Genesis 1:1-5
Andrew Scales
January 10, 2021
The most exciting thing about being a second grader at Tabernacle Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana, is that you receive a Bible at the start of the school year. During the Time for Children at the 11am service, my fellow eight-year-olds and I lined up in front of the entire congregation. Fourth graders took turns handing us Bibles while they read a verse chosen especially for each one of us. Our pastor prayed with us, and then we went downstairs for Sunday School.
Mrs. Byers, the director of children’s ministries, started that morning with a word to all the new Bible recipients while we sat cross-legged on the carpet. She said, “Listen to me: each one of you has your very own Bible. Do your best to read it as often as possible. Try to read it every day if you can.” And then we put together a skit about David, the shepherd boy who became king of Israel.
I was not always a good listener in Sunday School. I giggled during the cheesy 1980s Bible cartoons we watched, my crafts were always sloppy, more often than not I was bugging my neighbor instead of singing the songs. But somehow Mrs. Byers’ words that morning stuck in my mind like a seed planted into good soil. That night, I went home, and I opened my New International Version Bible to page one, Genesis 1:1.
I had heard Bible stories from my parents and my church my entire life up to that point, and we had a children’s picture Bible in our home. But I was just starting to read on my own. That night, alone in my bedroom, the opening words of Genesis, chapter 1, felt like an introduction to God. These first words of the Bible were what its authors wanted me to know first and foremost about God.
Reading that Bible over and over again until the gold page edges turned green, I learned that God’s words are powerful. God’s words have the power to make something out of nothing. Not just something… everything. When God speaks, all kinds of good things come spilling out: light and darkness, sun and moon; the oceans and lakes; trees and flowers; fish, birds, and all the animals that live on land. With words, this God could breathe out, stir up the empty waters, and shape each one of us human beings with our own stories, and hopes, and dreams. And God says that all of it is very good, possessing beauty and worth just by being itself.
It made sense to me, because I already knew then that our words, human words, are powerful, too. Kind words, true words, loving words can make people come alive and flourish. Ugly words, false words, hateful words can beat people down, stomp all over them, kill and destroy the good things God has made.
Words have power. The God who began all creation entrusted us, human beings, with the gift of speech, of communication, this extraordinary power to build up or destroy. What we say has power for ourselves and others. Our words, in some small way when compared to God, still play a role in creating the world we live in. It’s as if speaking the truth and loving people is a way of being tuned into—in a relationship with—this God who begins the whole story of the Bible and the cosmos in Genesis with a word.
But being false, lying to people, dividing and destroying others with fear and hatred, these are the actions of someone fashioning an alternative reality that does not reflect the goodness of God’s world. It’s a false world, a world where that person’s words—through cruelty, or malice, or selfishness—have a mysterious power to define, even in some small way, a false reality for everybody else. Maybe you’ve known people like that in your everyday life. Maybe you’ve known a bully at school, in a group of friends or family, someone at work, who needs to dominate and control, whose angry outbursts and hair-trigger temper tantrums keep everybody else walking on eggshells around them. The world revolves around them, it exists for them alone.
This twofold power of words—to give life and to destroy—has been on my mind because I can’t escape the truth that it’s been a terrifying week for our country. Amid a pandemic that is claiming three, four thousand American lives each day, President Trump hosted a rally in our nation’s capital that gathered white supremacist extremist groups from around the country. With lies and conspiracy theories that have been disproven many times over about a “stolen election,” the American President incited a mob to assault a joint session of Congress by breaking into the Capitol.
Some members of that mob carried the Confederate battle flag, others erected a noose nearby, still others hid pipe bombs around the building. They smashed windows, terrorized staff and elected officials, stole government property, shouted racial slurs, and assaulted police officers.
Threads of conversation on social media platforms reveal that there were plots to kidnap and murder the Speaker of the House and the Vice President. These white supremacist extremists were not only destroying the offices and chambers of a federal building; they were attacking our common conviction and ideal that each person’s voice matters. That our votes matter. That our words get to be a part of electing who governs us and makes decisions on our behalf. Finally, at least five people, five human lives that are precious to God, have died as a result of these destructive words and actions.
I’m talking about Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol because it revealed again troubling truths about who we are as a country, and what God calls us to say and do as Christians in this hour. This is not an isolated incident. It is an eruption of the insidious strains of white supremacy in America that have demeaned and destroyed the lives of people of color for generations. The symbols of hatred that signify the long history of terrorizing people in America—the Confederate flag and the noose foremost among them—are in direct conflict with God and God’s ways. The horrors our neighbors have seen and known throughout their lives are not just in history books; these threats to their safety are happening today.
As Christians, we believe, nevertheless, that God’s Word is more powerful than all earthly powers. I took Mrs. Byers’ words to heart almost thirty years ago now, and I’m still reading my Bible and getting to know this God who speaks to us. I learned while studying Jewish scholar Nahum Sarna’s commentary this week that the word for the “breath,” or “wind,” or “spirit” of God that hovered over the formless waters—God’s ruach—it is the same word in Exodus 14 for the wind that parted the Red Sea when God brought Moses and Israel out of slavery in Egypt (Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, 6). God’s spirit troubles the waters of creation before calling forth light, just as God’s spirit pushes apart the sea to liberate Israel from bondage.
That was a connection that I had never made before, even in a lifetime of reading the stories Genesis and Exodus. The God who speaks creation into existence is the same God whose Word confronts the systemic evils that demean and oppress human beings. Theologian Miguel de la Torre writes in his commentary on Genesis, “The good news is that God’s spirit still hovers over the formless void of broken lives and the great darkness in which the marginalized find themselves” (De la Torre, Belief: Genesis, 12). The same Spirit that was at the beginning of Creation and delivered Israel from Pharaoh, is the Spirit Jesus breathed on his disciples to equip them for the work of the Gospel. The spirit of God is present, stirring, hovering, just as God is about to speak and make something good happen.
Just as we can grow in understanding the God to whom the Scriptures bear witness, we can also grow in understanding how God calls us to confront white supremacy today. We believe that God is still speaking, still stirring people to confront sin and falsehood, still illuminating us in the power of the Spirit. What does listening for God’s life-giving word look like in response to the death-dealing ways of white supremacist ideology and violence? I believe that Christians, and right now white Christians especially, can begin to listen for God’s voice today by listening in good faith to people of color share about their experiences of white supremacist terror in America.
One of my favorite prophetic voices of our time is the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, who along with Presbyterian minister the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, has revived The Poor People’s Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. initiated in the last year of his life. Two summers ago, Princeton Presbyterians hosted a book club for students and young adults that read Barber’s book The Third Reconstruction. He calls for a recovery of the idea of fusion coalitions from the First Reconstruction after the Civil War. According to Barber, “Between 1865 and 1900, interracial alliances in every Southern state arose to advance public education, protect the right to vote, and curb corporate power by reaching across the color line” (Barber, The Third Reconstruction, 116).
Groups at Nassau Presbyterian Church like the Mass Incarceration Task Force and the recently formed Anti-Racism Team are already exploring how to participate in networks and partnerships that confront the long histories of racial discrimination and terror in our country.
Committing to anti-racism work means that we are beginning the task of understanding uncomfortable truths we have so often hidden from. Listening to truth-tellers begins to dismantle the false realities and assumptions we’ve had about how destructive and demeaning the impact of white supremacy is in the United States. It’s a painful process, because sometimes we have to acknowledge our own complicity, our active participation knowingly and unknowingly in hurting, excluding, and frightening our neighbors.
But that repentance, the turning away from white supremacy’s sinful ways toward God’s ways, is a process of growing in relationship with God and our neighbors. It is an introduction to new depths of empathy and solidarity, of loving and being loved. God’s Word, Jesus Christ, comes alive among us through the power of the Holy Spirit when we commit ourselves to saying “no” to the words and actions that demean and destroy human life. God calls us today to the creative work of justice, speaking and walking in ways that reject white supremacist extremism, and affirm the dignity and voice of every human being.