its prophets and managed to mistreat all of them. We have been worldly, political, and divided. We have tried to maintain traditions that needed to die and to try innovations that should never have been tried. Most of us at times wonder if we should flee to a more perfect sort of church and we might for a time go to a place and enjoy something else but Anglicanism is strange in how it shapes you so that even if surrounded by fallen broken souls one has found a home for fallen broken souls and so we stay. We are reluctant to ask anyone to join us but some of us tend once here to remain. As an Anglican learning to have my life shaped by liturgy, I began to think about the Genesis account of creation as if it were liturgical, until I cannot think of it any other way. Life for us is understood in our liturgical returns. We come to worship often stained by the world. We hear the call to worship. We confess our sins in a congregational confession. We hear an absolution given to us in the Gospel. We hear the Scriptures read and confess the Creed expressing what the Church through the ages has believed. We hear a message based on the Scriptures and give thanksgiving with our tithes and offerings. We are invited to the table and partake together of the body and blood of Christ. We are given the blessing of the benediction and follow the cross back into the world where we seek to live as Christians. It seems to make sense to come again the next Sunday to confess our sins, hear the Scriptures, recite what we believe, hear the message, give ourselves in offering, partake of Christ as a body and follow the cross once more into the world. This is how we wend our way towards the goal of the upward call in Christ. This liturgical way shapes us and trains us in the way of Christ. We commit ourselves to the liturgy.

            Liturgy is a word we now think of as an English word that originally was drawn from two Greek words, one meaning the people and another meaning service or work. So there has been a common view that liturgy is the work or service of the people. Unfortunately simply repeating the mantra of a cliché like liturgy is the work of the people doesn’t explain as much as any of us would like to think. I am going to refer you to a wonderful word over on a site described as the Episcopal café that tries to capture a thought expressed by Maggi Dawn. Maggi is one of those people who remind us how the Church is bigger than our viewpoints. She is both more modern in her viewpoint than I am, and has integrated far better than I the actual living tradition of our Anglicanism. She is described here speaking about the meaning of liturgy. Her point about liturgy is that the term as used in the Greek world always reflected the presence of a benefactor who was inviting others to enter his work or vision of service. I think that Maggi Dawn's perspective leads us to better understand God's way of dealing with us. He is the benefactor who has envisioned a work of creation and of redemption and he desires to do this work by inviting us his people to enter his work. This is a work inspired, led, and designed by the grace of our benefactor, but our benefactor who has provided for us by his grace is a God who loves who desires to collaborate with us that we may enter his fellowship through the work and enjoy the satisfaction of our joined together accomplishments when we enter the rest after the work is done.

            Maybe none of that explains to you the reader how this concept of liturgy has reshaped how I think of the creation account. I will explain that now just a little bit. Earlier in my Christian life I had a view of creation which I now see as “the magician’s creation perspective.”  We can see the creation account the way we see a magician or illusionist on a stage. The magician has a hat, a wand, and waves his wand and speaks to the hat and produces a rabbit. This view of creation sees us people as mere spectators of the creation event. As spectators the most important thing we can do is explain what we have seen. So the creation account becomes something about which to argue regarding how we understand the work done by the magician on the stage.

            The liturgical view is different. The creation is seen as God entering relationship with the entirety of his creation by entering the creation with his Word to address the creation so that the creation might freely respond to God who has spoken through his word and has entered the universe in the presence of his spirit moving over the surface of creation. The creation instead of being a magic act performed in a sterile and passive creation is the gathering of creation as the benefactor and creator of creation speaks and creation hears and responds, moving from one aspect and scene of the liturgy to another until the whole of the service has had its impact upon the creation to which God is investing himself through Word and Spirit.

            You then see Genesis 1:11-12 as if it describes a work of God that is simultaneously a work of the creation energized through hearing the word of God. In Genesis 1:11 says “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth, and it was so.” We could be tempted at this point to understand this as the magical wand waving of the sovereign God with the universe as simply a passive recipient of grace or the object of God’s whims. But something more is to be understood in the creation as verse 12 retells the event from a slightly different perspective. In Genesis 1:12 we read “and the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind,” etc. Do you see the shift of what is being described? In verse 11 it is about what God says, purposes, and does in the work of creation. In verse 12 it is how the earth responds to the word of God and enters this work of God in creation. The creation is not a work of a passive universe being acted upon to the point that the existence of the creation is simply a way for a narcissistic God to show how great he is. Rather what we see is a God who is love who addresses his own creation and calls it into meaningful response according to the qualities which God has given to each aspect of his creation. While there is a difference between categories of matter, energy, life, and intellect; we misinterpret the creation if we fail to see that electrons are entering the dance of the music of the spheres in God’s work of creation. The creation was not a wholly passive entity being acted upon by God in the creation account. Instead to use Maggie Dawn’s view of liturgy, the benefactor of creation was calling the creation to participate in its own work of creation. This is a God who is chiefly an architect of love who happens to be sovereign as the creator rather than a sovereign who somehow finds a way to love.

            This is why God’s judgments are so interesting in the creation account. He loves how his creation responds when it hears his word and enters freely into answering the call to participate in his glorious work. The benefactor speaks to his creation and his creation responds freely in its own participation in the creation. God says let the earth bring forth vegetation. The earth brings forth vegetation and God responds by seeing that what the earth had done was good. We are then reminded that at the end of our present day of redemption we long to hear from the same God, “Well done, enter into my rest.” Our labors in the Gospel are not mere meaningless activities brought about by a sovereign God who does everything while we are mere insignificant members of an audience enjoying the spectator performance of a magic act. Instead the God of the universe, the benefactor of grace is addressing us and inviting us to be collaborating artists, musicians, workers, teachers, and servants involved in the work he is doing. Afterwards, like an old-fashioned day of making hay everyone will gather around a table and celebrate friendship and enjoy the fruits of a collective labor that accomplished something good and beautiful. A serious student of Hebrew pointed out that the Hebrew word translated God saw that each of these days of creation were good, includes likewise in the view of goodness that what God saw was beautiful. A liturgical view of creation allows us to see the goodness and beauty of creation as a work of the benefactor God who invites us to participate freely in a work where we hear his word and work freely to produce something good and beautiful according to his Word. This is the view I now have of the Genesis account of creation and it has introduced me into a whole perception of God and his creation that invites me to explore, to labor, and to seek to respond to God's Word with an attempt to participate in his work by offering that which might be perceived by him as both good and beautiful.