Mexican President Vicente Fox is off to a good start.  Enough time has passed in one year to see that he’s more than good intentions.  Democratic reforms are sticking and things are changing in Mexico.  When President Fox addressed the United States Congress on Thursday he spoke frankly and hopefully.  He did not appeal for charity or demand respect.  He acknowledged longstanding anxieties between his people and ours.  And yet he called for a profound trust to replace the generations of mistrust.  Fox did not try to say who’s been right and who wrong in our histories.  He didn’t demand their land back or claim reparations owed.  We remember the Alamo and they remember San Jacinto.  Leave it at that.  Neither did he try to uncover the origins of mistrust.  He simply named things as they are and got on with his call for trust. 

While he was at it, though, President Fox pointed to the predicament that faces Mexican immigrants – legal and illegal both.  They have a strange sense of caughtness between being at home in the places they live and not being at home.  He is calling for policies that will not resolve those feelings so much as see them as signs of the human condition generally that call for understanding and compassion.

It may seem odd to use this as my doorway to a series of sermons from Genesis 2-3 that I am calling What’s the Story?  (I am wondering myself.)  But when we go to the first part of Genesis and read the story of creation, the disobedience of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden, we find just these kinds of issues at stake.  We usually don’t go to these texts looking for these things; we go wanting to how the world began, how humans were created, where evil comes from, why we sin and suffer for it.  We want some ammunition in our war against Darwinism or capitalism or communism.  But those are not the main concerns of these chapters.  Those are things we bring to them, not what they bring to us.

Genesis tells us who created the world and hints at why.  Genesis tells us how we are meant to be and what we should do to arrive at that future.  It does not tell us how God created or how long it took.  It is not a physics or biology textbook.  It tells us a story in which we are not just supposed to gain facts about the first people and what was right and wrong with them; we are supposed to find ourselves in there – to find out what is right and wrong with us.  Adam and Eve are portraits of you and me.  Their story is our story. 

The Hebrews were not scientists or historians who thought if you could get back far enough you could see that the Big Bang really happened the way Genesis 1 describes it.  They were not concerned with whether the world was created fast or slow.  They were concerned with who they were, who God is, and how to deal with the strange feeling of being at once at home in the world and not at home.

So over the next few weeks, I am asking you to put aside all the questions you want Genesis to answer for you and instead let Genesis ask the questions you need to answer.  At its heart this is what the whole story is about.  It’s about how God questions us and calls for an answer.  This is how we are made and how we must live.  God commands and we respond.  When we answer God, we are at home in the world; when we ignore God and seek our own answers to life, we are strangers to God, to the world, and to ourselves.  When trust rules our relationships, life is Eden; when mistrust creeps in, we are pitted against God and one another.

So here goes the first part of the story today from chapter 2, verse 4 on.  In the Jewish Bible the translation starts out: Such is the story … such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created.  Of all the ways the world has tried to express itself, God chooses to reveal the truth of creation with a story.  And it has a kind of once upon a time quality.  Not that it’s a fairy tale, but it picks up the story way back whenever it was God was making the heavens and the earth.  It isn’t trying to leave us clues about whether the time was 6,000 years ago, 6 million, or 6 billion.  For the Hebrews to say that they were starting at the beginning meant they were going back to the point when the point of it all could still be determined, when the purpose of it all was clearer, when whatever it is that makes us think we should be at home in the world began to feel that way.

There was a time when there was no shrub to trim or grass to mow.  (My yard-boy son still wishes it were so, don’t you know?!)  The earth was nothing but a field of dirt with no one to farm it.  It hadn’t even rained yet, but it didn’t need to because the dirt was wet enough each morning from the water that swelled up like dew to make it clay.  What we see is a world waiting to be born, with the elements for life – earth and water – present and ready to burst forth.  There lives the dearest freshness deep down things, said Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem God’s Grandeur.  Hopkins thought of all the world as charged with the glory of God.  The dew on the morning ground is just one more sign that our lives are shot through with upsurging goodness that comes from God and not ourselves.  Life is a gift.

Have you ever thought about the fact that you didn’t get to choose to be born?  Do you realize that from beginning to end God is your genesis?  Sometimes we wonder why are we are here, and sometimes we wonder why we die before our time.  But fairness demands that we acknowledge that life was not our choice to begin with.  We are the handiwork of God, creatures of God’s own design.

So God has poised the world for birth, but it’s nothing much until we come into it.  The incompleteness of creation, the barrenness of it until the making of humans, shows that the world wouldn’t be better off without you and me.  The world is made for you and me.  We come from it and it comes into its own with help from us. We all come from God.

Next we read that God reaches down and grabs a handful of wet clay and starts playing in the dirt, plying the potter’s trade, sculpting a man.  We come from the same stuff as the rest of creation.  It’s not man against nature; it’s man and nature in this thing together.  It shouldn’t surprise us that the elements in the earth and the elements in our bodies are the same, or that we are 80% water creatures.  We are earthlings from the earth.  Elemental earthmen.  The name Adam simply comes from the Hebrew word for ground, ’adamah.

Which also excludes other options.  We did not drop in from outer space as a race of aliens that landed in Rosewell.  We did not live other lives as free-floating souls looking for bodies.  We are from here.  The Jewish Talmud says that when God picked up dirt to make humankind, he grabbed handfuls from the four corners of the earth so that wherever we go, we can say, I’m from here.

Sad to hear the interviews this week with actress Anne Heche.  She’s got this new book out called Call Me Crazy!  She thinks she’s been insane most of her life.  She claims to have been molested by her late father as a child.  She says she has had an alter ego named Celestia who comes from other planet and talks a language only God understands.  After she and Ellen Degeneres broke up she was wandering around Fresno, California knocking on people’s doors and asking for directions to the spaceship that would take her home.

Crazy as that seems, Anne Heche is describing a severe form of the kind of deep alien feelings so many of us have.  The feeling that we must be from someplace else because we are in too much pain being here.  Or maybe that it would be better if we weren’t here, since we don’t seem to belong.  But Genesis tells us that we are from here, that we belong right here, and that our feeling of being aliens is not because we really are but because something has gone wrong in the Garden we were put to live in.

Painful childhood things have happened to some of you.  Adult things for some of you too.  Things that have set you to feeling like a stranger in your own home if not in your own skin.  And it makes you want to relieve the pain by escaping it to another place.  Some of you have even contemplated suicide as a way to get home.  But listen to me carefully, this is your home.  This is where God made you to be.  When the Bible talks about heaven, it isn’t saying that heaven is someplace in space, someplace we came from originally and have to get back to, someplace without all this dirt on us that holds us back and makes us always feel unclean.  Heaven is the place where we finally feel at home in the way God made to us to feel here.  I suspect when we get to heaven, we’ll be amazed at how much it’s like what we have already known – just without all the lostness and pain we know now.

But we are not only earthlings of the earth.  We are not just animated claymation figures; we are living beings.  God the sculptor shapes all the curves and stoops over the lifeless figure of a man.  God breathes into us the breath of life and we come to be.  God puts the divine breath into us and inspires us.

Back to Anne Heche for a moment.  The sense of violation and shame that she has felt – whether real or imagined, which can seem just as real – that sense of violation can make you feel that the way is forever blocked for you to come to a feeling of being at home in the world.  Most of us cannot remember the things that happened to us at the earliest times of our lives.  And if they were painful, we may block them entirely.  Therapy can only get you back so far.  But the way to healing is not to go back only to those memories of when things were wrong.  You have to finally do what the Hebrews did, what God inspired them to do: you have to go back all the way to God.  You have to go back to the point where you realize you are not in the end the product of the earth or an earthly father and mother.  You are the result of God’s careful crafting and personal breath.  What fills your soul and makes you you is not oxygen alone, it is the enlivening presence of God in you.

When you lose that sense, you are lost and need to be saved by the inspiring breath of God.  When Jesus breathed on his disciples and gave them his Holy Spirit, he was bringing them back to life, back to God, and back to themselves.

There is more here that we will pick up next week and the weeks following.  About the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.  About the Garden of Eden and all it promises.  But for now, understand why this first part of the story is so crucial.  You got off to a good start.  Not just Adam, you.  And nothing that has happened to you or can happen to you will change the fact that your life is a gift from God to be cherished. 

So breathe deep.  Breathe deep the breath of God.