OUR BORROWED PLANET
1. "GOD THE MAKER"

Pentecost 21 -- October 5, 2008
Genesis 1:26-31

In the Name of Jesus. Amen.

When asked “Where do you live?” we usually think of:
  • the name of our street and the number of our house
  • the name of the city or town in which we live
  • the state and the country in which we live
“Our Town” by Thornton Wilder is one of my favorite plays. It’s about the death of a young woman around the turn of the century. She wishes to come back to observe one day of her life -- the day of her twelfth birthday. She observes that day, unseen by those still alive. Emily discovers that the living understand little about death and even less about being alive. In terms of how we understand just where we live in light of the whole universe, 12-year old Emily tells a friend: “I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said, Jane Crofut, the Crofut Farm, Grover’s Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America; continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; The Universe; the mind of God. That’s what it said on the envelope. And the postman brought it just the same.”

Let’s take that idea of the universe and the mind of God a little further. If the sun was reduced to the size of a beach ball 24 inches in diameter, the planets in our solar system alone could be represented as follows:
  • Mercury would be a grain of mustard seed 164 feet away
  • Venus would be a pea 284 feet away
  • Earth would be a pea 430 feet away, with our moon a grain of mustard seed 13 feet out from the earth
  • Mars would be a raisin 654 feet away
  • Jupiter would be an orange half a mile away
  • Saturn would be a tangerine four-fifths of a mile away
  • Uranus would be a plum just over a mile away
  • Neptune would be a plum over two miles away
  • Pluto would be a pinhead about 3 miles away
That’s what scientists see with a telescope. What about what they see of God’s amazing creation with a microscope? We see another incredible universe:
  • If we could join end-to-end all the veins, arteries, and capillaries found in the average human body, they would reach from 21/2 to 4 times around the equator – or from 60,000 to 100,000 miles.
  • If we could flatten out the large intestine, it would cover three football fields.
  • The brain is made up of about 10 billion nerve cells or neurons. Each cell is like a tiny octopus, with many connection points on each of its many “arms.” One researcher estimated the number of connections and pathways that could be made by a normal brain: the number 1 followed by 6.25 million miles of zeros. If one could unravel all the tiny fibers that make up the average human brain, they would stretch approximately to the moon and back.
  • The human heart pumps about 72 times a minute, 100,000 times per day, 35 million times per year, 2.5 billion times in the average lifetime. Each day it generates enough energy to lift a person 500 feet.
  • The human eye has about 130 million light receptors, and about 7 million sensory terminals for sight. Each eye has about 300,000 “lines” going to the brain. These lines break down the scene observed and rearrange it within the brain to create the sense of vision. Although the eye transmits pictures to the brain upside down, the brain sees them right side up. And on and on we could go with the ear and other parts of the body.
“And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image ... male and female ... and let them have dominion [authority] over [all the earth].”

Long before it was politically correct in the United States or anywhere else in the world, long before any comprehension of global warming or the extinction of entire species, the reverence and care of God’s unimaginable creation was part and parcel of our calling as human beings, made in the image of God, on this tiny little planet, earth. The two creation stories of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are unified in two assertions: 1) God created everything out of nothing, doing so effortlessly and joyfully; and 2) God placed human beings on this lush planet which we have come to call Earth, not only for our enjoyment and sustenance, but also as a trust, to reverence and care for as a precious gift to all generations.

Jesus tells us in Luke’s gospel that if we don't praise the Lord, the rocks themselves will cry out. These days, it seems that if God's people don't cry out on behalf of creation, the politicians will. And then it becomes a polarizing issue, often based on one’s affiliation with one political party or another, rather than a common calling of the human family. According to Scripture, earth-keeping is for everyone, every human being.

For too many years, the church mistook the Genesis mandate as a license for world domination, rather than a call to just and compassionate care for the environment. But the more we marvel at God's use of color and texture, shape and composition, the sheer scale and the minute detail, the immense diversity of inexhaustible work of the God the Artistic Creator, the more we fall in love with the God responsible for this masterpiece. Everything that comes from God's creative hand draws us a little closer to the heart of the God. As Martin Luther put it, "God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone but on trees, and flowers, and clouds, and stars."

Then, a divine mystery takes place: God puts creation in our hands and says, "Let's create together!" To be human is to experience the joy of imagining, planting, ordering, building, and co-creating with God. We see this most spontaneously and unself-consciously in young children, who use the most unlikely things to create their own little wonders. Not only crayons and paper, or legos or blocks. Not even tree branches and snow – all artistic media in those little artists’ hands. When Adam was little, we would put plastic 2 liter pop bottles and other items in the recycling bin. Every now and then, I would go into his room to try to create some sense of order out of the chaos, and I would find all kinds of intriguing sculptures made out of 2 liter pop bottles, duct tape, and who-knows-what-else. I would think, “I KNOW we threw this stuff in the recycling bin.” But Adam didn’t see such things as garbage. He saw them as treasure with which to create something new. So he retrieved them, and “recycled” them in ways we never thought of.

When we participate with God in creation rather than consumption, we begin to see creation as a gift to be cherished, nurtured, and enjoyed, rather than a commodity to exploit for selfish purposes, our own creature comforts.

MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz created one of the most intriguing notions ever to leap from a scientific laboratory into popular culture: the "butterfly effect," the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz's suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly's wings, the little air current it sets in motion which has the capacity to expand and grow and interact with other environmental factors over time and space into an actual storm thousands of miles away. An intriguing theory, when we consider how the amount of unrecyclable or renewable garbage I produce will affect generations yet unborn; the disproportionate amount of energy I consume not only affects our planet now, but may well have lasting effects on our planet forever.

When we consider such matters apart from political parties and platforms, when we consider such matters simply as the people of God, we see that the very first command, the very first gift entrusted to us as that part of creation made in God’s own image, is to be caretakers, stewards of what God has created, and continues to create.

A steward is the guardian, the manager, of someone else’s property who is, in the end, accountable to the owner. Harry Wendt, the author and creator of The Divine Drama, the Bible study which 40+ of you studied with me last September-May, says that we really should change the words of the Apostles’ Creed to “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator and owner of heaven and earth...”

As we look at the earth, and at God the creator, we come to understand with both awe and humility that God set us into the beauties, the power, and the delicacy of this creation as honored stewards, guardians, managers. It is, in fact, a sacred calling. It is our legacy to future generations – not as Republicans or Democrats or Progressives or Independents, not as Americans or Europeans, not as citizens of a super power – but as the children of our powerful and tender God, our mischievously creative God, to honor and respect, to enjoy and pass along a creation as God intended it; thriving, intricate, balanced, that our children and their children can look at and say with God, “This is VERY good!” Amen.

*Statistics of our solar system and the human body from The Divine Drama Bible Study, by Harry Wendt.

Rev. Joan Gunderman, Senior Pastor
Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa, Minnesota

 
   

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