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Sunday October 22, 2006 - Proper 24, Year B

Have you ever been out in the countryside,
far away from the city,
and looked up at the sky on a clear night? It seems huge,
dark but not threatening,
glowing with thousands of pinpricks of light,
stars and planets in their courses
and ghostly shadows of galaxies.

Or paddled in the ocean down at Atlantic City, and looked east,
knowing that the closest land that direction is Portugal,
three and a half thousand miles away,
and the waves that wash over your feet
contain droplets of water
from the four corners of the globe?

Or driven west on route 70, and suddenly, somewhere in western Kansas or eastern Colorado,
come to the edge of a bluff,
and seen stretched out before you
the flat prairie grasslands and then beyond them the mountains
leaping up towards the sky,
gold and green and purple and white against the cold blue sky?

Faced with beauty like that
there's something instinctive
about the desire to praise God.

"Bless the Lord, O my soul;" says the psalmist.
"O Lord my God, how excellent is your greatness!
You are clothed with majesty and splendor.
You wrap yourself with light as with a cloak
and spread out the heavens like a curtain.
You lay the beams of your chambers in the waters above;
you make the clouds your chariot;
you ride on the wings of the wind.
You make the winds your messengers
and flames of fire your servants.
You have set the earth upon its foundations,
so that it never shall move at any time.
You covered it with the Deep as with a mantle;
the waters stood higher than the mountains."

This world of ours is so wonderful, we can't help praising God.

It reminds me of one of my favorite poems, that I first read in high school,
by the Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Praise God for creation. It's one of those things
that we sometimes find ourselves caught up in
without even thinking.
Did you see the leaves on the trees out on Church Street this morning?
They caught my attention yesterday:
they're caught half way between green and orange,
and it almost seems as if each one has a light shining behind it, they are so bright.
Or the flowers outside the front of the church — yesterday they were covered with big furry bumblebees,
all so busy gathering pollen that they didn't even seem to notice the crowds of people gathered there for a wedding.
That's creation,
the wonderful world
that we are a part of.
The wonderful thing
that God has created.

One of the problems with the way the creation-evolution debate has evolved
is that it's become either or.
Either you believe in creation, and the idea of a God that is responsible for it all and is worthy of praise.
Or you believe in evolution, and the idea that this all happened by chance, a random collection of events that somehow gave rise to life, and there's no room for God in it all.
Or at least, that's how people tend to characterize the debate.
And they tend to assume that scientists, with their training in the scientific method, will be on the evolution side,
and that religious people
who are somehow naturally gullible
will be on the creation side.

On Wednesday I heard our new Presiding Bishop-elect, Katharine Jefferts Schori, being interviewed on the radio. As you may have heard or read, before she was ordained
she was an oceanographer. She was thoroughly trained
in the scientific method.
But of course she also has a degree in theology. So she is both a scientist and a theologian.
And so it's probably inevitable
that when she gets interviewed,
people ask her what she thinks about the debate over creation versus evolution.
And the way she answered last week was this.
Science, she says, asks questions about what and how, in other words, what happened and how did it happen.
Faith asks different questions. It asks, given that these things happen, what is the meaning of them.
In other words, there is no essential conflict between religion and science. They are just asking different questions.

In fact, many physicists think
that there must be something behind
all of creation,
that behind all the experimentation and proofs and explanations
something must exist
that can account
for the existence of life itself.
Whether you call that something
God
is another matter altogether.
But for thousands of years
that's what we people of faith have been doing,
for thousands of years
we have been calling the thing that is behind all things
Science and religion
are not so far apart after all.

Which means
that when we look at creation
we don't have to make a decision
will we be scientists or people of faith.
We can look at this leaf
and know that as the days get shorter and colder,
there will not be enough sunlight
for photosynthesis to occur.
The green chlorophyll that is essential for photosynthesis
begins to break down,
and as it disappears
other pigments in the leaves begin to appear:
gold and orange and red and purple.
That's the how, the scientific explanation.

But if that is all there is to the change of color,
then why the beauty?
Why do people travel all over New England
to see the colors of fall?
Because we as human beings
are attuned to more than the scientific, we know, deep down, more than just the what and how.
We are aware of the wonder of it all, the joy, the celebration. Sometimes it is as if in fall,
between orange leaves and busy bees and bright yellow flowers,
the world is celebrating.
No wonder people traditionally held harvest festivals in the fall.
It was more than just celebrating the bounty of creation, the fall fruits and grains and vegetables.
It was celebrating the glory of God, giving thanks
to the one
who makes all this possible.

There's another poem, again by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I read in school. It's called "God's grandeur."

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

And it's that poem that reminds me
that this is more than just worship of creation. This is about God, the God who brooded over the darkness
in the very beginning of all things
and brought out of the chaos
life.
The God that through the Holy Spirit
continues to brood over this world of ours,
and continues to bring out of its darkness
life.

This God
is bigger than we can imagine. And this God
holds us close
like a mother hen
sheltering its chicks.

And in the end
it was this God
that brought meaning to Job's life.
You remember Job, the one who was tested, and had his fmaily and all his belongings destroyed, and would not curse God.
He wouldn't curse God
but he asked God
an awful lot of questions. A lot of questions
about why.
And the answer God gave him
was
"Look at creation."
"Look at creation."
"You will never see the whole picture, but I, I who created you,
created all this,
and you are part of it.
From dust you were made, the same dust as the stars and planets and earth,
the same matter
that is at the core of all things.
And I gave you life."

It's no answer at all
for Job's suffering.
And it's the only answer.
Because the answer to suffering
can never be an explanation,
can never be
scientific proof.
The answer to suffering
and to joy
is look at all this.
God made it; it's beautiful.
God made us. We are beautiful.
And we are loved.
And beyond all the whats and hows and whys,
that's what matters most,
that's what gives our lives meaning.
We are part of God's good creation.
God loves us.
Glory be to God for dappled things
and for human beings
and for the Spirit of life
who broods over us
and tucks us safe
under her wings.

 

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2006