A week tomorrow I preach for the OWW service - on Colossians 1:15 - 20, which seems to me to be Paul 'flirting with universalism' as a former URC college principal I know used to say.  You can't get away from what the letter says, that Christ's death was to reconcile the world (kosmon) not just the humans living on it.  Sharing this with my peeps will be fun!

But it got my grey matter working, which was a good thing, and drew me back to John 3:16, which Rob Lacey renders so exquisitely 'God's so passionate about the planet...." - the whole thing, not just the humans - and to Genesis 1 and 2 creation stories.

I have known for yonks that Genesis 1 and 2 are not identical, learned a decade back that they reflect two different traditions of writing, but had never really stopped to realise how much of a composite, mechanistic story we tell in Sunday School and the like.

The order of the two accounts is utterly different, as is the 'method' of creation.  Genesis 1 - the version we probably all think we know - six days of God issuing commands - is actually anything but mechanistic, rather God empowers the earth (and the seas) to 'bring forth' life.  How different from my Sunday School view of God making things and putting them in place, a bit like a supersized toy farm layout.  The idea of things 'coming forth' from the earth and seas probably formed the basis of the pre-evolution notion of new species emerging from swamps, but actually, dare I suggest offers support for a theistic evolution model?  It seems somehow a more gentle image of God than the one I have somewhere along the line acquired.  I have long loved the 'God saw that it was good...' statements imagining lots of 'wow' moments along the way.

Genesis 2 is much more mechanistic, but retains the interconnectedness with the earth.  The first human is placed in an empty world - reminding me a bit of the yellow pages advert of the person in a room with a phone - and then plants are provided and after that animals.  The helpmeet is the last stage, created not from the earth itself but from the human.  It is an intriguing notion to consider the world appearing around a person, yet still they remain lonely depsite all the blessings of creation.  The message of the importance of human relationships is pretty clear!

Having done my reading and thinking I had one of those 'duh, I'm so thick' moments when I coudn't believe I'd read these accounts so often and not seen what they actually said.

So now I face the challenge of how I communicate any of this to my peeps, some of whom are sure God spent 144 hours on creation and then sat down to watch what happened next, that the planet is a thing to be used and that Christ died only for people, and maybe not even for all of them.

What I want to do, I think, is to remind people that creation is 'good' and 'blessed' and that we are its 'stewards' who have a moral obligation to do our best to care for it.  If I can point forward to the end of Revelation which has earth made new, not just etheral souls floating around in heaven, and if I can get folk to think a little more about lifestyle choices, then I think I'll be happy. 

Whether I might then be subject to a heresy trial, who knows?!