The grace-filled relationship between Creator and creation in the Genesis song of creation informs all relationships. Full trust, rather than a litany of requirements and obligations, transforms our marriages, our families, our churches, and our neighborhoods? Perhaps it’s too unimaginable to consider how it can transform national and international relationships. Yet this is the future the Creator is inviting us to embrace.

There is both closeness and distance between Creator and creation. God is continually attentive to creation without imposition. Being fruitful is the creation’s delightful response to the Creator. The song of creation depicts humans as created in the image of God and as having dominion over the rest of creation. Walter Brueggemann writes that this “images the creative use of power which invites, evokes, and permits. There is nothing here of coercive or tyrannical power, either for God or for humankind.”[1]

Being created as male and female is part of God’s good creation. Gender and sexuality shape our lives. British theologian Sarah Coakley, in her book God, Sexuality, and the Self recognizes that much is warped in gender and sexual relationships. She addresses this by putting desire at the root of both the Divine and our humanity.

When God’s Spirit opens our hearts to Divine desire, it purifies and reformulates our human desire. All our problems of power, sex, and gender cannot be solved without prior surrender to the Divine. Sarah Coakley says that desire—even warped desire—is the precious clue woven into our human heart that ever reminds us of our relatedness and our Source.

The song of creation culminates in doxology. The Creator rests on the seventh day, enjoying and hallowing all of creation. I love the way Wendell Berry captures this in one of his poems:

To sit and look at light-filled leaves
May let us see or seem to see,
Far backward as through clearer eyes
To what unsighted hope believes:
The blessed conviviality
That sang Creation’s seventh sunrise,
Time when the Maker’s radiant sight
Made radiant every thing He saw,
An every thing He saw was filled
With perfect joy and life and light.[1]

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation (John Knox Press, 1982), 32.

[2] Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 8.