A Page from God's Blog

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

April 11, 2010

A Page from God’s Blog

Psalm 65:9-13

It seems that everyone these days keeps a blog,

a web log, writing their thoughts on the Internet

for any and all to read.

I’ve posted my sermons on a blog for the past 6 years.

And now it appears that even God has decided to blog.

I stumbled upon his the other day,

and I thought I would share his most recent posting with you.

Here's what God wrote:

“You cannot even begin to imagine the void,

the utter darkness,

the vacuum, the airlessness,

the stillness, the silence.

If I had to point to any one thing,

I think it was the constant chill

that finally got to me.

I resolved to do something.

But what?

I decided to experiment,

and so I took some matter I had created

and squeezed and patted it together,

much like a young boy makes a snowball.

And then I flung it across the void

and just I expected, it exploded,

all that energy I had compressed together

suddenly unleashed,

celestial fireworks going off in every direction,

a rainbow of colors lighting the void,

washing away the darkness,

even if just for a fraction of second.

                                   

As the light faded away I could no longer

see the pieces as they scattered,

but I had tried to shape the ball

as perfectly round as I could,

hoping that pieces would fly off 
in every possible direction.

And sure enough they did,

for after a short while,

I could hear things happening off in the distance,

all around me,

the first sounds to move through the void:

little rumblings, pops,

distinctly fizzy sounds,

whooshes, hisses --

the void suddenly alive with a symphony I had composed

a symphony entitled, “The Creation”.

And then the most wonderful thing began to happen:

first just one, then two, then dozens,

hundreds, thousands, millions,

billions of lights, tiny sparks,

glimmering everywhere I turned.

It was marvelous!

I began to travel around what you call space,

so I could examine more closely what I had begun.

I found that those little sparks of light

were not so little: they were enormous fiery furnaces,

some blazing red with heat,

others reflecting blue, still others yellow, white,

all of them giving off such wonderful light,

light to push back the darkness,

and heat to chase away the chill.

You call them stars;

I call them comforters.

                       

But for all the stars in the sky,

I knew there were still more bits and pieces

from that first snowball still traveling through the void,

bits and pieces that had changed in shape and size 
as they traveled.

And I noticed that those bits and pieces,

which you call planets,

seemed to be drawn to the comfort of nearby stars,

as though the heat and light called to them.

And those bits and pieces each seemed to find a star

where they could settle in,

like they were moving into a neighborhood.

They didn’t stop moving, though,

they each found a path,

that allowed them to glide and whirl with delight           

around their stars, basking in their glow and warmth.

Each star soon had its own collection of bits and pieces.

You call them solar systems,

but I rather like the word, “neighborhood”.

As I continued to watch,

I saw neighborhoods banding together, stars clustering,

as though the stars wanted to form their own neighborhoods.

These I called villages;

you call them galaxies.

Your neighborhood, your solar system,

is in a village you call the Milky Way.

It is a massive village with more than 200 billion stars –

yes I said billion.

When I started all this I wasn’t thinking small.

The Milky Way galaxy is a swirling, spiraling mass

that moves in its own dance with other villages,

billions of villages, each with billions of stars

moving around what you call the universe;

what I call, “home”.

Your own neighborhood -

your Solar System -  is on one of the spindly arms,

a spur that spirals out from the center

of your village, the Milky Way.

I often traveled to your neighborhood as it was forming.

I found it fascinating to take a seat on the planet you call Mercury,

the one closest to the sun.

I loved watching the sun do its work,

the hydrogen undergoing a marvelous process of nuclear fusion

giving off heat and light as a result.

Not bad for someone without a degree in physics!

It was the third planet that I watched most closely.

I knew conditions were different here,

it was just the right distance from the sun:

not too close, not too far.

I watched and each time I blinked,

another million years passed,

and there was something new to see:

great bodies of water,

mountains created as land masses collided,

and so much green!

I am so proud of my trees -

I must admit, even I was taken aback by their beauty,

their majesty, and their infinite varieties.

Now, nothing I create stands idle;

everything has a job to do, a purpose,

and the trees and all the greenery

got to work producing air,

air to support all the life forms I had in mind.

I started small,

and then guided the process upward and outward,

one creature after another,

each new generation a little bit more developed,

but all part of the same family.

I’ve never understood why so many of my children

think it all started just a few thousand years ago,

that I created the earth, the moon, and the stars

with little more than the wave of my hand,

and then as my final act,

created human life from the mud of a riverbank.

                       

Give me more credit than that;

It was WAY more complicated,

and it took a great deal more time.

You seem to forget that I live in the infinite,

so what do I care about time?

That fisherman friend of my Son’s: he understood:

“with the Lord one day is like a thousand years,

and a thousand years are like one day.”

(2 Peter 3:8)                       

While I don’t care about time,

I do care about family,

about connection, about community,

and so as I created,

I wanted everything tied together.

Yes, my children, protest all you like,

but you do have genetic links to monkeys,

and leopards, and robins, and dolphins.

I am hoping you’ll approve of the fact

that there is even a little of the stars in each of you.

That’s how I created everything:

I created it all to work together.

Now it is true that I created you in my image –

not literally of course,

because I am Spirit;

my Son has taught you that.

(John 4:24)

But in creating you in my image,

I didn’t make you of

“of any more special stuff than the rest of creation”;

(B. B. Taylor, The Dominion of Love, in The Green Bible)

I made you in my image for a special purpose:

I made you to reflect me,

my grace,

my goodness,

my love.

I also made you to look after things for me:

to look after all my creation:

to look after other men, women, and children,

especially the most vulnerable;

to look after the plants, the animals,

the birds, the fish;

to look after the seas, the sky,

the mountains, the trees;

to look after all my creation,

every part of it and every one in it,

because it is all good, very good.

When I gave you dominion,

some of you interpreted the word to mean “power”,

that you could do anything you wanted with my creation.

But the word dominion

is not about power,

it is about responsibility:

responsibility for looking after my earth,

my creation.

The land is mine, the water is mine,

the sky is mine

Every creature is mine.

The earth has life because I gave it life;

and I give it life.

I create;

Only I can create.

Can you create?

                                                           

Forty years ago you seemed finally to realize

the damage you had been doing to my earth, my creation,

through your selfishness, your irresponsibility,

your lack of thought for my creation.

You began to realize that you were turning my oceans,

lakes, seas and rivers into sewers,

that you were poisoning my fish, my birds, my animals.

You began to see that the skies I had created

and painted with the perfect shade of blue,

you had turned gray and brown

with haze from your cars and your factories.

                                                           

Oh, you tried to excuse yourselves,

saying it was all for jobs,

all for economic advancement,

all for prosperity.

I am all for that,

but not when it comes at the expense

of all that I have created,

all that I call good.

You’ve made progress over the past 40 years:

I look, for example, at my beautiful Hudson River

and see that it is starting to show signs of life again,

even eagles are nesting once again along the river

confident that they can once again find fish,

where 20 years ago you had poisoned

their food supply with your sewage.

The air in most of your cities is no longer a danger

to the youngest and oldest,

the sick and the weak.

These are all good,

all commendable,

but you still have far to go.

I hear now you arguing now about the impact you are having

on the climate in my creation.

Once again you seem eager to turn a faith issue

into a political issue.

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

Do you really think you can pump tens of millions of tons

of hydrocarbons and other pollutants into the air

from your cars, trucks, and your factories

without all that pollution having some impact,

some bad impact, on my creation?

Do you really think I created this earth

to absorb exhaust from hundreds of millions

of cars and trucks,

from tens of thousands of

smokestacks at plants and factories?

Did you really think your actions

wouldn’t upset the balance I created           

when I created this world?

Those who say that there is still doubt

about just how severe the problem is

sound too much like all those executives

from tobacco companies who all those years kept saying,

“there is no clear, incontrovertible proof

of a link between smoking and cancer.”

Those who deny the existence of the problem

remind me much too much

of the priest and the Levite

who walked by the injured Samaritan

pretending not to see him.

Do you think if you just deny there’s a problem,

deny that your actions might be harming my planet,

you can make the problem go away?

                                                           

My children, actions have consequences.

Your every action has consequences.

Drive a car one mile,

and you pour poison into the air, my air.

Put your trash out on the curb

and the truck that comes to collect has to dump it somewhere,

somewhere on my earth.

Caring for my creation begins with awareness,

awareness of what you are doing to my creation.

Open your eyes and see the impact

you have in all your actions.

Open your eyes and see the impact

you are having on my creation.

My beloved children, open your eyes and see:

you are not living faithfully.                                    

Now I am not asking you to give up driving a car,

or shut down your factories.

Don’t overreact.

What I am asking you to do

is to live your faith by caring for my creation,

live your faith by being a good steward of my creation.            

I gave you oil and coal, but a finite amount.

Quite frankly I am disappointed that you are still using them;

I thought that by the time you entered the 21st century

you would have left them behind

the way you left whale oil behind in the 19th century.

The engine in the car you’re driving

is 100-year old technology.

You are living in the past,

when you should be looking to the future.

Look to the winds, look to the sun:

I have given you them without limit.

I have also given you brains and talent:

put them together

and you can have the prosperity and abundance

you want, and I want for you,

and still live faithful, responsible lives

caring for my creation.

I am grateful to the Psalmist who wrote

“May the Lord rejoice in his works”.

(Psalm 104:31)

I think he may have been the first

to recognize that this earth and all that is in it is mine,

and that his responsibility is to care for it.

Live that way, my children,

demonstrate by your lives that you too

see all my creation as “good”,

and not just “good for you”.

Look after my creation so that

I can always rejoice in my works.

Do that, and not only will I delight in you,

my beloved children,

but don’t be surprised if you feel me

sprinkling a little stardust in your hair.

All my love,

God

AMEN

(Helpful inspirations for this sermon include, The Life of God by Franco Ferrucci; “The Dominion of Love” by Barbara Brown Taylor, found in The Green Bible; and Far Out, by Michael Benson, a magnificent collection of images of the stars in the heavens)