Friends, welcome to The Book of Common Words, where we explore the Christian spirituality of being human through poetry and prose about my life, art, and the Christian faith. I’m your writer, Aaron. This publication is 100% reader supported. Thanks for joining me in this exploration.
At Pentecost, we celebrate violent winds, tongues of fire, and strange utterances inaugurating the birth of the church. Pentecost is the Holy Spirit’s coming to indwell each of us who believe the gospel, who believe Jesus is Lord and the rest is bullshit.1
At Pentecost, something supernatural happened. I’m not just talking about the flames dancing on people’s heads, the divine translation of praise and worship into other languages, or even the boldness imparted to the disciples. Something beyond the natural happened. It wasn’t something that happened to the natural the way rushing winds and tongues of fire invaded the ordinary, natural world. This was something else entirely.
This something that happened began 40 days prior to Pentecost at the resurrection of Jesus.
When Jesus got up from the dead, after he endured the cross and scorned its shame, after he descended to the dead and harrowed hell, after the victory and glory of the son of God was put on display for all to see, Jesus, rising from the grave, announced a new creation.
This new way of being, this new economy of grace, this new creation was announced at the resurrection in definitive terms, and it was inaugurated at Pentecost. The resurrection was a retelling of the creation myth and Pentecost was a reversal of Babel, its tower, confusion, and chaos being undone by an upper room and amazement at hearing things in native tongues.
This new creation has only just begun. It changed the lives of those gathered in the upper room, and continues to change, charge, and catapult the church towards its culmination: the new Jerusalem.
When Heaven and earth collide, when we see the end of time, when the new creation comes to fulfillment, there will be a city filled with trees of life, for the healing of the nations, to feed and fill the hungry, to sustain us all before the throne of God.
This vision of the holy city is a marked difference from the garden of Eden we read about in the stories of creation. And it’s supposed to be different. See, we’re not returning to the garden. New creation isn’t a restoration to the way things were before the ground and humankind was cursed. New creation is a resurrection of all that once was into something new.
When Jesus came through the resurrection, people didn’t recognise him until he broke bread, showed them his wounds, called them by name. Jesus revealed himself to them because they couldn’t understand the new creation he was.2
In the same way, new creation—the resurrected heavens and earth—is something we can’t recognize right now. We can’t see it because we’re still in the old creation, and because it’s not fully formed, fulfilled, finished. We’re waiting on the new creation, even as we—the church invisible—bear witness to it. That’s what the disciples were doing from Pentecost onwards: bearing witness that not only is a different world possible, but that different world is breaking in and we can be a part of birthing it.
We are the midwives of this new creation.
As midwives, we must remember that this is a new thing God is doing.3 It isn’t a return to the former way, no matter how very good things were in the garden. The garden was a seed. Indeed, creation, this old way of being and living and relating, is nothing but a seed to be buried, just as Jesus was buried. And, just like Jesus, that burial will result in new life growing, bursting out of the soil, growing from a tiny mustard seed into a mighty tree where the birds of the air can find shelter and the beasts of the ground can find shade.
This is the truth of new creation: it grows out of the old creation. The old creation must fall, die, and be buried—baptized is as good a metaphor for it as any—so that it can shed its husk, and the new tiny life inside can begin to gestate and grow. The new is hidden in the old, waiting to burst forth and bloom.
And this is why most people who write a theology of sex get it wrong.
In the beginning, God created humankind in God’s image, male and female they were created by God.4 That’s where we start, but it’s not where we end. Most theologies of sex rely heavily on a return to Eden, a return to the idyllic time between male and female when we were naked and unashamed. Some go as far as to say that male and female signifies only two sexes or genders and therefore queer people are part of the curse.
That’s utter hogwash.
The language of “male and female” is an encompassing statement, like “the heavens and the earth.” It means top to bottom, the whole thing, all of everything that is. “God created the heavens and the earth” isn’t a literal phrase, but symbolizes all creation, just like “male and female” symbolizes all of humanity. It’s not a binary in Genesis one; it’s an encompassing statement meant to say every human, from male to female and everyone in between5, is created in the image of God.
But, remember, new creation isn’t a return to the old seeds. New creation is a birth of something new.
Galatians 3.28 reads like this in the NRSV: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Usually when people quote this verse, they say, “male or female.” But that’s wrong. The language here is exactly like Genesis for a reason. No longer are we separated, taken from one human and made to be two.
I mean, isn’t that what happens in the Genesis two creation story? A human is made, but there is nothing suitable in all creation to create a community with the human, so God puts the human to sleep, and from the side of that first human, God fashions a second. Thus, male and female.6 Separated. Forming a good community, but still divided. But now, there is no longer those lines of division. No Jew or Greek. No slave or free. No male and female. Why? Because all of you7 are one in Christ Jesus.
Jesus—he who started this new creation thing in the first place— has removed our divisions. That’s not to say we’re all the same, but we are all one. One what? One new creation. Take this idea and superimpose it on 2 Corinthians 5.17 (NRSVue): “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being!”
This is the kicker: we are all one in Christ, and since we are in Christ, we are new creation.
That new creation we are midwives to? It’s us that’s being born new.
That new creation that is a foretaste of the new Jerusalem and the culmination of history? It’s us.
We, the church, those of us who say Jesus is Lord and everything else is bullshit—we are the new creation that is breaking into the world, erupting from the old husks of all we used to be.
- The exact quote from Stanley Hauerwas is, “Jesus is Lord. Everything else is bullshit.” ↩︎
- Is. Jesus is still alive as a new creation. ↩︎
- Cue up the D.C. Talk for all my post-evangelical friends. ↩︎
- Genesis 1.27 ↩︎
- So to speak. We know that gender, sex, and sexuality don’t exist in a linear fashion. ↩︎
- For a much better and more in depth treatment of this, see chapter 6 in “The Forgotten Creed” by Stephen J. Patterson. ↩︎
- Us. This is about us, the people who are being swept up in this new creation. ↩︎
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