All ancient peoples had creation myths. One of the most powerful in the Mediterranean world was the Babylonian Myth, created some 1800 years before the time of Jesus. In this Epic Poem, divine beings are under attack by the ocean goddess Tiamat and so they create a hero, Marduk, as their champion. Marduk agrees to fight for the gods on condition that if he is successful, he will become the supreme god over them for all time. The gods agree and after a violent battle, Marduk defeats Tiamat, rips her in half and from her severed body creates the earth and the skies. Marduk creates the planets and the stars, the sun and the moon and Babylon as an earthly counterpoint to the realm of the gods. Finally, Marduk defeats Tiamat's husband Kingu and uses his blood mixed with earth to create human kind to do the work of bringing food to the gods and caring for their needs – as virtual slaves.

Now, most biblical scholars suggest that the Torah, including the Genesis Story, was written during and after the Babylonian Exile, in the 6th - 5th centuries before Christ. This morning (Sept. 27th – Blessing of the Animals) we heard James Weldon Johnson's fanciful take on Genesis (printed below) but the differences between the Babylonian and Jewish myths need to be lifted up just a bit.

In the Babylonian story, there are many gods while in the Jewish story, there is but one God. In the Babylonian story, creation comes about through a violent conflict in which the outcome is not assured. In the Jewish story, God easily tames the waters of chaos with his breath: through a word rather than a war. In the Babylonian story, human kind is created out of the bloody remains of Kingu to serve as slaves. In the Jewish story, God fashions human kind out of the dust – like a potter fashioning clay – and human kind is animated by God's own breath. Rather than being slaves, human beings are to be co-creators with God, cultivating and managing beauty, order and fruitfulness. The Babylonian story was a negative story of violence; the Jewish story was a positive one of love. The Jewish one - God creates food for human kind rather than demand that humans bring food for him.

In effect, the Jewish myth challenged the prevalent world view of the Mesopotamian world and in two important ways: Genesis tells us that we were made in the image of God. Theologians have argued forever about what precisely that may mean. Some have suggested that it means to have free will. Others suggest that in creating male and female simultaneously in the 1st story, human kind in our diversity – male and female, of various colors and tongues and cultures – we together reflect the vast comprehensiveness of God. Apart from that unity, God's image is fractured and incomplete. Others would say the words "image of God" refers to our responsibility for God's world. All these are true but there is a fourth.

The term "image of God" could also mean "in the shadow of God." Human kind is the shadow God casts into the world. And although a shadow is but a dim reflection, less than the reality it represents, the shadow reveals something about the reality of that greater one it reflects.

This suggests that we are beings of infinite value and worth and dignity and beauty. Our potential is to be so much more than we usually settle for.

For the Babylonians, we are little more than slaves, for the Jews and for us Christians, we are friends of God, we are his children.

And the 2nd great lesson is that the goal of creation is shalom. God the creator brought order and beauty out of disordered chaos as an act of overflowing love. The universe God creates is a holy space which bears God's life. It is a place God continues to care for through his regents, you and I. Living in covenant with God, we are responsible for our fellow creatures and for this good earth, our fragile home.

And so although we can never get back to a mythical Eden, the story tells us that the very purpose of human life is to create the good world God intended this to be. We claim Eden then as an alternative.

We glimpse Eden when we see reconciliation in the place of alienation, healing in place of brokenness, forgiveness in place of hatred. The greatest threat to Eden is the misguided call for autonomy and self-sufficiency. We were created in relationship. God looked at the world she had made and declared it, each day, to be "good," indeed "very good." And then she looked at the man she had made and declared him to be "not good." It is "not good" for the man to be alone, and Eve was created. We cannot be fully human apart from others and apart from God.

For Jewish tradition, the Sabbath – the 7th day when God rested from laboring over his creation and commanded Adam and Eve and their progeny to do the same - the Sabbath is where we recapture Eden. In honoring this set aside time, we have the garden back – a time of pure joy and bliss apart from constant working. It is to leave "ordinary time" and enter "sacred time' – what Rabbi Heschel called "not a place but a structure, a Cathedral in time" – in which we remember that the world is not ours but that we belong to a most generous God.

For Christians, our theologians teach us that the Sacraments are our Sabbath.