Sunday, August 20, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (reading starts around 23:15; children’s sermon starts around 24:52; sermon starts around 30:58)
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Readings: Genesis 1:1-5, Matthew 6:30-34
In the children’s sermon before this, I showed the kids a hat that my friends’ mom had made me growing up, and we talked about how special it is to receive things that someone made for us. I also talked about how this same friends’ mom had given me a big ball of yarn when I was going through a hard time because she knew what I needed and how to cheer me up when I needed it. God made this whole wonderful world for us, and God knows what we need – often even better than we do ourselves – so God asks us to go to God first with what we need because God promises to provide for us.
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” In one short sentence, you have the entire first article of the Apostles’ Creed. It’s even shorter and more to the point than the Nicene Creed — but packed into that one short sentence, there are some pretty big ideas.
Like the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed is set up in a Trinitarian format — so this first section focuses on God the Father, and then the other two sections focus on God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Today and over the next couple of Sundays, we’re going to dive into each of these sections and just let ourselves just really marinate in all the good stuff we can find in such a familiar text.
Sound good? (If not, too bad; we’re doing it anyway! 😜)
So, of the three parts of the creed, this first section is by far the shortest — but listen to how much is communicated in those few words: “I believe in God, the FATHER, ALMIGHTY, CREATOR of heaven and earth.” In that, I hear three really interesting ideas about who God is:
God is the Father — which, in ancient understandings, was not so much about sex or gender, but rather about God’s role as a parent; God as one who nurtures, who raises up new life as the head of a family.
God is the Almighty — the all-powerful, the most ultimate force in the universe.
And God is the Creator — the maker of heaven and earth – or, as the Nicene Creed phrases it, the maker of all that is, both seen and unseen.
Each of these ideas tells us something different about who God is, so I want to dig into each of them one at a time – and I’ll start with God the Almighty.
This, for me, is maybe the hardest aspect of God to fully relate to. But I find that thinking about it in perspective can be helpful. One of the most powerful (and terrifying) things I have ever experienced was an earthquake. I mean, I’m from Nebraska, where we don’t exactly get a lot of those. I’m totally used to shenanigans from wind and water and weather — but for the earth to start acting up felt like a kind of betrayal. It happened while I was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. One minute I was sitting at my table, working on a project, and the next minute, everything in my house started shaking; things were falling off the walls, power lines outside my window were swinging wildly back and forth, and the very ground beneath me was trembling. And I got off easy. Where I lived, the quake registered around a 4.3 — just strong enough to crack one wall of my house and to scare the pants off of me. But the epicenter of the earthquake was in Haiti — it was the January 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti — and the damage it caused to roads and buildings and entire communities was absolutely devastating.
And yet, as powerful as that experience was, in perspective, it directly impacted around two thirds of a small island that you can barely see on most maps. It was just a momentary blip of two plates sliding against each other on a small planet circling a mid-size star on a far-flung edge of one galaxy in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies — a universe over which God rules as the ultimate power in all existence.
You can extend this thinking to the most powerful things you’ve experienced — to other natural disasters, like the wildfires ravaging Hawaii and Canada right now— or even think about the most powerful and destructive things that humans have done, with the atomic bomb. Think of all the time and resources and knowledge and effort it took humanity to make just one. And then reread this passage from Genesis, where God simply speaks and entire worlds spring into being. That is power.
And in this passage from Genesis, we are shown exactly what God chooses to do with all this amazing cosmic power: God uses it to create! God uses that power to make stars and galaxies and planets and creatures – living creatures! God creates entire intricate ecosystems of organisms living in balance with one another — a world overflowing with abundance and life.
And you can learn so much about who God the Creator is by looking at God’s creation. I mean, just consider for a moment what a wonderfully weird and beautiful and wildly imaginative world this is. When it gets really cold, water turns into tiny crystals that float down from the sky and blanket the ground in sparkles. Who comes up with something like that?? We have fuzzy little worms that eat leaves until they crawl into a homemade sleeping bag and then come out as flying creatures with wings that look like stained glass. That is some straight up Willy Wonka sh*t right there! Or think of, like, the taste of a perfectly ripe tomato bursting on your tongue, or the smell of fresh cut grass, or the fiery colors of a sunset. This world that God made is absolutely full to the brim with wonders.
God the Creator made a world that is full of abundant nourishment for all the creatures living in it, a world that feeds us and shelters us and sustains us – but God didn’t stop there. God made this world beautiful — for no other reason than the sheer delight of it. And God gave us the ability to appreciate that beauty, to likewise take joy in the pleasures of this world. God gave us a world that nourishes us, body and soul.
And that is because the only thing more awesome than the almighty creative power of God is the love and tender compassion that God has for every last little bit of creation, including us. As small and as insignificant as we are against the vast sweep of the cosmos, God sees to it that we have all the things we need to live well. God cares for us, not as a super-powered ruler lording over his creation, but as a parent, lovingly providing for their children. Jesus tells his disciples, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” ‘And imagine: if this is how God clothes grass – which is here one day and gone the next – just imagine how God will provide for you (a much more complex and long-lived organism than grass 😜).’
This is our God: awesomely powerful, wildly creative, and unfathomably loving and compassionate. Taken together, all of these things paint us a portrait of a pretty extraordinary God: the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.
Our creed begins by declaring our belief, our deep trust, in this extraordinary God – which seems fitting, because the one thing that our God asks of us is that we seek God first. God knows that at any given moment we each might have a dozen different things clamoring for our energy and attention. God knows our needs, our worries, and our wants. And God’s not asking that we just drop all these things and ignore them – not at all. Rather God’s invitation is that we ease our grip on all those anxieties that keep us up at night; that we learn to keep God at the top of our heart’s list of priorities and trust that everything else will follow. Because that is exactly what God promises us.
And when we focus on keeping God first in our lives and in our hearts – like we do in the creeds – that mindfulness often has a way of opening us up to a broader perspective on things.
Being mindful of God the Creator keeps us awake and sensitive to the beauty of creation; it inspires us to be grateful and to care for this earth that sustains us, for the wonder of our bodies, for the sheer miracle of just being alive.
Being mindful of God the loving Parent reminds us that we are, first and foremost, beloved members of a family. Whatever or whoever else we may be, love will always be the truest thing about us. And remembering that opens us up to see the world with that same love and compassion. It encourages us to look at the world through God’s eyes and to notice the places where love is needed, the places where the abundance of God’s creation is not being shared.
And being mindful that God – our loving, creative parent – is also the Almighty can give us a deep sense of hope. Sometimes it seems like the powers of this world are bent on hatred and destruction, and that the challenges and problems we face are too complex and difficult to overcome. But none of this would even exist apart from God. Nothing in creation can stop God’s agenda of life and light. God’s love will always, always triumph in the end.
And that is why we continue to make our confession of belief, time and time again: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.”
This is the Day 