Wonder at Creation – Worship the Creator- Genesis 1: 1-5 &24-31 and John 1: 1-14

The Creation Care Team came up with the theme, Wonder at Creation – Worship the Creator. What a great theme. The beauty and grandeur of creation touches each of us. The Bible speaks repeatedly of the stupendous magnificence of the creation: of its overwhelming beauty and elegance, of its vast and diverse array of creatures, and of the incredibly complex and interdependent weave of its ecosystems. In Genesis chapter 1, God is first described as the Creator who, as Creation unfolded, Saw everything that He had made and found it to be very good.

The size of God’s creation is hard for us to fathom. We think of the Earth as a pretty big place. It is 25,000 miles in circumference. If you could drive around the Earth it would take you 40 to 50 days.

The distance from the Earth to the sun is 93 million miles. A 747 jet flies at about 600 miles in one hour. If we could take a 747 jet to the sun, it would take 17 years to get there.

As we move farther away from the Earth distances get so large so fast that astronomers have to measure using the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second. Light can go around the Earth 7 and 1/2 times in one second. It takes 8 minutes for the light of the Sun to reach us. It takes 5 light-hours for the sun’s light to get out to Pluto.

When we leave our solar system, distances become enormous. The nearest star, named Proxima Centauri, is over 4 light-years away. Just imagine if the sun were reduced to the size of a large grapefruit and placed in Washington D.C. Proxima Centauri would be the size of a cherry and as far away as California. On this same scale, the Earth would be smaller than the top of a pin, and only 50 feet from the grapefruit sun.

The center of our galaxy is about 27,000 light years from us. The closest galaxy to us is called M31. It is two million light years away!

Although we think our planet is very large, when we compare it to other objects in our solar system, it is really quite small. We could fit 1000 Earths inside Jupiter. And we could fit 1000 Jupiters inside the Sun. It would take one million Earths to fill the sun, and our sun is only a medium-sized star.

Wow! We can, Wonder at Creation. When you try to get your head around how vast God’s creation is and how much greater God is than we are, we might ask with the author of Psalm 8, When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; 4what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals* that you care for them? The Psalmist goes on to say, Yet, you have made them a little lower than God,* and crowned them with glory and honor.

The author of Psalm 139 praises God and says, I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. The Psalmist is right and yet I doubt he knew just how amazing a creation the human body really is.

There are approximately 2.5 trillion red blood cells in your body at any moment. To maintain this number, about two and a half million new ones need to be produced every second by your bone marrow.

Considering all the tissues and cells in your body, 25 million new cells are being produced each second.

Our heart beats around 100,000 times every day.

The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime - that's enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.

Our blood is on a 60,000-mile journey.

We truly are fearfully and wonderfully made.

God created us in his own image. We have tarnished that image with sin and we have frequently abused God’s beautiful creation, but God still loves us. As the author of the Gospel of John tells us, The Word became flesh and lived among us. The Word is God, who created all things. God is the one who made this vast creation that is beyond our imagining. God is the one who fearfully and wonderfully made us the intricate, amazing creatures that we are. When our sin plunged us into the darkness, Jesus came to be our light. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God became one of us.

Darkness has always been a potent metaphor for those things in life that oppress, frighten and intimidate us. - those things that cause us worry and anxiety and leech the joy from our lives. We know darkness in our physical lives when illness is close at hand or when we lack the basic necessities of life. We know darkness in our emotional lives when we are burdened with worry, confusion, fear, grief, guilt or hopelessness. We know darkness in our social lives when relationships fail. We know darkness in our spiritual when prayer seems an empty exercise and worship a performance offered to an absent audience. Darkness symbolizes the evils with which we are entirely too familiar.

Pastor Tom Long tells of joining a group exploring a cave. Several hundred yards into the cave, the leaders had the group stop and sit down. They were told to turn off their headlamps and eventually they were enveloped by an utter and impenetrable blackness. They literally could not see their hands in front of their faces. After a while, the leader turned on his headlamp, and what a difference one little six-volt flashlight made! It cast enough light to push back the darkness and enable them to see one another, the room we were in, and the pathway out.

While the lights were still out, the leader had asked how hard they thought it would be to find their way out of the cave without any light. They all said it would be impossible. They would not be able see the hazards, the slippery places, or tell the difference between a five-foot and a fifty-foot drop. The leader agreed and then said, This particular cave is pretty popular. People come here at least every week, and sometimes several times a week. Were you to get stuck in this cave without a light, your best bet would be to wait for someone else to enter the cave and find you.

It takes no great imagination to make the connection between the darkness of that cave and the darkness we know in our lives; between the light from that leader's headlamp and the light of Christ, the Light of the world. We wait for One who enters our darkness, finds us and brings us out.

God is with us. Our rescuer has found us and will remain with us until our deliverance is complete. The word becoming flesh is God’s gift of love to us. God wants us to see his light shining in the darkness. He wants us to hear his Word, the Word made flesh, piercing the silence. The boundaries of darkness are pushed back. A light shines in the darkness. A light shines in our hearts and the darkness is powerless to extinguish it.

It was question and answer time at the worship workshop lead by a friend of mine. A hand shot into the air. Obviously, the man was eager to speak. There's one thing about our worship service that really gripes me," he complained. "It's like fingernails being scraped across a blackboard - the announcements, I just hate it when the minister spoils the mood of worship with all those dull announcements. Heads bobbed in vigorous agreement all around the room.
My friend said he knew what the man meant. You're singing the hymns and praying the prayer, your wings catching the strong breeze of the Spirit carrying you upward and then, thud ... the Christian Education Committee will meet in the library on Thursday at 7:30 .... It’s Like Icarus striving for the sun, you find your wax wings suddenly melting, and you plummet back to the world of flesh, dust, and committee meetings.

What he tried to say to the questioner was that he understood how he felt and that, yes, the announcements were often rattled off without care or passion, and, yes, they did sometimes seem to be somewhat uninspiring, but that the details of the church's institutional life were important, and five minutes of them couldn't hurt, and so on ....

After the meeting my friend realized he blew it. He didn't give the right answer. What he should have said is that, properly understood, the announcements are one of those places where the rubber of the church's theology hits the road. Indeed, it just may be that by moving seamlessly from Holy, Holy, Holy to The telephone crisis counseling ministry is in need of additional volunteers, by punctuating its soaring praise with the commas of the earthy details of its common life, the church is expressing in its worship one of its most basic convictions about the character of God: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
The Gospel of John opens with trumpet sounds and soaring phrases: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... With these ethereal phrases at the beginning of John's gospel, it is no wonder that the church selected, as a symbol for John the Evangelist, the high flying eagle.
But John's poem does not end with the first line. The eagle suddenly dives toward the ground. Heaven crashes to the earth. The closing notes of the hymn fade, and it is time for the first startlingly earthbound announcement in Christian history: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us ....

The conviction that God refused to float in sublime isolation above time and space, but became in Jesus Christ, flesh and blood, is the doctrine of the incarnation. And what it means is that we do not escape the mundane to encounter the living God. Indeed, the announcements in worship become symbolic of the Christian truth that it is the "fleshy" details of life, in the working and the serving, in the community projects and the committee meetings, that we encounter God-become-flesh in Jesus Christ. When the announcements about Feed My Starving Children, funerals, Bible studies, and meetings of various committees begin, "Holy, Holy, Holy" does not end. The church is simply confessing that these are the places where that holiness is to be found. The Word became flesh ... However many inward turns our spiritual path may take, it eventually leads out to the world of flesh where we are called to meet Christ in human community.

So yes, we God wants us to Wonder at Creation. And Yes, God wants us to Worship the Creator. But one of the ways we worship is to get down and dirty in the everyday activities of life.
 

Creation belongs, first and foremost, to God. Psalm 24 verse 1 reads: The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. Being made in God's image means we should have the same aims for creation as God does. It means that we should help creation, act towards creation the way God acts towards his creation. God wants it to flourish, to grow, to be fruitful and multiply. In Genesis 2, God puts Adam in a garden, to tend it and keep it. We should be like gardeners in the world, seeking to help things grow.

Gardening in God’s creation and helping things to grow in these days means doing things like:

Bringing our own bags to the grocery store and saying Neither when asked, Paper of plastic?

It means replacing our incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones.

It means turning off lights and adjusting thermostats.

It means shorter showers and turning off the faucet when we brush our teeth.

It means inflating our car tires properly and reducing our speed to save gas.

We have a wonderful creation. We have been called to care for it and be good stewards of it. Yes, there is darkness and many predict gloom and doom, but we are the crown of God’s creation. The Word has become flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus Christ has come to be our light so that we can stop being the problem and start being part of the solution. Spend some time this week thinking about what you could do to engage in the “fleshy” work of taking better care of the creation. I have run off some suggestions on symbolically green paper and the ushers will give them to you on your way out. These are little things, but if all of us did them it could make a big difference. It would make a difference for our wonderful creation and it would bear witness to others that we are people who worship the Creator. Amen.

GUIDED BY THE GOSPEL: GATHERING • GROWING • GIVING