Creation 1: Where were you?

This morning I begin a series of three sermons on the Christian doctrine of creation. This morning: Where were you? Next week From nothing. And lastly, The delight of God.

The universe is big.

I don’t know how often, if at all, you have occasion to reflect on the sheer scale of the universe we inhabit – although when I say ‘inhabit’ it is only true in the sense that we sit in one crowded into one tiny corner of it. We can only travel in our minds’ eyes across the beams of light that reach us from the distant suns hovering some 14 billion light years away – meaning that what we are seeing is somehow the light from events that occurred some 14 billion years ago. We cannot see beyond this, simply because there has been enough time for light to travel that far. Even the light from our own local sun takes 8.3 minutes to reach us, 149.6 million km away. The sun is gradually increasing in temperature, such that another billion years will see it evaporate all the water on earth, and life will cease, if we haven’t managed to do that ourselves already.

The sun is itself of course only one of between 200 and 400 billion stars in the galaxy we rather cutely call the Milky Way. The diameter of the Milky Way is some 100,000 light years across. Earth sits about two-thirds away from the centre of the galaxy on a spiral shaped collection of dust and stars called the Orian-Cygnus arm. The possibility is that there are at least 10 billion planets that are, like earth, in a habitable zone, or as it is sometimes called, the ‘Goldilocks’ zone where things are ‘just right’. So far we have discovered just one.

In the 1920s, the great astronomer and telescopist Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the Milky Way was only one of approximately 200 billion such galaxies in the universe that we can see.

How did it get so big? The current thinking is that the power unleashed by the Big Bang, some 13 or 14 billion years ago was sufficient to expand a concentration of matter as tiny as an atom into the scale of a galaxy in an instant, and has been driving an expansion ever since.

As the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the late Douglas Adams put it:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

How are we to exegete this vast text? At the very least, we ought to be awestruck. We are awed by the dimensions and age of medieval Cathedral, just a few hundred metres long and a few hundred years old. We are awed by the feeling of size and permanence that a landscape can give us. And yet these are as nothing in comparison to the universe itself. And against the immensity of the universe, all the concerns and anxieties of human life seem quite trivial. Our fretting about where to park our cars seems no more significant than our worry about how to treat our cancers. Our perspective is so limited, our time so brief, our bodies so puny: what do they matter?

That was how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opened: with the pathetic Arthur Dent trying to protect his suburban home against being demolished to make way for a motorway all the while unaware that the whole earth itself was minutes from destruction at the hands of the Vogons. The same perspective comes through in Monty Python’s film The Meaning of Life, in ‘the Galaxy Song’:

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,

And things seem hard or tough,

And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,

And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.

That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,

A sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,

Are moving at a million miles a day,

In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,

Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Though it is done with the comic’s touch, it is a deeply disturbing and discomforting view of the way things are for men and women. The universe, even though it is extraordinarily beautiful, is actually a remorseless, unforgiving, unyielding place. Its greatest confidence trick, its biggest lie, is that it convinces you and me that it was made with us in mind. A moment’s contemplation of the depths of space and the forbidding span of time must surely rid us of the egotistical notion that we human beings are at the centre of things, and that what happens to me is of any consequence whatsoever. You might as well laugh: as James Taylor says, … since we're only here for a while/ Might as well show some style.

Something similar is going on in the book of Job - similar, but crucially, not at all the same. We are familiar with the story of Job: brought to the brink of death by loss of his family and possessions, he is urged to consider what the causes of his personal disaster are. The impeccable theological logic of his so-called friends is woefully inadequate. Job’s only resolve is to not accuse God – and so it goes. At the height of the story, after chapter upon chapter of silence, God speaks to Job ‘out of the whirlwind’. And what does God say to Job? Does he give him a solution? Does he explain what is going on?

No –if anything, it can be said that he taunts Job. His speech is the delivery of word which designed to silence. It is the playing of the ultimate trump card: where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up your loins like a man,

I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements – surely you know!

Or who stretched the line upon it?

On what were its bases sunk,

Or who laid its cornerstone

When the morning stars sang together

And all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

Is this not the same move that Douglas Adams and Monty Python make – and with a little sarcasm to boot? A ruthless blow to the human ego? Well, yes: yes it is. We haven’t got the capacity to answer these profound questions – we simply haven’t earned the right to challenge the creator. Did we pop off down to IKEA and assemble the earth from a flat pack with an Allen key? Did we knit together the canopy of the sky? Did we turn on the taps and create the mighty sea?

The questions come from God one after the other like a rain of blows on a fallen boxer. Only one of them would be enough to prove the point.

Have you commanded the morning since your days begane,

And caused the dawn to know its place

So that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth

And the wicked be shaken out of it?

Answer: no, no, no and again no. There can be no answer to the creator. If we are dwarfed by the creation then how much more are we dwarfed by him? It is, by the way, one of the great blessings of modern science that it has shown us the true scale of the picture. That the universe is far, far larger and far, far older than we ever imagined can only increase the awe with which regard the one who made it. His eternal qualities and his divine nature shine forth from every star. The heavens declare the glory of God – and we moderns have the privilege of seeing just how extraordinary that glory is and how far it reaches.

But what are we?

It does seem as if Job is being completely flattened by this speech – crushed underfoot like an ant. But then as it unfolds, we realize something more is going on than we see in Douglas Adams or Monty Python. For a start: instead of the terrifying and lonely quiet of the vast universe, Job hears, and we hear, a voice breaking the silence. We hear the voice of reality itself; the voice of the creator himself – the words of the creator of the rolling spheres, the potentate of time.

And though, in fact, the voice of God puts Job and the rest of us very much in our place, the very fact that there is a voice at all is extraordinary. That the creature is addressed; that the puny, suffering, vulnerable, short-lived creature is addressed by the eternal being who made all things is the moment at which we gain a flicker of hope. Even as this word is delivered as a judgement upon human arrogance, it is a word of tender grace and mercy towards our kind.

And the speech, as we take a closer look at it – there is no more beautiful passage in all of scripture – is not nearly as threatening as it first seems. It is actually playful and tender, as God lovingly and even humorously describes the animals in all their wildness: the mountain goats giving birth who knows where, the wild ass who won’t be tamed, the ostrich who foolishly lays her eggs on the ground where someone may step on them but who runs like the wind, the snorting warhorse, the flight of the eagle and the hawk, the Behemoth, or hippopotamus, with bones like tubes of bronze, the Leviathan – can you give it to your kids to play with like some fluffy dog? It is as if he is teasing us about our supposed dominion over the animals. Has the tiger recognized your dominion yet? Or the crocodile?

These words are humbling, but they are not crushing. They give us a perspective of scale, a bit of necessary self-understanding; but they are not designed to make us despair. They do not leave us with no alternative but to laugh bitterly to cover up our despair at our insignificance. On the contrary: we learn here that the Creator of all things, who made all things according to his Wisdom, does come towards us human beings and speak to them. He does not remain concealed somewhere in the darkness of space, standing behind some supernova or lurking in some black hole. He is not playing some game of hide and seek with us, as if we could simply deduce his existence from the way things are. Not at all. God is speaking to us. He is addressing himself to us – revealing himself. And that word at once rightly de-centres us but immediately elevates us: for we are the creatures to whom God the creator in his wisdom speaks. We aren’t who we think we are, for sure: we are not anything in the scheme of things, taken on our own. But the voice of the creator is spoken to us, for our benefit, in our hearing.

Why us? Even the Psalmist doesn’t really know: what is man that you are mindful of him, the Son of Man that you care for him? Yet you made him a little lower than the angels… It’s mysterious – a hidden counsel of God. But we are addressed by him, even to the extent that God himself becomes one of us, and not any other sort of creature. Let us not try to explain why should be so. But let us believe it to be so. In Christ, the wisdom of God from before the world began, the word that made worlds, is graciously and mercifully spoken to us. The only question is: will we hear it?

Meditating on the scale and grandeur and beauty of the created universe is something Christians ought to seek to do regularly as a spiritual discipline – and I’d like to challenge you to think of it in this way. Scripture does it often enough, after all! Urban living is designed to screen out nature and give us the appearance of human omnipotence and significance. Having heard the God who speaks, we need the reminder of our place in the order of things. The God of Jesus Christ is the God of all reality. When we contemplate that reality in light of Jesus Christ we begin to understand something of the privilege we have received in being spoken to by God. We are given a true sense of perspective: that human beings are by size or power anything much in the context of the universe; but that we are incredibly blessed by the God who stoops to speak to us.