God Needs Our Cooperation
Where is God when… ? - Part 4
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Luke 10:1-12; Genesis 1:24-31; 1 Corinthians 13:5, 7
God said, “Let the earth produce every kind of living thing: livestock, crawling things, and wildlife.” And that’s what happened. God made every kind of wildlife, every kind of livestock, and every kind of creature that crawls on the ground. God saw how good it was. Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”
God created humanity in God’s own image,
in the divine image God created them,
male and female God created them…… God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good. There was evening and there was morning: the sixth day.
Genesis 1:24-27, 31 (CEB)
Listen to this Week’s Sermon here:
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The ancient Babylonian story of creation, The Enuma Elish, tells of the great god Marduk who out of a tremendous war among the gods managed to subdue the chaotic forces of earth and re-create it into the habitable world in which we live today. Unlike the Hebrew creation narratives in Genesis, the Enuma Elish along with parallel stories from Sumeria and other regions of ancient Mesopotamia, are filled with violence, bloodshed, and destruction. Creation is birthed out of struggle, of battle, and of war.
Not so for the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In the Hebrew retelling of these ancient myths we find a singular God who speaks love into nothingness. God said, “Let there be”… and there was. On the 6th day, for example, God said, “Let the earth produce every kind of living thing,” and that’s what happened. The earth produced. Creation was not violently subdued and chaos forced into submission by the most powerful deity. Rather, Creation itself worked in cooperation with God, responding to God’s invitation to produce every good thing for the flourishing of life, all life, plant, animal, and human.
This distinctive creation narrative among it’s parallels in the ancient world sets God apart and establishes God’s power as cooperative rather than coercive. The way creation itself cooperates with God’s desire by producing good fruit sets the tone for the way humanity would be called to work with God as co-creators and stewards of all that God had made. From the very beginning, God intended human beings to work collaboratively with one another and with their Creator to multiply and fill the earth, to plant gardens and build communities and civilizations of people who would work together for the benefit of all. From the beginning, the thriving of creation depended on human cooperation with God.
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which He looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are His body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
~ attributed to St. Teresa of Avila