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Inspired Part 2
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
See if you want Genesis to answer your questions about cosmology, then you better be prepared to receive ancient answers about cosmology. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons dot church for more information.
Jeremy Duncan:Alright. Welcome to church. My name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here at commons, and if we haven't met outside of this online space, then welcome. We really do appreciate the fact that you've taken a bit of your day to spend with us here on the live stream.
Jeremy Duncan:And today is part 2 in our new inspired series. If you missed last week, this is a series where we are teaching ourselves how to read the Bible through the lens of Jesus. At commons, we use this language of being intellectually honest, spiritually passionate with Jesus always at the center. Those are our values as a community and hopefully they come across in the ways that we do life together. But for us, Jesus at the center is not just a nice Christian sounding statement.
Jeremy Duncan:It's a signal for how we hope to shape our experience of Christianity and how we hope to engage an intellectually honest, spiritually passionate faith along the way. For Christians, the Bible is not flat. It points us somewhere. It points us to Jesus. And so once we have figured that out, once we've chosen that as our framework, well then we have to go back and reread, this time engaging the Bible through the lens of the word of God, which is the Christ who guides us in our reading.
Jeremy Duncan:And that's what we're talking about in this series. Christians often say things like the Bible is inspired, and we affirm this wholeheartedly. But the Bible is inspired in the ways it points us to Jesus. And Jesus is the revelation of God that helps us make sense of these ancient inspired texts. And so last week, we talked about words versus the word.
Jeremy Duncan:The Bible being God's words that point us to God's word, capital w in the world, which is the Christ. Paul says that we see through a glass darkly, but face to face, then I shall know fully even as I am fully known. And it's this guiding sense that everything short of Jesus is always going to be limited, because everything needs to be understood in the light of Jesus, because everything changes in the light of Jesus. That's the gospel. So when the writer of 2nd Timothy says, all scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and chaining, we say amen.
Jeremy Duncan:We simply recognize that it is the way of Jesus that enables us to interpret and understand the usefulness of those scriptures properly. And so with that as our framework, what we want to do now is begin to take 4 different genres of scripture, some that might even seem difficult to reconcile to Jesus. And we want to go back and reread them in the light of Jesus. Today we're gonna look at creation and fall. Next week we're going to look at some of the violence of the historical narratives.
Jeremy Duncan:We're gonna read poetry in the light of Jesus and we're going to look at eschatology and the book of Revelation with Jesus as our lens to finish. But today is all about creation myths. And when I say that there are already, for some of us, lots of things going on in our minds. Myth is this sort of loaded word, and so we need to talk about that. But I also said myths plural, and we need to go to talk about that as well.
Jeremy Duncan:However, first, let's pray. God, thank you for the invitation that returns to us over and over again through the scriptures to come back, to move a step closer to you, eventually to encounter you in Jesus. And as we do, and as our reading and our mind is shaped by the way that is Jesus, may we then have the courage, have the strength to go back to reread everything, to reevaluate every relationship, to understand every transaction we encounter through the lens and the light of Jesus. May everything be subject to the lordship of Christ in our lives and as we do, may we come to see you more clearly all the time. We trust that this story, your story, is beautiful.
Jeremy Duncan:And as we come to see it more clearly each day, may that beauty capture us all the more. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay. Today is about how we read our mythology through the lens of Jesus.
Jeremy Duncan:And for that we're going to need to talk about meaning making flood narratives, challenging our assumptions, and what's behind at the beginning. But let's start with this word myth, because this word has a couple of different meanings, and I'm very specifically talking today about one of them and not the other. In common conversation, we might say, oh, that's just a myth. If someone were to tell you that if you were to drop a penny off the CN Tower, it could kill someone, That is a myth. It doesn't matter how high you drop a penny from.
Jeremy Duncan:It will still only accelerate in 9.8 meters per second, and that's assuming there is no wind at all to slow it down. So the terminal velocity of a penny is likely to only reach about 30 or 40 kilometers an hour no matter how high you drop it from, which to be fair is still pretty fast. So please don't drop pennies off the CN Tower. They're going to leave a mark, but no, they're not going to create a crater in the cement. However when we talk about mythology, and particularly when we talk about mythology in ancient cultures, we're not talking about fake news.
Jeremy Duncan:We're talking about meaning making. And this is really important to understand. Pre scientific cultures were not less articulate or less observant of the world than us. They simply had a different set of presuppositions about what questions to ask about the world and how to answer them. So if you were to pose the question, what is the meaning of life?
Jeremy Duncan:Some people will immediately want to figure out how we got here. Others will want to focus on why we got here. And both of those are incredibly important. Asking the how is what gave us science and technology and objectivity and a growing understanding of the universe around us. But that doesn't mean the why isn't also important.
Jeremy Duncan:And in a pre scientific world where the how was largely beyond our scope, the why became the driving question in our cultures. The way we answer the why, even today, is often with a story. I think about Jesus' parables here. When God wanted to teach, when God wanted to speak, it was primarily stories God chose to communicate through. Because stories have this incredibly important role for us.
Jeremy Duncan:They speak to some of the most true things about our lives, and they're actually the ways that we tend to make sense of our world and lives. Modern studies done by the US Department of Defense of all sources actually show that stories with narrative tension and resolution actually produce oxytocin in our brains. Now oxytocin is the hormone that's released by the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland and it's the chemical that promotes social bonding in us. So myths are not just fake news. They're not even just good stories.
Jeremy Duncan:They are stories that become over time our shared social explanation for why. The problem is if you come to a myth that was written to answer the question of why and you ask it how, you're going to end up with some very strange answers, things like the earth being flat or dinosaurs being a hoax or the universe being only 6 1000 years old, because these are the wrong answers to the wrong questions. And so what I want to do today, assuming that in Jesus, we see a God who understands the power and the usefulness of story, is to go back and look again at some of the earliest myths in the Bible, where they come from, and how the ancient Hebrews were working with the conventional wisdom of their day, deforming in new ways to say something new and important about God. Then we'll find our way back to Jesus and look at how even these earliest stories prepare us for what is later revealed in Christ. Now one of the things we have to understand when we come to ancient mythology is similar to what we talked about last week when we talked about the idea of prologomena.
Jeremy Duncan:Neither us nor ancient Hebrews were a blank slate. Things like the creation stories in Genesis or the story of Noah and his flood, neither of these are original to the Bible. They both have precedent. And that shouldn't be alarming to us because remember, mythology was the shared conventional wisdom of the day. So to start with a preexisting story is essentially the same thing as when I talk to you about the oxytocin created by the posterior lobe of your pituitary gland.
Jeremy Duncan:This is shared wisdom about the world that is extracurricular, but it forms the foundation from which we make sense of the world around us. It's not my point, but it helps us to get on the same page together so that I can make my point. Same thing here. So let's talk about the story of Noah. You probably already know this, but there are many ancient flood narratives in the world.
Jeremy Duncan:That's not surprising. There were, of course, many floods throughout history. And the more limited your imagination of the scope of the world is, the more likely a large flood is to utterly deluge your world. What is surprising though is how closely these narratives follow each other. Now apart from Noah, there are 2 very famous earlier versions of the story.
Jeremy Duncan:The first is the Gilgamesh Epic, which is a Sumerian story from as far back as 21100 BCE. And this story is actually not really about the flood. It's a very long and winding tale about Gilgamesh. But at one point, our hero Gilgamesh is traveling to meet the ancient one and find eternal life. And he has a conversation with the boatman who is taking him across this mystical sea, and he's told the story about the time the gods conspired to destroy the world with a great flood.
Jeremy Duncan:Except he's told that one of the gods warns the ancient one whose name is Utnapishtim, and he builds a boat and saves the animals and survives the flood. After which, he's transported to this mystical plane where he now lives with his wife, and that's where Gilgamesh is going. However, in the story, the dimensions and the directions for the boat are given to Ut Napishtim by God the same way they are to Noah. The boat comes to rest on the top of a mountain the same way as it does for Noah. And when the rain stops, Utnapishtim releases a dove and then swallow and then finally a raven to look for dry land.
Jeremy Duncan:And when the raven doesn't return, Utnapishtim releases all of the animals and prepares a sacrifice for the gods just like Noweda does. Now the second major story is called the Atrahasis. This one comes to us from about 1700 BCE. And this one really is all about the flood. This time, Atrahasis is the hero.
Jeremy Duncan:His name means the very wise one. And in this version of the story, the gods feel like they have too much work to do, so they create some humans to carry the load. The problem is the humans are very noisy and they keep waking up the gods. So the gods figure they'll just wipe them out. However, one of the gods named Enki really likes Atrahasis.
Jeremy Duncan:So he warned him and he gives him directions on exactly how to build a boat and how to gather up all of the animals. And when Atrahasis is able to ride out the flood, he finally opens the ark and he offers a sacrifice to the gods and they all come down and they eat. Now in this version, the gods wanted to kill all of the humans, but only during the flood did they realize that they're all starving now with no one to work for them and make sacrifices to them. So in the end, the gods agree that maybe killing the humans was a mistake. Now there are other versions.
Jeremy Duncan:There's an Egyptian version called the Book of the Heavenly Cow. I mean, that sounds good, right? That one's from around 2000 BCE. There's a version called the Eridu Genesis, which might actually be the oldest. It's maybe from as far back as 23 100 BCE, but we only have fragments of this version.
Jeremy Duncan:So a lot of the details are missing, but we can see the basic flood story. However, what all of these similar stories tell us is that the idea of a devastating flood was conventional wisdom that was shared across multiple cultures, including the ancient Hebrews. It was part of their shared conventional answer to why. Why do we have floods? Why does this happen?
Jeremy Duncan:How can we make sense of these natural phenomena in our world? And so when the basic story is shared across all these different cultures, what becomes important then is the way that each culture takes that conventional story, the expected answer and reshapes it to say something new. And what's new about the Noah stories, first, that we don't have a bunch of gods arguing about what to do. Hebrews weren't monotheists after all. Also, what's new is that the violence we see in the world is the result of human sin.
Jeremy Duncan:In fact, the only sin that is named in the Noah story is our violence. And that God's redemption of that story is not meant to spirit us away to some paradise where everything is made perfect the way that Utnapishtim and Atrahasis are. Though this story instead is meant to lead us to the realization that divine redemption lands us back where we started. Now with a new perspective on our violence, a new way to live that foregoes our violence that creates violence. Where the Atrahasis and the epic of Gilgamesh lead us to believe that only the best among us, only our heroes could ever dream to escape this world and find peace.
Jeremy Duncan:And that the rest of us should get used to our plight here on the earth. No one tells us that we can do better right here, right now. That we can learn and we can change, and Maybe we're not perfect. Maybe we'll never be, but we can actually begin to heal the world through our righteousness. Now is no way a difficult story.
Jeremy Duncan:Yeah, of course it is. And it comes from a completely different world with very different assumptions and rules than we have. But if Jesus is the perfect image of the divine, and if Jesus shows us a God who absorbs violence instead of ever enacting it, then that must become the hermeneutic through which I am compelled to go back and reinterpret every story I read. So if your takeaway from Noah is that God is not like any of the other gods of ancient Mesopotamia that God is deeply invested in the human story and how it unfolds from here right here. Then that will lead you.
Jeremy Duncan:It will move you one small step toward the God that is eventually revealed completely in Jesus. If on the other hand, your takeaway from Noah is that God is ready to wipe out the world on a bad day, that God is angry and violent and completely unlike what we see in the Christ, then you are already heading away from the heart of the Christian story, away from where the story is going. Because everything has to be subject to the lordship of Christ for us Christians, including the ways we read the Bible, including the ways we trust that stories have more meaning than just the words on the page. Because the truth is any story, even Jesus parables will break down if you push them too far. So of course, ancient assumptions about the world will begin to crack if you try to force them to answer questions they are not interested in answering.
Jeremy Duncan:But the ancient Hebrews were interested in what was different about their God and what was different about their God is what is beautiful. It is what leads us one more step on the way to Jesus. Now if Noah was heavy, let's talk about the big one here. Where did we come from? You may have noticed this before, but there are actually two versions of the creation story in your Bible.
Jeremy Duncan:In Genesis 1, the world gets created, but then in Genesis 24, the story, again, essentially starts again. And people have noticed this for a very long time. I mean, the church fathers commented on this in the first couple centuries. Jewish commentators had been talking about it for centuries before that. Ephraim the Syrian from the 3rd century wrote that after the account was completed, Moses still returned yet again to tell the story of the beginning, even after the days of creation had been finished.
Jeremy Duncan:However, since these two stories come at creation from different angles, it never really created any conflict for us. And it wasn't until about the 18th century when German scholars noticed that the 2 different versions use 2 different names for God. Genesis 1 uses Elohim. Genesis 2 switches to the divine name Yahweh. And people started wondering about where these stories came from.
Jeremy Duncan:Though lots of people started working on this, it's usually credited to Graf and Wellhausen is the first who suggested that perhaps what we have here are 2 different writers whose versions have been combined together. They developed a system for analyzing the entire Torah, or the first five books of the Bible, and looking for what they surmised were 4 different sources. Now today, scholarship tends to recognize that things are a lot more complicated than that when it comes to ancient texts. We can't just neatly separate it out who wrote what. But this general idea that different traditions and authors and editors and contributors all played a role in the Bible.
Jeremy Duncan:This has been immensely helpful in understanding the Bible. And so what we see here in the beginning is that if we have 2 different versions of the same story and both of them were gathered and preserved by the community as inspired, that should tell us that both versions are saying something important and unique about God. And so just like Noah, we need to understand the conventional template upon which the ancient Hebrews were writing. We need to see what the ancient Hebrews were pushing back against to see what they wanted to say about God. And the ancient template comes to us in what is possibly the oldest known story to modern archaeology.
Jeremy Duncan:It's a story called the Enuma Elish. It comes to us from before the fall of the Sumerian empire around the 2nd millennium BCE. But here's how the Enuma Elish describes the creation of the world. He all starts with a swirling ball of water and chaos, which by the way is exactly how Genesis starts. Genesis technically doesn't begin with creation as much as formation.
Jeremy Duncan:In Genesis, the earth is already there, but it is formless and empty and darkness was over the surface of the deep, deep waters. However, in the Enuma, the water swirls and separates into 2 gods, the sweet, flesh water god called Apsu and the bitter, salt water god called Tiamat. And they give birth to a bunch of new gods, and those gods get very noisy and keep waking Apsu up. This is a motif we saw in the Atrahasis. However, Tiamat sides with the new gods who put Apsu to sleep and to kill him.
Jeremy Duncan:Well, Tiamat was not expecting that, so she turns on them. And eventually, there's a battle, and one of the new gods, Marduk, battles Tiamat and kills her. He uses her body to separate the water and the dry land. And again, we see this idea of separating the waters to create dry land in verse 6 of Genesis 1. But then Marduk kills one of the gods who was helping Tiamat, a god named Quingu, and Quingu's blood is then mixed with the dust of the ground to make the humans.
Jeremy Duncan:Another idea that we see in Genesis 2 verse 7, where this time God's breath is mixed with the dust to create humanity. And So what we've got here is the template for ancient cosmology. The world begins as a swirling mass of water And out of that chaos, the world is formed and humanity is created through it. This is basically the ancient science textbook that ancient communities started from, as strange as that sounds. This was their conventional answer for how the world came to be.
Jeremy Duncan:And so the question then becomes, what did it mean to them? And where the ancient Sumerian said, it means that life is the product of violence and war, and that the heavens are even more chaotic, even more terrible than anything we can experience IRL. The ancient Hebrews crafted 2 stories, each designed to refute the narratives they were handed. Genesis 1 tells us that the chaos of creation, the slow coming together of orbit and order. These are not the result of cosmic wars that glorify our own violence.
Jeremy Duncan:They're an expression of creativity and goodness. They are part of the graciousness embedded in the very fabric of the universe. This version tells us that violence does not bring order. War does not bring life. No.
Jeremy Duncan:It's good words and creative initiative. It is the kindness of God that shapes the world around us. The overflow of divine love poured out. But then there was more to be said, and so Genesis comes back around to tell us this time that humanity is not the result of blood and dirt. We are not death and violence.
Jeremy Duncan:That is not our starting point. No. It is breath and materiality. It is nature and nurture. It is the divine coming together that brings our story to life.
Jeremy Duncan:In fact, Genesis tells us that humanity itself, all of us, we are shaped by God in the image of the divine. It's not kings as divine emissaries. The way the Gilgamesh epic tells us. It's not particular peoples as representative of particular gods as we see in the Atrahasis. No.
Jeremy Duncan:All of humanity, even those that don't look like us, even those we might deem our enemies, all that breathe bear divine witness back to us. You see, if you want Genesis to answer your questions about cosmology, then you better be prepared to receive ancient answers about cosmology. But if like Jesus, you recognize that stories have a way of speaking to our most timeless questions, cutting through to the heart of the matter, what you begin to see is that from the very beginning, from the very first page, the Bible is already pushing back against our assumptions in order to begin to shape new pathways, new ways that would begin to eventually lead us one small step at a time all the way to the Christ. Because you see it's not God that is changing for us in the bible, it's that God is changing us all throughout the Bible. And in every step along the way, God is speaking in the language we understand.
Jeremy Duncan:In the language of Hebrew and in the language of Greek, but in the language of our assumed cosmology, in the language of the stories that we have already been told and taught. And God is doing this always in order to lead us to the moment when God might make God's self known fully to us in Jesus. And so once we have encountered that God, once we have been given new ways, new truth, new life, once we are born again to see the world, everything for the very first time. This is where we begin to trust that God has always been present to us, not just at every step of history but at every step of our story as well. And even when we didn't see God clearly, even when you misunderstood the divine, this is where you might come to trust that God has always been there in the ways that you needed divine grace.
Jeremy Duncan:All in order to lead you, to lead us, to lead the human story to this moment right here today where Christ is present to all of us. Let's pray. God of all grace, who has come to us in just the way that we need you, in the language that we understand, in the ways that we can make sense of. In your graciousness, you condescend to tell the stories that we can understand. And yet still you move us one step at a time to the point where you can be made manifest and incarnated, where your love can take up residence in human form.
Jeremy Duncan:We thank you for this graciousness. And, God, now that we see you, now that we are starting to see you, may we have new eyes. May we be born again to see everything for the first time. All the ways that your grace and peace have always been there leading us to Jesus. As we read, as we see, as we understand, May we be brought one step closer to your kingdom and your commonwealth in our world.
Jeremy Duncan:May we create the peace, the justice, the grace you dream of. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.