Good morning, Friends! Thank you all so much for coming today to worship.
My wife and I had a wonderful vacation. We drove more miles in one month than the whole rest of the year put together. We drove across parts of 8 states – North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire.
We managed one of the things on our long-time wish list. We went to the Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. They make everything from Corelle Ware to giant mirrors for the world’s biggest reflecting telescopes.
My wife signed us up for a workshop to make blown glass ornaments. The artist takes a long metal tube, and reaches into a 2,000 degree furnace. They gather up a glob of red-hot molten glass and bring it out.
They have to keep rotating the tube all the time, because the glass is liquid. You blow into the tube and make a bubble. Then they shape it and twist it, and dip it into trays of colored glass bits. Then they pop it back into the furnace again and shape it some more.
The artist makes it all look so easy, but you can feel the heat of the furnace from 20 feet away. Finally, our ornaments were done, and set aside to cool overnight, so they could be mailed to us back here. It was amazing!
You all know how important family is to everyone. We don’t get to see our family very much living here. So, we saw our son and his wife. We saw both my brothers and their wives. We saw cousins. We visited many old friends. And we stayed at our family cabin, way up in the mountains in Vermont, about 30 miles from the Canadian border.
It’s on a gravel road, three miles from the blacktop, and 8 miles from the nearest store. There’s no internet, and almost no cell phone reception. Our closest neighbor is over a mile away.
We heard owls in the woods, and saw wild loons on the ponds.
One morning we got up, went out on the deck, and saw a young black bear, just 60 or 70 feet away. He was munching green apples from an old tree that was planted back before my grandparents’ time. We looked at the bear, and he looked at us. He decided he had business somewhere else, and ambled off. Everybody was fine.
There was a big disaster in our town, a week before we got there. They had 11 inches of rain in one hour, which caused flash flooding.
Two families lost their homes, when the flood water washed them off their foundations. The real tragedy was, that one of our neighbors, a young farmer, 33 years old, was drowned in the flash flood.
We think he was trying to rescue some people who were trapped in a car. The people made it to high ground, but he fell into the water and was drowned.
The whole town was still in shock when we arrived, but people came together around the disaster. Every adult who could be spared came and emptied out the flood-damaged homes.
People took all the clothing home, and brought it back washed and dried. They pulled out the furniture and the household goods, and dried out and cleaned and repaired everything.
While the adults were working, the town opened up the school, and provided child care and hot meals for everyone. Two homes which were vacant were made available for the families.
It was the kind of all hands, community effort that you read about and hear about, but which so seldom happens.
The young farmer left a wife and two young children. Their extended family is taking care of them, but it’s tough. They had a celebration of life at the farm, and more than a thousand people came. Since there’s only 700 people in the entire town, that’s pretty impressive.
You may wonder what all this has to do with worship here. Well, it’s nice to know what your pastor has been doing for the last few weeks. We weren’t wasting our time.
We were refreshing our spirits. We were re-connecting with another part of our life, a part that we miss all the time. We were resting, and remembering who we are.
Every morning, I always got up to watch the sun rise. I’m a sunrise junkie. I love to see the hope and promise in a new day.
We took walks, lots of walks. I walked half a mile up the road every day, to a beaver pond that’s on our family’s land. Didn’t see the beaver – he mostly works at night. But the pond is part of a wetland, that we’re stewards of.
Wetlands are important – a lot of people think they’re useless, but they hold water back when it rains, and let it filter out slowly. Wetlands harbor an amazing variety of plants and trees and wildlife.
It’s an honor and a responsibility for our family to protect this area. And in turn, our wetland helped to protect part of the town from flooding and landslides.
Over the next few hundred years, the beaver pond and wetland on our property will silt up and fill in, and the beaver will move downstream and start over. Our land will become a flat meadow. It’ll grow up to forest, or maybe someone else will live there. I think about all these things, on my walks.
We had a another big storm this month. It was the tail end of one of those hurricanes. We had several inches of rain, and winds over 60 miles an hour.
When the rain comes down on the old metal roof, and you’re right up against the edge of the forest, you get a feeling for the power of nature that you don’t get, here in the city.
When you drive across the country, and see mountains that stretch for hundreds of miles, you don’t think so much about all the things we human beings get so involved with.
I want to read to you, from the book of Job, which is possibly the oldest book of the Bible. Job has a lot of troubles – very real troubles. And he complains to God about them, for 37 long chapters.
Over and over again, Job asks the question we all ask – “Why me, God? Why me?” And all Job’s friends keep telling him, he must have done something wrong.
Job keeps asking. He doesn’t know why all this stuff is happening. And finally, God answers. But not the way Job expected.
From out of a storm, the Lord said to Job:
Why do you talk so much when you know so little?
Brace yourself, and I will question you!Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
No doubt you decided its length and width.
What supports the earth?Who placed its cornerstone, when the morning stars all sang together, and the whole creation rejoiced?
When the ocean was born, I set its boundaries.
I wrapped it in blankets of fog.Then I built a wall around it, I locked the gates, and said, “Waves, stop here! Go no farther!”
Did you ever tell the sun to rise, and did it obey?
Did the sun take hold of the earth and shake out the wicked like dust from a rug?
Its light is too much for those who are evil, and their power is broken.
Have you ever walked along the ocean floor?
Have you seen the gate to the world of the dead?How large is the earth? Tell me, if you know!
Where is the home of light, and where does darkness live? Can you lead them home?
I’m certain you must be able to, since you were already born when I created everything.
Have you been to the places where I store up snow and hail?
From where does lightning leap, or the east wind blow?
Who carves out a path for thunderstorms?Who sends torrents of rain on empty deserts where no one lives – rain that changes barren land to meadows green with grass.
Who is the father of the dew and of the rain?
Who is the mother who gives birth to the sleet and the frost that fall in winter, when streams and lakes freeze solid as a rock?
Can you arrange stars in groups like Orion and the Pleiades?
Do you set the Big Dipper in place, and the Little Dipper?
Do you know the laws that govern the heavens?
Can you make them rule the earth?Can you order the clouds to send a downpour? Will lightning flash at your command?
Did you teach birds to know that rain or floods are on their way?Can you count the clouds and pour out their water on the dry, barren soil?
And then comes Job’s answer:
I know that you can do all things:
(selections from Job chapters 38-39, Contemporary English Version)
No plan of yours can ever be stopped.
Surely I spoke about things I didn’t understand, things too wonderful for me to know.
My ears had heard of you before,
But now – now, my eyes have seen you.
I’ve talked a lot already, and I don’t want to wear your patience. But there’s something important here.
All year long, we’re busy with our own affairs. And they mean a lot to us. We’re working, we’re earning money, we’re maintaining our homes, we’re watching sports, we’re all over the internet.
We’re electing people, we’re shopping, we’re driving here and there and everywhere.
But all the time, God is busy doing other things. Sometimes there’s some overlap. But God has different priorities and different plans than we do.
God has a whole world to maintain and keep balanced. God has millions of stars to keep in place. We are not the only living things on this earth. The world has been going on a lot longer than we’ve been around.
When I’m on vacation, you may be surprised – I don’t spend the whole time reading the Bible. I catch up on my other reading.
I read detective stories. I read history. I read science books. I read things I don’t have time for, the rest of the year.
One of the books I read last month was a geology book by John McPhee, one of my favorite American writers. He writes about what geologists call deep time – the time it takes to raise up mountains, and wear them down again, to move continents, and open up vast, enormous new sections at the bottom of the ocean.
In a way, it’s like that reading from the book of Job I just shared with you. Our time isn’t the same as God’s time.
John McPhee says: “Stretch out your arm sideways, and imagine that the 4.55 billion-year timeline of earth’s history runs from the tip of your nose to the tip of your middle fingernail. A quick swipe of a nail file would wipe out human history. So, a lot happened before we showed up.
Vast seas came and went. Continents formed, coalesced, split apart, regrouped. Mountain ranges were pushed up and eroded away. More peaks were shoved up out of the remains. Volcanoes spewed untold amounts of lava and ash.
Great ice sheets advanced and retreated for eons. Plates moving over the surface of the earth met and groaned as one was forced under the coming edge, or crushed against it. Running water slowly eroded everything it passed over, forming great rivers that cut deep-walled canyons over millions of years. Life startled into existence and began its long evolution.” (John McPhee, Basin and Range)
It isn’t that God doesn’t care. We simply don’t know all the things that God is doing. We can’t back up and see it all. Our minds are limited. We can’t take it all in.
Our response to all this is sometimes fear, or even despair – the universe is so huge, and we feel so small.
But really, what this does is, it keeps us humble. We are a small part, but we are a part of God’s great plan.
Remember what Jesus said – every sparrow counts. Every hair on your head is numbered.
We all have things we can do – things Jesus told us to do – and we can do them.
We are stewards of this world, not the owners of it.
All of our lives, we are part of a great chain, what the Bible calls a cloud of witnesses.
We are the ones who are called, to tell everyone that this is God’s world, we are all God’s children, and we need to be doing God’s work, and not just our own.
We can’t understand everything, but we can try our best, and we can try to understand at least a few things.
We can give thanks to God, for all the good we’re given.
We can give glory to God, for everything we see, because this really is a glorious world, and a beautiful one.
Anyway, it’s good to be back. And that’s what God did, on our vacation.