A Good Planet?
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on the 2nd March, 2008 by Professor Robert White FRS
Readings: Genesis 1: 26 - 2: 3 & Revelation 21: 1 - 5
Sermon
The title of this sermon is A Good Planet? Its particularly appropriate because we have just started the Year of Planet Earth. Though I did just wonder whether Pluto was stripped of its title as a planet last year as part of a master plan to clear the decks first of some planetary competition.
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Beginnings of books are important. Apparently we decide whether or not to read a book on the basis of just the first page or two. So authors generally work really hard on that opening paragraph, just to get us hooked.
On one sabbatical we lived by the sea on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. We lived next door to Michael Palmer. He's a doctor who writes best-selling medical thrillers - the sort you find at airport shops. He told us that one summer he was on the beach and was excited to see a woman sit down with a copy of his latest book. Apparently she picked it up, and opened it at the first page. But after about one minute, she yawned, closed her eyes and stretched out in the sun instead. He said he was gutted.
I wonder whether the creator God sometimes feels that way about the book he has written to tell us of his purposes. Today we heard an extract from the first chapter of the first book of the Bible read to us.
And that first chapter of Genesis is crucial because it sets the foundation for everything that comes afterwards. In modern parlance, we might say that Genesis 1 is God's mission statement.
The main thing we learn from that first book of the bible is that God created a good world. And that he was very pleased with it. In fact if we'd had time to read the whole of Genesis chapter 1 we would have heard that he says 6 times over that everything he created was good.
- the light, the darkness, the sea, the dry land, the vegetation, plants and trees, the sun, moon and stars, sea creatures, the birds, the animals
- For each one, it says in Gen 1 that God made it and 'God saw that it was good'
- Finally, he made humankind: in v31 as we heard read And God saw all that he had made and it was very good.
We can't fail to get the message, can we? God's material creation is good. Matter matters to God.
If I might say this, Christianity is a very materialistic religion. It is rooted in the material world. God came to earth as a real person, called Jesus, in a particular place in the Middle East at a specific time, when it was under Roman rule. There is no place here for the sort of religion that says that our main aim should be to strive for some higher spiritual plane, that the material things of this world are bad and are to be striven against. Christianity has its feet firmly on the ground. I like that - I'm a geologist.
So God says unambiguously in Genesis 1 that he made the world, and that it is a good world. God gloried in his creation, and his creation in turn reflects something of his character. 'The heavens declare the glory of God' proclaimed the psalmist (Ps. 19:1).
God cares for his creation in an ongoing sense - for example, Psalm 65 describes God as intimately involved in caring for creation: 'You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly... you soften it with showers and bless its crops' The bible is full of pictures of God's continuing care for this earth. For example, in Ps 104 The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God. In Ps 147, He provides food for the cattle, and for the young ravens when they call.
What about the question of where we, humankind, men and women, fit into the picture? Are we just the happenstance outcome of a long and random evolutionary history? Or something more significant? It's a crucial question. And the Bible tells us in Gen 1:27
God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
There is no doubt that humans are special - we are not just animals, though we are that as well - we are something more. We are made in God's image. Although God cares for all of his creation, for all the animals and so on, there is the sense in the Bible that humans are of particular significance in that they can relate to God in a two-way relationship, being made in his image. And God's first commandment to humankind, in Gen 1:26 was to rule over the earth - to steward it - and that included everything - the fish, the birds, the animals, the earth itself. So if we are people made in God's image, we have the responsibility to care for the earth as God himself cared for it. We ought to be, as it were, vice-regents, ruling on behalf of God.
So God's creation is good, and we are commanded to be stewards of it on his behalf.
If I can just comment from a scientific perspective, the bible¿s view of how special the world is certainly resonates with scientific understanding. For example, the physical constants of the universe that make it possible for us to exist here are astonishingly finely tuned. So much so that the so-called anthropic principle that investigates this is now a subject of study in its own right. Indeed the president of the Royal Society, Sir Martin Reiss has written a book about it called 'Just 6 numbers', which points out the very special tuning of the universe which makes life possible. Of course, the anthropic principle can't be used as a proof for the existence of God, but it certainly is utterly consistent with the Bible's view of the creator God.
So I could finish there and conclude that it is indeed a wonderful, fruitful, good planet on which we live. Then we could all go back to our comfortable warm rooms, our Sunday dinners and our stereos with warm furry feelings inside about how good things are. Except that if I did stop there you would rightly say that I must have been locked away all my life in an ivory tower. Or living in cloud-cuckoo land.
Because the world isn't rosy, is it?
Almost every day we hear of new suicide bombers blowing up innocent people. Just yesterday over 150 Palestinians, including women and children were killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza. The worse day for deaths since 2005 - but of course there have been many other even worse attacks prior to 2005. And we can't ignore the fact that the twentieth century was the most murderous century ever in human history. Hundreds of millions of people were killed by their fellow humans.
We live in a world where we build food mountains in one place while people die of lack of food elsewhere. Where the obscenity of obesity, primarily in the West, occurs alongside 6 million children under 5 dying every year through malnutrition.
It isn't a trouble-free world. If we are human and if we are alive, then I can guarantee that we will suffer. Not all the time, and not all to the same degree, but each one of us here will experience suffering. Almost certainly some here have that burden to bear today. So its not an entirely good world.
It's a world that is out of kilter. There is still beauty, and love and fruitfulness in this world.
- But its as if they are marred,
- Its as if sometimes we see just an echo of how God made the world in the first place.
This is a picture of the world that we can all recognise, and if I stopped here instead I think we would all go back to our rooms somewhat depressed.
And I have to say that this is pretty much where the secular world stops. The secular world has no answers as to why we live on such a troubled planet. That's just the way it is, they might say, and we just have to get on with it. Its all down to our selfish genes.
But one of the reasons that I am a Christian, and am grateful to be one, is that the bible does not sweep this problem of a messed-up world under the carpet. It acknowledges it, and it meets it head-on. The reason the world is in this mess, as the bible explains a couple of pages after our reading in Genesis, is that humans, created by God, have purposely turned their backs on their creator God. Its as if they have said 'my will be done, not thine'.
This is what the Bible calls sin - putting ourselves first, refusing to acknowledge the rightful sovereignty of our creator. Its something that the bible says the first humans did, but I guess each one of us here knows in our hearts that we too are guilty of putting ourselves first - ahead of others around us, and if we think about it, ahead of our creator God's call on us, his people. But the Christian good news - the gospel - is that God hasn't left us in this mess. He loves us enough that Jesus, his own son, was willing to die on the cross to take the punishment that we deserved for turning our backs on God.
So I can summarise by saying that we live in a good world that God has created, but one which is marred by human sinfulness. But there is a final and distinctively Christian perspective on this that I want to address for my last few minutes. It's a message of hope' and its in marked contrast to the secular world which really can say nothing further.
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I don't know whether you ever turn to the last pages of a book before you've got there - its very tempting with some thrillers. Especially when you are two-thirds of the way through and its nearly midnight. In the second reading today we heard the last chapter in God's plan for this world in Rev 21. So we already know how God's story ends. It ends with a new creation - a new heaven and a new earth. It ends with God coming down to live with his people, much as he did at the beginning in the Garden of Eden, when he walked with Adam in the cool of the evening.
It ends with a world where there will be no more tears, no more death, or mourning or crying or pain. Isn't that something to long for in a world racked by death and pain? There will be no more hankies, or hearses, or hospitals. Because they won't be needed. God has promised he will remake this cosmos, in the new heavens and new earth.
There is no sense here of the populist view of heaven as a place where disembodied spirits float around in a nebulous, spiritual realm. The decisions we make in this world, the things we do and say, our personalities, will all in some sense carry forward to the world to come. They will be purified (1Cor. 3:12-15) and transformed: but the Bible is clear that how we behave in this world has a bearing on the next. The 'glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it.' - beautiful music, great art, fantastic volcanic eruptions that don't hurt anyone.
The distinctively Christian attitude is underpinned by hope. It is worth working in God's creation now, not only because we are commanded to do so, but because what we do now matters for that future. The certain hope of a renewed future creation is not a license to abandon care for this one. Rather, the opposite is the case:
As we finish lets remind ourselves that God created a good and fruitful world, that he made humans in his image and that he placed us in a world where we could serve and worship him. And although we live in a cynical and lost world with all the pain that is brought about by human sinfulness, Christians have the certainty of hope for the future.
As CS Lewis said:
'The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you get neither.'
If we are Christians, we already know what happens in the last chapter. We know how this book of life ends. We know that whatever it feels like in the ups and downs of our daily lives, Jesus has already won the victory over sin. We know who wins in the end.