August 8, 2021 Sermon

 

August 8, 2021              Ps. 104                 Sermon    Rev. Peter Hofstra

          So for the next few weeks, we are going to consider one of the most often used liturgical elements in our worship service, the Apostle’s Creed.  This past Sunday, we spoke of the Triune nature of our God, which is how the Creed is organized.  Unlike the theology of the Trinity, what the Bible has to say about each of the three persons in the trinity is much easier to lay out. 

          So why do we confess in the first section of the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth” (or creator of heaven and earth).  This is the God of the first chapters of Genesis, God spoke and it was.  It is this God who has made us.  For someone on the outside, considering how various religions connect and interconnect, as the God of Abraham, our God the Father would equate to the God of the Jewish and Muslim faiths.  But from the inside, our understanding of God in each faith would be very different.

          The power and the joy of Psalm 104 is the intimacy of God’s relationship to God’s creation.  I count at least fifteen direct references to what God does in the creation.  “You stretch out the heavens”, “you make the winds your messenger”, “you make streams gush forth”, “you cause the grass to grow”.  Sense a pattern? 

          It is a little thing, but when describing what God does, I am used to the phrase “maker of heaven and earth”, although ‘creator of heaven and earth’ is also correct.  But I like ‘maker’ better because there is a nuanced difference in the meaning.  As the Creator, God creates it and it is.  It’s like the created thing can then take on a continued meaning of its own.  But that’s not what the Bible teaches, it is not what Psalm 104 teaches.  God makes it, but that process is not just the wind up, but the ongoing creation.  What I think God is trying to get us to understand is that the creative power of the Lord is not simply in the making of creation, but in sustaining it as well.  That if God somehow stopped creating, everything we know as our reality would cease to exist.  Another way to think about it might be to consider that God did not simply exercise God’s creative energies during the six days of Genesis 1, but continues to do so throughout the existence of creation.

          Psalm 104 not only lays out this ongoing involvement of God in creation, in the making of all, but it includes motivation, the ‘why’, not just the ‘how’.  Verse 31 is what I am looking at in particular.  “May the glory of the Lord endure forever, may the Lord rejoice in his works.”  Ties back to what Genesis has to say about how God saw that the creation was good.  But then came the wildcard.  And that wildcard is us.

 

          Psalm 104 paints a God who is up close and personal to the creation.  How often is that how humanity actually considers God?  While not an absolute, there is an interesting commonality that is found across religions of the world.  Behind whatever god-creature or pantheon they are involved with, there is almost always (maybe always) an undefined creative force that wields what is often a primordial power of bringing creation to what it is. 

          But such a being is not usually well defined and fleshed out in the religious system, except perhaps in our own.  The reason for that seems to be a human presumption to equate transcendent power with distance.  The assumption is that it would take phenomenal trans-cosmic power to create the known universe.  How in the known universe could such a powerful being be interested at all in the likes of individuals like us?  It might not be a consideration of how a God so powerful could possibly know about something as insignificant (except in our own minds) as us, but rather, why would a God so powerful be interested in us?

          This kind of thinking has given us theologies of a ‘wind up universe’, like creation is an old fashioned clock.  God created it, wound it up, and now is off doing important ‘god things’ and does not get involved in the things of humanity.  It is a God who does not care for humanity, a God so distant that this God may even have forgotten humanity.  Some even assume that God somehow expended all God’s power and energy on the creation, so they no longer have much left to help even if God wanted, a notion of a weak God.

          From that point, pushing God out to the margins, assuming God does not have unlimited power and ability, it doesn’t take too long to remove God from the picture entirely.  From the 1850’s there has been an active vein of humanist thought that proclaims that God is dead (if God ever existed at all).  That kind of thought is certainly not out of date.  There are a number of authors today whose books sell like mad because of their full frontal assault on the notion of God, on the notion of the Almighty. 

          These attitudes are reflected in the attitude of this nation toward questions of the religious.  Most people will answer ‘yes’ to the question of whether or not they believe in God, but that God will not be as well defined as we have in Scripture, particularly in Psalm 104.  There is an acknowledgement that God exists, some theologians argue that humanity has the sense of God indwelling them as a part of their very creation.  But the very reason that they do not seek a well-defined or more thoroughly ‘human-like’ God is for the very reason that many in our history have turned God into an idol, defining and regulating who God is and what God wants to reflect their own personal agendas, creating God in their own image.

 

          And this is not as far out on the fringe as we might expect.  Yes, we can certainly name cult leaders, David Korresh, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, people who devoted themselves to taking the power of God as their own by standing up and daring to claim that they are God’s spokesmen on the earth.  The authority of God blends into their own personal desire for authority and power and it so often ends in disaster.

          But even in the mainline church, how much damage has been done to people when church leaders claim that they know God and speak for God?  Churches in both Canada and the US bear great responsibility in the earlier times of our nations histories when they ran frontier schools, cloaked as mission efforts among first nations of this continent, when they were really fronting a deliberate attempt by the central governments to eradicate native cultures from the minds and experiences of children.

          It seems that we hear about the experiences of the Roman Catholic church the most in the popular media, but how often has leadership of the church claimed the authority of God to justify the abuse of children?  More recently, it has come to light that many denominations will turn a blind eye to spousal abuse in the ‘Christian’ home because the man is made head of the house by God as Jesus has been made head of the church by God.  Yes, the Apostle’s Creed uses the metaphor of Father to describe God, powerful biblical language.  But that language and that metaphor of God have been twisted into sick and perverse actions in too many families.

          These are not the kinds of things we want to think about in regards either to the church or to our God.  But if we don’t, doesn’t that make us culpable for the evil that is done in God’s name, by God’s church?  Such is the power of sin and evil, even in the midst of God’s own community.  Before we came to an era where we are finally bringing these things into the light of day, how many people just faded away from the church?  How many people preferred to have a God who was vague and transcendent precisely because the God who was up close and personal in their experience was so manipulated by sinful humanity?

          Oh pastor, why are you making us think about such horrid things?  God either so vague as to be useless or so manipulated as to be the very justification for evil?  Honestly, because if we as good Christians do not stand up and understand how the very author of our creation and our faith has been manipulated, polluted, watered down, and twisted, how are we going to embrace the truly sweet, incredible God that is our Creator?  And if we have not done that, how on earth can we come alongside others who desperately need to know the Real God that we know?

 

          ³⁵Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord!  That is how the Psalmist finishes Psalm 104.  In the context of our sermon in understanding our God the maker of heaven and earth, it is like the Psalmist is declaring that anyone who has sinned, anyone who has done wickedness by manipulating people on the authority and reality of God, let them be consumed, let them cease to exist.

          Because what do we really know about God?  We know that God loves us so much that God sent God’s only Son to save us, to give us a path of reconciliation with our Creator, gave us the gift of forgiveness in the grace that comes in our Lord Jesus Christ.  All that Jesus does is infused with the power of the maker of the heavens and the earth.  Our God in heaven remakes, renews our own right relationship with our God.  And that power, that love, is enough to overcome every other notion that sin in the world has put out there about our God, as either a power too broad to be comprehended or a power so personal that human sin has manipulated.

          To read Psalm 104 is not to read about a wind up creation that God is letting run down to the day of Judgement.  It is about a creation in which the power to make that is in our God continues in every moment.  And while we may understand that in the first instance that this is talking about what God made, according to the order of creation in the beginning of Genesis, let us also understand that this power that continues to make is in the relationships that God also formed at creation. 

          In other words, God not only created humans, but also, in the witness of Scripture, created a relationship that is unique with us humans in God’s creation.  What makes us unique as God’s creation is that God made us with free will.  And what did we do but take that free will and turn away from our God?  But if God’s creative power is ongoing, it not only continues our lives moment to moment as created beings of our Lord, but also creates, moment by moment, our relationship with our God.  And through what Jesus has done by God’s power, God has granted us a free path to restore that relationship.

          At the end of the day, our relationship is restored, sin is forgiven, brokenness is healed, by the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The reason that even works is because of the creative power of God, whom the Bible calls the Father, who is the maker of the heaven and the earth.  That is why we confess, “I believe in God the Father, the maker of heaven and earth.”  Amen.