As simply as I can say it and still say it all: Creator creates creation. Subject, transitive verb, object. Subject and object thus inseparable, incomprehensible apart from each other, because (think about it) if there is no creation, the Creator has not created and therefore is not a Creator.

The Creator, once identified as such, is not free not to create. Like the one who claims to be a writer but never writes, or a student who never studies, you forfeit the title, the identity, if the action that earns the name is not forthcoming.

Likewise, if the Creator does not create, there is no creation. Everything that is, says the poet-liturgist of Genesis 1, owes its “is-ness” to the worker who speaks it into being, locates it here not there, separates it from that with which it does not belong, orders the mess and assesses the results.

Sun and moon, day and night, the very passage of hours known as time owe their existence to this worker. Earth and sea and sky, from the depths to the heights, everything the poet knows about. If she had known about DNA and mitochondria, black holes and dark matter, viruses and bacteria, particles and waves, she would have included those, too, on a designated day, in the verses of her poem celebrating the is-ness of all that is. All of it, every neutron, proton, electron, and muon; every quark, lepton, and boson; all of it imagined, called forth, fashioned, placed; all of it created, all of it creation, of the Creator.

And so the simplest grammatical formulation of Genesis 1 contains a profound truth, one that our ancestors in faith asserted was the starting point for everything else they would ever say about themselves, about the world, about the invisible worker who brought it all forth and sustains its existence – that we are bound together, That One and all of us, all of this, bound together by the grammar and glory of our original story: Creator creates creation.

This is not a small thing to say. Especially because we have it on good authority that the poetry of Genesis 1 was composed and ultimately written down during the Babylonian exile of our ancestors. Meaning, the 6th century BCE, when mighty Jerusalem finally fell and the invading army mercilessly deported the remaining members of the chosen tribe of Israel into slavery, away from their homes and crops, away from their children and parents, away from the house of their God. In a strange land, their personhood owned by other persons, strange gods proffered for their adulation and loyalty, the refugees of father Abraham’s descendancy made a bold, totalizing claim about the world and everything in it. They said, “Creator creates creation.”

They said, “We whose bodies are bowed down by the pain and violence of war; we whose families have been shattered by separation; we whose property has been taken from us so that we are materially impoverished; we whose identities are named by others as less than, as chattel; we nevertheless assert spiritual autonomy. We assert that the One who has to do with us – the One who is our God – this God is God of everything. Including all of us, and including all of you, including everything we can see and remember and imagine. Because this God is Creator and Creator creates creation.”

And by this assertion, they were saying, perhaps more as a hope than a memory, that the God with whom they had to do is not disinterested, not dispassionate, not a distant observer of all that is and all that happens. Because all that is and all that happens is God’s, to begin with. And so it matters to God.

Think about the painstaking process the poet delineates in Genesis 1. In a careful, rhythmic sequence, the Creator speaks forth one idea, then another idea, not quickly or thoughtlessly, but over a series of days, with time each day for reflection and assessment, and the chance to edit, if necessary.

The Creator is an artiste, adding a layer of color, texture, complexity, each day; then stepping back to look with a critical eye. “Hm. It’s good,” the Creator says at the end of each day’s work, as if it is a delightful surprise even to that One, as if there is pride of workership – and it has been work!

By the exhausting end, we imagine the Creator resting contentedly, the way one does after the expenditure of mighty effort that has ended in a splendid result, the kind of rest that no one would begrudge, the fruit of all that work being so apparent to all who pay attention. “Let the whole world rest,” God says as God reclines in God’s Lay-Z-Boy with a cold beer and the remote control, inviting even the newly breathing humans to take a nap on their first official day of life.

And what I’m saying is, that’s a fairly preposterous claim to make when you are enslaved and your whole world has unraveled. It’s an irrational faith claim when there is a despot on the throne, when violence rules the day, when your identity is endangered, when your religion has been corrupted, when Sabbath rest is disallowed by the pressing insistence of the economy that enslaves you.

You look around from the middle of all that muck, and say, “Creator creates creation. And thus God is invested here. We are the work of God’s hands. God will not abandon what God has made.”

In a way, it’s like a challenge to God, to say from that awful place, “Hey, you made this, remember? Remember how there was nothing, and you said, “something,” and then there was something, and you said it was good? And remember how there was nobody, and you said, “somebody,” and then there was us, and you said we were very good?”

“Remember how there was just dirt, and you played in the mud and fashioned me, and put your mouth on my mouth and breathed in me, and then we were us, you and me, bound together by the Spirit that is you and lives in me?”

It is the plea of the created one to the Creator: “Remember me. Remember us. Remember how it all started. Remember who you are – Creator, creating creation. Remember that we are the work of your hands.”

If that is the starting point, everything else we will ever say about God will be predicated on that assertion. God sustains, God governs, God punishes, God redeems – whatever else God does from then on, it springs from God’s bound-together-ness with what God has made. Jesus will get even more specific about this later – the bound-together-ness he calls “love,” saying straight up that God loves the world God made so much that God sent God’s Son to save it. That bound-together-ness is the why of everything God does now.

The Bible makes neither historical nor scientific claim; it does not mean to tell us accurately how or when things happened for the sake of the precise human record. Instead, it does much, much more than that. The Bible claims to describe the very Ground of our Being – by narrating how that Ground of Being has been and is and will be with us.

And the first claim it makes is that Creator creates creation, that we are bound together with the one who made us and knows us and loves us best of all. It says from the first chapter that there will be no theological claim about the nature of God without a corresponding anthropological claim about the nature of us. We will not be able to speak of one without the other, God without us, us without God. It does not work, once Genesis 1 becomes Genesis 1.

And so we hear this ancient poem about God in the dark, God in the mud, God hovering and shoving and arranging and sculpting and sweating and evaluating and resting, and we have to decide [not] whether we believe that it happened in six, 24-hour days, 6,000 years ago, or whether the fossil record can support the Bible’s primitive science. There is no science here.

No, what we are being called to decide is whether it’s true – that Creator creates creation, that God is in all and through all and over all and invested in all; and correspondingly, that we are good, and very good, necessary pieces of the grand whole that God loves.

And as hard as that was to believe for the Babylonian exiles in the 6th century BCE, it is hard to believe here, and now. If you’re waking up every day to check the news to find out where the violence is and how close it feels to you; if you’re barely surprised at the disappearance of neighbors you didn’t know or care were not citizens; if you feel incapable of hoping that queer folks will ever be left to live in peace; if you know yourself all too well, and confess that you talk about more than you actually contribute to the world’s deep needs – it’s hard to believe that God is in this with us, and that we are good, very good, and even necessary to what God has made. It honestly might be easier to go with a literal six-day creation than try to live out of that claim.

But that’s what Christians around the world are doing, y’all. Every Sunday, and every day, believing again that all this is God’s. And asking God to remember that. And remembering ourselves into good and fruitful work, good stewardship of whichever little part of this has been given into our hands. Good work, in a good world, by good people, who deserve to rest. Believe it. This is the gospel. Everything else comes after.