We all are curious about our beginnings.  We want to know where we came from;  who we are; whose we are; what went on before we our own memories kick in.  I’ve realized, since my mother’s death this spring, that since she was the last of her generation to die, carrying on the family stories now lies in my generation.  If we don’t tell them, they will be lost.

So it was with some interest that, in doing a major cleaning job in our apartment, Allen ran across my baby book, which my mom filled in after I was born.  Now I have to admit that my mother was fairly spotty about filling it in.  There are lots of blanks, holes in my story that I’ll never know.  But then there is other information that is nice to learn or relearn.  I know, for instance, that I was 7 pounds, 12 ounces and 22 inches at birth.

There’s a list of the first people who came to visit me though I don’t know what day...maybe on my birth day since I was born very early in the morning.  I know that when I was nine weeks old, I went to church for the first time.  Though who took me, what the minister and other people said remains a mystery.  I don’t know; maybe mom was trying to shield me from some unkind remarks.  And maybe I got there on my own.  I doubt it, looking at this picture taken around that time.  It doesn’t look like I did much at all on my own, precocious though I may have been.

So it is with each of us.  We are curious about our beginnings because beginnings are important.  And as true as this is for us individually and personally,  it’s all the more-so for us collectively.  Thus it is that there are a wide variety of creation stories to match the various cultures out of which they spring.

Some scholars think that the creation narrative we heard today sprang up during the time of the Babylonian exile.  The Jewish oppressors, the Babylonians, had violent, gory creation myths.  Our narrative, which each of us knows so well, may have been an antidote to those Babylonian creations myths.  Instead of violence, we have a creative God who brings into being creation; much more suitable to tell young Jewish children living far from their homeland.

The Hebrew word for “created” is bara.  The very first words of our Bible are b’ray-o-sheet bara elohim….”  (בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים) “At the very start, God created…”  Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the word bara is used only in conjunction with God.  God creates;  humans make or form, but they don’t bara.  That is left to God.  And on these six days of creation, God certainly did bara.  God brought into being all of creation:  the universe, the stars, the earth, all the creatures that inhabit it, including, of course, we human creatures.  God’s activity is one of creative energy that causes all of everything to come into being; certainly not something that we humans can do. 

And God saved us for last.  God created humans last and, in doing so, did so in God’s own image.  Our curiosity about our beginnings is satisfied, to a point.  It’s a bit like my baby book;  there is some important information, but still there are blanks.  What does it mean to be created in God’s image?  And what does “dominion” actually mean?  These are important and serious questions that we are left to ponder on our own.  I am, though, regularly encouraged, as I stop for a nap, to remember that God needed rest after all the work of creation that God did!

If we are in God’s image, how is it we’re like God and how are we unlike God?  An image is only a partial capture of the thing it is imaging, after all.  I do appreciate that in this account of creation (there’s a second account that follows this one), God’s image includes both genders; God created male and female at the same time.  That’s why I think gender-neutral language about God is so important:  God is at once both genders, without a single gender.  It’s a bit mind-blowing, but one that leaves us with no good pronoun for God.  “God” will simply have to suffice when talking about God.

When God gives us dominion over all the earth, God did a dangerous thing, the effects of which we see in particular over the past few decades.  We’ve taken dominion to mean that we can do anything we want with creation.  According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, dominion means to have supreme authority over something.  Certainly, in giving humanity dominion God did not mean for us to recklessly have our way with the world, stripping it of its resources in a few short generations.  Dominion, I believe, implies responsibility as much as it means control. 

But have we been responsible?  Have we exercised our dominion in an accountable way over the past decades?  I think perhaps not.  And this lack of responsibility has led to all sorts of difficulties in our world, most recently evidenced by natural disasters that many scientists are claiming are the result of global warming.  Global warming, of course, is a result of dominion run rampant.  We are paying for the results of years of our overuse of the planet on which we find ourselves.

If we are created in God’s image, it’s up to us to exercise our dominion with responsibility.  We aren’t Babylonians with a violent creation story; our creation myth involves a loving God who created everything and put us in charge, handing us the keys, as it were.  As the image of God, we should use caution as we become the dominate force in the world around us. 

Dominion and image are only two aspects of our communal creation story that we should pay attention to.  There is a variety of riches to be mined from these verses at the very beginning of our scriptures.  These stories remind us of the vastness of the universe which we are a part of and our part in it.

Creation stories are important: our creation story, my creation story, your creation story.  Those stories tell us who we are.  We recognize where we came from.  And they tell us who we belong to.  We learn that we are made in God’s image, both collectively and individually.   And as such, we need to recognize the great responsibility that we carry because of that.  All of us are created in God’s image.  Let’s live like it.