Sermon: The wonder of creation

Last weekend I watched a TV programme that I had recorded a few weeks earlier. It was about three hours after 6.00pm local time when, according to the American pastor who made brief headlines around the world, the so-called rapture was supposed to have happened. There were few surprises among Christians that it didn’t since, if even Jesus said he doesn’t know the details of when God will bring this wonderful world to its climax, then someone with a calculator in Kansas certainly can’t.

 

The programme I watched was one of Professor Brian Cox’s amazing series on the wonders of the universe, in which he tries to explain to non-scientists like me the impact of gravity. The only appropriate response is indeed wonder; but for me it is wonder at the even greater glory of God expressed in the sheer marvel of the solar system. Brian Cox is helping us to appreciate the science that resonates with the very different biblical way of telling this story – we must not pretend that the biblical accounts are scientific but they are profoundly theological and complement the scientific insights we are only now discovering. An earlier programme echoed remarkably in several places the imagery in the Genesis creation stories. So I was not surprised to hear, this time, Cox speak of the probability of stars being ‘flung into space’ by the impact of two galaxies meeting in millions of years’ time: some people will recognise the phrase in one of Graham Kendrick’s hymns, ‘hands that flung stars into space.’ When we are reaching for words to describe something, whether we are a scientist or a theologian, the language of poetry often comes in handy.

 

Professor Cox is causing us to wonder in a way that is truly marvellous. We are just beginning to comprehend the universe in ways the Psalmist could only dream of when, three millennia ago, he too looked at the skies without the benefit of a telescope, and exclaimed, ‘When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?’  The Psalmists words and Professor Cox’s pictures are different ways of trying to display and express the wonder of something so much bigger than us.

 

We have to let the different genres of language make their own contributions to our understanding without forcing one genre to be something other than it is. As a non-scientist, I rejoice in the work of scientists and want to learn more, so long as they put it in ways I can understand. So I will go on wondering at and trying to grasp the scientific insights of contemporary research, some of it here in this university. Today, I hope that I can make a theological contribution as a priest.

 

Genesis tells us in story form of the theological origins of our cosmos, just as Prof Cox does in scientific terms, and the reading we heard from Revelation alludes to and develops that theological vision; it is emphatically not claiming to be historical, factual or scientific – the author tells us that time and again of seeing visions and hearing voices, and we abuse the books of Genesis Revelation when we try to make science or history out of them. In fact, the book of Revelation nearly didn’t make it into the bible at all because, at the time that the canon of the New Testament, its content list, was being finalised, Revelation was one of the books whose inclusion was in question. As late as 360, the Council of Laodicea rejected the book from the canon of Scripture and Cyril, the Bishop of Jerusalem banned its public reading. In 367 Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, included it in the list of the books that became the New Testament, but even then it took a few more years for that particular list to become the norm.

 

Revelation is a difficult book, full of strange visions which are all too easily misunderstood by people who want to treat them literally. Despite that, I believe the bible would be incomplete without Revelation because it takes us full circle and revisits the theological story that began when God created the heavens and the earth. It also draws on visions given to prophets like Ezekiel, Second and Third Isaiah and Zechariah, from whom we heard, around the time of the exile in the early sixth century BC, which anticipate the reign of God.

 

The context of these visions is the restoration of the people to their land and their refashioning as the people of God. They went back to Jerusalem and rebuilt its ruins. The theme is always restoration or repair of what is old and flawed, and the use of the word ‘new’ in the Hebrew is always in the sense of renewing to original purpose the institutions, places or the hearts of God’s people. It is with this understanding that we can make the transition to the vision of the book of Revelation and its links with Genesis’ imagery of creation, of light, of the tree of life, of fruit for the healing of the nations. It is not an undoing of Genesis but a renewal of it, an holistic story of creation and recreation. A theologian comments “When we say that ‘God’s grace is new every morning’ (Lam 3:23) we recognise in each sunrise a prelude to the new creation: ‘Behold, I make all things new.’” (Jurgen Moltmann. History and the Triune God. p75).

 

We heard today from the end of Revelation when the holy city Jerusalem – the symbol of God’s presence on earth in much of the biblical story – is described as the bride of the Lamb, Jesus Christ, and is seen coming from God, full of the glory of the Lord. Think of the recent royal wedding and the bride, dressed beautifully for her husband, coming down the aisle and you get something of the picture. Just as the commentators described what the bride was wearing, so the bride of Christ is described in Revelation in terms of beauty with symbolically perfect measurements and adorned with precious stones.

 

And then the startling words, “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light.” For centuries, the temple had been the focus of God’s presence but now it is not needed and even the need for created light described at the beginning of Genesis is all over, because God is its light.

 

Revelation keeps revisiting Genesis: the water of life flowing from God’s throne, echoes the waters flowing from Eden in Genesis 2 and from the temple in Ezekiel’s vision. The tree of life is present with its leaves for the healing of the nations, again taking us back to Genesis where God planted the tree of life in the midst of the garden. To grasp the significance of this we must recall the Genesis story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in taking the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which led to God expelling them from the garden, for fear that they would also eat the fruit of the tree of life and live for ever with the consequences of their disobedience. In the vivid language of Genesis, God placed a cherubim and a sword that flamed and turned to guard the way to the tree of life and the rest of the biblical story is, in theological terms, the story of how God acted to undo the damage and reopen that way to life for people and nations so desperately in need of healing. Now the tree of life is present and in the centre of things, bringing that healing.

 

Ultimately, God brought that life in Jesus Christ. So, recall the words at the beginning of John’s Gospel about the Word of God, ‘What has come into being in him was life and the life was the light of all people.’ and Jesus words, ‘I am come that you might have life, and have it abundantly.’ ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’

 

There is still more: God’s servants have God’s name on their foreheads which again takes us back to the Genesis where Cain, after he had murdered Abel and become a fugitive from Eden, was given a mark as a sign of protection as he was driven from the garden. In baptism we have the sign of the cross made on our forehead: we bear the name of Christ who has unbarred that blocked path to the tree of life and opened the way to life.

 

This is only scratching the surface of how these last chapters of Revelation offer a vision of creation healed and restored, bringing to completion the story of God’s good purposes for the world begun in Genesis. So we were not and are not waiting to be rescued from an evil creation, at 6pm local time on whatever date a flawed calculation next suggests, but we await with joy God’s renewal of all things in the new heavens and the new earth.

 

Just as Brian Cox’s TV series moves us to wonder at the immensity of the universe, so the sheer immensity of God’s purposes for that universe should move us to awe and wonder, especially in this Easter season. The day of Christ’s resurrection is the first day of the new creation. The early Christians understood the resurrection not just as an historical but as a cosmic event, the beginning of the new world when all tears would be wiped away. The day of resurrection is the day of light, just as the first day of creation was the day of the creation of light. In the words of an Orthodox theologian (Vladimir Lossky), “Since the victory of Christ over death, the resurrection has become the universal law for creation: and not only for humanity but for the beast, the plants and the stones, for whole cosmos.” 

 

And so the Orthodox church sings with exuberance in its Easter Liturgy of the cosmic significance of Christ’s resurrection, “Christ is risen as God from the grave in glory, and has thereby raised the whole world to life with him.” Christ has “given his life for the whole world and has filled the whole world, the whole creation, with light.” “O wonder! How did the life of all taste death? Only that he might lighten the whole world.”

 

It is the lightening, healing and recreation of the wonderful creation, of which Brian Cox is showing us more than we ever dreamed, that we, God’s Easter people, await in its fullness. Amen. 

Zechariah 8:1-13, Revelation 21:22-22:5