this
is from the Ash Wednesday service, as the ashes are marked on your forehead,
one of the options to say is:
Remember
that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
The
reading we have just heard is the second story of creation, though it is likely
that it originates during the time of King David, and the version found in
Genesis one, originates later, during the exile.
These
stories tell us a lot about what was happening in the life of the people, they
were not written to be scientific explanation of the beginnings of the world
and people.
Does
your family have origin stories, how you came to live in a particular place, or
in a particular country? Or stories about a close shave that almost wiped out
the family, or lost fortunes.
These
are origin stories that speak into the life of the people of Israel, they speak
of the creativity of God, the orderliness of God, the place of people in
creation and the responsibility given to people to care for the creation.
“The Lord God took a handful of soil and
made a man.”
Unlike Genesis
1, where God speaks creation into being, here, God makes people from dirt. In my
mind I see God making mud pies. I thought of bringing clay or play doh this morning
and you could all make a person. “God breathed life into the man, and the man
started breathing”
This reminds
me of the valley of the dry bones in Ezekiel.
But we
are not God, even if we made a person from clay, we are not able to breathe
life into it to make it live.
God sculptured
the dirt of the ground and formed a person. In the Hebrew there is a word play,
Adam from Adamah – or earthling from the earth.
And God
placed the person in a beautiful garden.
Then, God
realises that it isn’t good for the earthling to live alone.
I wonder
why?
Then
we hear how God created animals and birds from the dirt and had the person name
them. Naming the animals made the person a partner in the creation process.
In
summary, God made a person out of dust, put him in a garden, looked for a
companion in the animals and birds, and we know that then God a partner for the
person, one person became two people.
I
am not a Hebrew scholar, but I am told that the word Adam is grammatically
male, but that does not imply that Adam was male. It isn’t as obvious in English,
as our words for ‘a’ and ‘the’ are gender neutral. In some languages, the words
for ‘a’ and ‘the’ are different depending on the
gender of the word. For example, in German the word for Friday is masculine, and
the words for trees are generally female, which means different words for ‘a’
and ‘the’. In Hebrew the word for person, Adam, is male.
Then
when the person becomes two people, different Hebrew words are used ‘ish and
ishah’ – man and woman.[i]
One
thing that I am guessing you are waiting for me to talk about are the trees,
the two special trees in the middle of the garden.
‘One of the trees gave life—the other gave the
power to know the difference between right and wrong.’ And we know that the
people did eat from the tree they were told not to eat from. When i was thinking
about this passage this week, i wondered what God expected. Have you ever told
a child not to eat another lolly or biscuit? What do they immediately want to do?
What
did God expect, as soon as you say – you cannot, don’t even think about it,
what do you do?!
In
this story, God made people to tend the garden, to be gardeners, but they
decided they wanted to be gods rather than earthlings.[ii]
What
happens when we decide we know better than God?
This
story reminds me of to whom we are accountable. We are accountable to God for the
state of the garden we were made to tend; as humans we are part of the ecosystem
that encompasses all that God made. As we have become more mechanised and
modernised, life expectancies, health and education have all improved. But with
these advances it seems we have forgotten, that we too are creatures not gods. The
earth is not an infinite resource for us to plunder. In this version of the
creation story, the earth is a beautiful garden which we are to tend and care
for.
with
plastic in our oceans, and silt in our rivers
with
fires in the Amazon and rising sea levels
we
have not tended the garden well.
Remember
that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
I
think sometimes the biggest issues of our times come from us not wanting to recognise
that we are part of nature. When we try and separate ourselves, and our future,
from that of the plants and animals, we damage ourselves as well as the rest of
creation.
When
we forget that God created us to live in community; to work together and to
care for each other; it is easy for people to be overlooked and isolated.
What
do we need to live?
………………
Two songs
came to mind as I was pondering this passage, one is a Bob Dylan song: Man gave
names to all the animals; and we are not hearing that one today.
and the
other is Beautiful things by Grungor.
[i]
https://www.stevethomason.net/2019/09/06/a-cartoonists-guide-to-genesis-218-25/?fbclid=IwAR2c8QMQ7MpZNFT6EPy7TWHSs250kHy2kGTCPvEz2riFLbk0ND0xEze7VaI
[ii]
https://robertwilliamsonjr.com/reading-eden-time-ecological-crisis-genesis-2-4b-
