Remember Who You Are
The story we tell matters. That is why the work of reading and wrestling with scripture in a community of believers is vital – because the story the world tells us might be subtly or wildly different from what we discern when working together as people of God.
I want to begin today with a bit of a story.
In 2009, Matt and I purchased our Cape Cod-styled home in Burtonsville from Dorothy Santini Hutton Renner, Dot for short – the last Santini on Santini Rd. What was once a family farm had been divided into several home sites, and generations of Santinis had occupied four different houses on the road. The one we live in was built by Dot’s father in 1952.
Dot worked as a bookkeeper, played the piano, and in earlier days, smoked like a chimney. We still sometimes smell the evidence of that in the central stairwell on cool, damp days. We refer to it as the ghost of Dot. She was also a lifelong United Methodist, baptized, confirmed and married – possibly more than once – at Liberty Grove United Methodist Church, a half-mile from the house.
As a master gardener and a founding member of the Burtonsville Garden Club, she cultivated a yard full of plants over many years.
Matt and I were both moving from relatively new cookie cutter developments where every house had exactly three builder-grade shrubs and one small tree planted hopefully in the front yard. While there had been a year-long foray into community gardening while we occupied a rental property, it didn’t necessarily prepare us for the responsibility of established plantings everywhere – including hybrid lilies that Dot had faithfully bred herself. Stashed in a small box in the basement was even a sorted and labeled stash of cockscomb seeds, and somehow it felt like we had inherited a legacy in that box.
We moved in on a chilly February day when the ground was cold and hard and bare. By May we realized that we hadn’t just acquired a house – our home was actually a vibrant patch of creation, alive with beauty.
And work. So. Much. Work.
Today, I would estimate that we harvest between 75 – 100 pounds of heirloom tomatoes annually. This year I have canned both fig and cherry jam. We have the most amazing collection of echinacea (or coneflowers). Wisteria mingle with grape vines – a lovely red grape and classic concords. Blackberry brambles fight for sunlight alongside the fig tree. The sour cherry shades the koi in the pond.
There have been seasons when life demanded that we pay attention to other pressing things – seasons when berries fed the birds rather than the family, seasons when weeds co-mingled quite happily with hydrangeas.
In many ways, the land sustains us. Not just physically, but also environmentally and emotionally. AND we work to sustain the land as well. To feed it. Tend it. Groom it. Draw forth the best. We don’t have control…not at all. But there is work to be done for the land and for us to thrive.
When I list my interests or hobbies, I don’t list “gardening.” Because for me this is not hobby – it is our life, part of us, an obligation and a joy, an interdependence.
Today’s text is from the creation stories in Genesis. If you read chapters one and two of Genesis side-by-side, it feels like two stories – the first an ordered series of “days” in which dark and light emerge, chaos gives way to the sky and the land and the sea, daytime and nighttime and seasons, and animals begin to swim and fly and crawl and walk. On the day that the animals of all kinds came forth, God also made people – “let us make humans in our image.” That text goes on to talk about humans’ dominion along with a responsibility to fill and subdue the earth.
Today’s story comes immediately after that. It’s like a digression or excursus from that first story – a slightly different set of details about how the human came to be and what the human’s role is. It digs in, differentiates, and expands a bit.
This creation story found in Genesis 2 is the one that lays the groundwork for the story of Adam and Eve and a snake and an apple. It is the story that sets up the narrative about human sinfulness so often referred to dramatically as “The Fall.” We have lots of versions of that story baked into the society around us.
But our text today doesn’t take us into that story yet – the one about Adam, Eve, choices, snakes, fig leaves, and The Fall.
The text for today IS rich all by itself. We shouldn’t race past it to get to the next chapter …because it is rich in what it says about relationships. Relationships between:
God and creation
God and humanity
Humans and creation
Humans and God
Humans and other humans….
There are so many important relationships here.
This second or expanded creation story places the creation of “man” as one of the first acts of God. Before there was any vegetation (because the text specifically says there was no one to till the ground yet – a hint about relationships) the text says that God formed a person from the dust of the ground, breathing God’s own breath into the nostrils to bring the being to life.
We need a little excursus or digression of our own right here. In Bible study this week, one of the questions I posed about this text was how it had, rightly or wrongly, shaped some societal norms and what we might need to reconsider and relearn and reestablish about this story.
In a room full of women, we laughed a bit. Let’s start right here with God forming “man” from the dust of the ground. In the Hebrew, God formed ha-ad-am from the dust of the ground. Let’s remember that this is the first human – created in a space where there is ONLY ONE human -with no need to differentiate by gender. Ha-ad-am means human. Person. Man as a species.
Ha-ad-am is not someone’s name, and at this point in creation, gender is not an issue. So…somewhat importantly, I think, we can’t use this passage to suggest that God is a man...as in made in God’s image. Also we can’t use this passage to suggest that God began by creating someone named Adam.
Once God created a human to till the ground, God set to work on establishing the Garden in Eden. There in the garden God made everything pleasant grow up from the earth. And the text gives a detail in the 9th verse – “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
God put ha-ad-am in the garden to till and keep it, and gave ha-ad-am a single instruction – you can eat of every plant except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eat that one, and you’ll die.
Then God recognized that ha-ad-am should not be alone. So God created all the animals and they parade past ha-ad-am to be named. Cows, ducks, squirrels. But none of those was a suitable “helper” for the human. In Hebrew, the world is ez-er. And it is important to note that the same word describes God in the psalms – so we should not read this idea of a helper as a subordinate in any way. Ha-ad-am needed someone to be in relationship with.
Don’t we all?
So God took a rib from ha-ad-am to create ish-sah, a word translated here to woman – so that there is a distinction from ha-ad-am. We now have “man” and “woman.” And ha-ad-am declared “this is at last bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”
Over years, the church read an implied power structure into this story – often resulting in the subordination of women – in marriage and in society. But what God created was a partner, a helper, a co-laborer…someone to make ha-ad-am whole – God created an interdependent relationship.
The church also read into the first account of creation found in Genesis 1, where God grants humans “dominion” over creation an implied power structure, glossing over the details from chapter 2 in which God cannot call forth the rest of creation without human to till and work the dirt.
When we linger here in chapter 2 and read closely, this is a story that reveals the basic call we share as human beings – to tend, to till, to work as to draw out creation. There is no dominion here. There is a vocation, a job to be done.
The story of creation in this chapter reveals our dependence on God. And on the land. And on one another.
God gathered up dirt from the ground to breathe life into it. God depended on ha-ad-am to do the work of tending and tilling that same ground so that creation would continue to emerge and thrive. God recognized that ha-ad-am should not be alone.
There is so much here…I could go on for another 20 minutes. I encourage you to think about the relationships in this part of the creation story and then think about our current climate crisis.
I encourage you to think about the difference between the idea of “dominion” in the first chapter of Genesis and the idea of “tilling and working” so that plants can emerge in the second.
I encourage you to go google “doctrine of discovery” and think about how the church’s interpretation of dominion might have fueled colonialism and slavery.
I encourage you to think about how something can be a myth – that is a traditional source story – and be true without being literal.
There is a lot at stake in the stories we tell, the stories we allow to shape us. We have to do the work to know the stories. To really understand the stories. To see ourselves in relationship to God in the stories.
Perhaps you have recently been in a meeting or a conversation where someone introduces themselves in this way…
I am Laura Norvell.
I live in Burtonsville, MD on land originally inhabited by the Piscataway, in the Paint Branch watershed, which flows to the Patuxent River, and then to the Chesapeake Bay and then the Atlantic Ocean. I live on land where the brown trout and the Henlow sparrow and the whorled milkweed are threatened species.
This has become a common practice among groups seeking to be fully inclusive and respectful of indigenous cultures. I had an ah-ha moment this week about this practice while I wrestled with this Genesis text.
I initially believed this was an exercise in some sort of political correctness. But at its best, naming where we come, telling the truth about the dirt beneath our feet, from is an act of remembering that we come from the topsoil, the dust of the ground – not American dust, not global Western dust. We come from the dust of God’s creation. We come from God’s breath and dust. Naming our location can be an act of remembering the breadth of God’s creation and our relationship and responsibility to all of it.
We come from God’s breath and dust.
And so…I live on .85 acres of land nurtured in love over generations. I put my hands in the same soil that Dot loved. In the same soil her parents loved. In the same soil her grandparents loved. I wait expectantly each spring emerging Baptista and iris. I pull pigweed and lamb’s ear. I hold my breath to see if the hydrangea FINALLY bloom. I continue that work because it is my call. I continue the work because it is how I am fully myself. I continue that work because I encounter God in the garden.
Today, as we enter into a time of silent reflection, I hope that you will reflect on your specific connection to God’s creation, on your specific work as part of God’s creation.
Let’s breathe in that breath of creation and hold a few moments of silence.
May it be so.
Amen.
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