“The shortest distance between two people is a story.” I don’t know who first said that (there seem to be conflicting attributions), but I often repeat it because I have found it to be so true. It is in and through stories that we truly get to know someone.
Trusting someone to receive our stories is one of the most 
vulnerable things we can do; receiving someone’s stories with respect and care is one of the most sacred acts of love and friendship that we can offer. Stories reveal our deepest truths, our most profound moments of personal development, our greatest loyalties, triumphs, and griefs; our strongest feelings and values and commitments. And it’s in stories, above all, that we ground our identities, whether that identity is in a family, community, nation, ethnic group, or religious tradition.
One of the best films ever made about the power and meaning of storytelling is one that should have gotten a lot more attention than it did when it came out twenty or so years ago. It’s called Big Fish, and it centers on the fraught relationship between a father, who is a traveling salesman and a garrulous storyteller in the tradition of tall tales in Southern U.S. folklore, and his adult son, who finds his father’s constant far-fetched stories embarrassing and even self-servingly dishonest.
At the beginning of the film, the son, named Will, is getting married, and his father uses the reception as an opportunity to trot out one of his most well-worn stories, a story about how he caught a legendary catfish know to locals as “The Beast” on a river in Alabama on the very day his son was born. The Beast had turned up its nose at every lure that every fisherman had tried to use on it, no matter how fancy and expensive, and so it grew and grew in size and years and legend as an “uncatchable fish.”
Edward, the father, though, had heard that the fish was possessed with the spirit of a famous local robber, and so he realized that the lure that would work was gold. So he took off his wedding ring and tied that to the biggest line he had, “so strong it would hold up a bridge, they say,” he declared, “if only for a few minutes.”
Well, he cast that ring lure upstream and sure enough, the Beast leapt out of the water and hit that wedding ring lure before it even landed back in the water again; and just as quickly, it snapped that line clean in two. So he jumped in after it, grabbed the line, and followed that fish upriver and downriver, determined to get back his wedding ring. When he finally wears out the fish and catches it, he discovers that the fish isn’t a him, but a her, and that she is fat with eggs.
Wanting his ring back but not wanting to kill such a magnificent fish and deprive his son of the chance to catch her children, he squeezes it instead, and the ring pops out of the fish’s mouth and into his hand. “Now, you may wonder why the fish went after the wedding ring if it wasn’t possessed by the spirit of that robber,” he tells the crowd, who are all enraptured by the story except for Will, who sits fuming to the side, a forgotten footnote at his own wedding.
“Well, that’s the lesson I learned that day, the day my son was born: sometimes the only way to catch an uncatchable woman is to offer her a wedding ring,” he concludes, kissing his wife affectionately as the crowd bursts into applause. Will, however, isn’t even in the room anymore, having stormed out before the story concluded, and they become estranged over the next three years, until Edward is diagnosed with cancer and Will comes home from France for a final visit.
That visit constitutes the rest of the movie, which moves back and forth between Will’s present-day struggle to understand and know his father, and the tall tales that Edward tells about his life. I don’t want to spoil the film if you haven’t seen it, because it really is a gem. But I can say that Will finally comes to understand is that truth is not the same thing as fact, and that fact does not necessarily reveal truth, nor does truth necessarily require fact.
That’s a crucial truth in itself that is important, and sometimes hard, to hold onto. As I’m sure you know, this story of God creating the world, along with the other stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, have been coopted into all kinds of controversies in the last 150 years or so, particularly in the United States. The battle lines have been drawn between Creationism and Evolution, between faith and science, between fact and fiction. Now, tthis is not a sermon on Evolution vs. Creationism, but it’s basically impossible to look at Genesis, and especially the first chapter, without at least acknowledging that elephant in the room. Furthermore, the biggest problem with that debate is relevant to how we understand this story of creation as instructive to our faith.
The truth is, there’s no conflict between the story of creation in Genesis and the scientific theory of evolution, because they are each providing explanations for radically different things. Evolution is a scientific theory that explains the observable, quantifiable change in hereditary traits in life forms over generations. Genesis is a theological story that is expressing existential truths and convictions about the world and humanity. Saying there is a conflict between them is like saying there’s a conflict between an organic chemistry textbook and learning how to make our family’s version of buttermilk biscuits from my granny.
My granny wasn’t interested in learning or explaining the chemical reactions that made the biscuits rise, nor did she think that saying the “secret ingredient is love” was a factual statement that required her to start burning chemistry textbooks. There wasn’t a conflict there, just a fundamentally different focus and methodology. Her focus was on teaching me how to make filling and tasty biscuits and continue a family tradition in doing so, not explain the facts of yeast fermentation. So if you treat the Genesis stories as scientific textbook instead of a theological story, you’re already burnin’ the biscuits before you’ve really even started cooking.
What’s important about this story from Genesis is not, and has never been, that it is a factual account of how the world came into being. Neither Jewish people, whose stories these obviously are, nor centuries of Christians, who obviously took up these Hebrew Scriptures as an essential part of God’s Word, were confused or concerned about that. What’s important about this story from Genesis is the truth that it proclaims. And there is a lot of truth packed into this story. The truth that God is independent from and existed prior to the natural world, for example; that creation is, well, a creation that was intended and initiated by God simply because God wanted to do so. That truth is perfectly consonant with the scientific theory of the Big Bang as the most compelling explanation of the origins of the universe; they are simply explaining two radically different aspects of the same thing.
Then there is the truth that human beings have both a special identity and a special responsibility within the created order of the natural world. The special identity is being made in God’s image; there are a lot of different explanations of what precisely that might mean, but all of them are about us having a special identity and/or capacity that is different from every other creature. It’s the truth about our special responsibility that is harder, because it doesn’t come across very well in most English translations.
In our reading this morning, you heard, “…fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over…every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Things like “subdue” and “have dominion over” might sound like God is saying humans can conquer and control the rest of creation however they see fit. But that’s hardly how God calls on human beings to exercise power, at any point in the Bible. Rather, God consistently expects and calls upon those with power and authority to exercise them for the well-being of others.
That’s also just good leadership. One of the main reasons that the United States military is so highly disciplined and motivated is because the officer corps has an ethic that they sum up with the phrase, “officers eat last.” Unlike many other militaries in which the ordinary soldiers are expected to serve the officers, in the U.S. military it’s the other way around. If you are a platoon leader or company commander, at the end of a long day of exercises, movement, or combat, you are expected to make sure your troops have enough to eat and as safe and comfortable a place to sleep as is possible before you ever attend to your own needs. Those officers still “have dominion,” but they exercise it for the well-being of those over whom they have dominion. That’s essentially what this passage really means in terms of how human beings are expected to have dominion over creation.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this passage tells us the crucial truth that in the beginning, the world was good. In this story, over and over and over again, God surveys what has been created and sees that it is good. The light was good; the earth and the seas were good; the plants and vegetation with their fruits were good; the Sun and Moon and stars were good; all the creatures of the earth and seas were good, even the sea monsters and the snakes; and then, after human beings are created and creation is finally finished, God sees that everything God has made is “very good.”
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of that truth. There have been many times when Christians have been tempted away from that conviction, have argued that this world is something that is rotten to the core, something to be abandoned or escaped or rescued from, while the spiritual world is where true goodness lies, unfettered by the corruption of the body and the material world. That is, and always has been, a false theology, and this passage is one of if not the most important witnesses against it.
Whatever brokenness or fragility or corruption is in this world, and there is plenty of all of that to go around, it is not how God created or intended the world to be, and God’s activity in the world, God’s story of relating to creation, then, is always about redeeming and restoring what has been lost, not escaping or abandoning it. The one exception to that is the story of Noah and the Flood, and that story ends with an explicit recall of this creation story and a promise that God will never give up on creation or destroy it, which means that the rest of the entire Biblical story is essentially a narrative of how God will heal what has been wounded, and bind what has been broken, and resurrect what has died, until all of creation, and especially humanity, is once more what it was and was always intended to be: very good.
Our blessing and calling then, is to be invited by God to join in that work, to use our gifts and skills and circumstances and resources as John Wesley once summarized: “do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” And we can; we can do a lot of good, for as long as we can, trusting in others to follow us, until everything, everything, is fully and finally very good.