In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Gen. 1:1a

And deservedly so. Not only does the phrase have a magisterial ring to it, but the subject matter could hardly be more significant. It's just a 10-word sentence, but in a way it's about everything that is. It's about God and God's role in creation and history, signifying that God is primary, that God's decision launched everything that comes after this moment.

And it's about time, and the start of history. It's about the earth and the sky and how, in mythic terms, these things came to be.

So the phrase deserves its place in the pantheon of the greatest opening lines of all time.

Except that's there's a hitch. The King James version, the version with which we are all most familiar, is actually something of a mistranslation.

Not that I would know. I can no longer read a word of Hebrew. But I trust people who do know, and the scholarly consensus is that the grammar of the sentence is a little more nuanced than the King James version allows for.

Sparing us all the technical details, a more faithful translation of the Hebrew goes something like this: When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void (this comes from Walter Brueggeman, as found in Theology of the Old Testament , pg. 153).

That is to say, history and creation do not begin with the Big Bang. Rather history and creation begin when God begins to work with the stuff that's already there.

When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void.

What that tells me is that Israel's faith is not concerned with the scientific origins of the material world. Rather Israel's faith, and its understanding of life itself, is rooted in God's decision to give order to chaos. When by God's speech, the swirling mass of gases that comprised the universe began to take formal shape. When by God's spirit, energy and matter began to breathe.

And that, my friends, took work. Divine work. That work, God's own labor - a labor of infinite love and incomprehensible genius - is worth honoring today, on this Labor Day Sunday.

Last week we looked at the Sabbath, and the central role Sabbath observance plays in Jewish spirituality. We saw how Israel's understanding of the Sabbath is rooted, on one hand, in its own liberation from captivity in Egypt.

And how, on the other, it's rooted in this very story. How Sabbath is the culmination of the creation myth -the first thing ever to be designated as "holy," a thing not made by God but kept by God. Observed by God. Enjoyed by God.

But one must remember that in the story, this story, God rests only for a day before going back about God's own business. And prior to that seventh day, that Sabbath rest, God worked for the better part of a week.

Maybe that week was figurative or metaphorical. But the point is that God imagined and designed and spoke and created for six days, and rested for one.

The simple math of creation is the first testament to the value and sanctity of work - you shall work six days, and rest one . If Sabbath is holy, surely work is inherently good.

Indeed, God's own language to describe all of this divine activity is a commentary on the value of work itself. And gives us an ethical model for making judgments about what is good.

In a repeating refrain, the text says that everything God made was good, and it was good for a reason. Not just because God made it, but because it was beautiful and wondrous. Because it was purposeful and well-ordered. Because it was life-giving and energy-producing. Because it was plentiful and abundant.

And so it was good. God "himself" leveled this evaluation and in so doing gave us a template, gave us permission, to make similar judgments about work.

Work that is life-affirming and well-ordered, work that makes something beautiful out of chaos, whether that's cleaning up after a hurricane or painting a picture, this work is good. It is work done in the divine image.

And the opposite is also true. Work that despoils creation is not good. Work that exploits human beings; work that is not life-affirming; work that adds to the chaos of the world. This work is not good. And as God's people, it's important that we have the courage to say so.

So this mythic story tells us several things. It tells us that God loves work, and gave us work as a gift. It gives us a way of making judgments about the value of work, a way of thinking about work ethically.

But there is still one more thing to say about this story of creation, this account of God's labor of love in creating the world and everything in it, everything we know and love.

Last week we saw that a church that matters, a church that deserves to be taken seriously in times like these - a time of war and terror, a time when climate change threatens life - is a church that practices what Walter Brueggeman calls "liturgical resistance." It's a church whose worship is about something besides entertainment, whose worship is not a diversion but a moment of liturgical consequence.

What are you talking about preacher? Liturgical resistance? Liturgical consequence? What's that? I come to church to sing and to pray.

And that is exactly the point. You see, this passage is not just a mythical story. It served as a kind of early liturgy for the Jewish people. Scholars agree that it was written sometime after the Jews had been taken captive in Babylon.

It was a time when, for the Hebrew people, the earth was a formless void; a time of chaos, when darkness covered the face of the deep.

And so they sang this hymn of creation. They shared in this affirmation of faith together. It was a type of liturgical resistance, when they created a "contrast-world" to the world in which they were held prisoner.

When they sang this affirmation of their deepest faith, they withdrew emotionally, liturgically, politically, theologically, even geographically from the world in which they were held captive, not to escape but to cultivate their hope, to nurture their faith that God could, and that God would, eventually, create order out of chaos, light out of darkness. (Author's note: I owe this idea to Walter Brueggeman.)

So this story is indeed about everything that is. It's about creation and the start of history. It's about work, about God's own labor in bringing into being the earth the sky and everything that lives and breathes.

And in the end, it is also, this story, a gift to us. A liturgical gift that is ours to sing or say or pray when our own world gets dark. When chaos swirls around us.

When it feels like we've been carted off into captivity or exile, this story is here. And it can serve as the raw material out of which we can begin to create a contrast-world. Out of our faith we can co-create with God a different reality, full of light and order.

God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.

Amen