The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God
June 14, 2026
3rd Sunday after Pentecost
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Psalm 19: 1-6;Genesis 1: 5-10; Colossians 1: 15-20
“The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God.”
by Rev. David J. Wood
3rd Sunday after Pentecost, June 14, 2026
First Congregational Church of Camden, Maine
Genesis 1: 1- 5, 12b; Psalm 19: 1-6; Colossians 1: 15-20
The New York Times recently issued a summer challenge, which encourages us to “touch grass — or in other words, to put down your phone and reconnect with the real world.” Their first challenge is for us to commit to spending 20 minutes a day in nature. This challenge stems fro a landmark study of nearly 20,000 subjects that revealed that “when people spent at least 120 minutes in nature a week, they reported significantly higher levels of health and well-being.”
So there you have it! The challenge has been issued. I must say, that I have been impressed with how many of you are already doing this: sailing, fishing, gardening, hiking, walking for starters.
If the truth be told, we know more than we have ever known about the natural world and yet, more and more the world is something we pass through and by unnoticing—we behold it less and less. We have to work to hear its voice, encounter its wonder, know its sacredness….
Let me begin by reflecting briefly on the 3 texts we just read together.
In Genesis 1, God revels in the goodness of the world for its own sake…well before humans arrive on the scene and is placed there as caretaker—to serve as stewards of God’s good creation.
God declares creation “Good” a total of seven time here in the first chapter of Genesis: ”…and God saw that it was good.”
Spirit & matter, Physical and spiritual, religion and nature, creator and creation, body and soul: while distinct from one another, these dimensions of our existence are not opposites or at war with each other. They are deeply intertwined, interdependent aspects of an ultimate whole…hold together in a SINGLE MYSTERY.
“We are holy creatures living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy.”
”God saw that it was good. Very good”
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Psalm 19 bears witness to the conviction that the revelation of God comes in/thru/by CREATION…the natural order. In this Psalm as in many other places in the Hebrew Scriptures, in relation to Creation, we find a poetry of awe and reverence and profound cherishing.
At the heart of the spiritual life is the capacity to be touched by the world in which we move and breathe and have our being. Where nature is no longer perceived as a divine creation or sacred web, it becomes an exploitable resource, valued primarily for the usefulness it provides or the pleasure it gives.
Drained of its inherent sacredness, it no longer commands reverence. Its value is entirely contingent on human needs and desires.
Hartmut Rosa puts it this way:
In late modern life, without realizing it, we are driven and compelled to encounter the world not as a wonder to behold, but as a point of aggression: It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. We are constantly working to bring the world with reach that we become incapable of being reached by the world…
Rabbi Abraham Joshua claims that:
“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.” We should, Heschel claims, “Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
“Awareness of the divine begins with wonder,” Heschel wrote. “What we lack,” Heschel said, “is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
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In our third text for the day, Colossians 1: 15-20, you will notice that the phrase ”all things” is used six times. The saving work on Jesus, while certainly for humans, is NOT ONLY for humans…it is for ALL THINGS”..
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”
The full scope and scale of God’s redemptive saving work is not to be missed. It encompasses ALL THINGS.
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• The God-given goodness of creation.
• The Revelation of God through creation
• The Redemptive work of God that encompasses all things…all creation.
Together these texts bear witness to the deep, sacred meaning of creation…of the God-given, nature of the world.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and declared that it was good.
Humanity has created the means to destroy the earth and declared that it was progress.
God made the heavens and the earth.
Which begs the question,
What have we made of the heavens and the earth?
Given the climate crisis unfolding in our time, we who claim this story of Creation have much to answer for.
Wendell Berry, poet, novelist, environmental activist, farmer…and a Christian, puts it this way:
Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. ….It has, for the most part, stood silently by, while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households.
It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economists that "economic forces" automatically work for good, and has assumed with the industrialists and militarists that technology determines history….
The religion of the Bible, on the contrary, is a religion of the state and the status quo only in brief moments.
In practice, it is a religion for the correction equally of people and of kings. And Christ's life, from the manger to the cross, was an affront to the established powers of his time, as it is to the established powers of our time.
(Wendell Berry, “Christianity and The Survival of Creation”)
It is easy to feel overwhelmed, hopeless and despairing of what we have made of our world. It is not always clear what hope looks like or requires of us…
Which is why you need to be here on Thursday night to hear Bill McKibben! Bill is someone who has kept his gaze firmly on the reality of the climate crisis…who, in 1980, wrote what most consider to be the first book setting off the alarm about climate change—and he has remained vigilant in that effort from then until now.
Bill is a devoted Christian who beholds the world as place charged with the Grandeur of God….and he is a person of undaunted hope. I consider him to be a kind of John the Baptist figure, calling us to repentance and hopeful action.
He embodies what hope looks like…and why we must resist the temptation to bury our heads in the busy-ness of our lives, why we must resist the temptation to burrow into to the safety and security of our private sheltered worlds we have created and dare to respond in hope to the call to live as those who have been charged with the responsibility to love and care for this world.
He writes, our “planet filled with the vast order of creation. It is a buzzing weird, stoic, abundant, reckless, haunting, painful, perfect planet. All of it matters, all of it glorious. And all of it can speak to us in the deepest and most satisfying ways, if only we will let it.” (The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job and the Scale of Creation, by Bill McKibben)
I want to close with a story from the life of John Muir…hear it as a parable for this time and our lives. As you may know, John Muir was a Scottish born American Naturalist, author and environmental philosopher, explorer of the western regions of our North American continent and is known as the Father of our National Parks.
For decades he trekked from the California Sierras to the Alaskan Glaciers, observing, reporting, praising, and experiencing with a childlike delight in and mature reverence for nature. He tells of an occasion in 1874 when he was visiting a friend who had a cabin in a valley of one of the tributaries of the Yuba River in the Sierra Mountains—it was a place where he could venture out into the wilderness and then return to the warmth and comfort of shelter.
On one December day, a storm moved in from the Pacific…a storm that bent the tall pines and fir trees as if they were blades of grass. It’s easy for us to imagine Muir retreating to the comfort and shelter of that cabin, wrapping himself in sheepskins, lighting a fire in the stove and preparing himself a warm cup of tea and waiting out the storm. Perhaps writing reflections on the passing storm in his diary on the passing storm.
But no.
Here is his account from his diary:
“… when the storm began to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us…
I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook….After cautiously casting about, I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas Spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, Though comparatively young, they were about 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy.
Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion.
The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles braced…
I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.
When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered down through the calming woods. The storm-tones died away, and, turning toward the east, I beheld the countless hosts of the forests hushed and tranquil, towering above one another on the slopes of the hills like a devout audience.
The setting sun filled them with amber light, and seemed to say, while they listened, "My peace I give unto you.”
In the words of the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The World is charged with the Grandeur of God”…if only we have the will to behold it….the ability to be held by it and respond to it. Amen.