09.09.2025
Saint Francis
Creation as an Ongoing Gift
Sermon for September 7, 2025 – Creation 1
A sermon based on Genesis 1 - Pastor Bea Chun, St. Francis Lutheran Church
Grace to you and peace
from the One who is,
the One who was,
and the One who is to come.
“What have you done! Look at all this tohu wabohu!”
That was a frequent exclamation of my mother
when we were little children.
We would look around the room
and see toys and building blocks everywhere.
At one point we had made a fort out of chairs,
tablecloths, pillowcases, and cardboard boxes.
But eventually the fort collapsed,
leaving a trail of wreckage across the floor.
Another time, we decided to change the outfits of our dollies.
We got only halfway through,
and now tiny doll dresses were scattered everywhere.
And then there was the Lego harbor,
left mid-construction,
pieces spread across the floor like a miniature earthquake.
Such tohu wabohu! my mother said.
And she always added:
“You had better get all of this cleaned up before supper time.”
We grew up in Germany, where tornadoes are exceedingly rare.
Otherwise, my mother might have said:
“Look around! It looks like we got hit by a tornado!”
But in our house, the name for such a mess was always tohu wabohu.
Later, when I went to seminary,
I discovered that tohu wabohu was not just my mother’s favorite expression.
It was actually a Hebrew word.
It appears in the very first chapter of Genesis,
in the passage we heard this morning. Genesis 1:2 says:
“When God began to create the heavens and the earth,
the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep.”
That phrase — “complete chaos” — is what tohu wabohu (תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ) means.
Primordial chaos. Emptiness. Unformed disorder.
And then, as the creation story unfolds, we see how step by step,
God imposes order on this chaos.
By creating boundaries and limits,
by separating one thing from another,
God brings creation into being:
- Light separated from darkness becomes day and night.
- Waters above separated from waters below create the sky.
- Waters below gathered into one place create dry land and sea.
And once this order is established,
God calls forth life
— vegetation, animals, humans —
each flourishing in their own space,
within God’s carefully ordered creation.
But the story does not end in Genesis 1.
The rest of the Bible can almost be read as a constant back-and-forth
between order and chaos.
Again and again, God gives the gift of order,
and again and again, that order unravels, and chaos breaks out.
It is as if some part of the original tohu wabohu
is always lurking in the background, waiting to undo creation.
Take, for example, the story of Job.
It begins with the well-ordered, prosperous life of a man named Job.
But then disaster strikes:
First, his oxen and donkeys are stolen,
and the servants tending them are killed.
Then his sheep and their shepherds
are consumed by fire from heaven.
Then his camels are stolen,
and still more servants are slain.
Then a catastrophic storm collapses the house
where his children are feasting,
killing all ten of them.
And finally, Job himself is struck
with loathsome sores from head to foot.
Almost overnight, his well-ordered life unravels,
leaving him surrounded by chaos and destruction.
How could such a thing happen?
How could it happen to him
— a devout and faithful servant of God?
Job rails against heaven and demands answers.
For a long time, there is silence.
But finally, God answers from the whirlwind.
And the answer is not what Job expected.
God says:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”
And again:
“Who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb—
when I made the clouds its garment,
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed bounds for it,
and set bars and doors,
and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?”
And it goes on much longer
— a magnificent, poetic speech
about the storehouses of snow and hail,
about the mountain goat giving birth,
about the vast wonders of creation.
At first, it makes you wonder:
why does God talk about all this
when Job is crying out in anguish?
How does this help Job in his suffering?
Here is what I think:
It is God’s way of saying, I am a God who creates,
who brings order out of chaos, who makes life flourish.
Your suffering, tragic as it is, is not by my design.
The power of chaos still operates in the world.
Tohu wabohu still exists
— chaos, desolation, war, famine, disaster, heartache.
And overnight, as Job discovered,
there can be loss of wealth, loss of loved ones,
loss of health and livelihood.
Chaos and order
— sometimes they play out in small, everyday ways.
Sometimes we ourselves engage with these forces.
When I go for my morning walks in Oakland,
I encounter a wide variety of front yards,
each showing a different relationship to chaos and order:
Some let everything go —
knee-high weeds, trash and debris gathering in the corners.
Some are highly manicured —
hedges trimmed so sharply you wonder if nail clippers were involved.
Some opt for no vegetation at all,
just expanses of cement, perhaps decorated with plastic flowers.
Others go wild, planting everything imaginable,
creating a lush personal jungle.
Each yard is a little testimony:
a different way of arranging,
or not arranging, chaos and order.
But of course, chaos and order also take on much greater,
more ominous dimensions.
Whole cultures and civilizations
rise up and then collapse back into ruin—
back into tohu wabohu.
And we feel this bleakness now, don’t we?
We sense the unraveling of the good order of society
—justice, fairness, safety, all under strain.
We feel the weight of climate change and its acceleration.
A sense of helplessness begins to set in.
But the testimony of Scripture is this:
God never abandons us
And God is not done yet!
Creation is not just a one-time event long ago,
but an ongoing process.
God continually restores, heals, and renews what is broken.
And the final outcome, we are promised,
Is the flourishing of the whole world.
We get a glimpse of this final outcome
in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation.
There, we see one last great struggle
between the order of creation
and the chaos of tohu wabohu—
one more last great uprising
of the dragon, the beasts,
the plagues, and the catastrophes.
But the final vision is not chaos.
It is a new creation:
A holy city.
A tree of life bearing abundant fruit.
Leaves for the healing of the nations.
A flourishing world where the beauty and order of heaven
fills the entire earth.
This is God’s design: a flourishing creation.
And this vision is given not only to comfort us,
but to inspire us. To call us.
Because we are not merely observers of creation
—we are invited to be co-creators with God.
To resist chaos where it destroys life.
To nurture order where it enables flourishing.
To work with God for the healing of the nations.
This is our hope.
This is our calling.
And this is the promise we hold onto:
That the God who once brought order out of tohu wabohu
is still at work,
and will bring forth life
until all creation flourishes.
Amen.
