Genesis 1:20-2:4a

This past weekend, I took advantage of the winter storm and went snowshoeing for the first time in my life. The day was clear, and the blanketing of snow transformed the woods into vast expanse of white interrupted only by naked trees, meandering creeks, and animal prints.

And two parallel tracks, left by a cross-country skier, cutting through the woods expertly and daringly along paths I would never have thought to take on my own. But I did take them, obliterating the delicate imprint of skis with my own large and cumbersome tracks.

The great account of humanity’s creation by God in the book of Genesis notes that we were made in God’s “image and likeness” (cf. Gen 1:26, 27) These two words, image and likeness, have been subject to all kinds of interpretation, but for me the most compelling is understanding them in terms of pattern and imagination. That humanity was created with a God-shaped pattern that allows us to imagine God, to relate to God, rightly. The consequence of sin and all the ways that we lead ourselves away, or are led away from God, is to erode that pattern, or to impose on it patterns of our own creation. The imprint of snowshoes wiping away or marking over the ski tracks.

If in the creation account in Genesis we hear of humanity’s promise to bear the image of God, our Gospel lesson from Mark is a sobering reminder of what so often happens when we bring to bear our own limited humanity on the things of God. “Why do your disciples not live according to the traditions of the elders?” (Mk 7:5). Why do they eat with defiled hands? Why don’t they follow time-honored rules?

Jesus’s response draws their attention from human creations to God’s creation: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!” (Mk 7:9). His point is ethical, especially on the honoring of parents, but following the Genesis account this evening, I see it also as imaginative. If our human creations—our ways of doing things, of talking about things, of relating to things . . . our footprints in the snow—so elide God’s creations, so “void the word of God,” (Mk. 7:13) if they so distract us from the commandment of God, then how are we to imagine God rightly, to bear God’s image?

I’d like to suggest that we can start with ourselves, by recognizing in fact how limited, how impoverished our imaginations are now, compared to the greatness with which we were created: God has made us “but little lower than the angels” and has adorned us with “glory and honor” (Ps 8:6). Psalm 8 can be embarrassing to hear because its vision of humanity’s place in creation feels so much grander than we have any right to. How can we claim this great place when we see the smallness and pettiness that surround us and threaten to bury us? How embarrassing is it to hear that we are given mastery, or “dominion” in the language of Genesis (Gen 1:26, 28), knowing our depressing track record of authority and dominion—whether five hundred years ago or five days ago? It can feel embarrassing, because with everything we know about who we are, how could we possibly merit this grand vision?

But if this grandness embarrasses us, it also challenges us, challenges us to imagine humanity’s place in the context of God’s great creative vision, and not our own: “O LORD our Governor. . . . When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what is man that you should be mindful of him?” (Ps 8:1, 4-5). Who are we, that God should be mindful of us? And God is mindful of us. What does that say about us?

God sees us—sees you, sees me—as so much more than we may imagine ourselves to be. We worry and stress and fight and see and experience the worst in each other, and in ourselves, because we cannot imagine that our smallness and pettiness and limitations are not who God created us to be, but who we have created ourselves to be.

God has created us to be so much greater.

And though we may be satisfied to tromp through the woods in snowshoes, God has created us to ski.

Amen.