Sermons

Creation Stories
Text: Genesis 2:4b-25
Speaker: Joel Miller

The book of Genesis is appropriately named.  It’s about beginnings.  It reaches all the way back to the origins of, as it says, the heavens and the earth.  It goes on to tell the origin story of a small near eastern tribe through its patriarchs and matriarchs.  They are a people who will be, for much of their existence, on the losing side of history - slaves, exiles, living under foreign rule in their own land.  And that’s really something, because, as has been repeated many times, “history is written by the victors.”  Usually.  Remarkably, a sizeable portion of humanity has now adopted Genesis, this minority report, as their own origin story.  The fact that we’re even talking about it today and that most of us have a printed copy – or ten – in our home is remarkable indeed.

It’s hard to overstate the power of origin stories.  For example, consider the founding story of our nation many of us were taught in school.  The Pilgrims came to America in search of religious freedom, which they found as they established Plymouth Colony.  We fought a revolution against the tyranny...

Baptismal Waters: Creation, Choices, Beloved 
Speaker: Joel Miller

Genesis 1:1-2

In the Genesis 1 creation story, there’s no need for God to create water.  It’s there from the beginning.  Along with the darkness. And the Ruach Elohim – the Wind from God or the Breath or Spirit of God, depending on the translation, hovering, like a mother bird, over those primordial waters. 

There’s something about water – something so essential, so given – that makes it hard to imagine existence without it.  Genesis 1, the opening words of scripture, doesn’t even try.  In the beginning there was darkness, there was the Divine Breath, and there was water.

A creation story told by Native peoples of this continent, the Haudenosaunee, shares this sense.  It’s the story of Skywoman, who descended on a beam of light, down to our world.  At that time, the story goes, there was only darkness and water, and those who lived in the water like the beavers and swans and fish. 

As she descended these beings held a council and determined she would need a patch of earth to land on.  It was...