Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
TREES
by: Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)
THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And what an amazing creation it is. This is one of those days when I wish I had a video system to show some of the wonders of God’s creation. The universe that God has made is full of incredible sights – stars beyond number just in our own galaxy, galaxies beyond number of all different types, spiral galaxies like our own, globular clusters, and elliptical. And each one of these galaxies have as many stars in them as sand on the seashore. There are gaseous nebulae, black holes, and novas. The pictures we have been able to take with the Hubble telescope and other advanced scopes are absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. In our own solar system, we have planets and moons that are small balls of rock, huge giants of gas, massive chunks of ice, asteroids and comets, meteors that happen to fall into our atmosphere and give brief dazzling displays of light. The universe has so many marvels that are beyond our imagination, so beautiful and magnificent that no human would have ever thought of making, but these wonders are not beyond the creative mind of God the Creator. And the universe itself is so vast that we have to measure its distances in light-years, the distance that light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles. And the universe itself is estimated to be tens of billions of light-years across. Try to imagine that.
And right here on earth, we have so many incredibly beautiful and mysterious natural wonders - Mountains and seashores, canyons and waterfalls. I’ve always wanted to see the eerie shimmering veils of the Aurora Borealis. I was able to see the majesty of the stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, spread across the vastness of the blackness of the night sky when I was in the jungles of Peru, but here we have lit up our night skies with so much artificial light that it masks so many of these nighttime wonders. Only the brightest stars of the heavens are visible to us now. We have a moon that produces tides and reflects the light of the sun, an atmosphere that provides our breath and refracts the sun’s light to produce gorgeous sunsets and sunrises. The heavens and the earth that God has created are fearfully and wonderfully made. He has given us a beauty that is beyond comprehension both on earth and in the heavens and He has given us an order in the universe that allows us to begin comprehending His creation. God’s universe truly is wonderfully made.
But the most mysterious, the most wonderful, and the most precious creation from God is life. From the simplest microscopic sized single cell bacteria to the 400 ft tall redwoods of California, from snakes that slither along the ground to the albatross that flies up to 9000 miles at a time, from birds that lay eggs to marsupials whose babies grow in a pouch, from bats that live in caves to strange creatures in the deep sea, God’s creation on earth includes an incredibly diverse array of various forms of life. It’s amazing to me that some people can believe that all of this came about by random, undirected chance.
God’s creation just screams out “I am here. I am powerful. And I want you to know me.” As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” The vastness and beauty of the universe and the sheer diversity of life that we see demonstrates God’s amazing power and majesty and His awesome creativity.
In recent years, astronomers have been finding planets circling around distant stars, hoping that they might find some that are similar to earth, that could support life as we know it here on earth. For decades, the skies have been scanned for radio signals to try to find some indication of intelligent life out there somewhere. I used to run a program on my computer that would download data from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project. The program would analyze the data and send the results back. As far as I know, they still haven’t found anyone out there. We seem to be alone in the universe. Okay, some people claim to have seen UFOs and even been abducted and had gruesome medical experiments performed on them. And there are lots of sci-fi movies about alien life, some friendly, like ET, but usually hostile like in the War of the Worlds, or Predator. We may not want to be alone, but it seems that the only life in the entire universe is right here.
Why would God create life? The universe itself is so amazing and beautiful, God might have stopped right there and said ‘This is very good, I can enjoy this for eternity.’ God saw that his creation was good, but it wasn’t yet complete. God couldn’t rest before creating life to bring completion to all that He had made. God created life to populate this little world orbiting around an average star in an average galaxy. He made plants and animals of all different types and sizes, an amazing abundance of living things. But God wanted to share this world with life that could also appreciate all the beauty and magnificence that He had created. And so God created man and woman. He made them in His image and He made them to be stewards of His curious little world. And God made them to be in relationship to Himself and to each other. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He has a relationship within Himself and His creation would not be complete without having people with whom He can also have a relationship. He wants us to enjoy His creation with Him and He wants us to enjoy our relationship with Him and each other.
Life in the universe seems to be extremely rare and life is therefore very precious. Life has value because it is God’s creation. You have value not because of what you do, but because of who you belong to, because of who made you. But we act as if life is not precious. We act as if life has little value. We see life all around us and so it seems that life is not so precious, as if life has little value. Even human life has been devalued. Our value in the eyes of our society is based upon what we can do, our value is based on our worth to society. This utilitarian view of human life leads to the devaluation of that life. Not only are babies killed in their mother’s wombs because they are inconvenient, but the elderly and those with disabilities are seen as worth less than the able-bodied and the young. But we are all God’s creatures, we are all made in His image.
A friend of mine from the seminary, Mike, has a teenage boy with Down’s syndrome. This young man will likely not ever be productive for society. He probably will not ever be able to hold a job that would allow him to provide for himself. He will likely be a drain on the resources of his family and the rest of us. Because of this, our culture has decided it would be best if he never lived at all. His father told about how when his wife was pregnant and they discovered the likelihood that he would not be a normal child, the doctors pushed the option of abortion on to them. It’s estimated that 85% of all babies with Down’s syndrome are aborted. To the doctors, this baby would always be a burden to them, not a blessing. Mike immediately said no way because he recognizes that all human life has value not because of its value to society but because of the value of all human life to God. The doctors didn’t give up. They asked Mike to leave the room so they could convince his wife that terminating this pregnancy is the best option. But she also knew that abortion was not an option, that despite the child’s genetic abnormality, this child would still be a blessing to their family. This child is a blessing not because of his potential to benefit society, but he is a blessing because this child is a gift from God. Their son has been a blessing to them and they would never wish to change their decision. Despite not being normal, they love him and he loves them. Despite not being normal, this young man is made in the image of God. He is fearfully and wonderfully made.
I end with this thought. Your life also is precious to the one who formed you. You are valued by God not because of what you can do, but because you are His creation. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.
And may the peace of God and the love of Christ be with us now and forever. Amen
