Sermon                                                                                                  Sunday 28^th  August, 2005

 

Reading:                                  Romans 1 “since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly             

                                                                     seen, being understood from what is made, the world around us, the skies above……….

 

 

                                                                                                                                               

Come autumn many of us look forward to taking a trip to the country, to see the colours changing, and to experience that stillness that is often the mark of autumn.

Looking forward to just that kind of experience, I set off on the long climb of Blackhope Scar about three years ago – it’s a rugged and lonely moorland hill in the Moorfoots, with peat mosses, peat hags. The cloud came down, but I knew the path to the summit well enough……… so you can imagine my surprise on reaching the top to discover, hidden by the low cloud a gigantic Radio Mast…. right at my favourite viewpoint.

It was a couple of years before I toiled to the summit again. This time to discover – in broad sunshine now – the radio mast – now accompanied by fifteen or so wind turbines……..

Probably other hillwalkers, looking for quietness, looking for those wild places………

to be closer to creation, more aware of the beauty that God has created

have climbed Blackhope Scar - to find a radio mast and fifteen wind turbines………..

 

To reflect for a moment - there are questions here about our landscape and the technology around us………….about the world around us and our use of it………….

about nature and what we are doing with it……….

and that’s a debate that runs all the way from stem cell research to climate change

 

Over the past few weeks , we have been exploring what the Bible declares of the creative power of God. The very first verses of the Bible proclaim the fact that God spoke and there was life –

 

“let there be light and ….there was light,”

 

By His Word, the sun, moon and stars, the green leaf were called into being……….

By His Word, Israel was called into being, He created a people for Himself,  and, in due time,

By His Word, the Church too was called into life.

 

We see that creative power in Jesus, that day when He took the five loaves and two fish and blessed them, and the thousands in the crowd ate. Creative power, multiplying, manifolding, the bread.

What then is the place of human beings in the world that God has created ?

 

Now, there are some very very complex issues here………. so not surprisingly

over the past decades, different views have been expressed in the church………

 

In the 1960s some were very optimismic that human beings could take greater and greater control of their own future. The Christian thinker Harvey Cox was one of them.

The 1960s was a decade in which many new towns and cities were built. In Brazil, a completely new capital city was built, called Brasilia: designed by Lucio Costa the architect and planner. Built in the shape of an aeroplane, it had residential zones, commercial zones, and at its centre had  government offices, ministries, and parliament, a huge television tower, and a modern cathedral………..

 

Harvey Cox saw cities, new cities such as Brasilia as the future for the whole world. He was full of praise for the freedom that the big, new cities give their inhabitants. Optimism about the future………. optimism about progress and technology

 

By the 1970s, things had changed.  Some, like Jacques Ellul, a Christian thinker from France had become much more pessimistic………

Jacques Ellul thought that technology had got out of control. He argued that we as Christians and Jews, should have been much stricter, when the chance was there, concerning the boundaries of science, the development of technology, the exploitation of nature. We have been interfering, he said, with matters that will one day be beyond our control.

Events seemed to be proving him right. One morning in March 1979, a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suddenly overheated. Jacques Ellul’s words seemed prophetic. During the tension-packed week that followed, scientists scrambled to prevent the nightmare of a nuclear meltdown, officials tried to calm public fears and more than one hundred thousand residents fled the area. Equipment failure, human error, and bad luck would conspire to create an event that almost got out of control.  Just as Ellul had predicted - We have interfered, he said, with matters that will one day be beyond our control.

 

What does the Bible say ?

Now, there are some very very complex issues here……….

over the past decades, many different views have been expressed in the church………

well, all we can do, at the most this morning is to look very briefly at one broad theme in the Bible: found in Genesis 2

 

It is this – that in creating the world, God has given responsibility for the world to human beings: but this gift brings with it real responsibility

Genesis says: The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden

to work it and take care of it

The Lord God has given the world to human beings to live in, to look after it, to use its wonderful resources, its harvests, its richness.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden

to work and to care for it: 

to work the earth and to care for it,

but both of these words to work and to care  in Hebrew, mean the deepest most faithful care for the earth…..

Adam is to take care of the earth as……………

as a watchman watches over a city, or with the attentive care with which Israel looked after the Ark of the Covenant.

So, the Lord God had placed Adam and Eve

in communion with Himself, and in a deep relationship with the earth.

 

We catch a glimpse of this kind of attentive care in 1 Kings 4,

where, it is said of Solomon, that he knew plants from the cedar of Lebanon, to the hyssop that grows out of walls, he had learned about animals and birds, reptiles and fish

says the writer of Kings……….

 

Or, look at Psalm 95, where the psalmist sings

the Lord is the great God, … in His hand are the depths of the earth

and the mountain peaks belong to Him

the sea is His, for He made it, and His hands formed the dry land…..

come, let us bow down in worship

let us kneel before the Lord our Maker……

 

and Paul declares in Romans 1:

since the creation of the world,

God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature

have been clearly seen, being understood from what is made,

the world around us, the skies above……….

 

To know Jesus Christ, therefore, is to begin to understand all that is ours in Him, all the gifts that God gives us in Him.

The hills, the rivers and the seas - the quiet waters of a loch in the early morning – the delight of  open landscape -  the rhythm of the waves. When our eyes are opened, we see the sheer beauty of the earth that God has made. We become aware of the beauty that God has created, we know ourselves to be re-created in mind and soul in these wild places. And from deep within us thanksgiving wells up through Jesus Christ………

AMEN