Lost in Wonder, Love and Praise
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Emmanuel Baptist Church; October 18, 2026
This month we are engaging in a 30-day challenge to notice and appreciate beauty in all the ways that we find it across our daily lives. Some folks are playing along at home with these grids; others are playing along on Facebook. If you haven’t been engaging in this practice of gratitude and celebration, it is not too late to join in.
As we make a special point to attend to beauty, we want to be very clear that not everything is beautiful and good. Much around us is ugly and evil. We are not pretending otherwise.
Writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley says that
“To be a human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection, and its creation. It is a challenge to believe that this right is ours.”[1]
Because we are made in God’s image, she asserts, we have a responsibility to notice and to protect and even to create beauty. We celebrate beauty because that is who we are.
I need to stop here and mention that today’s sermon has a sound track which is going to be your job. I’ll teach it to you. The sound track is “It was so so good.”
Now, this is not so-so, in the sense of just all right. This is so, so, in the sense of very much. And I want you to feel the word good, so when you say it really enunciate the D, so it sounds like Goo-Da.
Let’s practice, I’ll say it first and then when I point at you, it’s your turn. You’ll know what to do when this slide appears again.
It was so, so good.
“Let there be light.” God said, and there was light. This is familiar to us. So familiar that perhaps it doesn’t register that light is created on the first day, but the sun and the moon and stars are not created until the fourth day. Also neither candles nor electric lightbulbs have been invented yet, so what kind of light was there at the very, very beginning?
One of my colleagues suggests that light was created first so that God could see what on earth they were doing.[2] But Jewish and Christian scholars have pondered this more seriously for hundreds of years. They identify a sense that this first light is not physical. It is not what allows us to see with our eyes, but that it is what enables us to perceive insight and wisdom. With this light we see the patterns of beauty and goodness built into the fabric of creation and we see the image of God in every human being.
God called forth the light and pronounced it good. This is the pattern that repeats across the first chapter of Genesis. Something is created each day and It was so, so good.
Creation is not done in a moment, with a snap of God’s fingers, but it takes time. And, God does not take the approach of working alone. Biblical scholar Terence Fretheim notes “God catches up the creatures along the way to participate with God in ever new creations: let the earth bring forth; let the waters bring forth… Let us create humankind. God invites the earth and waters and microorganisms and you and me into the creative process.”[3]
The seas fill with the tiny life forms of clams and mussels and seahorses and jelly fish, then seaweed and coral, and finally the giant manta rays and sharks and sea turtles, dolphins and whales. Back on dry land, rolling hills form and majestic mountains push up almost to touch the sky. Grass and meadows intersperse with forests of redwoods and cedars and oaks and maples cover the land, except for the deserts and tundra. The trees and sky are full of flocks of geese and red-winged blackbirds and songbirds of all kinds. We see swarms of bees and hummingbirds and dragonflies. We hear and feel the thunder of buffalo and wildebeest and elephants. And It was so, so good.
Finally, we see the creation of human beings, male and female, in the image of God. On the sixth day of creation, we were made in the image of God, according to Genesis 1. But before our sense of self-importance gets too big, we might note that we are created on the same day as the other land animals. We don’t get our own special day -- a signal that we are part of a larger community. We are created after the birds and sea-life. In fact, the animals of the sea and the birds of the air are told to be fruitful and multiply first, before that instruction is given to humans. And before humans ever appear, six times it says “God saw that it was good.”
God gives the human beings, our ancestors and you and me, “dominion” over the earth. That word “dominion” has been taken as license to exploit and plunder the earth leading to the ugliness of strip mines and oil spills and wars over minerals like gold, copper and diamonds. In Genesis chapter two, the humans are commanded to “subdue” the earth. But these words “dominion” and “subdue” are used when God has named the creation good. They are used before sin has entered the story. They have the sense of “to bring order out of continuing disorder.”
There is continuing disorder in God’s good world that needs to be subdued — yet, that very disorder is also evaluated as good. As one scholar explains explains: “If there were no freedom in this creation, no touches of disorder, no open ends, then moral choice, creativity, and excellence could not arise. The world would be a monotonous cycle of inevitability, a dull-as-dishwater world of puppets and automatons.” [4]
God’s approach to creation was and continues to be communal and relational. God gave us an on-going role. We are to be orderers of chaos, continuing to make something beautiful together.
Last week, Jim and Angela and I attended a retreat with the Alliance of Baptists. We were there as part of our anti-racism work called Thrive. We learned that New Orleans was one of the largest cities in the South as early as the 1700’s. The institution of chattel slavery was different in the city, not better or any less ugly, but different from that on the plantations. Even after the Lousiana Purchase, New Orleans law was based on French law which was entangled with Christian Catholicism, which means there was no separation of church and state. The law of the land was that no one worked on the Sabbath, not free people, not slave-holders, not enslaved people. So, every Sunday, the people of New Orleans went to worship at the St. Louis cathedral. And every Sunday, when mass was over, enslaved Africans walked about a half mile to a place that became known as Congo square. Our tour guide said, “They went to Congo Square to remember who they were.” Under the trees, which are now 300 years old, they gathered, as many as 500 or 600 people, to make music, dance and trade. They came from many African countries and so did not speak the same first languages. Music became their primary form of communication, music that evolved into jazz and blues we know today.
They went to Congo Square every week, to remember who they were. Please do not hear me ignoring the deep evil surrounding this or romanticizing the situation. Rather, I am amazed and grateful for their strength and endurance, for their ability and willingness to create beauty in such circumstances.
Cole Arthur Riley, who lives as a person of color in an age of white supremacy says this, “Practicing wonder is a powerful tool against despair. It works nearly the same muscles as hope, in that you find yourself believing in goodness and beauty even when the evidence gives you every reason to believe that goodness and beauty are void. This can feel like a risk to those of us who have had our dreams colonized, who have known the devastation of hope unfulfilled. [5]
I also got to talk with a man from Cape Verde this week. Cape Verde is a small island country off the coast of West Africa. It is a place not many of us know about or that was true until the World Cup tournament this summer. Cape Verde soccer players play for various teams, scattered all over the world. But they came together as one team for the World Cup. Their goalie was 40 years old, considered too old for his job by at least a decade. No one had ever really heard of them until they started winning. Then everyone following the World Cup knew them and was rooting for them. This man I met in New Orleans said he was so proud of his country.
Together, we remembered other stories that came from the World Cup. The Scots who celebrated so much that they drank the Boston pubs dry. The English fans who sang Sweet Caroline when they played Norway in Miami and the Norwegian fans who then sang it when they played Ivory Coast in Dallas. The surprising celebration of American culture by Europeans who revelled in free chips and salsa they didn’t order at restaurants and discovered the unimagined joy of something called ranch dressing. This is the kind of beauty and goodness we were created to share.
This month, we celebrate beauty across all aspects of our lives, including our life in this community. We heard from Angela who rejoiced in the beauty of authenticity, how she encountered Emmanuel for the first time at Pride and then proved that we really mean all are welcome here. We heard from Finn about the beauty of this church as people and relationships. This morning Jean spoke about this church’s willingness to tackle tough issues to understand them together and finding the money to do what we thought needed to be done. And It was so, so good.
Hold onto these stories, because this really is our work – to remember who we are: creators of beauty and purveyors of wonder.
Beloved ones, we bear the image of God. God expects us to remember who we are – those entrusted with responsibility for making something beautiful together. God has high expectations of us and high hopes for us. May the courage of our living and our giving bring joy and bear hope and infuse peace. And may we bring delight to the Divine heart, so that we will hear “it is good, it is good, it is so so good.” Amen.
[1] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us (New York: Convergent Books, 2022), p. 40
[2] https://stjohnsalbany.org/sermons/2026/10/5/who-we-are
[3] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/baptism-of-our-lord-2/commentary-on-genesis-11-5
[4] Sibley Towner, Genesis (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001), p. 21.
[5] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, p. 37