Day Sixty Four - Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens

Since the winter lockdown started to ease, Bunyan Meeting has met for worship a couple of times in the church garden. It’s a beautiful space, a haven in a built-up area, and our open air worship is one of the blessings we want to carry with us from the horrors of the last year into the future.

Last Sunday, it was All Age Worship, and we asked each person to bring a stone with them. During the service, we painted our initials or names on the stone, and brought them forward as an act of prayer.

The stones came from the havens of our lives, from our gardens, or the riverside, the places where we touch the earth, and know we are part of God’s creation. Genesis 2 puts this into words. God took some clay, or soil, for which the Hebrew word is ‘adamah’, and made a human being, for which the Hebrew word is ‘adam’. It’s hard to convey the similarity in the words in an English translation. Most versions don’t even try! But some talk about a ‘groundling’ made from the ground, or a ‘human’, made from the ‘humus’, (a gardener’s word for soil).

However you say it, there is a very close link between the human race and our earth, our planet. We are made by the same God, and made from the same ‘stuff’. It’s a profound insight, rooted in Scripture.

At our service last week, we thought hard about ground under our feet. Bunyan Meeting was founded in an apple barn in an orchard, on the rich, fertile soil that forms on the sedimentary rocks which cover most of South East England. (It’ll be different for you, of course. But the rocks under your feet will have formed your landscape, and shaped the lives of the people who live there.)

Bedfordshire is built on clay. If you travel into London St Pancras by train, on the way you will pass through miles of clay pits and quarries. And when you get into London you will see where all that clay has gone - turned into millions of bricks to build Georgian Squares and Victorian Terraces as the capital spread outwards.

But Bedford town lies on older rock. The River Great Ouse, winding its slow way to the Wash, has cut through the soft clay to reach deeper, further back in time. These earlier sedimentary rocks take us to an era of warm, shallow seas, where ammonites and sea urchins drifted downwards over millennia as they died, to form layers of limestone, which would eventually turn out to be excellent building material. You can see it in the houses and bridges in surrounding villages. We are shaped by a landscape formed through aeons, out of warm sea and hard rock, volcanic fire and seismic shift.

But we can reach even further back than that. We and the earth, this stone and our flesh, contain elements that were forged unimaginably in the birth of stars.

One of these evenings, go to a garden or a quiet place, stand on the good earth; feel it beneath your feet. Look up at the night sky, stars, galaxies, things far beyond our understanding, held in God’s power. Know that you too are God’s creation. Look, and wonder.

Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:

who created all these?

He who brings out the starry host one by one

and calls forth each of them by name.

Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

The LORD is the everlasting God,

the Creator of the ends of the earth.

(Isaiah 40: 26, 28)

Janet Wootton