Open your bulletins and look at the two Bible verses at the top of our worship liturgy for today, in the box that says, “Words to Ponder.” We have all heard those two verses many times before, but I want to be sure you understand some amazing things in them this morning.
Could we read them together? “Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:26-27
Through most of the first chapter of Genesis there is one God operating. Its “God said, God made, God said, God made,” and so on. But then, in verse 26, it’s not one God operating, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image.” Who’s the us? It’s a very early reference to the Trinity, this amazing concept that permeates the Bible, that there is one God, but this God exists in three persons, working together. In the very core of who God is, there is fellowship, there is love, there is giving. Three expressions of the one God, who always work together, always honor each other, defer to one another, and love one another.
Some of you may be wishing that I would make this clear and understandable for you. But I can’t. I don’t understand it myself. We often come to understand things we don’t understand by discovering that the new thing is like something we already understand. But the Trinity is beyond my understanding, a mystery. There’s no one quite like God.
But any God worth his salt ought to be higher and greater and more wonderful than our puny brains can comprehend. So mystery is OK.
But there is a very big clue to what the Trinity is like in the second verse we read, something that brings it all closer to us. Could we read the second sentence, Genesis 1:27 together again? “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Whatever God is like, he made us like him. We are in his image. And right here, when the Bible is talking about what it means to be like God, what does it say about us? It says that when God was creating us in his image, he made us male and female.
The God of the Bible is one God, eternally existing as three persons. And maybe three persons being one is too much for little old humans to pull off, but two persons being one, a man and a woman, we have a shot at that. And I know there are days when just being married to one person is about all we can handle. But when marriage goes well, that’s a taste of what God is like. You know the feeling at a wedding, with all the hopes and dreams of a couple who are madly in love with each other. That’s a taste of what is deep inside this one God in three persons.
And today as we celebrate Don and Marilyn’s 59th wedding anniversary, I think we can look at them and see something of what the trinity is like. You see Don and Marilyn together an awful lot, don’t you? You see them watching to be helpful to each other. You talk to one and it isn’t long before they’ll mention the other. I think that after 59 years of marriage they really love each other.
And I’m sure they’ve had their ups and downs, maybe still some rough spots even after 59 years of marriage. They’re just as human as any of us here. But haven’t we all seen glimpses of something wonderful there? Know that what we see is a chip off the old block, a reflection of the love and devotion in the very heart of God, a reflection of the fundamental purpose of the universe.
We all have seen people who live by the business model: if it makes money, do it. We’ve seen it lived out to the point of people crazy to sell bundles of mortgages that were riddled with fraud, but offered the promise of getting rich quick. And we’ve seen it lived out to the point that people were so greedy to make fast money that they would buy these bundles of risky, risky loans. Greed took a whole bunch of very smart people and turned them stupid. And we’ve seen the fruits of greed as our whole economy is now severely injured and barely limping along.
We have all seen people who live for fame, who run from one publicity stunt to another, who run themselves ragged, desperate to keep in the spotlight. And we’ve seen those people crash again and again.
Know that it’s love that makes the world go around, not greed and not fame.
I understand that if you have two tuning forks tuned to the same pitch, you can strike one to get it vibrating, and then just hold the other one beside it and the second one will pick up the vibrations, too, and come to life.
When we come together in committed, loving relationships, we are vibrating with the very heart of God. Suddenly we feel in tune with the vibrations at the core of the universe. This is who we are. We have found our destiny.
Committed love is scary, you sacrifice a lot of freedom to come and go as you like. You sacrifice a lot of privacy, you can’t hide in a marriage anymore. You have to consult with someone else when you spend money, make job decisions. You sacrifice a lot. But love makes it all worth it. Love makes it a bargain.
And those who aren’t married can still give an awful lot of love in other ways. It’s for all of us. I feel it when I throw toys for my dog to fetch. She loves it and I enjoy doing it for her.
I feel it when a grandson cuddles up beside me in a chair and I read him a story.
I feel it when I baptize a baby.
I feel it when I Kathy is out of the house and I clean up the kitchen for her. (Such things do happen occasionally.)
I feel it
Love and relationships are at the core of the reality of this earth because they are at the core of the very nature of the God who created it all.
But our passage says another thing about what it means for us to be created in God’s image. It says he put us on this earth to have dominion over it, which means to make it a better place, to bring order, to bring fruitfulness, to do whatever it takes to make life better. We share a family resemblance with the God of creation, who brings order out of chaos and life out of emptiness.
One of the biggest steps we take as creators in God’s image is to raise children of our own. And if you have to sacrifice a lot to have a good marriage, you sacrifice much more to raise children.
What does it cost to be a parent? It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per child by the time you feed them, house them, take them to the doctor and get them through college.
It costs you sleep, especially when they are young, but I could tell you some stories about losing sleep over teenagers, too.
I remember years ago when I friend told us we needed a break and she would watch the children for a couple of days so that we could get away. And the first time we had breakfast together, just the two of us, for the first time in several years, it was just amazing. We could talk! There were no interruptions!
Being a parent costs the heartbreak of loving your children with every ounce on energy and wanting them to make the very best choices in life, but realizing you can’t force them. So you set the best example you can. You teach them what is right as best you can. You give them advice from time to time as best you can. But there are days when they wander and it eats you up inside.
Love often hurts. Often it hurts really bad. And if you stop and think about it you may realize that you are in just the spot where God finds himself, taking the huge risk of bringing someone into this world, loving them with all your heart, and then having to wait and watch as they make their own decisions for life, sometimes decisions that work out really well, and sometimes decisions that don’t work out well at all.
Parenting (mothering and fathering both) come from the very heart of God. In parenting we find that it can be a joy to get up in the middle of the night to care for that fragile little one. In parenting we find that
