The chapter we received together is part of the first letter of Paul to the church in Corinth. Paul is offering guidance on a variety of topics – trying to lay out what holy living as followers of Jesus should look like. In chapter 6, for example, he says that Christians shouldn’t be taking each other to court; WORK IT OUT amongst yourselves. And in chapter 8, he talks about the pros and cons of eating meat from animals that were sacrificed in pagan temples. 

The lectionary wants to give us just the little section about loosening our ties with the world as it is. And that certainly would have been less weird to read in church. But – we read a lot from the Pauline Epistles, the letters of the early church written by the apostle Paul. Paul was a tremendously important leader in the first decades of Christianity. He started many churches and nurtured others. His teaching and preaching, some of which is preserved in his letters, shaped Christianity in fundamental ways. So it’s a good idea to pause, now and then, and reflect on who Paul was, and his vision of church and Christian life. 

Chapter 7 of First Corinthians is not the most obvious preaching text – especially in a church that generally leaves matters of partnership and intimacy to your own consciences. But there are some things I really love about it – awkward as it is. 

First, I love how much we get to know Paul, here. He’s really TRYING to understand marriage and intimacy and give good counsel about it, even though it is very much not his jam. Paul seems to be someone who was called to celibacy himself – he just doesn’t feel a yearning for intimate companionship or life-partnership. But he understands that other people do, and he’s trying to make allowances and offer good guidance – even though he can’t help but notice that having a spouse and a family seems to make people kind of distracted and anxious! But, as he says, he knows not everyone can be like him, so – it’s definitely better to marry than to burn. 

I enjoy how he talks about his own authority. Notice that he’s very conscientious, here and elsewhere, about specifying what comes directly from Jesus, and what is just him, Paul, trying to offer his best counsel. The advice against divorce – that’s something Jesus said. But other parts of this chapter are Paul – “I, Paul, and not the Lord”. 

There’s integrity and humility in that – but Paul also doesn’t want to sell himself short; he wants people to take his teachings seriously. “And I think that I too have the spirit of God!” Notice, too, that Paul is already softening Jesus’ rather stark stance; Paul implies that divorce could be OK if a couple has irreconcilable differences on matters of faith.

I enjoy how Paul’s writing style combines very pragmatic, concrete advice with occasional bursts of poetic language – like this nice bit of parallelism: 

“For the one called in the Lord as a slave is the Lord’s freeman, just as the freeman called is a slave of Christ.” 

And this text – with its echoes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:

I mean, beloveds, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.

So part of what I appreciate is that in this single chapter, we get such a good sense of Paul’s voice, and who Paul is. It feels like meeting someone who lived 2000 years ago. That in itself is cool, for me. 

Paul’s sense of the provisionality of everything is the second thing I love about this chapter. When Paul writes this, it’s probably about twenty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. The early Christians are holding onto a sense that Jesus may return very soon, but they’ve also already put two decades into developing ways of living as Christ’s followers in the world as it is. Paul is walking that tightwire – saying, The time has grown short; don’t get invested in things – but at the same time, we may still be here for a while, so, if you feel like you need to get married, go ahead. 

That sense of holding things lightly isn’t just because Paul and others anticipated the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world as we know it. They were also living with profound uncertainty and risk. The worst persecutions of Christians started later, but it was already no picnic. Paul was repeatedly jailed and beaten. People lost family connections and livelihoods because they became Christian. 

In our Gospel for today: did you notice the first phrase, “After John was arrested…”? Mark doesn’t actually tell us what happened to John the Baptist until several chapters later. But Jesus’ mission begins in the shadow of his arrest. Mark is incredibly deliberate in his language. He is telling us here that Jesus knows, from day one, that his preaching and movement-building will likely lead to his arrest and worse. Everything that happens in the Gospels – and Epistles! – happens under the persistent threat of repressive violence.

When Paul advises the people of the church in Corinth to live as if everything might change tomorrow – or tomorrow might not come at all – he’s speaking about the reality of their lives as well as the expectation of the Second Coming. And I feel some resonance with that, today. Beloved friends, the present form of this world is passing away. Day by day, week by week, we’re slowly getting accustomed to the idea that there isn’t a switch that will flip and reset things “back to normal” – with public health, democracy, church, or climate. Instead we’re going to have to discern and build the new normal. Lots of new normals. Somehow. Together. 

The third thing I love about this chapter is how carefully egalitarian Paul is about gender. Now, there’s a great big asterisk there – for his time and place. We may rightly balk at some of his language – for example, we would say now that every person always has full authority over their own body. And of course, Paul has little notion of same-sex partnership or a diversity of genders. But note: in this whole chapter, Paul says almost nothing about women that he doesn’t also say about men, and vice versa. I think it’s fair to say that that’s both intentional and countercultural. The authentic letters of Paul name a number of women who were apparently leaders in the earliest churches. It only took a few decades for patriarchy to get a grip on the churches – for example, somewhere along the way, someone adds a couple of verses to this very letter, saying that women should not speak in church. But during Paul’s time, offering more respect, autonomy, and authority to women than some of the surrounding cultures and religions was part of what made Christianity appealing. And Paul is leaning into that, here. He’s actively constructing Christian marriage as equal and mutual. And – importantly – optional. More on that in a moment. 

Paul’s vision of church and Christian life were tremendously influential in shaping Christianity. And even looking at a text this specific in its focus, we can see some big ways that the church – that OUR church – is Paul’s church. 

First: Paul placed tremendous value on the shared life of church communities. He believed that a group of Christians practicing their faith together really MATTERS. Both as the workshop for faithful living, the place we question and struggle and learn and grow – and as the primary tool for inviting others into the way of Jesus. Notice, for example, that in all this advice about family life, Paul never says, Have a lot of babies so we can grow the church. He believes that Christianity is a way of living that – if done wholeheartedly by an imperfect but loving, hopeful, faithful community – will attract people. Over and over in his letters, Paul says: Focus on trying to follow Jesus; take good care of each other; and let God take care of the rest. 

Second: For Paul, Christian living doesn’t look like just one thing. The Church doesn’t offer a diagram of the perfect Christian family. Instead, it invites you into being a certain kind of person, formed by faith and worship, and trusts you to order your life accordingly. Paul emphatically affirms that churches contain couples and families, people who want to be coupled, people who used to be coupled, and people called to singleness. That’s important. And it’s a recurring theme for Paul, across the Epistles: there isn’t one template for Christian life. People’s households and food practices and observances can look different; what matters is whether they’re striving to follow Christ.

This is a part of Paul’s vision of church that, at its best, the Episcopal Church and the Anglican way of faith honor well. I hear it from former evangelicals exploring the Episcopal Church: that it’s strange, but refreshing, that our church doesn’t tell you the right – the Christian – way to do every little thing. Instead, we offer some foundations for faithful living, in our worship and teaching, and then expect people to exercise their conscience and make their own decisions. There is something very Pauline about that. 

Third: Paul anticipates that we’ll use our experience and reason and prayerful discernment to allow our understandings of God’s will and God’s purposes to evolve. Well: If I’m honest, Paul anticipates that PAUL will use his experience and reason to allow his understandings to evolve. Take the passage on enslaved people who become Christian, here. If you look this up in the New Revised Standard Version, you’ll find something QUITE different. The original Greek text is somewhat ambiguous – is it telling people that if they’re enslaved when they become Christian they should stay that way; or that they should seek freedom, so that they’re bound only to Christ? What we read together is David Bentley Hart’s translation – based in part on what Paul says about slavery elsewhere, in the letter to Philemon. 

By Hart’s reading, Paul is almost working out what he thinks as he writes this passage. He says, a couple of times, Whatever you circumstances were when God called you to faith, stay that way. He feels very strongly about that on the issue of circumcision. But he does waffle about marriage – it’s better to stay the way you are, BUT if you can’t handle being single, it’s OK to marry; AND if your new faith really comprises your marriage, it’s OK to divorce. As Hart reads it, enslavement is another such example. There’s no shame in being enslaved, but if you have a chance to seek your freedom, take it, so that you may be free to be fully bound to Christ and Christ alone. 

Paul makes space for a diversity of ways to live a faithful life – and for people to seek to change their circumstances – because Paul believes your desires matter. He knows that human desires can be disordered and lead us astray; he has plenty to say about that elsewhere. But I think he also has a pretty keen sense of the risks of trying to suppress or ignore our deep yearnings and needs. So, he advises, Seek a holy way to live out your desires – whether that’s taking steps to secure your freedom from bondage, or finding a partner for covenanted intimacy. Which is why, even though Paul had little notion of same-sex couples or diverse gender expressions, there’s a deep sense in which the Episcopal Church’s journey towards the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ folks is grounded in Paul’s thought, Paul’s vision.

Paul wrote the letters to the Romans, letters to the Corinthians and the Thessalonicans, the letters to the Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon, and maybe Colossians. His voice and story are preserved in the book of Acts. His importance to the early church was such that at least four other letters were written in his name. His is the single voice we get to know best in the New Testament, with the POSSIBLE exception of Jesus. And even though he sometimes confuses and dismays me, even though I sometimes argue with him, I am grateful for Paul.

I’m grateful for his hopeful vision for Christian community, and his open-ended vision of faithful living. I’m grateful that he modeled extending our understanding of the way of Jesus into new situations. I’m grateful for Paul’s voice, Paul’s mind, Paul’s heart. And I’m grateful to serve in Paul’s church. 

We receive today’s Genesis text at the Easter vigil every year and sometimes in the Sunday lectionary as well – it’s a fairly familiar story. But today I want to dwell deeply with the first few verses. Let’s look at them together in a few versions.  

1. New Revised Standard Version (the Episcopal Church’s usual translation): 

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

2. Robert Alter’s translation: 

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, Let there be light. And there was light. 

3. Everett Fox’s translation: 

At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters – God said: Let there be light! And there was light. 

I want to spend a little time with some of the most interesting words here. First, “the Deep” – translated variously as Ocean, Waters, Abyss. The Hebrew word is tehom. The waters before Creation. An image that makes me think of finding fossils in Door County – fossils from the Silurian period, 400 million years ago, when living things were just starting to take forms complex enough to be preserved in stone. An image that makes me think, too, of the watery darkness of the womb. 

This idea of “the deep” is part of ancient cosmology – how the ancient Hebrews, and other peoples as well, thought of the world. There were the waters above the dome of the sky; the waters here on the surface with us; and the waters under the earth. 

Sometimes tehom simply means subterranean water, an important resource in a dry land, like in Deuteronomy 8: “The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters [tehom] welling up in valleys and hills…” In the great flood in Genesis, it’s not just the endless rain that causes the flood; it’s also that “the great deep” bursts open. The waters under the earth rise up and overflow.

The Red Sea – which the people Israel cross as they flee bondage in Egypt to begin a new life as God’s people – the Red Sea is described using the word Tehom, in the song of triumph after the crossing and in Psalm 106, re-telling that sacred history centuries later: “God rebuked the Red Sea, and it became dry; God led them through the Deep as through a desert.”

Tehom is also used in many texts talking about the scope of God’s power and wisdom. In the Book of Job God asks Job how he dares to challenge God’s judgment, when God knows the very mysteries of Creation: “Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?” (Job 38:16)

Tehom shows up a LOT in the Psalms; here’s an example from Psalm 33:  “By your word, O God, were the heavens made…You gather up the waters of the ocean as in a water-skin and store up the depths of the sea.”

So the Deep, Tehom, is both ecological and mythological… there’s mystery and power here, and danger. The deeps are something only God has the power to comprehend and contain. 

Let’s turn to the next evocative phrase – formless void, “welter and waste” – in Hebrew, tohu vebohu, tohu and Bohu. The Complete Jewish Bible renders it as: “Astonishingly empty.” One translation of the Septuagint has: “Unsightly and unfurnished” – like a poorly-maintained apartment… 

The word tohu is used other places in the Bible, and variously translated as formless, waste (as in both wasteland and wasteful), futile, vain, useless, empty, wild, chaos, meaningless, desolate, confusion. “Bohu” is not really a word on its own. It would be like saying “turvy” without also saying “topsy.” 

This exact phrase, tohu veboho, tohu and boho, appears three times in the Old Testament. The second and third times are both intentional allusions to this, Genesis 1, the first time. In Isaiah 34, the phrase shows up in an oracle against the land of Edom, a neighboring nation who who collaborated with Babylon in the conquest of Judea: “From generation to generation it shall lie waste; no one shall pass through it for ever and ever. But the hawk and the hedgehog shall possess it; the owl and the raven shall live in it. God shall stretch over it the line of welter, the weight-stones of waste.”

The prophet foresees – and/or hopes – that this enemy nation will be given over to the creatures of the wilderness, and returned to primordial waste. Just a few verses later comes a beautiful text we sometimes read in Advent: The wilderness shall rejoice and blossom… there shall be streams in the desert. 

Then, in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, a similar word is spoken to Judea herself. Jeremiah is the prophet of the conquest of Judea and Jerusalem. He spent decades crying out that God’s people, and especially their leaders, had gone wrong in fundamental and destructive ways, and that doom was coming unless they turned back to God and to righteousness. In chapter 4 the prophet speaks: “Your ways and your doings have brought this upon you…Disaster overtakes disaster, the whole land is laid waste…. I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and lo, there was no human there, and all the birds of the air had fled.”

God creates humanity… but in Jeremiah’s vision, there are no humans left. God speaks light into being… but in Jeremiah’s vision, all is dark. God creates out of waste and void… and in Jeremiah’s vision, collective human willfulness and wrong turns the earth back to waste and void. Tohu and bohu. 

That passage concludes, “For thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.” We know – because we have 26 centuries of hindsight – that Judea and Jerusalem were destroyed by the armies of Babylon. It was unspeakably terrible. And yet God did not make a full end. There was, eventually, renewal and restoration. And God’s people learned new things about God and about faithfulness during their time of exile and grief.

The Deep, Tehom, and the empty wasteland of Tohu and Bohu, are distinct, but alike. Fearful yet fruitful. Beyond comprehension, yet full of potential. In many ancient myths, Creation involves violent mastery of some primeval chaotic force. Some god or hero fights and defeats the monster of the abyss, and gains the power to make the world. 

There is no violence in our creation story. God simply invites the light into being…. Let there be light! And everything else, after it. Genesis and Jeremiah tell us that God’s ongoing creation of the world involves continually inviting tehom and tohu, all that is wild and strange, without form or meaning, into purpose and life and growth. 

But it’s a delicate balance. There’s a temptation to read this as Order versus Chaos. But it’s nowhere near that simple. There are hints in Job and Isaiah and elsewhere that the wilderness and the creatures who live there delight God, even as they terrify humans. Chaos can be fruitful, and order can be evil. The Babylonian army, for example, was VERY organized. So was the Third Reich. Order is a core value of fascism. 

Andre and Mary-Anne Rabe write this about the first verses of Genesis: “[God] is more than what is known and ordered. This God is present too in the unknown, the unordered, the unformed, the unexplained…  The kind of order in which chaos is an enemy, becomes oppressive, manipulating and ever more rigid… 

The only way in which order can retain its beauty is by embracing chaos as a friend… It is in nurturing this playful relationship that new meaning, new beauty, and renewed order is possible. … The tohu wa-bohu is more than the opposite of order – it’s a different kind of order. It is more than nothing, it’s the possibility of everything…”

My friend, Rabbi Betsy Forester, introduced me to a story from the Babylonian Talmud, a holy text of the Jewish people that comments on and expands the Hebrew Bible. On a recent Sunday we had a reading about King David’s desire to build a house for God, a great temple, in Jerusalem. Well, the Talmud says that David got as far as digging the foundations for the Temple. But he dug down so far that he allowed the Deep – Tehom – to rise up and threaten to flood the world. 

David quickly wrote the Name of God on a potsherd and threw it into the Deep… which dropped down again, sixteen thousand cubits. The very name of the Holy One had the power to contain those chaotic waters. 

BUT – then David realized that the Deep had dropped too far. Those primeval, mysterious waters have to be close to the surface of the earth in order to provide water for springs and wells. So David composed a set of songs, known as the Psalms of Ascent, and the Deep rose up fifteen thousand cubits –

to settle just one thousand cubits below the surface of the land. Where those mysterious, threatening yet life-giving waters could continue to nourish life. 

(Source: https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/rabbinic-creativity-and-the-waters-that-would-consume-the-world/)

Which brings us to baptism. 

John is a prophet, in the grand Old Testament tradition. Wearing funny clothes, living in a funny place, telling people that big change is coming and if they’re smart, they’ll change themselves NOW and beat the rush. This practice of baptism he introduces – dunking people in the Jordan River, as an outward sign of their repentance and commitment to turn away from sin – it’s most likely an adaptation of some Jewish customs of ritual washing, which were also ways to set yourself right with God.

Christian baptism builds on this foundation – baptism as we practice it, and to the extent that we understand it, is about repentance and cleansing; it’s also about passing through Christ’s death and into his risen life, being named as part of God’s great family, and indelibly marked by the Holy Spirit. 

Placing these verses from Genesis alongside the baptism of Jesus calls forward a connection that’s there in Scripture but that’s easy for us to miss. John and Jesus both choose to spend time in the wilderness, a wild, desolate, empty place – a tohu place. And when people come to John for baptism, he wades out into the river with them, puts his hands on their head, and pushes them down under the water. Into the deep. 

The Biblical text doesn’t use that word there but our baptismal liturgy explicitly connects the waters of baptism with the Deeps before Creation and the Deeps of the Exodus from Egypt: “We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water. Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ.” 

Placing these verses from Genesis alongside the baptism of Jesus invites us to reflect on baptism – our baptism, which Jesus’ baptism foreshadows – as an encounter with chaos, void, primordial winds and waters.. through which God carries us safely.  

What we actually *do* in a baptism is not frightening. It’s calm and contained. Very little water is involved. (Although I am VERY ready to do a baptism in Lake Mendota or the body of water of your choice!) 

But just as in the Eucharist a bit of bread and a sip of wine are in some way beyond our perception also consuming the body and blood of Jesus Christ, 

given for us as a sign of complete self-giving love – so in baptism a little water poured upon someone’s head is in some mystical sense our journey into the Deep, a dive down into the rich and terrifying depths of Tehom. 

It is our sojourn in the wilderness, wild, empty, and unformed. And it is our journey back to the land of the living, enriched and transformed by those strange and holy primeval energies which offer us the possibility of everything.

With all that in our hearts, minds, and spirits, let us renew our baptismal vows.

Andre & Mary-Anne Rabe’s essay: https://alwaysloved.net/2020/03/30/tohu-wa-bohu-gods-relationship-to-chaos/