“God – the deep mystery of the world”

Sermons on the Christian Creed of 381 AD “We believe in one God, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.ä

Scripture Readings: Genesis 1-2; Psalm 19:1-6; Psalm 148; Isaiah 40:28-32; Rom 8:18-23

God is a worker

With the confession that God is the ãmaker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseenä the church wants to gather up the biblical record that God is a worker, and that the result of Godâs work is good. It is good, because in Jesus Christ, God has made himself known as a good God.

Everything, all of life, what you see and what you donât see, the trees and the horses, the wind and the sea, gravity and conscience, everything has the stamp of Godâs beauty and of Godâs promise on it. That is what we read in the biblical creation story:

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. ….

And then God celebrated! God crowned his work with the Sabbath celebration:

… on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. (Gen 1:31 – 2:3)

We need to be reminded of that, don̢t we? When we read of famines and earth quakes, of landmines and starving children, of fire bombs and racial hatred, of dried out waterholes and poisoned rivers Рthen we need to be reminded that God has created things Рall things, everything Рto be good.

The creation stories in the Bible were not written in a perfect world. When they were written people knew of hunger and death and famine and war and exile. And yet, in the midst of the fragility of life, the people raised their heads and reminded themselves of the good news that there is a creator of heaven and earth, and that God, the creator, has not abandoned his creation. God is at the depth of what we see. God is the deep mystery of the world.

Therefore, when Jesus spoke of God and of God’s ways with the world, he gathered images from the world of nature: the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the lilies of the field, the mustard seed, the seeds that are sown onto the soil. Nature provided the language for saying that there is more to life than what our eyes, even the eyes of the scientist and the business manager, can see.

ãEverythingä, ãseen and unseenä! That includes me! Me, when I struggle with the question of life and its pains, its hurts and its challenges. Me, when the doctor says that I have an illness and I wonder how long. Me, when I lie on my bed and grasp for air. ãEverythingä.

Life – time and nature – is graced!

But ãeverythingä also means that all of life is lived ãin the presence of Godä. Is not this what the apostle spells out:

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. (Rom 1:20)

There is a depth to things. Mostly we are not aware of it. But then there is the moment of truth, the silent encounter when we begin to see nature as creation and it places us on a search for God.

The discovery of nature as creation

That is a discovery! It needs to be discovered that nature is creation; that nature bears a secret that the photographer and the scientist cannot see! We need to discover the depth to nature.

Take significant rivers like the Nile or the Ganges; or take significant mountains like Mt. Fuji in Japan, or the Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, or Ayers Rock in Central Australia. A geologist can climb up the mountain and examine it scientifically. He will notice the different layers of rocks, the different textures of soil; he may discover that there is bauxite or iron ore. The businessman may join him and analyse the scientific report and then write a business analysis to see whether it is economically feasible to mine the bauxite and ore, to build a skilift or a 4 star hotel to attract tourism. The tourist operator will ask how he can get the walkers and the skiers to the mountain. An artist climbs up the same mountain and is overcome by the snow caps and the virgin snow merging with the blue sky, or the red rock dissolving into the bushy desert. Rather than writing a report or a business analysis, he writes a poem or paints a picture. And for others the same mountain, Ayers Rock for instance for Aboriginal people, has intense religious significance. There for generations their people have experienced the nearness of the deity.

These different ways of looking at the same reality are not inferior or superior. They are different aspects of the same reality, and our life is impoverished if any of these aspects are missing. We begin to understand that reality has many faces. And if we try to limit it to one, we impoverish our own life. We need to develop a holistic vision of life.

That is meant when we confess with Christians through the ages that God is “the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” Nature can tell the story of God. The Psalmist rejoices:

“The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19:1).

Illustration

Such a discovery of the divine depth to things can also be made in human life. One of the most moving encounters last week at the meetings of the Human Rights Commission of the Baptist World Alliance were the testimonies of the General Secretaries of the predominantly white Baptist Union of South Africa and the predominantly coloured and black Baptist Convention of South Africa. They had mistrusted each other for decades. The whites were seen as supporting Apartheid and the blacks were considered to be radicals. I have been at meetings where their animosity towards each other was embarrassing. Recently they met at Colesberg. 90 from each group, with a facilitator (Ruben Richards, a friend and former student of mine). There was silence and embarrassment in the room as they listed their complaints and gave voice to their accusations against each other. Some saw no hope and wanted to leave. The table of the Lord was set. Ruben suggested in a last attempt that they might write down their grievances on pieces of paper and stick them on the wall. It was a long wall. And it filled up!

Silence. Uncertainty in the air. Then someone went to the wall, took one of the papers, read it, folded it up and placed it under the communion table, took the cup, went to a member of the ãotherä side and they drank and they began to weep. And then something started which went on for hours; as they took their past, placed it under the cross of Christ, wept tears of repentance and decided to let their time ahead be graced by the promises of God. There will be days and months and years of hard work ahead; negotiations about money and sacrifice; negotiations about different theologies. But now they have discovered the deep mystery to life again; they know that their time, their lives, their space, can be graced by surprises of joy.

Experience

Such experiences are important. It is important to remember, that before we can understand nature as creation we need to experience nature’s God in our hearts. Now I do not doubt that sometimes we have religious experiences when we climb a mountain, or see a beautiful waterfall or hear some inspiring music. But for most of us that would be the exception. Normally it is the other way round. First we experience God in our conscience and then out of that experience our eyes are also opened to the beauties and for the depth of nature.

The Bible confirms this our experience. Take the Creation stories in the book of Genesis. They are now at the beginning of the Bible, but in fact they are not the oldest literature in the Bible. First, Israel experienced God as a living and liberating reality, and then they discovered nature as creation and wrote the creation stories, confessing their God as the creator of heaven and earth.

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.ä (Deut 26:5-9)

After experiencing God on their journey from slavery to freedom, they then confessed their God as creator of heaven and earth.

The same happened with the early Christians. You may have wondered why Jesus Christ is in the New Testament called the “mediator and sustainer of creation” (1 Cor 8:6; Eph 1:9f.; Col 1:15-20; John 1:1.3). After having experienced Jesus Christ as saviour, the early Christians confessed that with him they have also begun to understand the beauty, the meaningfulness, the depth and the purpose of nature as creation.

God as my creator

So, confessing God as Creator is an intensely personal matter. We are not primarily making a scientific statement about how the world came about. We are not primarily trying to satisfy our intellect about the appropriateness of a certain theory of evolution. That we leave gladly to the scientific expert, to the biologist, the geologist, and the archaeologist. By confessing God as creator, we are saying that we can’t understand life and that we canât understand our life apart from our relationship with God.

That we have not just happened, random mutations of blind fate; thrown into a nihilistic universe. That we are not just irrelevant specks of dust in the vast expanse of the universe. That we are not merely a bundle of subconscious drives. No: created are we by a God who is “the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” That God has reached out of the glory of his heavens and called us by name and said to us, you belong to me. A God who has a plan and a purpose for my life.

What we read in the book of the prophet Isaiah about the Servant of the Lord can be applied to all of us:

“You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off”; do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand. (Isa 41:9f.)

Partners of Nature

Now we must not forget that God has placed us into a garden which provides air to breathe, food to eat, water to drink. The food we eat, the air we breath, the water we drink become part of us. We are so closely woven into the life net of nature that with the sickness of nature we are becoming sick. With the health of nature we are becoming healthy. Indeed, so “intimate is the linkage between humankind and its environment that the distinction between individual and environment blurs. Some of the air we breathe becomes a part of us. The oxygen metabolises our foods and becomes a part of our flesh and blood; particulates we breath accumulate in our lungs. Some of the liquids we drink become part of our bodies, as do the toxic substances the liquids sometimes contain. The soils become our food, which in turn becomes our tissues. In fact the term ‘environment’ – i.e. human surroundings – is an inadequate and inaccurate concept because there is not and cannot be a sharp distinction between humankind and its surroundings.”

The Ecology Crisis

It is therefore a very sad testimony to the human spirit what we have done with the surroundings which are part of us and of which we are a part. But it is also a sad testimony to the Christian churches who for generations have confessed that God is the “creator of heaven and earth” – but their confession has been a thoughtless one. We have not known what we were saying. It is bordering on the blasphemous that we have used sentences from the biblical creation account to justify the exploitation of nature in order to satisfy our own selfish appetites.

We have read in the Bible that the human person gave names to the animals (Gen 2:19f.), and that humanity should have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (Gen 1:26.28), and we have interpreted this to mean that we are the center of creation and everything else must be at our service and our disposal. We have arrogated divinity to ourselves. We have subjected nature to our needs and interests, rather than accepting our role of being partners of nature. The result of our arrogance is what we call the ecology crisis today.

A former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, commissioned a study to investigate the state of the environment and to try to predict its future. This resulted in The Global 2000 Report to the President which paints a somewhat pessimistic picture of our future, – unless a conversion in our attitude to nature takes place.

If the present trends of commercial interests continue “both forest cover and growing stocks of commercial-size wood in the less developed regions (Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania) will decline 40 percent by 2000.” This deforestation will further upset the delicate ecological balance. It will diminish the water supply, further soil erosion, and lessen the food production. In Mexico, Mesopotamia, and Latin America flourishing human cultures have died ecological deaths that were caused by deforestation.

The human being cannot live without water. We need water for irrigation and human consumption. Yet, “regional water shortages and deterioration of water quality, already serious in many parts of the world, are likely to become worse by 2000.” The deterioration of water quality through the use of pesticides, through sewage, and industrial waste will take place in areas where water is greatly needed. Some are prophesying that wars in the Middle East, in Africa and Asia will be fought over supplies of water.

Through overgrazing, destructive cropping practices, and deforestation desertification – “a variety of ecological changes that destroy the cover of vegetation and fertile soil in the earth’s drier regions, rendering the land useless for range or crops” – will further expand: by “almost 20 percent by 2000.” And that mainly in the least developed countries which need good soil for food production.

Air pollution has reached dangerous proportions in population centers. The journal of the World Health Organisation surmised that 60 to 90 percent of all cancer occurrences may be due to negative environmental influences. Through “acid rains” rivers, lakes, forests, and crops are “dying.” An “increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere” may lead to a change of climate with negative effects on the ecological balance. The ozone layer which “protects the earth from damaging ultraviolet light” is “being threatened by chlorofluorocarbon emissions from aerosol cans and refrigeration equipment” and consequently the rate of skin cancer may increase.

Large populations in Europe and America are increasingly relying on nuclear energy without having yet solved the problem of storing the radio active burning elements which retain their destructive radioactivity for thousands of years. Year by year the possibility increases that accidents in nuclear reactors will fill the environment with radioactive contamination.

This increasing encroachment upon our environment not only threatens plants and animals with an extinction of species which “is without precedent in human history,” but it threatens the humane survival of the human race itself.

Sin

We can’t blame nature for the ecology crisis. The ecology crisis is not a crisis of nature. It is a crisis of the human spirit. Created to be caretakers and partners of nature, we have assumed the role of ruler over nature and we have exploited and raped the earth in order to satisfy our own appetites.

We have shifted focus. Rather than keeping the first commandment and centring on God, rather than receiving life and being grateful for its gift, we have placed ourselves in the centre and exploited life for our own selfish ends. The apostle Paul warned long ago:

… though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! (Rom 1:21-25)

Invitation

The confession that not we, but God is “the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen” entails an invitation to each of us. Without God neither we nor nature can live:

When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground. (Ps 104:29f.)

God created everything. Then he looked at it and it was beautiful. God loved the world (John 3:16) and he invested his very being to restore it (2 Cor 5:17-21). He placed within us the hope that the story of liberation and salvation will also include nature (Rom 8) – but he calls us to be fellow workers with him in this story of salvation and liberation.

As we look upon nature let us be stirred by the Spirit to realise that nature is creation and that it can remind us of the creator.

O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. (Isaiah 64:8)

Thorvald Lorenzen: Canberra