George Floyd should not have died in police custody.  Businesses, homes, and lives should not be burned to the ground.  But there’s no building without tearing down, no creating without destroying.  Seeing the culmination of the labors he and his team of brilliant scientists and engineers had invested in creating the atomic bomb, seeing the detonation of the bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer thought of an ancient Hindu writing: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”  Murderer or liberator Che Guevara spoke of revolution as the apple that must be made to fall from the tree.

Some feel as if our world is being destroyed.  Some feel we are witnessing a revolution long overdue.  Does the Bible offer any lens to put these traumatic times in eternal perspective?  God’s Word is always speaking to us, helping us to understand what it is possible for mortals to understand.  Through the Holy Spirit that makes God’s Word come alive for us, in us, God’s Word is always giving us encouragement and hope to persevere, to keep the way of discipleship.

Where does the Bible offer help for these times?  Revelation—end, judgment, flames?  I want to think about the beginning, the foundation of all our failure and all our hope.  I want to remember with you some other things that we need to fit in, somehow.  Scripture mentions Leviathan and Rahab.  Leviathan might be a whale (it seems to be in Job), but in Psalm 74 and again in Isaiah 27, Leviathan takes on substantially greater dimensions.  “It was You,” the psalm sings of God, “who split open the sea by Your power; / You broke the heads of the monster in the waters. / It was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan / and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert” (Ps 74:13-14).  Okay.  What?  Where the psalmist recalls a past event, Isaiah looks ahead: “In that day, the LORD will punish with His sword— / His fierce, great and powerful sword— / Leviathan the gliding serpent, / Leviathan the coiling serpent; / He will slay the monster of the sea” (Is 27:1).

A serpent is not a whale.  A serpent, quick, strong, immense—a many-headed monster.  Just when you think it’s been quelled another head rises to strike with deadly venom.  What is needed is vigilance, wisdom, preparation, and faith.  We do not defeat Leviathan.  God defeats Leviathan.  We do not have the strength or power, the ability.  God does.

I mentioned Rahab.  You might remember the prostitute who saved the spies that Joshua sent to Jericho.  That’s not the Rahab I have in mind.  This other Rahab is mentioned in Isaiah: “Awake, awake, arm of the LORD, / clothe Yourself with strength! / Awake, as in days gone by, as in generations of old. / Was it not You who cut Rahab to pieces, / who pierced that monster through?” (Is 51:9).  Isaiah, writing around 750 B.C., is mentioning ancient, primordial events.

Leviathan, Rahab—monsters, monsters of the sea: the unfathomable depths, someway like the waters over which the Spirit of God hovered (1:2) for who knows how long, poised, about to act, about to speak.

So, in the beginning there was God and Leviathan-Rahab?  No.  Moses doesn’t record it that way.  Neither the psalms nor Isaiah return to this, as though insisting upon some eternal dualism.  Perhaps the psalm and Isaiah are using Leviathan-Rahab, this many-headed monster in the depths of the unfathomable waters, to name what is always at work against God and God’s creation, to name what God fights, actively and always ultimately victoriously, that God fights through creation, through providence, through Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, and I daresay through the Church, as the Church responds to God’s call, to God’s Word, clearly and sufficiently given in the Bible.  God is fighting sin.

Racism is always wrong.  When God created human beings, He created us “in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them” (1:27).  The Bible does not limit to one shade or hue the people whom God created.  One of our young disciples asked me if Adam and Eve were white.  A great question!  Our first inclination may be to think they were: we’ve always seen them shown that way.  What if they were black?  What if they looked like Middle Eastern people: Arabs or Syrians, Iranians or Israelis?

I fear that what this nation has been going through these last several days, decades, isn’t precisely about race.  I fear race has become the virtuous face to cover rage, frustration, resentment, will to power, to defeat, to destroy, to humiliate, finally to have sweet vengeance.  A political tool.  I sense politics all through these events, these times, in this most political year of 2020: the most crucial political year since . . . well, since 2016.

We live in angry times; it’s palpable.  Rage does not upbuild and has no interest in upbuilding.  Rage tears down; it wants to destroy and is ultimately self-destructive.  I hear and see unleashed rage against a society continually being sold the message that anyone can have anything, be anything, whether by your own will, the will of your benevolent, paternal government, or the will of your purchasing power.  We laugh at advertising, and it shapes our vision and expectations of reality, whether the advertising is commercial or political.  Messages.  The reality is our lives will never measure up to what this advertising promises: the vendors can’t deliver and have no intention of delivering.  False promises are the way of idols.

We shall always have the poor with us.  Must there be so many be poor, Lord?  Some of you have worked in distant countries long enough to see that there is little ground for comparison between being poor here and being poor there.  Race, poverty, rage—why can’t I have what you have?  What’s preventing me, who’s keeping me from having it?  Who is responsible for my miserable, dead-end life?!  Who can tell me?

Race is the issue; thus, cities are in flames, businesses looted, destroyed, demonstrators running around with clothing, shoes, and phones?  The language of the unheard?  Race is the issue, so let’s stop funding police departments?  Police departments, as such, are bastions of systemic racist white privilege?  Yet two of the four officers arrested in Minneapolis were clearly not white.  But they are police, which is as good as white, for political purposes.

Yes, beloved, there are racists and there is racism.  I fear, though, that there are those using race and racism as the self-righteous, self-justifying cover for something deeper, much more prevalent, much more difficult to address and heal: rage, lust for domination that will and must tear down to acquire.  It is easier to tear down than to build up.

What we hear in this first chapter of Genesis is God’s work of building up, from nothing.  You can’t build without tearing down?  God can and did.  God is so unlike us.  God is love.  God says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” (1:26).  Who is this “us”?  The angels didn’t make, didn’t help God create.  Who is this us?  God is so unlike us.  God is love: not love for oneself—is that even love?  “I just love . . . me!”  Not the love of one for one another, but the love that loves beyond self and other, the love that includes, the love that builds, the love that abides.

We are the work of this love, this God.  We didn’t participate in this work: we are a product of this work, part of this work.  We have a particular relationship to this work: God blesses us and tells us to “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (1:28).

Subdue, rule, have dominion.  How?  We haven’t gotten that right, yet.  Humanity has yet to figure that out, but this first chapter of Genesis provides the clue we need: God’s Word gives us the key.  We, all people, were created in the image of God.  We are to subdue, rule, and have dominion after the image of God: with the character, aims, and love of God.  But we are fallen; sin defaced the image of God in us.  Sin begets sin.  Let’s forgive sin, certainly, but let’s not excuse it.  Let’s not say that sin is the proper response to sin, the just response, the righteous response.  Sin is understandable, oh yes, we know!  This does not make sin right, whether it be the sin of racism or the sin of vindictive, wanton, chaotic destruction, the sin of callous disregard for human life, whatever the color of the victim’s skin.

If you think burning and looting, beating those who make the pitiable attempt to interfere with these things, is a just response to systemic racism and white privilege (whatever you take those beat-down phrases to mean), then what if justice came to your home, your business, your loved ones, your life?  What if the riot comes down your street?  No, you say?  Why not?  How is it justice when it is against someone else, whom you don’t know and probably wouldn’t particularly like, but terrible injustice when it comes upon you?  If all this destruction and devastation is truly the way of justice, if that is the hand of God, you should welcome it on your street too!

But we don’t, do we, because we know it’s not right, good, or necessary.  There is a better way.  Callous disregard for human life is not the way.  We must never permit God’s instruction to exercise dominion to be taken as license to dominate.  And how quickly, how easily humanity has, as history reminds us vividly, painfully.  The problem is not a problem of justice or a problem of race: all human problems are problems of sin—what we have done to each other and what we decline to do for each other.  Abandoning God to indulge the idols of every sin-whipped, unhappy desire.  Sin seeks to destroy us, our connection with God, to destroy God’s Word, to destroy the church and its faithful witness to Jesus Christ.  God provides the way to be set free from sin: Jesus Christ, the Word of God, but only those whom the Holy Spirit has plucked out of the debris of our destruction have accepted this.

Sin lives to destroy, to tear down and to beat us into submission.  Sin lives to dominate.  Burning businesses and beaten, bleeding bodies crumpled on the streets are the acute evidence of sin.  Sinful people being what they are.  We—everyone, no matter their color or creed—we only need look within, we only need review our own lives, to see the ordinary evidence of sin.

You can’t build without tearing down?  God builds from nothing.  People cover the earth with ashes.  God washes us in the blood of His Son.  By Spirit and Word, God knits together our scattered bones, sinew, muscles, covers us, breathes new life into us.  We were dead, and we are alive.  We were lost and we are found.  We were nothing, lived for nothing, to multiply nothing—being nothing—and God has made us His own, given us a name, an aim and destination.  God spoke us out of the formless darkness of the void, spoke us into the light now in us.

In us for what?  Merely to rescue us, as though we were particularly special and inherently different from the rest of humanity?  No!  The light of God’s Word is now in us so that we might know God who makes Himself known to us, who reclaims us to send us out into the formless dark voids of human lives, sin-dominated, sin-serving.  He sends us into danger, brothers and sisters: no wonder we tremble and find reasons to stay put!

No one serves himself or herself.  Everyone serves one of two masters: God or not-God.  Not-God takes many names, has many heads; apart from God it is all one monster.  You and I are sent to serve God, empowered, enabled by grace to bring others out of the formless dark void, into the life-giving knowledge of God.

God created an orderly creation.  Chaos hates order, rages against it with perfect hatred.  Disorder rages, knowing its inevitable impotence.  Leviathan, Rahab, monsters lurking in the unfathomable depths, the unfathomed depths of humanity, the very humanity that applies the most advanced knowledge and skill in order to become death, destroyer of worlds; the very humanity that runs to burn, loot, beat, to tear down.  How easy, to tear down!  How sudden, and how constant.  How shockingly, horribly, unsurprisingly easy it all is.

God gives us another way, beloved: The Way.  God gives us grace.  This bread and this juice, this body and this blood, like seeds of grace.  Do you want them?  Do you want God to plant these seeds inside you, seeds with life in them, seeds that will sprout, take root, grow, and bear fruit, fruit that has seed in it, seed for life?  God provides the seed.  God provides the water.  God provides the breath.  God provides the light.  God provides the soil.  God gives the growth.  God gives the fruit, that you might give to others, give in peace, give in faith, give in love, the love of God who is love.  Victory will never come out of flames, flames of rage, anger, self-righteousness and self-justification.  Victory comes only from God, by grace, through faith.

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and how unfathomable His ways!  For from God and through God and to God are all things.  To Him be the glory forever.