Rest stop dinosaurs and the image of God

Adam, Eve & T-Rex in yesterday's paper put me over the edge for some reason, and I won’t be able to write anything else until I get this out of my system.

I think dinosaur statues at a rest stop rather miss the point. You want to talk Genesis? Fine - let’s talk creation. Beginnings are important, or why else would so many of us spend so much time in therapy talking about our parents? If we come to the first chapter of Genesis without an agenda, the first thing we’ll read is this: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” It’s a beautiful beginning to a beautiful story of God’s creation of and in the world.

God spoke light and sky, land and sea into existence, so we walk and breathe and live and swim surrounded by the word of God, and we should read the planet like the Bible, hear the ocean like a voice from heaven, and look at trees like angelic visitations. The word of God is eagle and lion and chipmunk and octopus and cocker spaniel. God spoke strong and weak, beautiful and odd, huge and tiny. Every creature belongs somewhere – rivers or mountains or plains or sky – and is a syllable in the language of God.

We belong here too, with the dust of the earth circling in our bones, and dust may be all that’s left if we don’t become more careful. Every time the last of a species dies, we take away one of the words God uses to speak to us, and devastated eco-systems are like dead languages. We have forgotten that this place was supposed to be a garden.

In the beautiful places of creation, I think we feel a longing to return to what was and what is supposed to be. It was supposed to be harmony, the lion lying down with the lamb and so on, in a world of pacifist naked vegetarians. We’re nowhere near that now, and war and pestilence and violence and child abuse and all the other ways we hurt each other seem like a pretty big punishment for a couple bites of apple, a world where it seems like we’re standing on the wrong side of the gates to paradise, and when we finally see some angels, they are armed and unsparing to bar us from the way back in.

We have forgotten where we come from. We have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten where we live. I know I grew up with a map of my salvation like Christopher Columbus’ map of the world. We drew the part we thought we knew about, and for the rest wrote “Here be dragons,” where I would fall into hell and heresy and the convoluted tunnels of my dark dark heart. It was possible to travel past the edges of God’s world and drown in an ocean of godlessness. The world was hostile and not our home and more than we could handle.

I can see how some would come to that conclusion. God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Maybe God knew there is such a thing as knowing too much. We know too much now, and we know more every day, but I think we know the wrong kinds of things. We hear and see the evil of the world – at least on the news and through the internet. We know that is the way things are, but with all our information, I think we get lost in that and forget this is not the way things are supposed to be. We weren’t supposed to know evil like this. I guess God kept us away from the prospect of eating from the tree of eternal life because God knew that granting immortality in a world this full of pain isn’t doing anyone a favor.

The story of God asking Adam and Eve some hard questions is an archetype of all the ways we hide in the trees and blame each other for the sad sate of the world. Look at Adam – Eve sure went from “bone of my bone” to “this woman you gave me” in a hurry.

It didn’t get any better from there: Cain killed Abel, and we’ve been killing each other ever since. Sometimes we use guns; sometimes we use words. Either way, we aim for the heart. We all bear the mark of Cain somewhere on our skin. But there is this – the mark of Cain was a mark of protection, not a curse and not vengeance. It kept Cain alive. Cain’s punishment was to be driven from the land, to be a restless wanderer. He would no longer belong. We’ve been trying to find our way back home ever since. In a post-modern world, home lasts as long as a lease and is just the place you sleep between commutes. With globalization, everywhere starts to look a bit like everywhere else, so we feel like we’re always in the same place, but it’s never home. We know more about the personal lives of celebrities than we do about ourselves or our neighbors who live next door. Real people are a bit more challenging and tend not to have a publicist.

So we may not belong, but we are still alive. What would happen if we called each other “bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh” instead of all the other names we use? I think the practice of trying to see the fingerprint of God in the people we meet would change us. In spite of all our differences, we are all made of dirt and the breath of God. The breath of God in us makes us sacred; the dirt makes us mortals instead of angels.

God created us and we were very good, before we had done anything at all, before there was a Bible to read or prayers to pray or any good works to do. We were good, so what if we spent less time working out what it means to be a sinner in a screwed-up world, and more time looking for the creative presence of God in the world, ourselves, and each other?

What if discipleship is a matter of calling out the good buried deep inside us and others, rather than just rooting out the nasty stuff? We still are good, despite all the evidence to the contrary. We’re not good in the sense of flawless and perfect and free from wrong doing, but good in the sense of being infinitely valuable and bearing the image of God.
We hurt each other terribly, and sometimes the image of God seems battered past all recognition, but still - God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.

The world is still holy, and the Spirit still hovers over the surface of all that is dark and empty, waiting for us to pay attention.

Comments

[jose h.]

a spiritual director indeed...

Christy, thanks for this post. It served as my morning reflection.

[David]

Excellant post!

btw, Dr. Richard Mouw agrees with you 100%, as do many at Fuller.

Mouw described the difference between himself and too many evangelicals as this: He would say we are GOOD but fallen, while they emphasise FALLEN, but good.

I'm with you and him on this one.

[Kyle]

Christy, David sent me your way. I appreciated this.

A monumental read for me on the image and human nature was LeRon Shults' "Reforming Theological Anthropology."
Tough read at times, but well worth it.

[Jon]

goooood post

[LAmom]

Beautiful.

[Nathan]

Good stuff.

[bobbie]

christy, i have come back to this post again and again. it is one of your best.

i don't know if you've read macrina wiedekher's 'a tree full of angels' but it is so similar to what you're writing here - you'd love that book if you haven't read it yet.