“No way!”
“Yah-way!”

I found it surprisingly beautiful and for more interesting than what I’m used to seeing in Sunday School curricula. Way to go, Lutherans.

If you’re podcast savvy, the XML feed is here: http://www.isaaceverett.com/audio/emergentpsalterpodcast/podcast.xml

If you want to to listen to it on iTunes: click here: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=322056809

If you’d rather just download it, the link is here: http://www.isaaceverett.com/audio/epp089.mp3

If you want to stream it from the site, click the big gray button below.
[audio:epp089.mp3]

• Gather for dinner & social time 7pm @ Floridita’s, 3219 Broadway (1 train to 125th, cross 125th St, Floridita’s is at end of block)
• Due to Mr. Snodgrass’s academic schedule, the Bible-study will begin at 8:15

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell.

Scholarly studies have demonstrated that Genesis 1 is not the oldest creation narrative in the Bible. At least half a century before the Torah took its final shape, the book of Proverbs showed our familiar patriarch assembling the Earth – with the help of a feminine partner. This Thursday’s Bible Study will focus on the Bible’s first creation story (Proverbs 8:22-36), with an eye toward how it shaped the Genesis creation, the creation in John 1, and our understandings of the patriarchal “way of the world.”

TRICK OR TREAT – TWO CHANCES to participate in EXORCISMS & INVOCATIONS ritual

• Bowie is working on a Halloween Ritual for Wed October 31st exploring the power of language to impact reality! More info to follow.
• SATURDAY, Oct 27th from 11am-1pm, she’ll be doing this ritual with City Lights, another emerging church community in NYC, and would LOVE to have a couple other Transmissioners come along! If you’re available on Saturday and would like to help out with the planning for our Halloween ritual, please email bowiesnodgrass@gmail.com. Thanks!

Saturday, November 3rd
9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m
Cathedral House, 1047 Amsterdam Ave

Itinerary

9:30-10:00 Registration and Breakfast

10:00-10:15 Opening by Reverend Sirota

10:15-11:45 Isabelle Silverman, Environmental Defense: “The Science of Global Warming”

11:45-12:45 Lunch

12:45-1:00 Spiritual Meditation with Reverend Sirota

1:00-1:45 Elena Lomicky, Green Living Consultant: “Things We Can Do at Home to Reduce Our Carbon Footprint”

2:00-2:45 Bob Muldoon, Sierra Club: “Environmental Advocacy at the Community and National Level”

3:00-3:45 Frank Morris, Ecological Advisors: “The Spiritual and Economic Case for Environmental Investing”

4:00-4:30 Closing Service

People of all faiths are warmly welcomed to attend. We request a $12 donation.  Serving wonderful organic, vegetarian fare. RSVP required. Please contact education@saintsaviour.org

Featuring Genesis 2:24 and 3:24, JPS trans

ah my

yes

the fine art

of creation

let it be so bountiful!

into dry dust, breathe breath

god made the food garden

     a river with four branches

     and declared that from

hence, a man leaves his father

and mother and clings to his wife

so that they become one flesh

the mother of all the living

listened for good and evil

     ate apple after serpent

     and caused the couple

to be expelled outside Eden where

the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning

sword wait to guard the way to the tree of life

Since the park is pretty far away from a kitchen, feel free to bring food to contribute to the picnic. Also, if you like, please bring a prop to play with (umbrellas are encouraged).

See you then!
isaac

“then God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

Many of you probably know this already, but the Hebrew word which is usually translated as “soul”, i.e. nephesh, doesn’t really mean that at all. Biblical Hebrew, in fact, doesn’t even have a word for “soul.” Yep, you heard me right – all of those beloved passages like “Bless the Lord, oh my soul,” and “You shall love the Lord with all your strength, all your mind, and all your soul” don’t actually mean what you thought they mean.

Take this passage from Genesis, for example. When God breathes the breath of life into Adam, he becomes a “living being,” a nephesh chayah. Some people would interpret this to mean that God put a soul into the clay, but that word is also used for all the animals in creation, as in Genesis 1:24, “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living nephesh: cattle, creeping things, and wild beasts of every kind.” So either we make like the Hindus and believe that every dog, cat, and tapeworm has a soul or we are forced to call into question the central basic soul/body dichotomy which is so prevalent in our culture.

Genesis 2 gets it right; we are earthly creatures, physical creatures, and I mean “creature” in the literal sense of “that which has been created.” As I mentioned earlier, the word used for humanity in this passage, adam, is a variation on the word for soil, adamah. This word used to be translated as “man” or “mankind” and was later translated as “humanity,” but the most literal translation would be something more like “earth creatures.” As much as I love Origen, there’s no evidence here for the preexistence of souls.

Why does this matter? Ever since Descartes (or some might say, Aristotle), we’ve been taught to view pursuits of the mind and of the soul as higher than pursuits of the body. We’re taught that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, that sexuality is purely procreative and not spiritual, that only shallow people care about their appearances, and that people who work with their bodies should earn less than those who work with their minds.

And yet Genesis seems to tell us that we are our bodies. Suddenly the fact the average American spends 90% of his or her time indoors seems not only unnatural, but sinful. Suddenly obesity, alcoholism, and violence are not only physical problems, they are spiritual problems. Suddenly, taking care of our sisters and brothers with physical disabilities is a spiritual ministry.

Ultimately, it’s important to realize that divisions like “mind, body, and spirit” are completely artificial. All of those things make up who we are: our nephesh.

So at tomorrow’s Transmission, we’ll be celebrating creation and exegeting Genesis through movement, blessing the Lord with our entire integrated beings. Come join us in Sheep Meadow, 7pm.

At one point in his travels, he visited the newly opened Creation Museum. I’m including his reflections:

I told my friend Ivan – a good Catholic – that I was considering visiting a creationist museum and he let out a loud groan. “Those people give Christianity a bad name.”

I understand what he’s saying. It’s the way many Jews feel when we see a billboard announcing Rabbi Menachem Schneerson as the Messiah. Or the way many gay men feel when they see a Rip Taylor tossing a handful of confetti. It’s kind of embarrassing. Like Ivan, I’ve always taken evolution to be a cold, hard truth. As indisputable as the fact that the sun is hot or that Charles Darwin married his first cousin (the latter of which I learned in the encyclopedia and can’t get out of my head).

But creationism is Biblical literalism at its purist, so I need to check it out. I researched various creationist hotspots – both Jewish and Christian – and found a handful of possibilities. But nothing came close to Answers in Genesis. This is the $25 million, soon-to-open Kentucky-based museum – the Louvre for those who believe God made Adam less than 6000 years go from dust – started by an Australian evangelical named Ken Ham.

AiG is still under contstruction, which is fine by me. There’s something appropriate about seeing the creation of a creationist museum. So I flew down to Cincinnati, a few miles from the site.

A half hour later, I pull up to the museum – a low building with thick yellow columns perched on a gentle Kentucky hill. In the parking lot, I spot a bumper sticker of a Jesus fish gobbling up a Darwin fish.

I’m greeted by the publicist Mark Looy, a gray-haired man with a gentle, schoolteacher voice who guides me to a door that lets us into the lobby. It is, in a word, awesome.

The place is still deep in construction. Hard hats everywhere, the smell of sawdust, the whine of drills. But even in its unfished state, you can tell this is going to send the media into a Michael-Jackson-rial-like frenzy.

The first thing I see is a life-sized diorama of an Edenic scene. There’s a waterfall, a stream, and weeping-willow trees. An animatronic caramel-skinned cavegirl giggles and cocks her head to look straight at me, which is odd and impressive and disturbing all at once. She’s playing awfully close to a fierce-looking, razor-toothed dinosaur. Don’t worry, Mark tells me. In the beginning, humans and dinosaurs lived together in harmony. The scary incisors are for coconuts and fruit, just like pandas’ teeth.

When AiG opens, they expect thousands of visitors. And they’ll probably get them – polls say that as many as 50% of Americans believe in creationism. Not intelligent design. We’re talking strict, the-earth-is-less-than 10,000 years old creationism. (The creationists I met scoffed at Intelligent Design, which says the world was designed by a superior being, but not necessarily in seven literal days. The creationists think of it as some sort of nebulous theological mumbo jumbo).

Mark introduces me to Ken, the founder of AiG. Ken is wiry and energetic 56-year-old with a red Van Dykish beard. He quizzes me about my last book, the one about reading the encyclopedia, and I end up telling him about my ill-fated appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I was stumped by the question “What is an erythrocyte?”

“It’s a red blood cell,” says Ken.

He’s right. I’m thrown off-guard. A creationist who trumps me in science knowledge – that’s unexpected and unsettling.

Ken was born to religious parents in Queensland, Australia, and still has a thick Aussie accent despite his 20 years in America. We start walking through the rooms. “The guy who designed the museum also designed the Jaws exhibit at the Universal theme park,” Ken says. And it shows. The place is professional. We stroll past more than a dozen robotic dinosaurs. A statue of Eve with her flowing hair placed conveniently over her pert breasts. A partly-built ark. A room with a circular slope like the Guggenheim, a subtle reminder of man’s fall from Paradise. A theater with sprinklers to simulate the flood. A huge crocodile (a prop from the movie Crocodile Dundee). The future home of a talking Virgin Mary robot. A medieval castle-themed bookstore. Medieval? Because the dragons of medieval times were actually still-living dinosaurs.

As we step among the animatronic Roman Centurian and the currently-headless giraffe, I ask Ken the questions he’s been asked 1000 times.

If Adam and Eve gave birth to two boys Cain and Abel, how did Cain and Abel have kids?

“That’s an easy one. Adam and Eve didn’t just have Cain and Abel. It says in Genesis 5:4 that Adam had ‘other sons and daughters.’”

When it says ‘day,’ does that mean a literal 24-hour day?

“Yes. You’ve got to back to the original word in Hebrew, which is ‘yom.’ It’s the same word that’s used for a 24-hour day. If you don’t take that to mean ‘day,’ it’s a slippery slope.”

What about scientific dating that says the world is millions of years old?

“Ninety percent of age-dating methods are faulty.”

Which version to you use?

“Usually the King James. But you have to be careful with translations.”

Ken explains that, for instance, many versions say “the rabbit chews its cut” (Leviticus 11:6). “The skeptics say the rabbit doesn’t chew its cut. But you look at the original language, it says ‘the rabbit re-eats its food.’ And look at what a rabbit does. It excretes rabbit pellets and then eats the pellets. The Bible is correct.”

We walk into a room with a brick wall covered with menacing-looking graffiti. This room is devoted to modern ills, among them drugs and racism. “There is only one race, the human race,” says Ken.

The creationists are surprisingly liberal on race matters. Racial intermarriage is considered just fine. In fact, they think Darwin’s theory can lead to racism because minorities are sometimes seen as evolutionary lowers forms of homo sapiens. They are also progressive on Darfur. On other topics – including abortion and gay marriage – they are down-the-line conservatives.

We pass a dinosaur with a saddle on it. This display was mocked by my own magazine – Esquire – which called it a dressage dinosaur because of the English saddle. Ken downplays it. “It’s just a novelty. Just something for the kids.” He ushers me through. “This way, AJ.” (Thats one thing I notice: They say “AJ” here a lot. It seems common among certain types of religious people to say your name all the time. It makes me think of God’s first words to Moses, which were “Moses! Moses!”, but it’s probably unrelated).

Speaking of dinosaurs, if they really were on the ark, how did Noah squeeze them all in?

“He put them in when they were younger and smaller. The equivalent of teenagers.”

I later bought a paperback at the AiG bookstore called Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study, which spends 300 pages outlining the brilliant engineering that made the boat possible. There are chapters on the ventilation system, on-board exercise for the animals and the myth of explosive manure gases.

The book is beautifully argued – and I don’t believe a syllable of it. Which I know is counter to my quest. I had told Mark I was coming in with an open mind, but while down here, I realize my mind won’t open that far. I can understand being open to the existence of God and the beauty of rituals and the benefits of prayer. but the existence of a juvenile brontosaurus on the ark? And an earth that’s barely older than Paul Newman? I have to go with 99 percent of scientists on this one.

Of course, the creationists cite plenty of scientific evidence of their own. Or more precisely, they interpret the same evidence as being proof of creation. Mark told me about a T-Rex bone in Montana that broke open and had blood vessels. No way that could be millions of years old.

The article Esquire ran was called “Greetings from Idiot America” and it was very funny. But I have to disagree with the headline. The AiG folks aren’t idiots. And despite a British news show that scored its segment with Deliverance-style banjo music, they aren’t hillbillies. Everyone I met had a full set of well-orthodontured teeth and blinked at regular intervals. I can’t prove it, but I’d wager there’s no difference in the average IQ of creationists and evolutionists.

The thing is, their faith in the literal Bible is so strong, they will squeeze and distort all data to fit the Genesis account. In fact, you have to be quite sharp to be a leading creationist. The mental gymnastics can be astonishing.

Consider AiG’s resident astrophysicist, Jason Lisle. Mark introduced me to him proudly. “A real, live PhD who believes in creationism. Here he is, in 3-D.”

Jason has meticulously parted hair, looks a bit like Paul Rubens, and is sweet in an unforced way. He tells me it wasn’t easy being a creationist PhD student. He had to stay closeted about his beliefs and write for the AiG magazine under a pseudonym.

Now here’s the interesting part: like mainstream scientists, he thinks the universe is billions of light years big. But if it’s that big, and only 6000 years old, the light rays from distant stars wouldn’t have time to travel to earth. Shouldn’t the night sky be black?

“That’s a tough one,” he says. “But it’s not a killer.” There are several possibilities.

1. The speed of light may not have always been 186,000 miles per second. Perhaps it was faster when the universe began.

2. The time zone analogy. “You can leave Kentucky and arrive at Ohio at 4pm. In the same way, there may be something to continuous time zones in space.”

3. Something called gravitational time dilation. I didn’t quite understand it, but it had to do with our galaxy having a special place in the universe.

After Jason the astrophysicist, I’m brought across the hall to meet another creationist named Carl Kerby. Carl is a big guy – turns out his dad was a pro wrestler. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and gives off a casual, feet-on-the-desk vibe. His specialty: He is creationist museum’s resident expert on pop culture. Carl monitors movies and TV shows for subtle, or not so-subtle, pro-evolution content so that he can alert fellow creationists to the danger.

On his lift: Finding Nemo (namely, the line “Give it up old man, you can’t fight evolution, I was built for speed.”). And Gilligan’s Island (they use the word ‘prehistoric’ twice in one episode; “There’s no such thing as prehistoric,” Carl says). Other violators include Bugs Bunny, Lilo & Stitch, Bob the Builder and The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

“It used to be my favorite move,” he says of Limpet. “And then I played it for my family, and 13 minutes in, there was a nerdy science guy who pulls down a chart and starts talking about how fish were our ancestors. I had to stop the movie and talk to my family and explain.”

Of course, when it comes to secular entertainment, creationism’s enemy number one is Inherit the Wind, about the famous Scopes Monkey trial. It debuted as a play in 1955, and was later turned into a Spencer Tracy movie. And Carl – along with all his colleagues – insists that it’s wildly unfair to Christians.

When I got hom, I rented the movie and compared it to the actual court transcripts. And I have to say… the movie is wildly unfair to Christians. Or at least to this strain of Christianity.

William Jennings Bryan – a deeply religious three-time Democratic presidential nominee who was the prosecuting attorney for the anti-evolution folks – was turned into a total buffoon named Matthew Harrison Brady, played by Frederic March. Brady is a pot-bellied glutton. In one scene, he’s gorging on fried chicken out of a basket… in the courtroom.

The film recreates the famous showdown over the Bible between Bryan and the brilliant Chicago Lawyer Clarence Darrow. It’s a good scene. But if you read the court transcript, it was actually a more interesting and subtle confrontation.

For instance, here’s the dialogue from the movie:

Darrow: Do you believe every word of the Bible is true?

Bryan: Yes. Every word is literally true.

And here’s the corresponding real exchange:

Darrow: Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?

Bryan: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively; for instance, “Ye are the salt of the earth.” I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God’s people.”

Like creationists today, he admits there is some figurative language in the Bible, even if most of it should be taken as literally true.

And he had wit: “I believe [the Bible] was inspired by the Almighty, and He may have used language that could be understood at that time, instead of using language that could not be understood until Darrow was born. [laughter and applause].”

Not bad, you know?

As I said, I still believe in evolution. There’s nothing that will change that, even if they found Noah’s Year-At-a-Glance calendar on a pristinely preserved ark. And yes, I know there’s artistic license and all that. But it does seem odd to me that this movie – which is supposed to be a champion for the truth – distorted the truth so much. Why do that? Especially when you have reality on your side.

I spend my last half hour at AiG in the book shop. I flip through dinosaur books for kids, a Far Side-like cartoon book about the Fallen World, biology books, and theology books. I spend several minutes skimming an astronomy book called Dismantling the Big Bang, whcih aims to expose the philosophical weaknesses of said theory.

It makes me think of AiG’s resident astronomer Jason. Before I left, he wanted to make clear that he’s not a geocentrist – he doesn’t believe the earth is the center of the universe. “Does ayone anymore?” I asked. He said, yes, there’s a group called Biblical astronomers – they believe the earth is stationary because the Bible says the earth “shall never be moved.” (Psalm 93:1). Jason considers them an embarassment.

That was something I hadn’t expected: Moderate creationists who view other creationists as too extreme. But it will turn out to be one of this year’s big lessons: Moderation is a relative term.

Turning to the first chapter of Genesis, we find a very different portrayal of creation and, correspondingly, a very different portrait of God. Instead of a craftsman God, shaping clay like a potter, we have a royal God, summoning the world into existence by divine decree. Instead of playful, creative improvisation we are given a majestic sense of divine order.

Everything about this passage speaks of order. The passage is very stylized with regular repetitions – “God said… let there be… and it was so… and God made… and God saw that it was good… and it was evening and morning.” Furthermore, nothing is created at random; the world is created according to a repetitive scheme of sky, sea, land:

1) light (sky)
2) seperation of waters (sea)
3) dry land and vegetation (land)

-and-

4) stars, sun, and moon (sky)
5) fish and birds (sea)
6) animals and humanity (land)

It’s very interesting that this story doesn’t suggest that the world was created out of nothing, rather we are giving a glimpse of God drawing the world out of primoridal chaos. Before there is light, before God utters a single proclamation, the earth is formless and darkness covers the face of the deep. Rabbinic midrash makes a point of the fact that Genesis starts with the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, not the first, suggesting that we are not entering the story at the very beginning. We just don’t know what happened before God created light and, perhaps, it isn’t very important to know. What is important, however, is that this present reality is not a random occurance.

It’s important to pay attention to the geography of these stories. Genesis 2 leaves no doubt as to the location of this narrative; Eden’s location is tied into the Tigris, the Euphrates, Assyria, and several other locations. The majority of the action takes place in a garden, and God condescends to talk to Adam about individual trees.

Genesis 1, however, is much more cosmic in scale. Scholars believe that this story was written several hundred years after Genesis 2, when the Israelites were living in forced exile in Babylon. While the early Israelites viewed God as a local, tribal diety who was to be worshiped in the temple of Jerusalem, the later exiled Israelites had no temple and no land of their own, and so they envisioned God on a grander scale. They needed God to be bigger than their Babylonian oppressors. While Genesis 2 says “God made everything around us and placed us here within it,” Genesis 1 says “God is God no matter where you go or who rules over you.” Very different emphases.

So what does a modern person of faith do with the various contradictions between these creation accounts? I claim that such a reconciliation is not necessary. These two stories were written in different contexts and they have different theological agendas. If these stories are read literally, then the mutual contradictions demand explanation. If, however, they are read theologically, these same contradictions create greater depth of meaning. Together, they show us a God who is both majestic and playful, both cosmic and personal, both immanent and transcendant.