A sermon on Genesis 1:1-5, preached at Park Avenue Christian Church, New York, NY, on November 27, 2022 (Advent I).

Watch it on YouTube here.

When beginning he, God, created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was shapeless and formless and bleakness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God, she, fluttered over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; so God separated the light from the bleakness. 5 Then God called the light Day, and the bleakness God called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, day one.

Genesis 1:1-5 (Wilda C. Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church: Year A)

I prepared this sermon during a week when our nation has experienced two high-profile mass shootings, one at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs. One at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. Not to mention a shooting at the University of Virginia only the week before. These events occur in such rapid succession we may sometimes wonder how we can possibly maintain an appropriate level of grief and fury to match the enormity of the horror. As Shannon Watts, founder of the group Moms Demand Actions for Gun Sense in America, stated in a recent newsletter, “We’re not numb—we’re traumatized.”

Almost profanely, it feels, the theme for this first Sunday in Advent is “hope.” And I couldn’t help wondering what I could possibly tell you about that? I take seriously author Ta-Nehisi Coats’ skepticism about the word “hope” as ahistorical and too readily used to co-opt the death and suffering of oppressed people as “bricks” on the road toward progress.[1] And so I proceed humbly, my heart full with the question, one of the theological questions our theologically-dense text for today seeks to address, a question that apparently burned in the hearts of the story’s original audience, the ancient people of Israel in Babylonian exile: Can God really do something new in this place of void and bleakness?

Our text from Genesis is so familiar that hearing something new in it may not be easy. It is so mired in cliches and in unfortunate interpretations that have insisted we strip it down to merely a literal account of the age of the universe. But what we have here is soaring theology transmitted through a gorgeous poetic narrative. Luckily, the translation we’ve heard this morning from Dr. Wil Gafney’s Year A Lectionary offers a couple of points for us to encounter the text afresh.

What was most striking for me, and perhaps for you as well, upon first reading this translation of the first two verses of Genesis 1, was the use of both the male and female pronouns to highlight the different genders used to describe the Creator in the Hebrew text. The masculine plural Elohim—God—and the feminine singular Ruach—Spirit. Whereas most of our English translations of the Bible tend to reduce God to only the masculine singular gender, the Divine, in these very first lines of Scripture, is more expansive than that.

The Creator is Queer.

And so there can be no doubt that, when the text goes on to describe God creating humankind in God’s image on the sixth day, that people of all bodies and gender expressions are included in that Image.

But I think what captured my attention and my imagination the most in Dr. Gafney’s translation was the description of the Spirit “fluttering” over the face of the waters as a precursor to creation. The gentleness of the gesture is stunning. The Hebrew word, merahapet, could as easily be translated “trembling” or “shimmying.” And why should we not imagine God’s Spirit trembling in eager anticipation? Shimmying playfully as though to entice a new dance partner?

The exchange that follows does play out like a dance: God speaks light, the firstborn of creation, into existence. The ordering of the primordial chaos of water and bleakness does not unfold as it does in the creation mythology of Israel’s neighbors in Mesopotamia in Egypt, where the cosmos is generally the byproduct of a violent battle between the gods; rather, the God of Israel creates, effortlessly and intentionally, with words. Chaos is not brought to order with a show of strength or violence, but with a gentle and decisive invitation: “Let there be…” And the response? Immediately, without protest or question, Light Is. Light: where before there was only bleakness. Light: in its purest and most radiant form, emanating from light itself, since it won’t be until the fourth day that God creates the sun and moon and stars. God sees the light and responds, as though delighting in the aptness of a new dance partner, by acknowledging that the light is good.

And from that firstborn of creation, our eldest sibling, Light, God repeats the pattern and pronouncement of goodness each day. And if we read on until the sixth day we find that mysterious and compelling designation, provided specifically to humankind, that they are created in the image of God, the Imago Dei. And though many a tome has been written on the meaning of the Imago Dei and the subject deserves a sermon of its own, I want to speculate, just based on what the story has told us about God and how God works so far, that maybe being made in the divine image has something to do with our own creative power. Our own capacity to speak something new into experiences of bleakness.

Of course, such generative speech, which comes as effortless for God, can be challenging and even dangerous for you or I. Yet I know, as I reflect back on my experience, that there have been people along my path who have used the generative power of their words to speak something new into my life. Who courageously spoke their truth or shared their story in ways that brought clarity and light where before there may have been only confusion and void. I heard even Ta-Nehisi Coates say in an interview that Malcolm X was someone who gave him hope.[2] But what Malcolm X offered him was not optimism for a brighter future–which is one reductionistic understanding of hope–but searing and unapologetic truth, a refusal to placate or to make his message more palatable to white establishment audiences.

One individual in my own life who used the generative power of his own words to elicit newness was my high school theater teacher, Mr. Doyle. My senior year, my class staged a production of The Laramie Project, a play which chronicles the aftermath of the brutal 1998 hate crime and murder of Matthew Sheppard, a gay University of Wyoming student. To facilitate our empathy and connection with the material, my teacher, himself a gay man, shared some of his story with us, the pain, rejection, and self-denial he had dealt with from a young age. Even now, I am stunned by his courage. Even at an arts school in Southern California in the early 2000s, being an openly queer teacher was certainly not safe. And I’ll add, that in many parts of our country today, laws are being put in place—often referred to as “Don’t Say Gay laws”—to make it even less safe for teachers to be their authentic selves with their students, to share what is perhaps the greatest teaching tool any of us has: our story.

For me, my teacher’s words were like a pronouncement of, “Let there be light.” The glowing authenticity and reality of what he shared broke through the cold, abstract, anti-gay dogma of the church I had grown up in. His story changed me. And, as we brought The Laramie Project to the stage, as I witnessed the strong reactions the show evoked in its audience, I learned something important about the authority of my own words, that I could also use the power of my voice and my body to make space for the stories of those who had been silenced. It’s a lesson I learned at 17 that still informs my approach to preaching today.

(So if you take away no other message from this sermon, folks, let it be that we need gay teachers and we need the arts in schools!)

My friends, the world is full of violence. I wish I could authentically offer you hope that it will someday be completely taken away, and I know that there are verses in our Bible that make promises to that effect, verses I’m grateful for because they speak to that longing in my spirit—that Advent longing—for God to come on over and heal our world. But on weeks like this one, such verses don’t do much to address my anger and my grief. Because the violence keeps raging on.

But what I do believe, because I know it in my bones and in my experience, is that the antidote to that violence is in each one of you.

When we speak our truths and tell our stories—and work to offer safe spaces for others to do the same—we embrace the newness that God is indeed calling forth in each one of us. The same God whom we proclaim on Christmas Day was so enamored with humanity’s story that God chose to become a part of that story through the Incarnation. The Word made flesh.

My Advent prayer is that the Word of God may shine forth from you.

Let there be light.

[1] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Imagining a New America, interview by Krista Tippett, November 16, 2017, https://onbeing.org/programs/ta-nehisi-coates-imagining-a-new-america/.

[2] Coates.