“You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth, And the heavens are the works of your hands; they will perish, but you remain. . . .” (Hebrews 1:10-11)

Children, when you are young, the world looks very big indeed once you look beyond your own house, your own street and your own town.  Cities are big enough but perhaps we get used to them by making trips to the shops or perhaps to go to entertainments as a family.  Few of us can imagine what a whole country looks like except on a map.  I have been alive for 61 years on a small island but there are plenty of places here that I have never seen.  When it comes to whole continents and the earth itself, the mind boggles.  Beyond the earth itself we have the sun and the planets.  Light travels very quickly, in fact at 186,000 miles per second.  Even so it takes light from the sun 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach us!  That’s 91,402,000 miles away at the earth’s closest approach to us.  The sun of course is our closest star but there are many other stars in our galaxy; in fact 200 billion other stars at least.  Now that’s big!  We can’t travel at the speed of light, but if we could it would take 100,000 years to travel from one end of our Milky Way galaxy to the other.  That’s why we measure these big distances in light years. Do you know that there are at least 200 billion other galaxies, many just like ours, others quite different?  These can be seen in an observable Universe with a boundary currently 16 billion light years away, but this distance is increasing all the time as the Universe continues to expand faster and faster after the Big Bang moment of creation.  All this our Lord God made out of nothing. 

Why you may ask; particularly as the Scripture quoted says: “the heavens are the works of your hands; they will perish,” – that’s right, they will perish!”  Even physics tells us this from current observations, but I won’t go into that right now.  Why did God make a perishable Universe?  The truth is, we just don’t know.  It has not been revealed to us.  What we can and do know is that it has a purpose and we have a purpose being created within it.  Jesus said that we were not to be anxious but rather cast our care on and strengthen our hope in God who does not even let a little sparrow die without he knows it and His love is such that even the hairs of our head are numbered (Matthew 10:29-31) …. My hairs are not so many now as I get older and balder; but numbered nonetheless!  It is our job here to find out what God’s purpose for our life is and fulfil it.  We can do this knowing that even if this huge universe will pass away, God cannot and will not.  He is uncreated, not made; He remains; in Him we can place our whole trust and hope.

I am handing over to Fr Deacon Emmanuel now who is going to explore with you more about both the Creator and creation, the perishable and the One-in-Three who remains.

The Epistle for today from the book of Hebrews, Chapter 1, Verse 10 to Chapter 2, Verse 3, is composed almost entirely of verses from the Psalms in the Old Testament which have been placed in a Christian context. We are not really sure who wrote the book of Hebrews—possibly St. Paul or as Tertullian suggested in the third century, St. Barnabas—but very clearly, the author was a Hebrew Christian, a Jew who was convinced that Christ was now present on earth in the person of Jesus Christ, the Messiah.

The opening theme of this epistle is the creation of the earth and the heavens, based upon Psalm 101 (102) beginning with verse 25: “You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands; they will perish, but you remain.” So, God created the earth and the heavens, yet they will perish, and in some sense only God will remain. Both the author of the book of Hebrews and the author of the Psalms are saying to us that what is important in our lives is God. He “will remain” while everything else perishes. 

What we are seeking to understand is both life and the world from God’s viewpoint, not from our own.

The British poet, Alice Meynell, also tried to see the world from God’s side. Actually, she tried to see a daisy from God’s viewpoint. In her poem “To a Daisy” published in 1893, she wrote: “Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide/ Like all created things, secrets from me,/ And stand as a barrier to eternity,/ And I, how can I praise thee well and wide/ From where I dwell—upon the hither side?/ Thou little veil for so great a mystery,/ When shall I penetrate all things and thee,/ And then look back? For this I must abide,/ Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled/ Literally between me and the world,/ Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,/ And from a poet’s side shall read his book./ O daisy mine, what will it be to look/ From God’s side even of such a simple thing?”

There is in that poem the same reality set out in Psalm 101 (102) and in Chapter 1, Verse 11 of the book of Hebrews: everything dies—both in nature and in humanity—except God. Alice Meynell really struggled with that question: How does everything appear from God’s side? What is He seeking to do in nature and in our lives?  In a beautiful poem, published 30 years later in 1923, “To the Mother of Christ the Son of Man,” Alice Meynell wrote “of ambiguous Nature’s difficult speech” and of how all of us seek to draw Christ “close as our grasp can reach.” The full poem, addressed to the Mother of God, reads: “We too (one cried), we too,/ We the unready, the perplexed, the cold,/ Must shape the Eternal in our thoughts anew,/ Cherish, possess, enfold./ Thou sweetly, we in strife./ It is our passion to conceive Him thus/ In mind, in sense, within our house of life;/That seed is locked in us./ We must affirm our Son/ From the ambiguous Nature’s difficult speech,/ Gather in darkness that resplendent One,/ Close as our grasp can reach./ Nor shall we ever rest/ From this our task. An hour sufficed for thee,/ Thou innocent! He lingers in the breast/ Of our humanity.”

That’s all of us, isn’t it, whatever our ages? “The unready”! Life catches us by surprise; and then we try to catch up. Perhaps we shouldn’t try to “catch up” with what God permits or promotes in our lives, but simply let Him work in each of us and “shape the eternal in our thoughts anew.” Within each of our “house[s] of life,”—within each of us—there is “that seed locked in us”—that desire to believe in Christ “close as our grasp can reach.” There then is “our task” in life—to accept that God lingers in all “of our humanity.” The writers of the psalms, and the book of Hebrews, and the poets and us—are each part of that humanity in which the Trinity is always present—because we have been created, saved and guided by the presence of the One God who is always present in each of our lives.

And so we ascribe as is justly due all might, majesty, dominion, power and praise to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, always now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.                                            Deacon Emmanuel Kahn and Fr. Gregory Hallam