Another day in paradise

 

Psalm 8
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 31, 2026

Black and white photo of two people walking away from the camera. One person has their arm around the shoulders of the other. They are walking on a narrow street paved with bricks in a small downtown village area.

Bill Cosby is a very complicated, incredibly imperfect human being, but ironically he was also pretty astute when it came to the Bible. Back in the 1980s he did a comedy routine using material from the book of Genesis, talking about what God creates and what human beings invent.



Whenever God created something, God said it was good, saw that it was good, and it was GOOD. Quality of God’s work: good. God was satisfied with good.



Bill Cosby observed that man invents, God creates. He said “man” because it’s the 1980s and he’s working with a big Bible where no words are missing except a lot of women. Man invented an automobile. Called it fantastic. God did a tree, said it was good. Man did a refrigerator, said it was amazing. God did a rabbit, said good. The wheels fell off the car and the refrigerator broke down. Tree is still up and the rabbit is still running. Good. The difference between good and amazing, fantastic, and awesome. The man—awesome and God—good.



Everything is there in the garden. Everything is functioning. God saw all of this and said it was good. God then decided to create a human being who would be the brightest of anything God had created, made in God’s image. God created this human being…for what reason? To look after the garden. So God created, and boom, there was Adam. But if everything was good and everything was working, there was really nothing for Adam to do. There was no trash because he was the only human being. No paper cups, no newspapers, no chicken bones, so all Adam had to do was walk around. Nothing was misbehaving. There was nothing for Adam to do.



When Adam was created, there is nothing there that God said Adam was good, saw that Adam was good, and Adam was good. God did not have time to see if Adam was good because Adam started to mess up right away. Pretty quickly God then says, “The boy needs help”. So God creates Eve and truth be told, God doesn’t say anything about her being good either. But God does look at everything God created and says indeed, it was very good. The whole package.



God then grants these human beings dominion over the whole earth, which is the same word used in Psalm 8, a creation psalm praising God for the goodness of all that God created. That word “dominion” has always bothered me. Here’s this peaceful garden, this beautiful creation, this paradise in which we have been created just a little lower than God, even though God didn’t have to do that, and then <boom> dominion.



So, I went digging. I thought maybe it was a choice in translation. Maybe there’s another meaning. Nope, not really. Hebrew scholar Robert Alter translates it this way: “You make him rule over the work of your hands. All things you set under his feet.” That phrase, “under his feet”, is an image of subjugation, the relationship of master and slave.



Much of the time we think scripture is prescriptive, that it’s telling us what to do, when more often than we think, scripture is descriptive—describing for us how things are rather than how they should be. Humanity was not intended to enslave the environment or each other, but that’s precisely what we have done. Over and over again in the creation story, nature is called “good”, yet the word “dominion” is mentioned only once. In that context of the goodness of nature, it reads more like stewardship. To be created in God’s image, just a little less than God, “under our feet” reads more like responsibility. But that’s now how it’s turned out. We’ve focused on dominion and turned it into domination.



I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in one week, Pope Leo apologized for the papal role in slavery, denounced Just War theory, and published an encyclical about safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. All of it is connected: who is master, who is enslaved, and everyone is dehumanized, disconnected from nature and from humanity.



We see this pattern reverberate in how this country behaves toward wealth and power and how it treats immigrants and First Peoples, queer and transgender people, disabled and neurodivergent people, impoverished and unhoused people, and the earth itself.

· A billionaire can make an “oops” with a rocket test explosion costing $150 million like it’s pocket change, still avoid paying his share of taxes, while millions of people can’t afford healthcare.

· Detainees at Delaney Hall in New Jersey are on a hunger strike, protesting the poor food quality and inadequate access to medical care.

· The HUD administration is seeking to remove the Equal Access Rule, which requires housing programs to be open to all people regardless of gender identity, sexuality, or marital status.

· We witness this closer to home as the city of Wilmington prepares to evict folks living in city-provided tents from Christina Park in a couple of weeks.



Who is master, who is enslaved, and everyone is dehumanized. Humanity is divorcing itself, at war with itself, attempting to dissolve that unbreakable, unshakeable human covenant, when in truth, all of creation is relationships.



In his encyclical Pope Leo wrote, “The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer.” Recently the Ontario Supreme Court declared that cities have a duty to uphold the right to housing, that homelessness has the same equality protections as race, gender, disability, or nationality. Among many other ways, we help provide care to those who need it by hosting the Newark Empowerment Center and by pursuing our affordable housing project.



Today is Trinity Sunday when we celebrate the divine mystery of a God who is relational, including within God’s self. On the worship table we have Rublev’s icon of the holy visitors to Abraham and Sarah, but it has also been interpreted as an icon of the Trinity. The three figures are androgynous in appearance. They are seated around a table, each of them with their head bowed toward the others, none of them more important than the others. There is one chalice on the table, implying that they share with each other and thus have a care for one another.



We were created in God’s image, which means we were created in the image of a relationship. It is our relationships that have the power to save us. We human beings have each other and that is no small thing. Every day we awake to another day in this paradise that we have abused but it is a paradise nonetheless. Not perfect. In fact, it can be, we can be very complicated and incredibly imperfect. How can we more faithfully bear the image of God, which is relationship, in the ways we care for the most vulnerable, for each other, the earth, and ourselves? We, the earth, and its creatures are all a dwelling place of the holy. A sacred trinity when we live that way, cultivating beauty, life, rest, and connection. 

Good. 

Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com


Beloveds, created good...
Beloveds, created in the image of God...
Beloveds, created to cultivate life and tend it with care and appreciation...
God accompanies us together, in the work of love.
With peace, the Spirit sends us.