This Sunday, November 12, is the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost.
Verse of the Season:
This week’s sermon is: Let Justice Roll
This week's readings are :
Message:
Holy Wonder – Created Beauty
I suspect that one of the first places that we recognize
beauty is in Creation.
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Notice I say recognize, not experience.
o
A baby experiences beauty in her mother’s love
and the way she sacrifices her body for the sake of the child that that baby is
incapable of appreciating until much later.
Genesis 1 – God sees all He has made, and it is good.
Romans 8:20-23 speaks of the Creation being subjected to
futility and bondage of corruption.
Yet the beauty of God’s good creation peaks through.
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Sunrise
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Purple Mountain Majesty
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Amber Waves of Grain
There is a danger here for Christians that we slip into a
kind of sentimentalism that treats the creation as an idol – an object of
worship or a sacrament at the same level as God’s Word.
This world was created good, yet it struggles under the
curse of sin and decay.
There are terrible things in Creation:
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Cancer
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Violent storms
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The damage done by humanity in pollution and
mistreatment of the land.
o
Lithium pit.
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Sea Gull wrapped in fishing line.
So, is creation good or broken? “We see the dark moments of
destruction in creation and do not acknowledge the goodness of God. Created
beauty holds these experiences in tension and invites us into an experience of
aching awe: aware of the curse; we ache; aware of the goodness, we are in awe.”
– Schmitt.
We are pulled between two responses to this reality in our
lives.
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Mundane boredom – consider breathing – then you
get sick! – God awakens us to the beauty of life as a gift.
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A constant improvement project – always striving
for something better – God uses beauty to awaken us to acknowledge that we are
creatures incapable of ineffable perfection, inviting us to wonder and awe.
“This is the power of created beauty; it awakens us to the
gift of God’s good creation, and it inspires us to be involved, to attend to,
and to care for the things of this world. We do so with awe in the goodness of
God and ache at the horror of decay. Created beauty causes us to attend to life
as a gift and, behold, it is beautiful.” – Schmitt.
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