(Genesis 2:1-3; Hebrews 4:1-11)

In the great fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, near the beginning of the first book, the wizard Gandalf tells the young hobbit Frodo Baggins, who will in the end be the great hero of the story, about the dark times in which they live, and the great challenges that lie ahead. Frodo, understandably, says he would rather live in happier times, times that aren’t fraught with such darkness; to which Gandalf responds, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The time that is given. In modern Christianity, it’s almost an article of faith that C. S. Lewis was a very wise man; but it’s too easy for us to forget that his great friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the man who played the most important role in leading Lewis to faith, was also a very wise man—because we mostly know him for his fantasy stories. But there is very great wisdom in that line, wisdom rooted deep in Scripture, and particularly in our passage this morning. We are limited creatures. We are limited in our abilities—good at some things, bad at others—and while we can grow and develop, we’re limited in our ability to do so. We’re limited physically—I’d love to be able to play shortstop in the majors, but that was never even a vaguely plausible dream—and limited mentally as well. We’re limited by our gender, and to some degree by the societal expectations that go along with it. We’re limited in our ability to control or influence the world around us—we can only reach so far, and what is beyond our reach eludes us; our bodies stop at the edge of our skin, and everything beyond that is not-us, carrying on its existence apart from us.

And most fundamentally, we are limited by space and time—we are creatures of place, and of the time we have been given. We are creatures of the places we live and have lived, and we are creatures of our place in human history; we will never know the life of an English knight who fought with Henry V at Agincourt, or of a Russian revolutionary in October, 1917, or of one of the shoguns who ruled Japan in the 1800s. We were each born at a particular time, in a particular country, and have lived through a particular set of experiences; we know our life and no other.

This is how we are; and as Genesis shows us, we were created so. When God created the first human, he didn’t just drop him off to wander around, homeless; rather, he placed the human in a garden which had been created to be his home. God gave him a location, a home address, a neighborhood, even if his only neighbors had either four feet or wings, and he told the human, “Do your work in this place.” Today, he tells all of us the same: “Do your work in this place, the place where I have put you; follow me in this community, in the home where you live, in the family of which you are a part, in the relationships you have now.” As Eugene Peterson put it, in his book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, “All living is local: this land, this neighborhood, these trees and streets and houses, this work, these people,” and thus it is as locals that we must live out our faith, placing the word of God in the concrete reality of “this land, this neighborhood, . . . this work, these people”—and bringing it alive in our life in response to all the concrete frustrations, irritations, and problems that “this neighborhood, . . . this work, these people” bring us. It is this place on earth that gives our lives their shape.

It is also this place in time—and, more generally, time itself. As Genesis also tells us, we are creatures of time, our lives shaped and formed in every respect by time in its passing. We can see this in our bodies, which are a collection of rhythms—the rhythm of our breathing, in and out, in and out; of our pulse, the twofold beating of our hearts, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM; of sleeping and waking, as day succeeds night and night follows day in turn. We can see it in the rhythm of the seasons, spring-summer-fall-winter and spring again. We can see it in the music that threads its way through our lives, providing an ever-changing soundtrack to our existence, and in the flow of our movements as we walk, or run. And we can see it most fundamentally in Genesis 1, which shows us God creating the universe in time, in the flow of time, and shaping a rhythm: and God said, and God said, and God said, in six-part harmony—six parts to creation, and then a seventh part, the seventh day, the day of rest.

This is, by the way, true even if Genesis 1 isn’t talking about six 24-hour days; the point isn’t counting hours, it’s that this is the rhythm God built into creation, the rhythm for which we were created, of work and rest. Both are part of his design for our lives, and both are necessary if we are to live as he made us to live. Whether you’re still working for a living or you’re retired, God has work for you to do in this place; whether it’s necessary for you to support yourself or not, it’s a part of God’s plan for you, both for your sake and for the sake of others. He also has rest for you in this place, time set aside in his schedule for you to set work aside, during which we gather to worship him as one people; and together, together, they make up the base rhythm of life, the meter to which the poetry of our days is to be set. I should note, I am indebted to Cambridge theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie for that way of putting it, and more generally for his use of music to illuminate Christian theology.

The problem is, the world tries to convince us that limitations are a bad thing, and specifically that this limitation is a bad thing; but it isn’t. Think of our music, and I think you’ll understand, because in our Western musical tradition, meter is one of the standard limitations that gives shape and character to the work of composition. Think of 4/4—the time signature of a Sousa march, and many of our great hymns. “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” Or 3/4—I remember being told in elementary school that this was waltz time. I was, what, seven years old, I didn’t even know what a waltz was, but that’s what stuck with me—3/4 is for waltzes and Irishmen. “Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart.” 6/8 is always fun—beat it in two, sing it in triplets. “In shady green pastures so rich and so sweet, God leads his dear children along.” And so on. The meter isn’t a straitjacket; you can vary the rhythms, throw in changes of time signature, whatever you will. But the meter provides the structure, the necessary base rhythm within which, and against which, all those other things can work to produce their desired effects. As another great Christian novelist, Flannery O’Connor, said, art transcends its limitations by remaining within them.

In the same way, God has given us this sevenfold rhythm of work and rest, of work and worship, to be the base rhythm of our lives. You don’t see too many songs written in seven, because that extra beat throws things out of the typical patterns, but I actually learned one this weekend. “What we have heard, what we have known . . .” It’s a setting of Psalm 78, and I don’t know if that’s why Greg Scheer wrote it in 7/8, but the time signature gives it a real sprightliness; the extra beat breaks it out of ordinary time into something else quite again. The same is true in our lives of the Sabbath, of the day of rest—it breaks us out of the ordinary time that our world and its economy would dictate, a straitjacket rhythm of work, work, work, work. That’s the driving beat of money and accumulation and more, more, more; it is, if you will, the meter of a life governed by nothing but material concerns and the desire for things. Think of it as 4/4 with never a change in tempo or stress and nothing but quarter notes in sight. But the Sabbath—the mere fact of this God-ordained day of rest throws us out of that meter; it fatally disrupts the profit-driven, consumer-driven, one-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins, all-about-me rhythms of this world, and shows us another way to live.

This is important, because as Genesis will show us in chapter 3, human sin disrupted the music for which God created us, and so the rhythms of our culture are now very much at odds with his will for us, and with the life for which he made us. As Dr. Begbie puts it, in calling us to focus on God and God alone, worship sets up a cross-rhythm in our lives—the rhythm of the cross, which runs counter to the pounding beat of our culture. God calls us to live very much across the grain of that culture, and we can’t just do that by main effort; our culture is too powerful. It’s like the big black SUV stopped next to us at the light with the bass cranked so high it’s shaking our car from the tires up. To overcome that overwhelming sound, we need consistent, steady exposure to the cross-rhythm of worship—to what Eugene Peterson, in his translation of the Bible, rendered as “the unforced rhythms of grace.” We cannot work our way into a truly Christlike life, because we learn to work from the world, and we learn to work in its way; but if we cannot force it, we can let God’s unforced rhythms of grace carry us along, as we learn to worship. We can focus our minds and hearts on him, opening our lives to his rhythm, and in so doing, allow him to transform us. Instead of trying to beat our own time, we can accept the time our great Conductor has given us, and let him direct us on.

(Genesis 1:26-2:9; Colossians 3:9-11)

Did you hear about the human exhibit at the London Zoo? Seriously, back in the summer of 2005, the London Zoo ran a four-day human exhibit in its Bear Mountain section—eight human volunteers in swimsuits and tacked-on fake fig leaves with a sign at the entrance reading, “Warning: Humans in their natural environment.” The sign was a bit of a stretch, I think—sitting on bare rock in a swimsuit playing board games and fiddling with hula hoops, eating catered meals and drinking Starbucks doesn’t really qualify as “natural”—but what really bothered me about the whole thing was the message the zoo was trying very hard to send: Humans are animals just like any other animal—only worse. The zoo released a statement describing humanity as a “plague species,” and a member of their PR staff explained the exhibit this way: “Seeing people in a different environment, among other animals . . . teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate.” Note that he didn’t say “suggests,” as if that were one point of view people should consider, but “teaches”: as in, “We know this is true, and the public needs to learn this.”

For some who participated, the whole thing was nothing more than a lark, but others clearly volunteered because they agreed with the zoo’s agenda. One person in the exhibit, a 26-year-old chemist named Tom Mahoney, explained his participation this way: “A lot of people think humans are above other animals. When they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we’re not that special.” Again, notice that word “reminds”—the assumption is that this is something we ought to know but tend to forget. As I said last week, this is the scientific view of humanity: we are, as the zoologist Desmond Morris wrote some 40 years ago, just one more species of ape, distinguished only by our largely hairless bodies and our overinflated view of ourselves.

Of course, the whole thing was inherently ridiculous. Dr. Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary down in Louisville, put it well: “The humans on display at the London Zoo were not captured and placed there by apes or elephants. The signs identifying the various creatures were not produced by the inhabitants of the reptile house. The apes and other primates resident at the zoo may look upon the humans with curiosity, but they have no control over their own destinies—and unlike their hairless counterparts, they stay in the zoo overnight. . . . The undeniable reality is that the humans are buying the tickets, orchestrating the event, volunteering for the exhibit, and going home to sleep in their own beds.” Perhaps the most telling comment came from Tom Mahoney, who—as well as arguing that humans are nothing special—said, “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it.” I wonder if he ever realized that he and his fellow humans were the only residents of that zoo who could say that—not just about living in the zoo, but about anything.

Mahoney’s remark, it seems to me, underscores the fact that while many people will tell you humans are just animals, nothing more, they don’t really live like they believe it; indeed, I don’t think they could. At some level, unless we have been terribly abused, we all know we’re more than that, and indeed that we’re more than what we seem to be. We may bury that sense, but it’s still there, telling us that we’re more than mere animals, and that we need to behave accordingly—for after all, if we’re only animals, who can blame us if we go out and do whatever we feel like doing? But if we aren’t, if we alone in creation are made in the image of God—if there is this that makes us profoundly different from the animals—then clearly that comes with certain expectations and responsibilities, whether we want them or not.

So what does it mean for us that we are made in the image of God? As I said last week, this is religious language, as Israel’s neighbors would make images of their gods and goddesses—statues, idols—and set them up in their temples to worship them; but they also used this language of their kings. You see, theologically, they understood that their chief god, whichever one that might be, ruled their nation; but as a practical matter, clearly it was the king who ruled. Thus it must be that the king ruled the nation as the representative of the god, and so they spoke of the king being the image of their god—the god’s physical representation who ruled on his behalf.

Now, you can see in this a real elitism—only the most powerful and important person in the nation was worthy of this label; everyone else was less important, second-class. Their gods and goddesses would smugly accept their worship, but disdained to identify themselves with such insignificant creatures. Out of this came the mindset that some human lives were more important than others, which as a practical matter meant that your life was only important to the degree that you were of use to the king. From that sort of perspective, our modern notions of equality and human rights would have seemed like ridiculous drivel; if the king is the image of the god and you aren’t, obviously the king is greater and you are lesser, and you don’t have rights, you’re just allowed to do whatever the king wants you to do.

That was pretty much the way ordinary people were seen by those who ruled the nations around Israel—they existed to serve their rulers in whatever way those rulers might desire; which is why Genesis was such a radical text. Its insistence that all people are made in the image of God blew that elitism away and replaced it with a very, very different view of humanity—rooted in an equally different view of God. This was a God who identified himself not only with the important people, but with all people, declaring that he had created all people in his image; this was a God who had created humanity not to be his slaves, serving his comfort and doing his dirty work (which was why the Babylonians, for instance, believed their high god Marduk had created humanity), but in order that he might love us and we might love him, as we saw last week.

There’s an important lesson in this: no human life is worth less than another. That might seem too obvious to need saying, but in fact it needs frequent repetition; the idea that some lives are worth less than others is one which keeps cropping up all over the place. These days, we see it in, among other places, the euthanasia movement, and in some of the arguments made in favor of abortion. Princeton professor Peter Singer is the clearest example of this, arguing at every opportunity that some people’s lives are not worth living—and that their family members should be free to kill them if it seems preferable. Against this idea, in all its forms, stands Genesis (and indeed the whole of Scripture), which declares unequivocally that God has made all people in his image, and loves all whom he has made. It is not ours to regard anyone as less important, or less human, than anyone else, no matter what excuses we might offer; whenever we look at another human being, regardless of any other considerations, we see the image of God in them, and we must treat them accordingly, without exception.

Given, then, that this applies to all of us equally, what does it say about us as human beings that we are made in the image of God? This is a question which has been answered in many different ways over the centuries, and there’s probably truth in most of those answers—but most of them don’t come from the biblical text. To understand the idea here, we need to go back to the fact that the nations around Israel used this phrase of their idols and pagan kings. If we do that, we can see that this lays the groundwork for what is commonly called the “cultural mandate”: the command to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28 to rule the earth and fill it with people.

Now, in saying that, we need to admit that this verse has been misused over the years to justify environmental irresponsibility. There are those who argue that since God gave us dominion over all the other creatures and told us to rule the earth and subdue it, we have the right to do whatever we want with whatever part of the planet we happen to own; and there are too many in the American church who have gone along with this kind of thinking. Now, this isn’t to get into all the legal issues of property rights and environmental law, but we really must remember two things here. First, this command was given to sinless people—it cannot be used to justify sinful actions. Second, when God says, “Rule the earth, subdue it,” and so on, he gets to define what that means and how it’s appropriate to carry out his command. Remember the basic message of these two chapters: God made the world, and as such he’s the Lord of everything that is; that means he gets to make the rules, not us.

As such, Genesis 1:28 doesn’t mean that God created us to rule the world as we see fit, or that we have the right to do whatever we want with it; rather, it means that he created us to govern it under his authority, as his deputies. The world doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to him; it isn’t our property to exploit, it’s our responsibility to care for according to his will. Creation is his temple, and we are its caretakers and stewards. As such, the dominion over the earth which God gave us—and which we still have; he didn’t take it back once our first ancestors fell into sin—isn’t a privilege, it’s a duty. Yes, it entitles us to draw support from the earth and its plants and animals, for those who labor deserve a fair share of the harvest; but the key is that we work for the good of all creation, including our fellow human beings.

And if we don’t? If we use God’s creation selfishly, abusing it for our own personal gain? Then rest assured, we will be held accountable. Thomas Jefferson, musing on the evil institution of American slavery, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever”; and he trembled with good reason. As Paul writes in Galatians 6:7, “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.” We will be held accountable by God for what we have done with the world he has given us—for the pollution in our air and water, and for the pollution in our culture. We have abused the earth and we have abused our fellow human beings, and the one is a sin as surely as the other. Our call and our responsibility is to take care of our world—including its people—for the God who made us all, and it is not a task to be taken lightly.

Understanding this is essential to free us from idea that the world exists simply for us to use, which reduces mountains and trees to raw materials and people to assets and resources. God didn’t create us to be resources or assets for someone else’s benefit, and he didn’t create the mountains and trees we see out our windows merely to be raw materials. We may use the trees for lumber, and we may draw on other people’s gifts to do things which need to be done, but we must always remember that that’s not all they’re for. Even as we cut the trees, we need to care for the forest, and the land on which it grows; and even as we take advantage of other people’s gifts to accomplish our purposes, we need to be careful that we aren’t taking advantage of other people. The justice of God demands no less.

This, then, is what it means that we are made in the image of God: it means an important responsibility for us, to care for the natural world and for the people around us, and to recognize the image of God in every person we meet and treat them accordingly. It means that we as human beings were created to be God’s representatives on this earth, the agents of his rule, and that those of us who recognize that fact are responsible to live that out in whatever ways we can. And it means that there should be great joy in doing so, because living in that way brings us into harmony with the purpose for which we were made, and for which this world was made, and so it opens us up to the joy of God’s creation. When we live selfishly, thinking only how we can use the world around us for our own purposes, we close our hearts to that joy; but when we live as God created us to live, we open our hearts, and our eyes and ears, and that joy becomes our own.