Sunday, October 21, 2007                                  1

Sermon: "Pobody's Nerfect"

Scripture: Psalm 19

Reverend Larry M. Gerber

: "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer" (v.14).

song by Ken on this scripture???..

A space-traveling spider named Arabella spun websthat no one on Earth would have imagined. Her creativity is only one reason why we should be awe-ful, or awe-filled, Christians.

When you accidentally cruise through a spider web and feel the clinging threads in your hair and face, it ican be extremely irritating.

Even more irritating is to notice a cobweb in a corner of the ceiling just as guests are arriving for dinner.

Still, you can probably remember at least once in your life when you've accidentally spotted a web, perhaps after a light rain, perhaps by the woodpile in the back yard. Beautifully woven, beads of rain or dew hang from the silky fabric. Perhaps you've seen such a web when it's been backlit by the sun, and the effect is -- awesome. Really awesome.

NASA agrees with you.

So intrigued were the scientists of NASA that they wondered what effects zero gravity might have on a spider and her web.
                                                                               
So they found a spider volunteer and gave her a free ticket into outer space. Her name was Arabella, and she went into space aboard Skylab in 1973. Nearly 35 years ago!                           

Zero gravity seemed to bring out something in this webmistress. Unbound from earth's Newtonian laws, she spun webs of psychedelic fury, fancy webs no one on earth ever would've, could've dreamed of. This artistic spider worked hard, shaving and sculpting each individual filament, spinning webs that were asymmetrical patchworks of mind-bending creativity with varying degrees of strength and tension. Arabella fine-tuned her web by altering the bore of a few strands, and broke earthly patterns with an elegantly customized heavenly web.

The little space spider died, but her demise is not the end of the story. Two decades later, in 1992, NASA physicist David Noever pored over photos of the long-departed Arabella's webs and was struck by some awe. Awesome. Awestruck.

Tennis rackets! He saw tennis rackets. Of course. Why not?

"Designers had already taken racket technology as far as it would go in terms of expanded size and use of new materials," explains Noever to Rolling Stone magazine (John Bryant, "The Gear Decade," Rolling Stone, June 11, 1998, 87-89). "Arabella convinced me that a player should be able to tune his racket during a match just the way Eric Clapton tunes his guitar during a concert."

So Noever has now designed an adjustable Rocket Racket that will enable all tennis players to serve and volley with greater power and ease, thanks to Arabella. It happened because a NASA physicist was capable of experiencing awe.

So what is your awe? What stops you in your tracks? A spider making her web? A hummingbird flapping its wings rapidly, while staying in one spot? A new born baby? The sun set? The morning breeze? The rhythm of the ocean wave?

The psalmist says the "heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork" (v.1). This is what stopped him cold. Filled him with awe. Noever's Arabella is                                                                                                                                                                                       Arabellais a part of God's creation, too, and she teaches us that God and his creation are involved in an ongoing dance of birth and growth, insight and creativity, bold new ideas and life-enhancing innovations. When we look at the heavens, the work of God's fingers, full of stars and spiders and scientists, how can we say anything but: "O Lord, how awesome you are"(see Psalm 8:1).

Unfortunately, many of us are praise procrastinators. We don't stop to acknowledge God's awe-inspiring work as often as we should. We spend more and more time trying to perfect "our world" with human ingenuity. And when we do, we often are simply going through the motions of playing God, and messing up more and more.

Some of us are simply awe-deficient. With mind-spinning technology fascinating us and unveiling new toys every day, we have a high level of tolerance for the awesome. A simple spider web glistening in a corner of the garden after a fall rain doesn't cut it.

It's not that you want to diss the Divine, but that we downplay and diminish and dilute God's grandeur with our small, short-sighted, selfish earthly agendas and preoccupation.

We are so out of whack. So messed up. So not right. So arrogant that we think that we could say ANYTHING in praise of God! So confident that we believe that we can offer anything that might be ACCEPTABLE to God.

It's time for us to become awe-ful Christians!
It's time for us to offer the prayer of Psalm 19: "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer" (v.14).

It's time to reject our ruts, and forge new forms of prayer and praise to offer as an acceptable praise sacrifice to God, the one and only perfect and loving entity.

It's time to discover our true relationship with God as creatures made by a loving Creator.
So let's do it: focus our energy, intelligence, imagination and love on the challenge of making our words and meditations acceptable to God. We can begin this by acknowledging that it is God who is at the center of the universe, not human beings. It is God who is the intelligence at the core of life, not modern scientists.

When Harvard's preacher Peter Gomes began his career at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he read an interview with the school's most famous teacher and researcher, George Washington Carver. Dr. Carver, late in life, was asked by some writer what he thought was the most indispensable thing for science in the modern age. Carver replied, "The capacity for awe" (Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book [New York: William Morrow and Company, 1996], 321).

The capacity for awe. What a strange thing for a scientist to say! Awe is what opens our finite minds to the infinite intelligence of God. Awe is what connects our limited hearts to the limitless love of the Lord. Awe is what helps us to see God's glory in the sea and the land and the moon and the sun. After all, what is the sun, anyway? A ball of hydrogen and helium that is scheduled to burn for about another 6.4 billion years, God willing?

Well, yes, but it is so much more than that: It is also a life-giving part of divine creation, a "strong man" in the heavens who runs his course with joy. "Its rising is from the end of the heavens," says Psalm 19, "and its circuit to the end of them; and nothing is hid from its heat" (v.6). Awe-ful scientists and psalmists agree that the sun is the source of virtually all the energy used by living things. The sun's light causes photosynthesis in green plants, its heat causes winds, and its energy enables every animal and person to survive.

The sun burns with praise for God, and so should we. It plays its awesome, life-giving role in the welfare of the solar system -- as we should, too. Let's open our eyes to the invigorating, inspiring and incredible activities of God's glorious creation, a creation that has thrived for not thousands but billions of years.

Like the sun, let's run our course with joy, and give life to people around us. Like Arabella, let's spin our webs with cosmic creativity, and give praise to God in unexpected ways. As good and faithful creatures, our acceptable words and meditations are those that are offered to God with gratitude, contentment, energy, imagination, intelligence and love.

And while we are shouting praise for God's strength ("rock and redeemer"), let's remember that we're prone to weakness: "Clear me from [my] hidden faults," the song-master writes (v.12). Pobody's Nerfect you know!

This focus on human need may seem depressing at first, but in fact it frees us up for true Christian joy. Wondering why so much of Protestantism today has become a joyless religion, New Testament scholar Leander Keck, whom some of you will remember from the Disciple Class, suggests that perhaps "we are more impressed by the problems of the world than by the power of God. Perhaps we have become so secular that we indeed think that now everything depends on us; we should be able to make everything perfect. According to mankind We should all be perfect by now. But, we aren't and that surely ought to make us depressed, if we are dependent on our perfection.

But true, biblical Christianity is always joyful -- even in the face of sin and human shortcomings -- because it is grounded in the power of God, our rock and our redeemer. As people of faith, we do not have to save ourselves -we do not have to be perfect - but we can be forgiven - we can depend on Christ our Savior. And the God of the Bible is always living and active, full of grace and mercy and steadfast love -- he is an exciting God of history and nature, not a boring God of our own making (Leander E. Keck, The Church Confident [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993], 41).

Here's a final lesson from Arabella: Like Skylab spider webs that turn into Rocket Rackets, our Christian praise and prayer will be transformed into habitats for the homeless, micro-loans for low-income entrepreneurs, and new forms of Web-based ministry. There is no predicting how the ever creative Divine Creator will answer prayer.

The good news for us today is that God DOES find our best efforts acceptable, even when our efforts do not produce perfection.  The One whose existence is proclaimed and acclaimed by the natural world gladly accepts the praise we offer, however human it may be. God simply wants us to give him the best we have, and to rely on him -- whether we are web-spinning space spiders or men and women on planet Earth. Arabella spun some awesome webs, but in the end, even before the end of her mission, she died. Webs spun to perfection do not always have a happy ending, but giving God your best, even if it is far from perfect, will extend your life beyond imagination, and beyond this planet.

God's call to us?  Start being  awe-filled Christians doing awe-some deeds in the power of an eternally creative God.

Pobody's nerfect reminds us that we all make mistakes, we all fall short of human expectations, but if we give to God the best we have, we can proudly say: "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer"

Let us stand and sing our closing hymn as we invite our newest members and their sponsors to come forward for reception into the church.

Love Divine, All Love's Excelling - p. 384 v. 1 and 3

Will the new members and their sponsors please come?