In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

I suppose that underscores the reason most of us don't open our sermons with jokes anymore! A corny word play like that does a large disservice to a magisterial passage like this one. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. These words are so famous and so far reaching they were spoken by the Apollo astronauts on the moon.

As magisterial as these words are, as this whole passage is, this is also one of the most stubbornly misunderstood and misused texts in all of modern life. If you have a computer, I invite you, for example, to go home and Google that opening phrase, In the beginning.

You will get any number of web sites that are devoted to debunking the myth of evolution, and proving that the earth and the starts were created in six literal 24 hour periods.

What is so sad about that is this text was never meant to be about the "how" of science, or the truth-claims of science.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth is not an empirical observation. Rather it is a theological declaration. Before there were telescopes or particle accelerators, before the advent of biology and geology and astrophysics, there was Genesis, the Hebrew people's attempt to explain the unexplainable mystery of existence itself. And to identify Yahweh as the author of that mystery.

So this text speaks to the mysteries of life's origins, but did you ever wonder about the origins of the text itself?

These words are so familiar, so primordial, so foundational, that sometimes it seems like God e-mailed the words directly to Moses with the strict instructions to use them as the opening sentence of the Bible.

But the "genesis of Genesis," if you will, is more interesting than that, and more relevant than that. Scholars believe that the opening words of scripture were composed while the Hebrew people were in captivity in Babylon.

It was a time for them of great desolation. A time when they were separated from what they knew and what they loved, from what was familiar and treasured. A time when the institutions they relied on to gave their lives meaning and structure and stability had been deconstructed. A time when chaos swirled around them like the waters of the deep.

Perhaps it was for them a little bit like what 9/11 was for us. A time when the symbols of what made America so strong and powerful came tumbling down and the safety and security we took for granted proved to be an illusion. And chaos began to swirl around us, and is still swirling around us.

That's what Babylon was like for the Hebrews. Their temple had been destroyed, crumbling to the ground like our own World Trade Towers. Their world had changed, grown suddenly dark and chaotic.

Out of that location of Babylon, out of that experience of exile and dislocation, this text was born. And that location and context matter.

Most of us don't have much trouble believing that Genesis was not intended to be a scientific document. But it may come as a surprise to know that it's also not intended to be read as poetry. This account of creation is not simply a metaphorical explanation of how the world came into being.

Whatever else it may be, Genesis 1 is first and foremost a declaration of faith in the God who brought the world into being. Composed in exile, it is an act of theological resistance, a way of saying that this chaos will not last, that the gods of Babylon and the values of empire and the pain of exile do not define me, do not have the final say in how I understand my own life.

And that makes sense to me. For better or worse, and I'm sure it's for the worse, I'm not particularly scientifically minded. I don't know about the physics of creation. I don't know what the Big Bang means for my life.

But I do know what it feels like to be in exile. The earth is not the only thing that was once "formless and void." I know what that feels like in my own life. I've been to Babylon, watched my own institutions crumble. I've had my own private version of 9/11, when life's airplanes flew into my personal towers. I have felt the pain and disorientation that come when you discover that the sources of your security proved to be an illusion.

I've stood on mountainsides in Haiti where the soil is so degraded by deforestation nothing can grow there, and where the children are consequently so hungry they do not have even enough energy simply to play outside.

I've walked through African villages where 80% of the adults were HIV positive, where a whole generation was lost to AIDS, and where grandmothers faced the heartbreaking challenge of raising six young grandkids on a plot of land no bigger than my backyard.

I've sat in that darkness, the chaos of my own emotions swirling around me, in exile in my own private Babylon. And I know you've been to Babylon, too. I know you have because I've visited you there, in the heart tower in Mission hospital, in the emergency room in St. Joes and in on the sacred ground of the Warren Wilson cemetery after the loss of a loved one.

So you know what exile feels like, when your own life seems like a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

These words, written in the darkness of ancient Babylon, these old, old words are for all of us. This primordial declaration of faith is as relevant, and as necessary, and as true today as it was then.

Now, the King James version which we read today is the most poetic and most familiar rendering of this passage. But the Hebrew is actually more nuanced, and more helpful. Literally translated, the passage reads more like this:

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.

God didn't make the world out of nothing. God took what was already there, the swirling chaos of space, and made something out of it. Something beautiful and wondrous and beyond explanation.

Whether we like it or not, our lives will never be free of chaos and darkness. That's not the world in which we live.

We've been to Babylon before, all of us. And before all is said and done, we'll probably find ourselves there again someday.

But should we find ourselves there, then, like the ancient Hebrews, we will have this text, we will have this faith, that tells us chaos does not and will not have the last word. That God's spirit will hover the face of the swirling chaos of our lives, giving them light, giving them shape and meaning and substance.

This is the promise of Genesis, the first promise of scripture and the ongoing promise of our lives.

Thanks be to God!