Many of us love to experience the peace and serenity, or perhaps the wildness and beauty of ‘creation’. We may have our favourite spot, our bit of ‘sacred space’ that we visit regularly in order to re-create ourselves, to re-energise, to begin to feel human again! But we tend to objectify creation – we see it as something ‘other’ – distanced from ourselves and beautiful to look upon.
To worship in a creation affirming way is to worship God the creator. It is to see things the way He sees them. It is to look at everything and everybody through His eyes.
So let’s start at the very beginning, with the greatest love story ever told – the Bible! It is HIS-story! The story of God and His relationship with his creation – of how He sees it!
GOD LOVES YOU!!
He made you – He made me – He knows what you are like through and through, and He still loves you!
In the beginning…
· God made the light – and saw that it was good
· God made the water and the dry ground – and saw that it was good
· God made the vegetation – and saw that it was good
· God made the sun, moon and stars – and saw that it was all good
· God made the sea with fish and birds – and saw that they were good
· God made the land animals – and saw that they were good
· Finally, on the 7th day, the day known as the day of perfection or of completion to the Jewish people, God made human beings. THEN he saw all that He had made and He said that it was very good!!
I was a St Ann’s school the other day, where there is much sign language used, due to the students’ disabilities, and when I got to this part of the story, this is what we said: sign ‘very good’ (several times)!!!
And God has never changed His mind on that judgement. He still looks at it all and sees it as very good. His creation is very good, but only because it is complete with human beings – we are the culmination of his beloved creation. God loves you! God loves me!
And God wants people to love Him and each other. BUT we don’t always do that! That’s why I asked if any of you had seen human beings when we imagined creation to the accompaniment of the song of the loon. If we see each other as God sees us, we will value each other the way God does. He continually makes new efforts to save human beings from disasters of their own making because he loves us so much.
It’s all in HIS-story the Bible:
Genesis 6.5-8
Did you notice v. 6? God’s heart was filled with pain. God has always suffered because He loves. You know what happened afterwards. There was a flood, but after everything had dried up, it says in chapter 9 that God blessed Noah and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.’ And later in vv.12-17, God gave human beings ‘and every living creature’ the sign of the rainbow to show that God had promised never again to destroy all life by flood. God allowed his creation to be re-created!
Love wants to be intimate with the loved one – that is its nature. Love demands a fusion of the desire, will and being. God’s desire was always to re-create the openness and intimacy described of His relationship with Adam and Eve when they walked together ‘in the garden in the cool of the day’. So throughout the Old Testament we see examples of people who heard God in special ways, some of whom developed mutual relationships with God called covenants – relationships as binding as the covenant of marriage, with promises to keep on both sides. And God’s promises were always much bigger than any human being’s.
There was Abraham.
Genesis 15.4-6, 12-16
I want to pause on that last phrase – ‘for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure’. God loves absolutely everyone, and His patience is amazing. We don’t always believe that God loves us. But God loves all of His creation – he wants everyone to be saved from the judgement that must come on those who don’t obey him. The judgements are really self-fulfilling consequences of actions. God’s ways are spelled out for us because they are what is best for us – God should know! – He made us after all!! So if we refuse to do what is good for us – refuse to listen to the God who loves us, there will be consequences.
God’s love is spelled out today in the prophecy we had from Jeremiah 31.31-34. There God makes what I think is the greatest promise of all:
‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God, and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbours, or say to one another,
‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them
to the greatest,’ declares the Lord.
‘For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.’
The basis for that promise of forgiveness is Jesus. Jesus is God’s love made flesh – He is God in human form. So in him we can see what God is really like. He went around showing people how much God loved them – by listening to them (their hearts as well as their words), healing them, teaching them, and then finally transforming them by the power of His Spirit – God’s Spirit.
But those who were into worldly power didn’t like the influence Jesus had on people. So even though He was God (purple – the colour of kings), they killed Him (crown of thorns), by nailing Him to the cross. And they made fun of Him, too! But nothing could change who Jesus really is – because Jesus is God, he could NOT stay dead – He came to life again! So He is alive and with us here now. That is the story of Easter! Easter is the ultimate in creation affirmation – it is God giving His own life so that the creation He loves so much won’t have to be destroyed because of its fatal flaw. It is creation living again because He lives. It is eternal life – the quality of life anyone can have when in intimate relationship with the God that created us!
BUT it isn’t just the story of Easter. It is a story that we remember every Sunday when we come to church to allow God to re-create us as we celebrate the Eucharist – the Thanksgiving for what God has done in giving Jesus. The simple symbols taken from the most basic food creation affords – bread and wine – remind us of many things.
· They remind us of the Passover, when those who believed God and trusting Him put blood on the lintels of their doors were saved. God can be trusted.
· They remind us that because of Jesus’ dying on our behalf – God’s incarnate body and blood – we are set free – sin no longer has a hold on us.
· They remind us that we are all one body in Christ – many members, but united because of our common love for the Lord who loves us. We all take the same bread
· And there is much more!
The Psalmist prays ‘create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a right Spirit within me’. That is a plea that God answers amply for all those that trust Him. But God may have to answer that prayer daily, hourly, and perhaps minute by minute because we so often fall short – He is always there to do just that, and to transform us as He has promised.
To be creation affirming in our worship is to agree with God that nothing or no one is beyond redemption. To agree with God that everything is worth another promise, another chance, another giving of one’s life to re-create the wonder of what God said in the very beginning was ‘very good’. It is to love everything and despise nothing, having the attitude that Jesus had:
Philippians 2.6-11
Let us pray.
A Touching Place
Flute or recorder through on chorus once.
Chorus sung by everyone, then verses on their own and choruses sung by everyone as response