A video version can be found below if you scroll to the end of the text.

Genesis 1:1-5 In the beginning God created the sky and the earth. The earth was empty and had no form. Darkness covered the ocean, and God’s Spirit was moving over the water. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, so he divided the light from the darkness. God named the light “day” and the darkness “night.” Evening passed, and morning came. This was the first day.

Mark 1:10-11 Immediately, as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven open. The Holy Spirit came down on him like a dove, and a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love, and I am very pleased with you.”

God said, “Let there be light”
and there was light.
And God saw the light
and God saw that it was good.

So, curious minds want to know: who was the witness?
Who was there in the beginning
to say what God saw or what God did?
Who else saw the formless void
in the vast darkness
in order to confirm what the beginning was like?
On the other hand, maybe there was a witness,
or rather, two witnesses,
because they saw and reported two different things –
just like witnesses do.

The Book of Genesis begins
with two separate Creation stories:
the one we heard a piece from today, which is
the familiar “seven days of creation” story;
and the other one that involves Adam and Eve.
Lest you think they are the same story
they actually have two versions of the beginning.

Two distinct, different stories.
The editors of Genesis must not have been able to agree
on which was the right one,
and each represented a different theological tradition
in the history of Israel,
so they did what committees do – included them both.

But actually, that is misleading.
They did not work as a committee.

Our best guess is that the Book of Genesis
was compiled over several centuries
and represents a snowball rolling down the hill of history
gathering stories
and momentum along the way.

When we open up the Bible
Genesis is the first chapter we see,
and so naturally we imagine –
and were probably taught –
that Genesis was the first book written.
Not true.
Genesis does contain very ancient, pre-Hebrew myths
borrowed from early Mesopotamian culture.
But it does not get formed into a collection
and edited together in any coherent fashion
for five or six hundred years after Moses.
You see, Moses and Exodus are the actual beginning
of the Biblical story.

Genesis probably came into existence
in its present form
while Israel was in exile
in the Babylonian captivity
and used as a way to remind the dislocated Israelites
who they were
and whose they were.
And by the way, that is what stories do –
and what theology is meant to do:
remind us of who we are
and whose we are.

But I digress badly.

God said, “Let there be light”
and there was light.

And God saw the light
and God saw that it was good.

Don’t get me wrong,
I love the first chapter of Genesis
and this imaginative notion of how it all began –
it’s not even that far-fetched
from a science-oriented reconstruction.
Indeed, we think we know
from a geological reference point
that it did begin with water covering the formless void
and wind sweeping across it.
But of course, that is only how biological life began
not the planet itself
and not the Cosmos.
So even Genesis 1 leaves a big black hole
to the imagination.

My long, laborious point
is that the first chapter of the Book of Genesis
is an imaginative theological narrative
describing what the storyteller thinks
is the relationship between God and Creation.
It is not science.
It is not history.
It is not fact.
It is a story, a theological story,
aimed at delivering a theological point of view.

We do not have to agree with it
to be faithful people.
We do not have to accept its version of Creation
to be faithful people.

We do not have to regard it in any way
as authoritative
or authentic
or meaningful
to be faithful people.

Like the entire Bible, it is commentary.

It is not the first and last word
from the mouth of God to your ear or mine.
Some people believe that –
just like some people still believe the Earth is flat
or that Climate Change is not real.
But holding such beliefs is not the criteria
for Christian faith.

Now having said that,
I should also be explicit that you are welcome
to hold that point view
and also be vigorously part of this community.
However, you and I are not welcome
to hold everyone else to our points of view.

See how that works?
We do not have an answer book here.
We do not have an answer-all-the-questions doctrine here.
We do not have THE answer here.

Rather, we have lots of answers
and lots of points of view
and lots of speculation
and lots of ideas.
But in this community,
and in our tradition,
we have no one,
no single authority
empowered to declare the truth.
We do not even have one authoritative doctrine
because we are not a doctrinal church.
We do not have a pope.
We do not have a college of cardinals.
We do not have an ecclesiastical council
that determines truth or fact or the one-and-only theology.
We got noth’n…
except a long tradition of being on pilgrimage together
in community,
knowing that the light is good
and struggling to see it.

Now, everything I just said about Genesis
is also true about the Gospel of Mark,
another beginning we heard about today.

Who was there at the moment of baptism
to see the heavens torn apart
and to witness the Spirit descending like a dove
and to hear the voice from above
coo into Jesus’ ear?

The earliest Gospel storyteller we have is Mark,
and it is quite clear
that it was only Jesus who saw the heavens torn apart
and only Jesus who saw the Spirit descending like a dove
and only Jesus who heard the voice from heaven.

According to Mark,
it was a personal religious experience
not a sporting event.

Just as the Book of Genesis has more than one
story about the beginning,
the gospels do too.
The next storytellers, Matthew and Luke,
offer their theological points of view
which are somewhat different from Mark.

Luke insists the Spirit
came down in “bodily” form,
making obvious that anyone present could have seen it.
And Matthew insists
that the voice from heaven declares “this is my son,”
and so makes clear that it was addressed to witnesses
rather than only to Jesus.

The other Gospel storyteller, John,
writing as much as a generation after Matthew and Luke,
doesn’t even have Jesus being baptized.

That is probably because
John decided that Jesus being baptized by John
would not fit well
with the theological story he was telling.
I mean, think about it.
If you are John, and Jesus is the Word,
and was with God in the beginning – before Genesis –
you do not want Jesus
going down to the riverside
to be baptized for the forgiveness of his sins.
See what I mean?
For Mark, Jesus was fully human
and that means sinful in some way.
But for John, Jesus is divine
and necessarily sinless.
I do not even like the concept of sin
but let’s put that aside for the moment.
I prefer Mark’s version because it describes
a private religious experience
rather than a splashy public one.

I like it because what Jesus hears
is what every single one of us is dying to hear,
not only from God
but from those who are the closest thing to God for us:
mother, father, wife, husband, grandparent, soul-friend.
“You are my beloved,
and with you
I am so pleased.”

What is better in this whole wide world
than to be loved and affirmed
by the ones we most desire
to be loved and affirmed by?

So Mark’s story, the way he tells it,
is like that Genesis story
that affirms the light is from God
and God has declared it good.

The first chapter of the Gospel of Mark
is an imaginative theological narrative
that describes what the storyteller thinks
about the relationship of God and Jesus.
It is not science.
It is not history.
It is not fact.
It is story,
a theological story
aimed at delivering a theological point of view.

We do not have to agree with it
to be faithful people.
We do not have to accept its version of Jesus
to be faithful people.

We do not have to regard it in any way as authoritative
or authentic or meaningful
to be faithful people.

It is a theological story
delivering a point of view
about the relationship of Jesus and God.
Like the entire Bible, it is commentary.

Luke has a commentary too,
and it is different from Mark’s.
Matthew has a commentary too,
and it is different from Mark’s and Luke’s.
John has a commentary too,
and it is different from Mark’s and Luke’s and Matthew’s.

This is good news…and bad news.

Good news because we are free
to take Mark’s commentary and develop it with our own.
Bad news because we do not have a single,
definitive, factual, and final point of view.

So what do we do?

Here is one man’s opinion, mine.
Take it for what it is worth because I’m only a preacher.

We listen for voices.
We listen for the voice that speaks to us.
We allow the text to dance with our own life experience
and in the intimacy of that dance
whispers get heard.

We hear the whisper of a voice
we can’t be sure is from the text
or our own experience – or both.
But either way we trust it
because something about it speaks
with an authority that makes sense in our own experience.
For whatever reason,
it speaks to us
like that voice in Mark:
it affirms us
and it affirms what we have known to be true
and it sheds light
on what was covered by darkness
and void
in our own lives.

It is a voice
that affirms the light is good
and keeps us moving in a direction that bears hope.

So in our tradition,
we do not have the luxury of a loud,
authoritative voice
that can be heard or delivered in writing
to settle everything
once and for all.

We hear voices instead –
whispers really.

We hear whispers
and then we have to figure out
if what we heard makes sense,
and how it makes sense
and whether or not to follow it.

In fact, I believe there is a whisper here for you.
Today I mean, in this worship.
There is a voice with a word
or a story
or a whisper
with your name on it,
and for me too.

I believe that if we listen
we will hear a voice with our name on it.
It may have been in the text,
or in the dance between our lives and the text,
or in the prayers,
or in the music,
or in the silence between the prayers.
It may come later
in the reverberations from we hear now
or in the rest of the worship.
Heck, it might come days or weeks later
when all of a sudden we hear what we heard.
That happens to me as the preacher all the time.
I will write it
and preach it
and then days later – bang –
it hits me right between the eyes
in a way I hadn’t realized
as I was doing it.

Whenever,
whatever,
wherever – listen for the whispers.
Some of them have your name on them.