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What's your name? What do you do?...

Meet the True God: Meeting God in Action - Isaiah 42: 5-9; Colossians 1: 15-23 - April 29, 2007 - Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

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            What's your name? What do you do? When two people first meet each other, those are two of the questions that are basic in the conversation. Two weeks ago, I started a sermon series about meeting the God who is described in the Bible. I looked at the first of those questions - What is your name? - and we read how God revealed His personal name to Moses - Yahweh, which roughly translates, I AM. The fact that God gave His name was an invitation to relate to God as something more than just an idea, or a force, or a spirit in nature - all impersonal ways people have of thinking about God. The God of the Bible is a Person who invites us to know Him intimately, by name. And a Person has a will, and decides what to do, and then takes action.

            So, it is fitting to ask God a second question we ask to get to know a person - what do you do? I think the Bible answers that question in the very first words on the very first page. What does God do? God creates. God has many job titles that you can pick out from the Bible, but all of them, in one way or another, come back to the very first job title for God - God is the Creator.

            Of course, there's a lot of discussion about that nowadays. School boards across the country arc wrestling with the matter of whether to teach Intelligent Design or evolution. I understand the arguments made in those discussions; it just seem~ to me that choosing between Intelligent Design and evolution is a false choice. In my mind, they are two things that fit together very well. I find myself resonating with a cartoon I saw once in New Yorker magazine. It shows a scientist in front of three huge blackboards. At the beginning of the first one is the caption. How the World Was Created.  And then all three blackboards are covered with humbers and formulas and scientific equations.  Then, at the end of the third board, the scientist has just written, "And then a miracle happened."

            It seems clear to me that the universe is evolving. Things are changing, moving, all the time. Scientists will study that and observe and calculate - that's their job. But it seems just as clear to me that there is a miracle behind it. How else could it possibly be explained? For every conclusion humans make about the world, there are ten more questions. I believe that is because of the unfathomable mystery of the Creator behind it. Creating is what God does, and He does it very well.

            This morning I want to share four reasons that God the Creator is Good News to us. "[he first one is what I just mentioned: God does His job very well. What God has done is absolutely amazing. Let me just mention a couple things:

            First, the manx shcerwater. The mamx sheerwaters may be the earliest existing birds in England; it's one of those who have diminished rapidly in population over the last fifty years or so. It is a shore bird, about the size of a sparrow; and its preferred habitat is around the islands of the United Kingdom. It has cousins that live along the coasts of the United States. The manx sheerwater's claim to fame is the journey it makes in order to nest its young. In the spring, the sheerwater can fly an amazing 2500 miles to warmer climate, and then back again when the nesting is done. Some years back, some birders captured some in a little village in Wales; they thought it would be reasonable that these birds would do well in the very similar climate of New England. So, they banded them and released them near Boston. Amazingly, within two weeks the birds were back in their nests in their home village in Wales.

            You've heard stories like this before. Tiny insects, butterflies, birds - with amazing homing devices built into them that guide them over journeys of thousands of miles. Wonders like this are woven into God's amazing creation.

            It's an abundant creation. We know that there are many endangered species today; we know that many species are more than endangered - they're extinct. We also know that the world is much smaller now - with our communication and transportation methods - our reach from North Pole to South Pole, into the jungles and deserts. And, you would imagine that our sophisticated scientists have catalogued just about everything.

            And yet, just a couple years ago, explorers in a cave beneath Sequoia National Park in California discovered 27 unknown species - spiders, centipedes, scorpion-like creatures, and other small animals. A pill-bug whose internal organs are translucent; a daddy-long- legs with jaws bigger than its body; a tiny fluorescent orange spider. Some of them were specific to one small room in this one particular cave. I can see that you're not all as excited as I am about a new pill-bug. But just think of the abundance of life.

            And new life isn't found just in exotic, faraway places. A couple years ago, SU's biology department had a 24-hour blitz at Beaver Lake where they sought to catalog every life form around and in the lake. On a Saturday afternoon they had an ingathering of their findings, and I heard about it on the radio, so Sharon and I went over to hear the reports. They found over 2500 species of animals, fish, birds, and so on. The most excitement was over a tiny microscopic mite that was not found in any known catalog. Again, you probably thought your life was complete without another microscopic mite - but the point is - what an amazing, abundant, surprising, beautiful world God has made.

            Now here's some other Good News: God decided He wants partners to take care of this awesome creation - and those partners are you and me. God created human beings in His own image, and gave us dominion - responsibility - over the world He created. And just like all of creation, God made human beings with endless diversity and beauty.

            One of those cute children's letters to God you read of now and then said this: Dear God, I think the very best thing you ever created was the stapler. Well, of course, God didn't directly create the stapler. God created partners who had the intellectual capacity to create the stapler. (If we could only create one that doesn't jam up whenever I use it.)

            Imagine being creative partners with God. Of course, it is not an equal partnership. One of my favorite sports quotes ever was by Stacy King, who was a forward for the Chicago Bulls. And he said after a game, "I'll always remember this as the night that Michael Jordan and I combined to score seventy points." Seventy points by two players is quite an accomplishment in a basketball game. But what Stacy King is not mentioning is that Michael Jordan scored 69 of those points, and King scored one. That's kind of like our partnership with God - it's not an equal thing. But it's still a wonderful opportunity God has given us to take part in creation.

            I don't know of a time when there was more of an awareness of that than there is over the last year or so, in the heightened awareness of global warming. Global warming is still a controversial topic, but the vast majority of the scientific community is beyond controversy. The earth's atmosphere is warming, because of some combination of human activity and natural processes. Again, the exact combination of the causes is not known. But what is clear is this: it has already caused suffering, and it's going to cause a lot more. And to not do what we can to slow the process, and to help alleviate the suffering, is to walk out on the partnership with God that is one of the reasons we are alive to begin with. In our church, we thank our Green Team for helping us to get a handle on this.

            Now here's some more Good News about God the Creator: what God creates, God saves. That is the truth behind the scripture lesson we read from Isaiah 42. First we read a strong affirmation of the Creator-God: "Thus says God, Yahweh, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it..." Then again, God declares his name: "I am Yahweh." And then we get a wonderful list of the things God does in the world He created: "I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand...I have given you as a covenant to the people...to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am Yahweh, that is my name..."

            You see, God created a world of abundance and beauty. But that world fell to sin and corruption. And it became a world all too acquainted with blindness and oppression and the grief of sin and death. It became a world in need of salvation. We became people in need of salvation. And praise the Lord, what God creates, God saves. The God of the Bible is not some distant idea, or some impersonal force, or some spirit locked in to the cycles and limits of nature. The God of the Bible is a loving Person who creates, and then, when that creation groans out for a Savior, Yahweh, the God of the Bible, takes action, and brings salvation into the world.

            That's what is celebrated in Isaiah's words: this is a God who calls us for righteousness, takes us by the hand, gives us a covenant to live by, opens the eyes of the blind, and frees the prisoners from the dungeon of sin. This is a God who saves.

            And, of course, these words were fully realized in the New Testament with the sending of Jesus, God's very Son, to be the Savior of the world. Colossians 1: 19-20 declares, "For in (Christ) all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross." Reconciling all things to himself. Making peace by the blood of the cross. What God creates, God saves. And that includes you and me.

            And that brings us to one more piece of Good News: it's in that last verse in our scripture lesson from Isaiah, Isaiah 42: 9: "Behold," (says Yahweh), "the former things have passed away, and new things I now declare." The fourth piece of Good News this morning is that the Creator isn't done. The Creator is still creating new things.

            I don't know about anyone else, but I count on that. If God is all done with me, then that is depressing news. Because I am well aware of my faults, and, like Paul said in the Bible, like John Wesley, the founder of Methodism taught as a basic belief of Methodist faith: God is at work, creating new possibilities within us, moving us on to perfection.

            I believe that is God's plan for all of us. Anybody here ever get depressed by the same old same old? Anybody here ever get discouraged by the steady stream of bad news in the world? Anybody here ever despair that you will never overcome that habit, or conquer that recurring feeling, or get the old love of life back? Don't despair. God's last word hasn't been spoken yet. What you see today will not always be in God's tomorrow. Every cell in your body will be replaced in seven years. Every experience, every thought, every joy and sorrow we encounter, is potentially the foundation for something new and wonderful God can do tomorrow. God is not nearly done creating. And what God creates, God creates with beauty and abundance. What God creates, God holds in partnership with you and me. What God creates, God saves when it stumbles and falls in blindness. And what God creates, God is constantly transforming and perfecting.

            All of this is Good News - but, as always, only if you and I choose to embrace it. Wecan close our eyes to the wondrous activity of God around us - in effect, become the blind ones or the imprisoned ones in the scripture lesson. Or we can celebrate the abundance of creation, step up to the partnership with God, accept the salvation and reconciliation through Jesus Christ, and Holy Spirit God perfect us to new and exciting life. In my thinking, that's too good an invitation to pass up.