Good morning, Friends! Thank you all again for coming here for worship today.
We’ve had such a beautiful month, with beautiful weather here in our area. The fall color is just amazing! We have so much to be thankful for.
It’s so easy for us to get wrapped up in our own problems, that we forget to give thanks. We take so much for granted. We have so much to be thankful for.
Our scripture today is about thanking God and being appreciative. It’s one of the Psalms of the Old Testament.
O LORD, our Lord,
How great is your name in all the earth!
Your glory is praised above the heavens.
Your song is sung by children and babies at the breast.
You rebuke the mighty,
You silence the violent and the rebellious.
You are safe and secure from all your enemies.
When I look at your heavens, at the work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars that you have established;
What are human beings that you are mindful of them?
What are mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made us a little lower than God,
You have crowned us with glory and honor.
You have given us dominion over the works of your hands;
You have put all things under our feet,
All sheep and oxen,
All the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
The fish of the sea,
Whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O LORD, our Lord,
How great is your name in all the earth!Psalm 8 (composite translation)
What’s this saying? It’s saying that we just don’t thank God enough for all the things God has given us! If we tried to make a list, we’d be writing things down for hours.
The world we live in is amazing, beautiful, and complicated. All the things we see and know are made of the same building blocks – atoms and molecules. They’re too small to see, but everything – from the cells in our bodies, to stars and galaxies, are made up of them.
Do you know what DNA is? DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. You’ve probably heard of DNA. It’s a chain of molecules that’s in every cell of every living thing on earth.
Each strand of DNA is made like a spiral staircase. It’s actually a double staircase, because there are two spirals. Each step on the staircase is made up of four molecules. And the way those steps are made, tells each cell what to do.
It’s like a code. A code made up of molecules. Too small to see without an incredibly powerful microscope. But your DNA is responsible for everything, from the color of your eyes, to the color of your hair, to how fast you grow, and thousands of other things.
DNA is incredibly thin, and incredibly long. Remember, every cell in your body contains a double strand of DNA in it. More than 3 billion pairs of instructions. And it’s packed into your cells, so tightly, that if you could ever stretch it out, full length, your DNA strand would be six feet long. All that information, that makes you unique.
When something goes wrong with our DNA, that’s often one of the reasons our bodies develop cancer and other diseases.
DNA is something we get from both our parents – the father and the mother both contribute to what our DNA is.
DNA isn’t everything. Because a lot of who we are, comes from our life experience – what kind of a home we’re raised in, whether we were well-fed or starved when we were little, all the things we learned at home and studied at school.
And of course, our lives are affected by how much exercise and sunlight we get, and by accidents we have and by chemicals we’re exposed to.
In another of the Psalms, it says, “You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. . .” (Psalm 139:13-14)
We are incredibly complicated. And every living thing on this planet is complicated, too.
Every living thing needs its own kind of nutrition, its own special ration of water and warmth and sunlight. Without them, that special living thing won’t survive.
We can’t even imagine how complicated this world is. How all the living things in this world depend on each other.
Do you know how many worms there are in the ground? I looked it up this week.
In an acre of ground, depending on how rich the soil is, there are between 80,000 and two MILLION worms. Good soil has more. Poor soil has less. All together, the tunnels those worms make total about 1,200 miles long, just in one acre of ground.
Every bit of soil out there that grows things, has been through a worm, not once, but many times. The bacteria and nutrients that the worms digest, is what makes plants grow. Without plants, we’d all go hungry. And without worms, there’d be no crops. Healthy worms make healthy crops, make healthy human beings.
Did you know, what a miracle it is, that we’re alive here at all? So far as we know, the earth is the only planet in our entire solar system, that has life. We may find life somewhere else some day, but right now, from all the science we have, this is the only place where living things thrive.
Part of the reason for that, is that the earth is in exactly the right spot. If we were closer to the sun, the earth would be too hot for life to exist. If we were much farther away, the earth would be too cold.
We’re at the right distance, where water can be a liquid. Any closer, it would boil away. Any farther, all the water would freeze solid, or evaporate away into the vacuum of space. We’re in what scientists call the water zone, where it’s just the right temperature for life to exist.
Who made all this? Who’s responsible for setting everything in motion? Where did all the matter come from? What holds it all together?
How did the third big rock from the sun, become our beloved home, the planet that shelters us and gives us food and life?
Have you thought about that lately? Do you ever thank the one responsible? Do you just take it all for granted? Or do you ever stop and think about it all, how amazing everything is? Do you ever say, “Wow, this is amazing and glorious!”
Just asking.
Part of what makes us human, is that we can lift our eyes up from the sidewalk, and think about these things. We can say, “Wow, God, your world is so great! And we are so small!”
Whoever wrote today’s Scripture reading really understood what I’ve been talking about.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars that you have established;
What are human beings that you are mindful of them?
What are mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made us a little lower than God,
[or in some translations it says, a little lower than the angels]
You have crowned us with glory and honor.
You have put all things into our care.
We are here on this earth for just a few years. If we’re healthy, maybe 70, 80 or 90-some years. But God is forever. God is “from everlasting to everlasting“. A thousand years to us, is the blink of an eye to God.
Our entire religious tradition, Christians and Jews, going all the way back to Abraham, is about five thousand years. That’s five eyeblinks to God.
And yet God hears our prayers. God knows our hearts. God sees our entire lives. And God blesses us, every day.
We can’t hardly begin to wrap our minds around all this. But we can be thankful.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth had no shape, and darkness covered the deep, and the Spirit of God breathed over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated light from darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was morning and evening, the first day. . .”
Genesis 1:1-5
And God went on from there, and created the sky and the sea, the dry land, plants, trees, sun, moon and stars, birds, fish, animals of all kinds, and quite recently, human beings.
And every step of the way, every day of creation, do you remember what God said? God said, “This is good.” And when God was all done, at least what we can see, God said, “This is VERY good!”
And when it was all set in motion, when everything was up and running, do you remember what God did, on the final day of creation?
God rested. And that final day, that final step of creation, God said was the holiest day of all. God set it aside, forever, not just for himself, but for us, as a special day, a holy day, a day to look and admire and be amazed at everything.
“Don’t just do something,” God says. “Sit there!”
We get it backwards. We think we’re always supposed to be doing stuff. Building, and planting, and digging, and moving.
And God says, “You’ve got six days, every week, to do all that stuff. But on the seventh day, do what I do! Take a day off! Just look at all this amazing stuff in the world. Who could possibly believe it!”
And you know – there are people who never do take time to look at this amazing world and appreciate it. They never stop and look. They never thank God for all that they’ve been given.
That shouldn’t be us. We need to be praising God, for the mystery of life. We need to be thanking God, for the amazing, complicated way that everything depends on everything else.
We need to follow those simple directions we all learned in kindergarten – “Stop. Look. And listen.” If we all stopped, looked and listened more, we would all get along better with each other. And we would all appreciate this world more.
You’ve all probably heard me say before, “If you’re too busy to pray, you’re too busy, period.”
Just remember, prayer isn’t only about asking for things. Prayer is also about thanking God for things.
This month, let’s all be more thankful, more noticing, and more appreciative.
God is great. God is good – all the time! God made us, in ways we don’t fully understand.
Let’s not be foolish, not be ignorant, not be careless of our blessings.
Let’s give God the glory, for all the awesome wonder of the world.