The first words of the Bible are:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
With the cyclone in Myanmar, and the earthquake in Sichuan province so devastating the human family, I simply want to state that I don’t believe in a God who destroys life, but blesses life. I don’t believe that God sends earthquakes and cyclones to punish people or nations. I do not believe that God curses Myanmar and China; that is as heretical an idea as God punishing the Gulf Coast and New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina. I do not believe in the God of boundaries, but believe in the God of boundless love.
Simply, I believe in the God of Genesis, who, at the beginning of time, began to create the heavens and this earth, our fragile island home. Out of the chaos that was wild and wasted, with only darkness on the face of creation, God sent the rushing Spirit to hover and create. With cyclones then, like earthquakes now, God is still creating, and all life is still evolving. As time unfolds, we all must drink from the cup of astonishment and tragedy while we order ourselves better to cooperate with the goals of our common humanity rather than compete over the scare resources we each have access to.
I believe in the God of the light and curse not the darkness. And when God called the dry land earth and the gathering of the waters, Seas!, God saw that they were good, and so can we.
In Genesis, God said, let us make human kind in our image, according to our likeness! God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God did God create us, male and female did God create us. I believe that God has made humans all of one family tree, but we forget that we are unified with all of God's creation. All life comes from one source. We with opposable thumbs are in the same family as insects and trees, and even the rocks and rivers.
The first words of the Bible found in Genesis don’t call us to a childish faith in a simplistic God somehow removed from the reality of evolutionary science. We have strong enough minds to love the God of Genesis and pursue the science of Darwin. The first words of Genesis discovered long ago what science has been slow to prove: that we all come from one tree of life. All life has a common origin. All living things come from one simple beginning. I like how evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden puts it:
“All life belongs to one huge family tree. Some branches are the plants, other branches are animals. If you hug a tree, you’re hugging a relative, a very distant relative of course, but a relative nonetheless. And humans are not descended from apes and monkeys the way those species are now. We all go back in time when we had a common ancestor in the family tree. We’re not like monkeys, and the monkeys are not like us; the point is that we have a common ancestor.”
So, it is not buddhists in Myanmar that bury their dead, or animists in China that emerge from the rubble of the earthquake. You and I are burying the dead of our own family this morning in our tears, prayers and love.
John Donne said it powerfully in the well known passage: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . Any human death diminishes me, because I am involved in humankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…” (modified for language).
I believe in a God that has blessed us all the same, and blessed the creation itself, even in untamed glory. The challenge is: are we going to cooperate with each other in our commonality, or compete against each other, humans, animals, plants, and even the rocks?
The ongoing debate in evolutionary science is how much evolutionary change occurs because of competition, or cooperation. The term, survival of the fittest, which was not coined, or never used by Darwin, implies competition, dog eat dog, climbing to the top of the heap. Darwin used the terms Natural Selection, and this implies cooperation.
We live in a time of unparalleled call to cooperation. We seem hell bent on competition.