Genesis 1:24-27 (The Message)
God spoke: “Earth, generate life! Every sort and kind:
cattle and reptiles and wild animals—all kinds.”
And there it was:
wild animals of every kind,
Cattle of all kinds, every sort of reptile and bug.
God saw that it was good.
God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image,
make them reflecting our nature,
So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea,
the birds in the air, the cattle,
And, yes, Earth itself,
and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.”
God created human beings;
God created them to reflect God’s nature.
God created them male and female.
I am famous for forcing the family photo. This not only assures I will be out of the historical record, except an occasional finger or extreme close up. But I set myself up for failure. It’s hard enough to get people to attend an event, then you have to get them to face the same direction, stay still, people never stay still, and be photographed. Just for one image.
Recently I found a family photo from a Christmas when I was in elementary school. In my mind, Christmas was always a misty watercolor memory. People blending toward their best qualities, smiling and at peace, and why not? Dinner magically appeared at these events. Children were so reasonable from what I recall. My mental image looks like this.
Then, there is the reality. There I am. We rarely remember how our face looked or that we were part of a group and things beyond that moment might be affecting people or that we might be affecting people. We rarely know how our age or vantage point might have affected our experience or the people on the sidelines. We probably remember how we felt. The anger. Or shock. Or tension. Or worry or frustration. I hope sometimes we got to be this guy. But perhaps we were the little sister of that guy. The image is blurry, one of many in the stack. That quote by Anais Nin, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
I start the sermon with this image because many of us are headed on great family outings. And it might be helpful when you’re at the reunion or the bbq to go ahead and give accurate caption to the family photos, in real time, as a gift to your future self, especially now that we can easily delete and edit and filter our photos to show only the best times. Social media amplifies this. So perhaps give yourself a caption in advance: I regret forcing them to wear white in the sand. Or not pictured: The dog who refused to be photographed. The fear the grown ups had about a cancer diagnosis. The work email that had just come through someone’s phone.
Jill Davidson who recently passed away had a great strategy for those unflattering family photos. She loved how, no matter what, kids would point to themselves with delight and say “Look at me!” So, her whole life, no matter how off the angle, she wouldn’t say, “Ugh, I need to work out or I shouldn’t wear peach.” She’d just boisterously say “look at me!”
Families aren’t the only ones who create cherished pictures of themselves. Countries do too. Every people tells stories about who they are, where they came from, and what they stand for. Some of those stories are beautiful. Some are incomplete. Some leave people standing just outside the frame. Or negate the context. We just celebrated Juneteenth and are preparing for Independence Day, and on this 250 th year since the Declaration of Independence, Americans will be dusting off the images on the mantle of history.
The Declaration of Independence is in a way our family portrait as a nation: an image in words of who we believed ourselves to be, who we hoped to be, and who we are still struggling to become.
The historian Walter Isaacson said that the Declaration of Independence contains perhaps the greatest sentence 1 in the English language: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
Those are powerful words. Heart swelling words. Words that point beyond themselves. Words that have inspired revolutions, movements, and generations of people who believed the world could be more just than it was. But there has always been a problem. Who exactly was included in that little word we?
Our Sunday School class has been discussing the American Revolution documentary series by Ken Burns, and from behind the camera, Ken Burns asks about that word we. Did “we” include enslaved Africans who had been kidnapped and brought to this country against their will? Did “we” include Native peoples, some of whom fought alongside the colonists, some alongside the British, and many who simply wanted to be left alone? Did “we” include women?
Did “we” include loyalists? Or did “we” simply mean the men gathered in Philadelphia who signed the document?
The tension was there from the beginning. The Declaration reaches toward a broad vision of humanity, but it was written by people who could not fully understand or implement the implications of their words. A family photo where we are still trying to expand the frame, and to wonder how our particular vantage point might affect how we remember it.
1 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/greatest-sentence-ever-isaacson-excerpt/684491/
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously called the Declaration a promissory note written to all Americans. Yet for African Americans, he said, that check had come back marked “insufficient funds.” The Civil Rights Movement was, in part, an effort to cash that check – to insist that America live up to its own words, so that others could draw from the vault of opportunity and the riches of freedom and security.
Women also asked the framers to widen the frame. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John Adams during the Revolution and urged him to “remember the ladies.” Yet women waited another 144 years before gaining the right to vote. Generation after generation kept returning to those words and asking, “Who else belongs in this picture?”
As Christians, I wonder if there is another question we should ask. What exactly makes these truths true? The Declaration calls them “self-evident.” Jefferson’s beautiful sentence originally said these truths are sacred and undeniable. But Ben Franklin edited them. Self- evident appealed to enlightenment ideas of people like David Hume who thought pure logic, pure reason, would tell people what is true.
But Christians, especially those in the lineage of John Calvin, get twitchy about that notion. With the idea that human logic and reason are pure. We know that human beings do not always see clearly. We rationalize. We justify. We protect our interests. History shows just how easily people can convince themselves that some lives matter more than others.
Christians, especially Reformed Christians, doubt that equality is most an observable fact. It is, at its deepest level, a faith claim. The framers made that shift too. The next phrase in the Declaration of Independence says that human beings are “endowed by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights. That phrase was added by John Adams because of his faith. The faith that human worth does not rest on intelligence, wealth, strength, citizenship, achievement, or social standing, but on the image of God. That it doesn’t come from generals or genius or genetics, but Genesis.
Long before there was a Declaration of Independence, there was a declaration from God. In Genesis, God creates human beings in God’s image. The Bible does not say we are equal because we reasoned our way there. It says we are equal because God has spoken it. God looked at creation and called it “Good.” TovGod looked at humanity and called it “Very good.” Tov me-od.
And then, if you want to know what God thinks of humanity, look at where Jesus spent his time. He kept widening the frame. Tax collectors. Fishermen. Women. Children. Samaritans. Roman soldiers. Lepers. Immigrants. Sinners. The sick. The forgotten. The people respectable society cropped out of the picture.
And then on the cross, Christ stretched out his arms wide enough to gather the whole family photo.
And then in the resurrection, God announced once and for all that death, hatred, exclusion, and division are actually not the caption on this human family. The caption forever is only this: created in the image of God. Beloved. Forgiven. Very good. The caption matters.
On Father’s Day, I remember a conversation with my Dad years ago. It had been a hard day. I had little kids and all those declarations I had made about the kind of parent I wanted to be had gone out the window, along with an actual kid’s shoe. An expensive one, from Stride Rite. It was not a day that made it into the photo reel. I remember asking my dad how on earth he did it. I asked him to give me advice, anything, on how to hold it together. And he said, “Well, I’ve found that if you say child of God after their names it changes things.” Try it even for one hour, and I promise you it will change you.
Because the truth is that every family photo is imperfect. Someone is angry. Someone is grieving. Someone feels forgotten. Someone is standing at the edge. Someone isn’t sure they belong. Someone feels like they are messing it up. I don’t know about you but sometimes I am all of those things at the same time.
And to all of us, Jesus says, “Look at me!” Look at me for hope that this snapshot in time is not the end of the story. Look at me and have some grace for yourself and them. Look at me and remember what is true. Look at me and remember what is just. Look at me for how much love costs but also how much more it gives. Jesus says, don’t just put a picture of me on the mantle, let me be the lens through which you see your life. And the people who cause you heartache. And the future just over the horizon. Look at me. And the more you do that, the more you will look like me.
I believe that is what God has been trying to do all along. Not create a perfect family portrait. Not create a perfect nation. Not create a perfect church. But to keep gathering imperfect people into grace. Again and again and again. Expanding the frame. Healing what is broken. Teaching us to see ourselves and one another as God sees us and sending us to turn the lens to those who need mercy, who need care.
Amen.