Brown's Daily Word 6-20-11

Good morning,
Blessed be the Name of our Lord the Maker of Heaven and earth. I trust you had a blessed and a beautiful weekend. Once again the Lord of the Sabbath blessed us with a full and joyful weekend. One of our ministry teams prepared and served a meal Saturday noon at the First United Methodist Church, Endicott. The Lord also blessed our Saturday Evening worship. One Christian clown danced to the song, "Thank You (for giving to the Lord)". It was anointed. The youth led the worship service yesterday, using the Parable of the prodigal son as recorded in Luke 15, as their theme. It was done with "Holy Imagination". We had two young children dedicated during morning worship.
Alice and I walked in one of the parks last evening. We met some people (one friend now lives in Florida) and talked for some time. We saw another big flock of geese, along with a set of three small goslings, safely grazing. It was a beautiful evening with a brilliant sunset. We were walking while it was past 9 PM and it was still daylight. Blessed be His Name.
One of the readings for yesterday was taken from Psalm 8. King David, who loved being outdoors, begins and ends this psalm with praise of God, who made the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Even though the majority of the psalm is taken up with a discussion of humanity, it’s clearly God who’s central. It’s God who has made us what we are. It’s God whose image we reflect in the glory we show forth in our lives.
You can imagine David sitting out on the hills at night, under a clear sky, looking up at the heavens and being overwhelmed, blown away by the wonder of the heavens, and then as so often happens in that sort of situation, beginning to think about his own mortality. He looks up and bursts out in praise: "O Lord, our king, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" In Psalm 19 we find a similar idea: "The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge." It’s as though the inanimate world has a voice that continually sings God’s praises. Jesus said a similar thing to the Pharisees on the first Palm Sunday, "I tell you, if [my disciples] were silent, the stones would shout out." God is so great that even the inanimate stars and planets proclaim God’s glory.
At the other extreme, "Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark [that is, a defense] because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger." If the universe declares the glory of God, so too do babes and infants.
Do you remember feeling intense awe and wonder as you looked up at the Milky Way. Do you remember being amazed at their brightness, a brightness you never see in the city, at their number, beyond counting, at the vast expanse of them, covering the sky. Young children in their innocence can often sense what we sophisticated adults are blind to. It might be possible for an adult to look up at the stars in a blasé way as though there were nothing new there. But a young child will be blown away by the same sense of wonder as David expresses here. It is that innocent acknowledgement of God’s glory that defeats the hardness of the sophisticated. In fact the weakness and gentleness of infants is often the chosen defense of God against the powerful and violent.
Jesus took the words of this psalm in Matthew 21:15-16, to answer the Pharisees’ objections: "When the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they became angry and said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read, ’Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself’?"
Yet, as David looked at the stars and meditated on what he saw, he was driven beyond praise to humility and then through humility to wonder at God’s amazing goodness to and trust of us human beings. He said a fascinating thing: "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers." (It’s not "the work of your hands", but your fingers.) This huge expanse, mind boggling in its breadth, is the result of God’s fine motor skills, tiny by comparison with him. The universe is beyond our comprehension! Yet that which is overwhelmingly immense to us is finger work for God. God is that big, so what does that make us? We fade into insignificance by comparison. It puts humanity into perspective. How can we be so proud of our ability to control technology when we compare it to what God has done?
And so he cries out, "what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" His wonder at God’s creation now spills over into wonder at God’s care of us insignificant mortals. Wonder of wonders, God has made us just a little lower than God. Despite our seeming insignificance, we’re made in the image of God. We are doubly blessed. First when He made us in His image. Secondly, He redeemed us with His own blood. Blessed be His Name.
In Christ,
Brown
http://youtu.be/c-Jkktpp9QI
Saturday evening worship service.
Location: First United Methodist Church
53 McKinley Avenue
Endicott
Sponsored by the Union Center United Methodist Church, 128, Maple Drive, Endicott

Saturday,June 18 7, 2011
6 PMDinner
6:30 PM Worship Service
Worship Music:
Speaker:Dave Hettinger