And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

I have often told the story about the time, long, long ago, when a little girl in our Sunday School asked me – in one of my early years in ministry - what God does for a living.

I answered quickly and casually, as I was inclined to do in those days, “God creates” and she seemed happy enough with that answer so I didn’t push the point.

But over the years I have realized that I may have never answered a question quite as well as I did that one!

God creates.

And one of the things that made it such a good answer was that I didn’t say “God created” as if it was a once and for all accomplishment, done and finished in the 7 days of creation and never to be visited again, that would be remarkable enough but not terribly meaningful to us in anything but an inspirational way, sort of like reading the life of Lincoln or King, it could fuel our own dreams but it wouldn’t actually touch them and shape them and create them in our current culture.

No, what I am saying, and I want to say it as clearly and understandably as possible, God creates.

Not only did God create, at the beginning of time, but each day, each hour, each encounter with the world is a point where God is creating, in the present tense, in our contemporary experience.

And today, of course, it’s an easy argument, it is springtime and the very land around us is screaming of creative activity and I could offer up Brett as Exhibit A.

God creates and he does it by working through the wonders and mysteries of birth itself and he creates a life and that life creates joy and fear and awe in the hearts of parents and that life creates laughter and fulfillment in the hearts of grandparents and that life creates companionship and opportunity in the hearts of the rest of us, God creates.

But I don’t want to stop there, I ‘ll get back to him.

The reading from Revelation is, in my Bible, on the next to the last page. It is a vision of the world to come, and there at the end of the whole story, we find that God will be doing the same things that he was doing thousands of pages and countless centuries of our time earlier, he will be creating.

And not just the physical things that we see around us, but the spiritual things that are unseen.

Yes God has created the beauty of the great oceans but God has also created the circle of family and friends where our hearts find their fulfillment.

Yes, God has created the wonder of the great mountains but God has also created the Church to be conveyors and protectors of our faith.

Yes, God has created the splendor of the night skies and joy of a sun-kissed day, but God has also created each of us with our wildly diverse and wonderfully faithful ways of loving each other and God.

This activity of creation is not only where God starts, but it is still happening and apparently will continue to be what God does for eternity.

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

Now that sounds wonderful and exciting, because it is wonderful and exciting to be in on the ground floor of something that God is doing. While I was a student in seminary I spent a summer working at what was then, the brand new Community Reformed Church in Whiting. We met in a store front, and every week members came early to set up the folding chairs and every week there were more and more people and the energy level was enormous and it was fun to be able to invent the traditions of a place.

But what about when we are in a place that already has some significant traditions?

What about when we are in a Church with 170 years worth of things we either always do or never do?

What about when we are living lives of responsibility rather than adventure?

What about when our concern for security begins to outweigh our concern for faithfulness?

What about the old adage of Ben Franklin, “If you are not a liberal when you are young you have no heart, if you are not a conservative when you are old you have no brain.” Was he right? I hope not. Can’t there be a balance between our traditions and our dreams? Between our heads and our hearts? Are we, as the years pile up, required to give up the hopes and visions and excitement of the early years of our lives and our relationships?

And what will happen when Brett’s life doesn’t go perfectly according to our dreams and plans and hopes, what will happen when the cruelty of the playground or the obstacles of life cause static in the relationships of love that God has given him?

Will we simply throw up our hands and say we can do nothing to change our Church, our lives, our world, our children, our parents, ourselves?

Or will we let that creator God do what God does?

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

There is a way of looking at God, a theology, that suggests that once upon a time God set the worlds spinning and whirling their way through the universe and – if the person is nominally Christian – God even spent the early years hanging around and being involved with people in a special and intimate way, but then God withdrew, somewhere in the 1st Century, and left us to ourselves with some stories and teachings to work with.

I suspect that more people believe in that Theology, that understanding of God, than I know.

Because it is a comfortable way of believing, it means that you don’t have to carry your faith with you into your business dealings, it means that you don’t have to carry your faith with you into the voting booth, it means that you don’t have to carry your faith with you into the way that you raise you children or care for your parents or endure the person who just rubs you the wrong way. But the problem is that the God who is distant isn’t the God whom we find in scripture or in the world around us.

That distant God is a fabrication, that distant God is our creation rather than our creator.

It’s strange how we smile, indulgently, when we read the OT story about the people creating their god statue in the form of a Golden Calf and we spend little time thinking about the commandment to not make any graven images to worship, thinking it to be designed for a more primative people.

And yet so many of us create a God who fits our biases, a God who blesses our prejudices, a God who endorses our nationalism, a God who doesn’t disturb our comfort zone or change the things that we like about ourselves and our church and our nation and our world.

That God is not the God of Scripture and that is as false a God as the golden calf of Israel.

The true God is always creating and recreating, and always will be, God isn’t changing, but we are and our understanding of God is. One of the great images of the OT has God as a potter, spinning and shaping and then sometimes, folding and crushing to be reshaped into the right form, isn’t that an accurate picture of how God has acted in our lives?

Whether it is your job or your marriage or your relationships with children or parents or friends, or our congregation or our nation, God has worked us and shaped us and sometimes folded us back into a lump so that we could be reworked and reshaped over and over again to meet new challenges and opportunities.

And it will happen again.

And as much as we might not want to have it happen, because all of that folding and crushing can hurt, we know that we can trust the potter, creator, to bring us back into a better and finer and purer form than we were, that is how God has always worked, and will always work.

And it will happen to Brett.

And it will hurt to watch, but we live in a world of hurt and for every Pat Tillman who was willing to walk away from the riches and fame that so many worship, to serve and sacrifice for honor and duty, there are dozens of army prison guards who bring shame to our nation and who have no sense of honor.

You see, if all that God did was to create us and turn us loose, we would be at the mercy of the terrorists and bullies of the world, of every nation and every faith tradition.

But God still creates and recreates and so we live the best that we can and we love the best that we can and we serve and worship the best that we can, and when we fall short we know that God is at work, even or especially in our failures, to reshape and respin and recreate us.

This is what God does for a living, it’s God’s job.

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

Well let me amend that ancient answer of mine.

Not only does God create, but God re-creates.

And it is well worth noting that the word re-creation is the same as recreation.

It is not just God’s job, it is God’s pleasure, God’s enjoyment, God’s recreation.

Our lives, our world, our hearts and relationships, they are God’s playground, they are the places God wants to go and swing and run and throw and catch and reestablish who he is and who we are.

And we can’t meet him on that playground if we are so lost in our serious conversations and somber activities and empty lives. We need to play with him.

He’s there in Brett’s smile, he’s there in the ways that you love and pamper your mothers today or in the way that you cherish her memory, he’s there in the quiet times from now until September when you sit outside at night after dinner and talk, he’s there in that relationship that needs rekindling, he’s there in the laughter and the games and the joys of life.

We need to play with him and as we do we shed the baggage of the years and our eyes grow clear and our hearts strong and we become, again, the people we have been created to be, in mission and in education and in worship, we become the body of Christ. Don’t be afraid of the changes, you already know the author of those changes and when the changes come they are really saying to you God wants to know if you can come out and play.

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”