Creation Stories

December 11, 2005

Rev. Paul Beckel

First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org

[Unfinished notes from an Intergenerational Service]

How many of you have heard stories about how the earth came to be? I will bet you have each heard different stories. And even if you are brothers and sisters and heard a story together, or if you went to the same church, or watched the same TV show, or read the same book, or went to the same science class, and heard a story at the same time, then I still bet that you heard different stories.

All of the books behind me tell stories of creation. They tell stories from different cultures, they tell stories for different reasons. How could there be so many different stories? Didn’t the world just get created once? And all people come about in the same way???! Probably...but....

This book is called, by christians, a bible. It’s really dozens of books, and dozens of stories inside each of the dozens of books. It’s more like a library with history books and songbooks and lawbooks and sermon collections and recipe books...fiction and nonfiction...all are here. Or a CD ROM with an incredible amount of information packed in...think of the hundreds of people credited after a movie...so many because the stories were passed on orally before written down edited translated....

The first half of this collection was written before there were any christians, ... better called the Hebrew (or Jewish) Scriptures. The first two stories in the very first chapter are about the creation of the universe – how all this came to be.

The neat thing is that these two stories are different. The first one is pretty much like “big momma makes the world.” Every part of that creation is big and majestic and wonderful. The second story has more details. And the details are different enough from the first story -- so that it’s pretty obvious that the second story is not just a continuation of the first. In the second story plants and animals and people get created in a different order, by different methods and for different reasons. They’re both good stories, but they’re really short. So people are always embellishing and creating new variations. One unfortunate part about this is that we’re so used to hearing the blends and variations that most people don’t even know that these stories in Genesis are two different stories... and the meaning of the separate stories gets lost.

You see, in the first story, the creator makes everything just out of words. It’s like the creator has ideas – poof – the ideas become real. Like poetry. And everything is big and magical and majestic and every time the creator God looks at what’s been made, she says “That’s Good!” It’s about unity and everything fitting together and making sense.

The second story is very different. In fact it introduces the whole idea of differences – and disunity and complexity and imperfection. The second story starts without plants or animals. It starts with the creator getting his hands dirty. (I say he and sometimes I say she – even if you go back to earliest versions of these stories – which were written in a language that we can only guess at some of its meaning -- it’s impossible to know if the storyteller meant he or she or both or neither when talking about the creator god ...and when talking about the first humans).

So in the second story, instead of creating through words, god digs into what’s been created -- so far -- and makes a human out of the earth. [Now that has very different implications: were we just someone’s idea or dream...or are we something that comes out of the earth?] Then, instead of saying “that’s good” god says “it’s not good” ... “to be alone” so kind of like you do when you make a clay figure, then you want to make it different, god ripped a piece off of the first human and made it into two humans.

And this story continues in a very different way from the big “everything is good” story. Because these two humans start doing ordinary day-to-day things. And the god, instead of being in awe of her creation, starts to get frustrated with it. Like a sculptor who has to keep reshaping her block, or a painter who paints over a part he doesn’t like, god sees that even tho things may be good, they’re not quite finished. And at one point, you may have heard about another story that follows these, the creator gets so frustrated with what he’s made that he floods the whole planet so he can start over.

Is it ok to make up new versions on these old stories? I said earlier that the first part of the bible is among the holiest part of Jewish scripture. But it’s only part of it. The Jews over thousands of years added more and more and more stories and interpretations of stories. They even wrote down the arguments that the teachers (Rabbis) had with each other about what the stories are supposed to mean. And so the arguments themselves have become sacred writings.

So that’s like the second story – about the imperfection of real life and our trying to wrestle with it and understand it. And if you’re wrestling with a story or a song or a sculpture or a relationship or anything that has meaning... it’s going to change. And you’re going to change. And that’s good.

Of course there are many many other creation stories that have nothing to do with jews or christians or even gods. Stories created by people from other cultures who had similar questions: why are we here? How are we related to the earth and the plants and animals and stars and what appears to be infinity of time and space? Can we live forever? What’s to come of us if we don’t? Who is in charge? Is life just my own dream, or a movie that someone else is directing? Or is it a play that I have a part in -- but I have to interact with and partner with a lot of other people and props and gravity and fire and feelings?

And -- Why does life seem so huge and fantastic and at the same time so petty and mean?

Some of the other stories that have been created to answer these questions include that the universe was built on the back of a turtle, and that that turtle is still down there holding us up.

Or, there’s one from the cold cold northland of Norway in which everything began as rivers of ice, and then volcanoes, and then a giant awoke out of a melting block of ice...and then a cow beside the giant. And the cow fed the giant milk...and the cow licked the other huge blocks of ice, and licking them, released sleeping gods from chunks of ice. And these gods knew that the giant was dangerous, so they hacked him to death, and since he’d drunk so much milk, it all spurted out of him to become the sea. And his dead body became the land. And his hair the trees. And they pushed his huge skull up to become the sky. And the gods found two fallen trees, and they breathed life into them to become the first humans, from whom all of us were born.

There’s a lot of violence in creation stories. In the bible story, god pulls apart the first human that he made; in this Norse story, the gods hack the giant apart. In an old Greek myth, little gods are torn out of the skull of a bigger god.

There is a sculpture in a christian cathedral in Chartres, France which shows Adam, the first man, emerging from the side of god’s head. Is this another violent story – or is this like that first bible story -- with god thinking humans into existence? Or a combination?

Good stories are often violent. A good story has to grab you and make you pay attention. It might be familiar and make you feel better, but it also has to sometimes surprise you and always hold something new, something deeper to understand about it for when you’re ready to see it. A really valuable story can’t just tell you what you already know, or want to hear.

READING “It’s a Good Thing” Evi Seidman

It’s a good thing I’m not in charge here. I could never have thought of a pine cone
or a pomegranate or a porcupine. And even if I’d thought of one, how on earth
Would I have engineered a comet or organized life in a pond?
And where would I have found the energy To make each and every snowflake different?

(It’s more like me to come up With one or two passable models, Make a mold, crank ‘em out.)

And it’s not like me to at all to finish up An entire mountain range, then go back And carefully touch up with tiny forests of moss on the north side of ever stone.

I’ve got a pretty good head for details But it does seem likely that I’d have left off the dots on a ladybug’s back, And neglected to tie in each and every strand of silk to every kernel of every ear of corn; Why, I lived in a house for two years before I hung the curtains in the bedroom. I’d probably never get around to making a waterfall