O heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty: Open our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works; that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, we may learn to serve thee with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all things were made, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
What a childlike theme: joy in God’s creation. I can imagine plenty of adults exhibiting admiration of it, or perhaps voicing this prayer in their own words and saying something to the effect of “that, in finding an appreciation of thy whole creation, we may learn to serve thee with gladness.” But in order to picture rejoicing in creation, I am likely to leave behind such mature, abstract ideas as these for the much more physical ones of rolling down a hill, or jumping into a river, or climbing a tree. Of course, what I think is that the physicality of this childishness has, embedded deep within it, the simple but essential truth that is the heart of rejoicing in creation – a truth which we, as we learn and age, too often forget to leave room for in our faith.
Before I get ahead of myself, though, and come to the final point here at the beginning, I want to look at another word, creation, because I think it is such an important word, and yet the attention it receives these days has such a strange emphasis. You see, scripture spends two chapters telling us about how creation came to be created, and then devotes the rest of itself to the Story which gives creation its meaning. Certainly, I believe that the first two chapters have immediate relevance to the modern question of the origin of life and matter (and a whole host of other issues as well), but I assume that most people who choose to bend their knee and confess, as this prayer does, that Jesus Christ is Lord are more or less in agreement with me on the idea of creation having been created, and that in the Genesis way. When I call attention to the word creation here, it is not in the sense that we see in the first two chapters, but in the sense that we find in the story told throughout all the rest of scripture.
Redemption. That is the story in a nutshell, although nutshells alone are lacking the meat and point of a nutshell – which here I mean the Redeemer Messiah, who, in a twist on the metaphor, was not a nut at all but was the most profound human to ever walk upon the earth. Perhaps the most amazing thing about him is that what he did was redeem. He could have come and done a thousand things – indeed, most people looked for him to do those things, and most of the things they looked for are, in their own way, the opposite of redemption. For he could have come as a righteous judge upon the Jews, but instead he picked 12 of them to become the true sons of Abraham. He could have come as a kingly judge upon the Romans, but instead he offered them citizenship in his own kingdom. He could have dried the seas in his wrath, but instead he gave peace to them. He could have come and purged creation of its wicked sons just as the angel of death walked through Egypt long ago sparing only the sons of the obedient, but when he came, what he killed instead was death itself, that greatest perversion of creation. It’s even shocking, maybe, that time after time, given so many choices, what he always chose was redemption – the work of reclamation of creation, instead of the utter condemnation of it. It is breathtaking that the Word – through whom in the beginning all things were made and about whose work the Father saw that it was good – stepped back into the world and said “I make all things new.”
And this redemption, this too is so near the heart of that rejoicing. For when the man with the withered hand raised his hand and found it redeemed and whole, he had not simply learned to appreciate the idea of a working hand. I think we can be sure that he learned the meaning of rejoicing in creation – because that small but very personal part of creation had been redeemed and because he had seen the Redeemer! It was a thing so very physical and spiritual at the same time, and probably only abstract as an afterthought.
As I flip the pages of the prayer book to this, the first prayer, and meditate on it, I am reminded that not only have I been redeemed and not only have I seen a great deal of the redemption of this creation, but that I have been given by the Messiah the ministry of reconciliation – of redemption. And I am reminded that when I look upon the physical world – creation – and perceive in it the hand of God so that He is glorified, and so claim the Messiah’s victory over its perversion – that when I do all of that – I am not simply enjoying creation as if its enjoyment were some kind of extra perk of having a life at peace. I am not simply admiring it, or appreciating it as if its goodness were just an abstract, non-physical thing like an idea. When the creation is realized for what it truly is – the joyous work of our Father, which is redeemed by the work of the Son – then by the work of the Spirit I am bringing its redemption to fruition. It is childlike in its physicality – this rejoicing in what we see and touch, feel and smell and hear. But we have become the worst kind of grown-ups if we mistake that physicality for a lack of spirituality. For this is not simply a secondary part of what it means to follow the Messiah. It is redemption itself, and it is at the heart of the great plan of God for this world.
