The Second and Third "day" of creation

This blog is the continuation of our sermon series for Lutheran Campus Ministry focusing on the the days of Creation in the first chapter in Genesis.

Pastor Katie's Homily on Wednesday September 17, 2025

Genesis 1:6-8

One of the hardest things, to me, about being a person of faith, is the

realization that I will never be able to understand God.

The Bible gives us all sorts of evidence of this:

- Romans 11:33 says, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and

knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how

inscrutable his ways!”

- In Isaiah 55:8, the Lord says, “For my thoughts are not your

thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.”

- I could go on…

God’s thoughts and ways and wisdom are, in many ways, un-

understandable to us…

But there ARE ways that God reveals Godself to us.

Whether it’s through an experience in nature or kind words at just the

right time or a passage in the Bible that speaks into your life – We

cannot fully comprehend God, but neither are we completely ignorant of

God’s activity and presence in the world.

Part of being human is a desire to understand.

We’re all here, at school, to learn and understand more than we did before. So when the

incomprehensibility of God starts to bum me out or overwhelm me,

I actually find comfort in the fact that this desire to know and understand

God has been part of the human story since the beginning of time.

People have always been trying to understand things! And people have

always been trying to understand God. Our ancestors saw evidence of

the divine hand throughout their known world, so that even without spaceships or scientific formulas or cameras or books, they were able to

look at the world around them and learn about God.

As we continue in our worship series celebrating God’s act of creation, I

want to lift up something Pastor Will said last week: That these verses

are not so much a story about how things happened, but a story about

whodunnit.

These creation narratives don’t have to be scientifically accurate for them to be truthful.

Our reading from Genesis this evening is really short, but it begins with the truth that “God said.”

Who said? “God said.”

God said that there should be a separation between the waters of creation

– remember the first day of creation, when God’s spirit was hovering (or

surfing) over the face of the waters? Well on this day, God said that the

waters should be separated, and, according to the writers of Genesis,

God decided the best way to do that would be by making a dome.

A little background, here…

● Cosmology is the science of the origin and development of the

universe

● So picture yourself as an early human

○ You look around, you see the earth

○ You look up, you see the sky

○ You have no idea what’s beyond the sky, or how the lights in

the sky came to be, but you see the sun and the moon and the

stars

○ And you know that sometimes, water comes down from that

sky

● So what would you think about that? How would you explain the

phenomenon of rain, for example??

The Genesis tradition tells us that early humans believed the sky was

actually a dome. A hard-material dome kind of like a snow globe!

Only instead of the dome keeping water in, like it does for a snow globe,

this dome was made to keep water out.

So I guess it’s actually more like Sandy’s tree dome in SpongeBob.

(Here is my very bad drawing of the dome of the Sky.)

Ancient humans believed that when it rained, God was opening holes in

the dome to let some of the water above the dome rain down to water the

earth. (For example, the flood later on in Genesis starts when “the

fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens

were opened.”)

Doesn’t this kind of make sense? If you had never seen a picture of the

earth from space, or didn’t know about the water cycle, wouldn’t this

cosmology kind of make sense?

Humans have been trying to understand God and God’s creation since

the beginning of time. God’s creative power has ALWAYS been mind-

boggling for us humans, and even if we think that ancient humans are

kind of silly for their understanding of the universe, just think of all the

stuff we are still discovering every day about God’s creation.

So at this point, I want to break for our discussion questions and hear a

little bit from y’all:

1. What could we learn about God through this “day” of creation?

2. What, in your opinion, is the difference between understanding

something/someone and having faith in it/them?

The students’ answers to question 1 included things like:

● “I’m kind of imagining God inside the ‘ball’ of our atmosphere

with us. Like God is constantly at work protecting us from the

chaos that threatens to bear down on us.”

● “God is separating and protecting us from danger.”

● “God separates and organizes the chaos FOR us, never separating

Godself FROM us.

● “God was intentionally preparing a place for the rest of creation,

including us!”

● “God didn't separate the waters from above; God's spirit was

hovering over the waters! God is still in the midst of creation.”

And for question 2:

● “It’s hard to know which comes first!”

● “It’s like how I have faith that an airplane or a rollercoaster are

going to work, even though I don’t understand how. I have faith

that God is real, even when I don’t understand how.”

● “Faith is a virtue that we are able to practice because of God’s

grace. And the more we practice our faith, the more we grow in

our understanding of who God is.”

We humans understand a lot more about the world now than we did

when the book of Genesis was being written. Some of our ancestors’

understanding of the world we have left behind, but some we hold onto.

God is always at work bringing peace in the midst of chaos.

God blesses creation and calls it good.

And God is still creating – making all thing new.

Pastor Katie's Homily on Wednesday Sept. 24th, 2025

Genesis 1:9-13

Let’s recap what we’ve heard in this creation narrative so far…

Day 1: God’s spirit hovers over the waters of creation, God creates light; God calls

it good; God separates light from darkness. God calls the light “Day” and the

darkness “Night.”

Day 2: God creates a dome in the midst of the waters; God separates the waters

that are above the dome from the waters under the dome. God calls the dome

“Sky.”

And now, on Day 3, God does a little more work ordering the chaotic waters under

the sky…

God gathers the water into one place and dry land appears!

God calls the waters “Seas” and the dry land “Earth.” And God saw that they were good.

We’re maybe starting to get a picture of the planet as we know it… with continents

and oceans… and God’s not done yet!

After revealing and naming the dry land, God spoke again, saying – “Let the earth put forth vegetation.” Specifically plants that yield seed and fruit trees that bear fruit (with the seed in it).

And it was so. God’s word empowered the earth to bring forth vegetation…

specifically plants that yield seed and fruit trees that bear fruit (with the seed in it).

And God saw that it was good.

The five words at the beginning of verse 12 really stuck out to me when studying

the text for this week. Verse 12 begins: “the earth brought forth vegetation.”

“The earth brought forth vegetation.”

And these words stuck out to me because I realized that this is the first time in the

story that God’s creation actually participates in the creating.

Night and Day didn’t really “do” anything after they were created. The sky did “do” something (separate the waters above from the waters below), but that was, like, a one-and-done thing.

The earth on the other hand, heard God’s creative word, and joined in creating.

“Let the earth bring forth vegetation,” God said, and the earth did.

The earth brought forth plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it.

And God saw that THAT was good, too.

Now, we haven’t quite gotten to humans yet in this creation narrative, but I’m

starting to see some parallels between human and non-human creation.

For example, we – and the earth – share God’s gift of creativity. On this “third

day” of creation, God tells the earth to bring forth vegetation, but God doesn’t

exactly give a how-to manual! We don’t hear God giving explicit instructions to

the earth to… make corn or grow daisies or produce an oak tree.

Rather, God gives the earth the command to put forth vegetation, and then God gives the earth room to respond.

On this “third day” of creation, we are starting to see God’s creativity spilling forth

even into the things that are being created…

And God’s creativity spills out into us, too! So that when we hear God’s voice in

our lives, we can imagine any number of ways to respond to it. As much as we

might prefer a “how-to” manual, creation shows us that the ability to imagine new

possibilities is simply a gift from God.

And that brings me to the second parallel between us and the earth – we have the

ability to be creative and try new things, but we don’t HAVE to DO anything to be

called “good.”

God didn’t wait for the earth to produce vegetation before calling it good!

No, God called the earth and the seas good BEFORE they had even done anything.

The earth was simply existing when God saw that it was good.

And God pronounces us “good” for simply existing, too. God gives us grace and

love before we’ve even done anything to deserve it. Before we’ve started studying

for a midterm or applied for that internship or remembered to call our friend back,

God looks at us and sees that the fact that we exist is, indeed, very good.

So our ability to respond creatively to God’s word comes AFTER the

pronunciation of our goodness. God FIRST delights in the fact that we exist, and

then God invites us into GOD’S work of bringing forth vegetation and bearing

good fruit in the world.

Discussion questions: God saw that the earth was good for simply existing, so why

do you think God gave it something else to do? What’s your favorite fruit or

vegetable? (What could we learn about God through this “day” of creation?)

Students’ answers included:

● “God’s not done with creation yet! There is more to come, and the fruits of

the earth will support additional life.”

● “God created the whole universe, but as far as we know, humans only exist

on earth. God took extra care in making our planet habitable.”

● “Works are not the same as faith! Our works are good things, but they come

out of our faith. They do not determine our standing in the eyes of God.”

● “The text says ‘let the earth’, which sounds like the earth wanted to bring

forth fruit. Almost like God was giving it permission to do what it had been

created to do.”

We have permission to be who God created us to be and respond to the gift of

God’s grace in our lives.

In our creativity and in our simply existing, God loves us and calls us “good.”

Amen.