It’s How You Hear

Recently, a group at our church tried to hear Genesis chapter 1 with fresh ears.  That’s hard to do for a lot of reasons.  Genesis is not exactly unexplored textual territory for Wednesday nighters in the Church of Christ.  They’ve known which thing God created on which day since they learned the Creation Song in Sister Jones’ Sunday school class back in 1972.  I mean, they are so biblically literate, can you imagine what glory would ensue if a Wednesday night regular appeared on Jeopardy and scored a Bible related category?

“I’ll take obscure Bible characters for 1,000, Alex.”

“And the answer is . . . a daily double.  You have $ 50,000, Barton – how much would you like to wager?”

“I’ll make it a true daily double, Alex.”

“For a hundred thousand dollars, the answer is . . . Moses called them Mom and Dad.”

“Who are Amram and Jochabed?”

Plus, we turned to Genesis 1 in January which is when a lot of people are starting over with their annual read-through-the-Bible resolution, which isn’t really a resolution at all.  If you do it every year, it’s a habit.  So they had already waded through Noah’s flood and were well on their way to climbing the Tower of Babel when we went back to the beginning.

But this time, instead of just hearing what the text says, we spent some time talking about how we hear it.  There are options.

You can listen to Genesis the way you listen to a news report.  Most of us in the group grew up this way, assuming that the basic purpose of the creation narrative is to answer questions that begin with the words who, what, when, where and how.

Of course, as Walter Brueggemann says, if you listen this way a collision with science is inevitable.

Which is probably why some people hear Genesis as myth.  Some use the term myth in the sense of a literary genre.  Others use it in a dismissive way aimed at people who listen to Genesis literally.  They say it’s just like other ancient creation texts (it isn’t) and that the purpose of Genesis was to spin a better yarn than the Sumerians (it wasn’t).

If you hear Genesis as myth, you certainly won’t cross swords with any scientists, but you might find yourself fencing with Paul or Jesus.  They both seemed to take it a bit more seriously.

So our Wednesday night group tried to listen to Genesis like we’d listen to a sermon; like it’s a proclamation about the Creator and his creation.  What might we hear about God’s relationship with us and our responsibilities to him, to each other and to the rest of creation if we listened this way?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

A young mother of two remarked, “When you hear everything God did to prepare the planet for humans to live on, it’s like he was nesting – getting the nursery ready for his children.”

Another young mom, who is the Lindsey Vonn of knitting, said, “I’m amazed that he went to all this trouble to create this beautiful planet, then just turned it over to us!  If I spend 70 hours knitting a sweater and give it to someone, I want them to care as much about it as I did.”

An engineer: “Every day, I spend hours figuring out how to solve complex problems involving materials, circuits and people.  God spoke and things came together at the molecular level.  That’s a power I can’t even imagine.”

A retired teacher: “And he didn’t do all of this by himself.  He did it in community.  He said, ‘Let us . . . .’”

We heard awe from a medical doctor.  Reverence from a Ph.D. in veterinary pathology.  Devotion as we sang a verse of How Great Thou Art.

At the end of our time, we listened to the 1968 Christmas Eve broadcast of Apollo 8.

Then we prayed.

Makes you wonder.  Does the way we hear some texts get in the way of what God wants to say?