Playing in the Dust: A pilgrimage with the creation stories

Playing in the Dust

A Pilgrimage with the Creation Stories

David Runcorn

© David Runcorn 2024

Published in 2024 by Canterbury Press

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Unless otherwise stated in the text, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked ‘NIV’ are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The ‘NIV’ and ‘New International Version’ are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

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ISBN: 978-1-78622-629-7

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‘In the Scriptures we are in our Father’s house

where the children are permitted to play.’

Raymond Brown

‘Yahweh created me at the beginning of his work

… when he laid the foundations of the Earth.

Then I was with him as the apple of his eye

and I was daily his joy;

constantly playing before his face,

playing in his inhabited world,

and rejoicing in humankind.’

From Proverbs 8.22–31

‘In the beginning was the conversation.’

John 1.1 Erasmus

to Jackie

for all beginning now

Contents

Let Me Tell You a Story – some introductions

1. Beginning Now – creating then and now

2. God – the God who makes things

3. Tohu wa Bohu – out of the void

4. ‘Let There Be’ – the sound of God’s voice

5. Where the Wild Things Are – here there be monsters

6. All Good – the goodness of God

7. The First Bible – creation as revelation

8. Looking Like God – being made in God’s image

9. Taking Care – ecology, dominion and subduing the earth

10. Sabbath Play – creation complete in God

11. The God Who Tells Stories – reading the Bible

12. One Creation – Two Stories – the Bible as conversation

13. The Dust Creature – the first human

14. The Garden – the making of Paradise

15. The Two Trees – meaning and purpose

16. Not Good to be Alone – the creation of the woman

17. Flesh of my Flesh – human relationships

18. Called by Names – the changing names of God and the humans

19. Talking to a Snake – desire and temptation

20. The Fall in Four Acts – descending into sin

21. Adam and Eve’s DNA – Adam, Eve and the evolutionary story

22. In the Cool of the Evening – on freedom and obedience

23. Eve – mother of all life

24. Adam’s Sin and Ours – ‘as in Adam all die’

25. Because You Have Done This … – judgement and exile

26. What’s Love Got to Do With It? – evolution and creation

27. The Wound of Becoming – what this demands of us

28. The Cost of Creating – what this demands of God

29. The Winter is Over – the garden in the Song of Songs

30. The World is a Wedding – creation in John 1

31. Resurrection and Recreation – Easter and beyond

32. O Happy Fault! – sin, the cross and the new creation

Praying in the Dust

Sources and Further Reading

Acknowledgements

The Bible Texts

About the book cover

In religious art it is rare to find depictions of Adam and Eve that are not preoccupied with temptation, sin or their anguished eviction from the garden of Eden. The cover chosen for this book is one exception. It is a painting by the Finnish artist Hugo Simberg (d. 1917). He called it Paratiisi, – Paradise.

Some artists, like some storytellers, make their meaning clear. Others let the picture speak and so leave spaces for personal interpretation. Paratiisi is more of the latter as, I think, are the creation stories.

The scene Simberg has painted has both simplicity and depth, like the story it is exploring. Creation has a new and unfinished feel. In the background, the trees are in harvest mode, but the foreground is bare and unadorned.

In the centre of the picture is a companionable triangulation of God, Eve and Adam. On the ground before them, a bead game is laid out, ready to play. Eve is leaning forward. Her right hand is reaching into the dust. She is looking at Adam with eager intent. In another Bible context this might be the lively presence of divine wisdom, personified through the wholly positive image of a woman. Meanwhile, God is also gazing upon Adam, with steady, non-anxious curiosity.

The moment is poised.

We are waiting for something to happen.

Where is Adam in all this? His eyes are shut, his head lifted. Is he concentrating or just unconscious? Here is humanity, yet to awaken − to itself, to life, to companionship, and to God.

We are surely at that moment in the picture.

All is ready.

My hope is that the reflections that follow capture the same spirit of beginning, of play, awakening, and of endless possibility.

Let Me Tell You a Story

Some introductions

Sitting opposite me on the train, a young boy was curled up in his seat, almost hidden behind the large book he was gripping hard with his small hands. It was called Megamonster. He was oblivious to all around him and so captivated by what he was reading that he was physically leaning into the book as if to get nearer the action.

Our lives begin with stories. We are born into them. From our earliest moments we are surrounded by them. Bedtime stories are one of my earliest memories as a child. Bathed, cuddled up, warm and content at the end of the day, they were part of love, life and home and a doorway into worlds I had yet to discover. The invitation to make believe, to playfully explore with unbounded imagination is what gives us the framework for our journeys into life and for acquiring the essential life skills for managing monsters. The Bible calls this wisdom. Repetition was part of the fun. ‘Read it again!’ But I was often asleep before the end. Years later, I watched those stories weave their magic on my children too.

That the beginning of the Bible finds God telling us stories is significant. In biblical and theological studies there has been a rediscovery of story and a renewed focus on the Bible as literature. Close textual analysis is still important. But the realization has slowly dawned that if the ancient scribes have gone to the trouble of carefully crafting those texts and words into stories it is not really our task to take them apart and ‘explain’ them.

I was not expecting to write this book. It emerged out of a period of my life when I was struggling with exhaustion. Not surprisingly, faith too had become a wilderness. The familiar texts, prayers and disciplines of a lifetime now felt empty of meaning. You may have known such times? I continued to practise and explore faith as best I knew how – particularly through the preaching, writing, talks, Bible studies and retreat reflections that have always been my ministry. On the occasions when the subject was mine to choose, I invariably turned to the creation stories. Something always seemed to be going on there, stirring in the dark. So, when I was invited to speak at a holiday week at Scargill House¹ I opted again for the opening chapters of the Bible. As I spoke, I found myself energized in new ways by those familiar words and images. It felt as if faith was being recreated. The experience seemed to be mutual. Each morning, after offering a Bible reflection, I invited any who wished to talk further to return after the coffee break. I expected a few to come, for half an hour or so. Everyone came. Every day. They became exhilarating times of communal Bible reading, theological exploration, honest questioning, and personal storytelling that only stopped when it was time for lunch. This book is my continued conversation out of that journey shared and the themes that surfaced over those days. So wherever life and faith finds you as you read this, please hear the invitation to join in.

This book takes the form of short reflections that travel alongside, and circle around, the Bible stories, pausing occasionally to take time with particular themes or insights. I have tried to sit close to the storyteller. I am hearing-impaired so I am used to having to listen carefully and to keep checking. The stories had a way of continually surprising me. I thought I knew them so well. Someone wisely observed that you can never read them too slowly. I have imagined being in conversation with the storyteller. ‘What do you mean?’ … ‘I don’t understand’ … ‘How does that make sense?’ All the time I have tried to trust where those stories might lead and what it might mean to be building faith upon them. We do not listen well when we are fearful or anxious, and in the many challenges the church is presently facing there is a great deal of both.

Each chapter is therefore incomplete in a sense. Perhaps we are always closer to the beginning of the conversation than the end. Short as they are, these stories of our creation prove to be inexhaustible and the discussion can, and does, continue in a variety of directions.

We never read the Bible in a vacuum. We come to it laden with our own questions, experiences, concerns and needs. We also come with blind spots and assumptions that have been shaping our understanding without being aware of it. The creation stories in the Bible are burdened more than most with all these. The first task is to try to be as aware as we can of what we bring, and then to lay them down. Not because they do not matter, or are unwelcome but because, if the text is to guide us, we must first let it speak on its own terms, in its own way, with its own twists and turns and quirky strangeness. That is the way stories work, especially when