A Great Run

A Great Run
Devotional for the United Church of Christ Science and Technology Network
October 14, 2017
Rev. Dr. Ruth E. Shaver

Before the mountains were brought forth,
   or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
   from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
—Psalm 90:2, NRSV

I blame my parents. 

They sat me down in front of PBS in primetime and made me watch NOVA and Nature and Cosmos (with Carl Sagan) and then took me to church on Sundays. 

It was inevitable that I’d grow up thinking God has an amazing imagination to have written the laws that led to human intellect and curiosity over “billions and billions” of years.

Well, not inevitable, but certainly likely. It was definitely impossible that I’d be a Creationist. I knew by the age of 10 that human civilizations had been around in Mesopotamia by at least 5000 BCE (now estimated at 6000 BCE), which meant that my first reaction as a junior in high school to Bishop Ussher’s date of October 23, 4004 BCE* for the creation of the world was to laugh uproariously. When I discovered later that people take that as truth in the face of all the scientific evidence to the contrary, I wept.

I still wonder, even after talking to many Creationists (including those who espouse any of the modified versions of Creationism/Intelligent Design), how people can put one small part of one minuscule part of our knowledge about God and God’s creation in such a primary place when there’s so very much more evidence that God’s imagination spans eternity. An eternity, I’ll add, that’s much longer than 6,021 years. Our God-given intellect and curiosity has led us to discoveries that regularly confirm the age of the Earth as 4.5 billion years old and life on Earth as arising 3.7-4.3 billion years ago.

Life arose before the mountains were brought forth, y’all, or at least the mountains we know today. Which means God loved us at least 3.7 billion years ago, because that’s the life that led to us, and before that, God so loved the world (us!) that God’s rules created it. Let’s not forget that those rules were imagined into existence before the Big Bang…which means that we, too—whether in our current physical form or as sentient beings capable of wonder or both—were imagined before then. When we declare that God is God from everlasting to everlasting, it’s much, much more amazing to me to think about what I know from science than to think about it from Ussher. Don’t get me wrong, 6,021 years is a good run, but I’m much more in awe of God for a great run of 13.8 billion years and counting!

Prayer:
God who is from everlasting to everlasting, stretch my mind that I may glimpse just a little of the glory that creation reveals. Stretch my heart that I may love life—all life, wherever it may be found—as passionately as you do. All praise to you, to Jesus the Christ, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.

*My parents got married on the 5,969th anniversary of the creation of Earth. Neither of them cares much about that, but it makes me laugh to think about it. Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad!

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