1 Gods Story of Creative Purpose (part of a sermon series that parallels the Presbyterian Church [U.S.A.

]s Engage:Gospel curriculum) by Joshua L.F. Bower Delivered September 22, 2013 First Presbyterian Church, Whiteville, NC In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. A lots happened since God created the heavens and the earth, but one thing is still true: we can learn an awful lot about God by looking at creation. In fact, taking a good look at creation can actually teach us a lot about the gospel, the Good News were talking about as we go through this first piece of Engage. It can teach us whats at the heart of evangelism. Right now youre sitting on pews in a church on the planet we call Earth. Earth weighs about 6 billion trillion tons. It has this wonderful thing called gravity that gives you the illusion that youre sitting still. But youre flying all over the place. Earth is movingso that means youre movingaround the sun at roughly 66,000 miles an hour.1 At the same time its rotating at the equator at a little over a thousand miles an hour. Have you ever heard somebody say, I feel like my head is spinning!? Turns out theyre rightit isat a rate of about 700 miles an hour. While your heads spinning, lets talk about space. The edge of the known universe is approximately 90 billion trillion miles away. The visible universe is a million million million million miles across. To give you a sense of how big that is: Our solar system is so big that the stars youll see when you stand outside tonight arent actually what the stars look like now; theyre what they looked like years ago when the light youre just now seeing first left them. Theyre so far away youre seeing stars that existed years ago! But even as big as it is, our solar system takes up less than 1 trillionth of the universe. Our solar system is part of the Milky Way galaxy, and it takes this massive solar system of ours 200250 billion years to orbit the Milky Way one time. The Milky Way is part of a group of 54 galaxies that are together called the Local Group, which is part of an even larger group called the Virgo Supercluster. This Virgo Supercluster is moving at a rate of 666,000 miles an hour. And when things this big are moving this fast, wacky things can happen. A few weeks back I mentioned these things
1

The fun facts in this sermon about the universe and atoms and people come from Rob Bells book What We Talk About When We Talk About God (HarperOne, 2013) in the chapter entitled, Open. In the book, Bell gives references to a ton of other books on these subjects you can check out, too!

2 called neutron stars. These stars have such strong gravity that as they travel they actually collapse in on themselves. Neutron stars can weigh more than all the continents on Earth combined and fit in a teaspoon. And all these amazing things are all part of what we can see, but we can only see 4% of the universe. 96% of the universe is made up of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. And maybe craziest of all: somewhere 90 billion trillion miles away at the edge of the universeits still expanding. Its growing. Creation is still happening. Can you believe all this?!?! God saw all that he had made, and it was very good! So right now youre sitting on pews in a church here on the planet we call Earth flying through space at 66,000 miles an hour and spinning around at 700 miles an hour. No wonder going to church makes people so tired! But since we talked about all the big stuff out there, lets talk about the little stuff in here. These pews youre sitting on are made of materials like wood and fabric. But if you were to put those materials under a microscope you would see that theres actually more going on with that wood and fabric than you can see. And if you kept on going and breaking down these materials over and over again getting smaller and smaller youd eventually get to what scientists used to think was the smallest thing we could see: atoms. Everything in the world is made up of these atoms. Theyre small. How small? Well, 1 million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as 1 human hair. A single grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms (thats 22 with 8 zeroes). But atoms, it turns out, arent the smallest things there are. Atoms are made up of even smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. But when technology was created that could split those up we discovered that there were even smaller particles. Currently, somewhere around 150 particles smaller than atoms have been discovered. But theyre not just small, theyre crazy! The electrons that orbit around the protons and neutrons in an atom dont follow a set orbit like the Earth does around the sun. No, electrons actually disappear in one place and then reappear in another place without ever traveling the distance between where they were and where they are. Particles just vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will come or go! This is where we get the phrase quantum leaps. And these unpredictable movements are happening really, really fast. How fast? A single electron can do 47,000 laps around a

3 four-mile tunnelin 1 second. And on top of all this atoms, it turns out, are 99.9% empty space. Everything you can see and touch and hold is made up of these particles in constant motion, bouncing off each other, crashing into each other, coming in and out of existence billions of times in billionths of a second across completely empty space. But somehow none of you look nervous that at any second the pew youre sitting on might simply disappear! Somehow these crazy seemingly-random unpredictable particles combine to create everything. If you were a gambler youd be crazy to bet on all this being able to happen like it doesbut it does. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good! I dont know about you, but all this kind of information about creation does 2 things: First, it just blows my mind. I cant wrap my head around it. And second, it just leaves me in awe of the God who created it. Looking at the biggest and the smallest parts of creation shows us, I believe, just what an amazing, overwhelming, incomprehensible, indescribable, flat out awesome God we believe in. But what does all this have to do with the Good News of the gospel were talking about in Engage? What does it have to do with evangelism? Wellweve talked about the heavens and the earth but as mindblowingly amazing as they are, neither were made in the image of God. No, to learn the deepest truths about God, you have to look at us: human beings. Were the only part of creation made in Gods own image, in Gods likeness. We are right smack in the middle of the universe. Really...if you include all human beings from birth to death we stand roughly 3.2 feet tall. Thats halfway between the width of the known universe and the smallest particle discovered so far. And if you thought there was more going on with the pews than you can see, get a load of yourself. Your body is made up of around 75 trillion cells. Every one of those cells has 6 feet of DNA that contains over 3 billion letters of coding that works together to make up the different parts of your body. But it does something else: Every day you lose 50150 strands of your hair. Some of you will feel like youre losing significantly more. In those same 24 hours you shed 10 billion flakes of skin. 90% of household dust is dead skin. Those arent dust bunnies in the corner; theyre people! Every 28 days you get completely new skin. Touch your armgo ahead, do it. The skin youre touching right now wont be there when our church hosts the presbytery meeting next month. But its not just your skin: every 9 years your entire

4 body is renewed. Every single cell in your body, all 75 trillion of them, dies and is reborn. But somehow, all of these cells that are made up of molecules which are made up of atoms which are totally unpredictablesomehow your cells keep being reborn as youno matter how many other peoples atoms you breathed in the last time you went grocery shoppingthey still make you. God created everything else, and its amazing. But only you were created in Gods own image. And you are constantly in a state of renewal. At the sub-atomic level God is literally remaking you every second of every day. But yet you are still you. This all points to a massive truth that is foundational to the Good News we proclaim: God is all about healing. God is about transformation. Last year we went through what we called The Story. At its core its about healing and redemption. God made a good creation, human beings messed it up, but God wouldnt let the world rot. He called a man and that man became a people and from that people came a Messiah and that Messiah lived and died and rose again to be a Savior who called into existence a church that lives on to this day until that Messiah returns to finish establishing the kingdom he started when he was on Earth. The whole story is about fixing the brokenness. Last week we said that at the core of who God is, is Love. God is Love. That love leads God to heal all the broken parts of the world, to forgive sins, to bring people back to him through his Son. Healing and redemption and forgiveness are literally built into Gods creation. Just as God is healing and transforming even the atoms in your body, he wants to heal all of you. And he wants all those who have experienced his healing in their bodies, minds, and spirits to share that healing with others. He wants the church he established to be a place where emotional and spiritual wounds are healed, where people are supported and built up and reminded whose image they were created in. And he wants his healed church to go out and take that healing to those who may have never heard his name. This is at the heart of creation; its at the heart of who God is; and its at the heart of evangelism: spreading the Good News of Gods love and healing to all the world. Amen.