Psalm # 19: 1 - 6
Preached: 6 Jun 2010 Des Arc First UMC Nursing Home
Today’s psalm is a dialectic psalm—that means it is a piece of
work in two parts. The
first six verses that I just read are all about the beauty and
grandeur of Nature that God created. The second half is all about
the perfection of God’s law and how we fall short of that perfection
and wish God to clean our souls of the impurities.
My first two churches were Granade’s Chapel North of Ozark and
Altus UMC in Altus Arkansas.
Both of these churches were with about 25 people each in
attendance and both were struggling to exist.
They were about an hour drive from my home in Fort Smith and
each Sunday I would get up get my stuff ready and head out to do my
duties for them. I would
head north out of Fort Smith catch the 1-40 eastbound and then weave
through the hills as I drove to Ozark to turn off there to go to my
first service. Just past
the Mulberry exit you climb a slight hill and as you go over the
pass to the next valley I would see the sun rising in the east over
the hills I was headed to.
Every time this view would take my breath away.
I have also visited places like the Rockies in Colorado, and
Yellowstone, Yosemite, and many other place of natural beauty.
I have sat on a pacific island in the Philippians and watched
the rain come in over the crystal blue water. I have even scuba dove
those same waters and wondered at the beauty beneath the surface,
with it’s many myriad of tropical fish and coral.
I have been very fortunate in my
to have experienced the beauty and wonders of this world. I
have also looked out into the heavens and wondered at the millions
of billions of stars in this universe and marveled at how large it
truly is.
And then I think of how small and insignificant I truly am in
this great scheme of things.
We each live about 70 to 80 years some a little more, too
many a little less. When
we compare that to the billions of years this universe has existed,
I can only shake my head at how fragile and limited I am in
comparison to all of eternity.
When I was a child Atoms were first being defined and thought
about. I used to think
about us being on this earth the way the electron circled about the
nucleus of the atom and though how if I were on the electron I too
would wonder about all the other atom around me and how great and
large my “universe” would truly be.
Well we are like the being on that tiny electron circling our
sol the same as the electron circles it’s center. And we really do
not know what is going on in the next electron or planet or solar
system or for that matter the entirety of the universe.
When we think that God was able to create everything that we
see, know about and can feel. We have only an inkling of how much
and how great the being truly is.
Early man used to worship the Sun as a god mainly because they
did not know it was just a small sun in the midst of a vast
universe.
Just a hundred years ago it was discovered that many of the
objects in the sky that we thought were suns or start were in fact
galaxies trillions of stars filling. We have expanded our thoughts
and horizons exponentially since then also.
Truly our God is a wondrous being of unimaginable ability and
power.
We mere humans are not able to create on thing on our own. We
say we do but all we are really doing is recombining things that
already existed in new and different patterns.
As I write this sermon we are having the well in the Gulf of
Mexico spewing out hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil every
day. And we seem powerless to be able to stem or stop it.
God created this world and used that creation to create the
resources we would need to survive.
Europe was once covered from top to bottom with timber.
Mankind stripped those trees from the land and allowed the
grass to take over.
America likewise was covered from coast to coast with forests. And
we have likewise taken down those trees and striped the land to
build our houses and make our books and plant our crops. I am told
that from Hickory Plain to Cabot used to be a solid forest of trees
also—now it is open pasture and fields.
We are now taking out the rainforests of Brazil and Argentina
at the rate of hundreds of acres a day.
The Sahara Dessert used to be as green at one point as Brazil
was 40 years ago. Are we turning the rainforest of South America
into a new Dessert with our actions?
What will we do when we have fun out of coal and oil? The way
our great grandparents ran out of trees in their time. Yes we are
replanting some trees to replace those that we have taken down, but
we are almost to a point where this world can not and will not
support it’s population any longer. What are we going to do then?
We do not have the answers yet.
Green energy is far from being an answer to this planets
problems but it is a start.
We as a people will need to not only learn how to generate
the energy we need from our
Sol. But also use that knowledge to move out of this little
speck of dust and into the rest of the universe, sooner than we will
be ready for it. What
will we find out there? All the wonders that God created for us to
need to live on .
So why should we worship God—Because to not worship him as our
Lord creator would be saying that He could not have done all this
and that we really have no purpose in this world but to destroy it
forever, and that our children and descendants really do not matter
and never will.
It has taken us about 100 generation from the time of Christ
till today. And we have
done more harm in the last 10 generation than in the 1000 before
them. What will we leave
for the hundreds to follow us.
I for one want to leave an awe of God our Creator at least.