Beginnings are important, and they involve the important task of laying down a solid foundation. When you construct a building, whether it’s a house or a skyscraper, you need to get the foundation right, or you will have problems.
Yesterday we celebrated the birth of our nation, and it’s good for us to go back and look at our beginnings.
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It was a good foundation, but there was more work to be done. To say that all men are created equal was not quite enough. So in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed The Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of all slaves.
Then in 1870, the 15th Amendment added to the Constitution, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." In other words, the color of a person’s skin could not be used to keep them from voting. Furthermore, a person who had been a slave was also elegible to vote. But loopholes made it a reality that in many places this law was not followed. It was not until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 that the majority of African Americans in the South were actually registered to vote.
And it wasn’t until 1920 that the 19th Amendment "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Women were finally allowed to vote!
So we celebrate our nation which is certainly not perfect, but is a country that highly values freedom for all. It is entirely appropriate for us to sing “God Bless America,” praying that God would continue to bless our nation and that our nation would be a blessing to the rest of the world. We are, all of us, privileged to live in this great country.
There is another beginning that I want to talk about today that is far more foundational than the beginning of this nation. It is recorded in the first chapter of the Bible, and is about the God of creation. It’s not recorded in the sense we might think, as by an eyewitness. God, after all, was the only eyewitness to the creation of the world. But it was recorded as the witness of what godly people had come to believe was the truth about God and creation.
We accept these words as truth, not necessarily in the way you might say a book about science is true, but in the message we learn about God. Science is the process of learning about the world—how it was formed and how things work. As time goes on, the truth of science changes, because we learn more and more about creation. I took introductory classes in Physics in college. The basics I learned still stand. But there is a great deal in introductory Physics today that was not even known when I was in college. It’s still the same world, but the understanding that scientists have today has changed.
The message about God that is found in the Bible is different. That is because it is a message that has been revealed to its writers by God himself, through the Holy Spirit.
This revelation is not like channeling. In other words, the author, of the book of Genesis for example, did not sit with the hand of God moving his pen, or the voice of God dictating word for word. The one place in the Bible where this sort of direct, unchanged message from God was given was when Moses went up on Mt. Sinai and received the Ten Commandments. Those Ten Commandments were directly, specifically given by God—inscribed in stone by the finger of God.
But other partsof the Bible were written by men (and possibly even women) of God, writing as they were inspired by the Holy Spirit. There is no question in my mind that God has inspired the Bible as we know it today. The Bible is the record of God’s self revelation to humankind.
I’m going to read this opening passage from the Bible. It is an incredibly beautiful account of creation. Whether or not the writer got the scientific details correct—how long, for example, was a day for God?—regardless of that, they got the theology right. It all started with God, this amazing, powerful, creative God who is the author of all that we know. And over and over, God calls his creation good. And then God creates humans—and here is the amazing thing you don’t want to miss—after all of the glorious mountains and seas and animals and plants and stars and much, much more—after all of that, God decides to create humans in his own image! That does not mean necessarily that we look like God, but that we are thinking, creative, spiritual beings created with these incredible aspects of this even more incredible God.
What a beginning it is! And I believe it shapes our understanding of who we are today just as it did thousands of years ago when the author of Genesis first penned these inspired words of scripture.
Genesis 1:1-2:3
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 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.
3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
9 And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
20 And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
24 And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
Is that not a fantastic beginning? There is a lot I could say about this passage, of course. But I want to focus on one thing—that we are created in God’s image.
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
A great deal has happened since then, but I believe that every one of us is still created in the image of God. Some will say that image was irretrievably shattered in The Fall, when sin entered the world. I do not accept this argument. I believe that we are, as the Bible tells us in many places, all sinners. But we are still created in the image of God.
So let’s ask some questions about this: Who exactly is created in the image of God? Does where we are born make a difference? Does the color of our skin make a difference? What about our religion or lack of religion: does that make a difference?
I believe that every single human is created in the image of God. God determined this in the beginning, and God does not go back on his word. I also believe that we need to get this straight in order to understand how God would have us relate to one another. If we truly believe that each and every person, regardless of birth, regardless of what sort of mess they or others have made of their lives—every single person is created in the image of God, I believe we will be much closer to understanding how God sees us.
As many of you know, I recently attended the Institute on Christian-Muslim Relations, and I promised to talk about it this month in my sermons. This is where I believe we must begin, in our relations to Muslims as well as in our relations with all people. As I said as the beginning of this sermon, the foundation on which we begin is important.
I want to start my attempt to understand Muslims by recognizing that the estimated 1.5 billion people in the world today who call themselves Muslims are, each and every one of them, created in the image of God.
It is only when we begin with that understanding that we are able to enter into respectful, fruitful dialogue. The question is not whether they are right or wrong. The question is, how will I view them as persons?
It’s really no different from how I will view anyone who seems to be significantly different than I am for whatever reason.
I have done a good bit of thinking on this over the past few months, and I invite you to think carefully about this as well. You might begin by thinking about the accident of your birth. Why do you think you are who you are? What did you do to deserve to be born into the family you were born into, with your particular physical characteristics? How did you come to be who you are?
When I was growing up, I remember a fantasy I had—that my true identity was somehow discovered, and it came to be known that I was actually a princess. It was a silly fantasy, I suppose—or was it? Because the truth is that, mundane as my birth might have been in the eyes of the world, I was created in the image of God, and because of Jesus, I now know that I truly am a child of the King.
And so are you.
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