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O praise God in his holiness… Let everything that hath breath, praise the Lord.  AMEN. (Ps. 150)

As we look towards Lent in a couple of weeks’ time, and as part of a pattern of Sundays, this Second Sunday Before Lent has a particular theme to it, reflected in the Psalms and Readings for the whole day, and particularly for this afternoon.  And that theme is creation.  It’s a sort of Creation Sunday – and that’s a subject we ought to think about often, and we do, but this Sunday has a particular focus for our thoughts and prayers about creation.

Psalm 148, which the choir sang earlier, is a great hymn in praise of creation.  It begins with the broad sweep: ‘O Praise the Lord of heaven, praise him in the heights, praise him, ye angels and all his host’ [Vv 1-2]; and then moves into closer detail: ‘Praise him, sun and moon, stars and light, the heavens and waters above the heavens [See vv. 3-4] – showing a particular image of creation, which we’ll return to in a moment.  And with a particular theology of creation: ‘He spake the Word and they were made; he commanded and they were created’ [See v. 5].

The Old Testament Reading, from Proverbs 8, is part of a hymn in praise of Wisdom, thought of in the Old Testament as God’s presence in the world – rather as we think of the Holy Spirit.  And Wisdom is linked to creation: ‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his works, the first of his acts of long ago’ [Prov. 8:22].

And the New Testament Reading, the wonderful vision of heaven from Revelation 4, is leading us in our thoughts towards the new creation, spoken of at the end of the Book of Revelation, but also ending with the words: ‘You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created’ [Rev 4:11].

From the first words of the Old Testament to the end of the New, everything that exists is ascribed to God, and that, for the writers of the Old and New Testaments, is a cause for praise, and wonder, and stewardship of the amazing universe in which we live.

The ways in which writers and thinkers have tried to imagine all things coming into being has varied over time.  The writers and collators of Genesis, for example, imagine God speaking – ‘Let there be Light’ – and all things coming into being by the power of his Word.

Going back to the imagery of Psalm 148, of the heavens and the waters above the heavens, the so-called

‘Flammarion engraving’ is a wood engraving by an unknown artist, so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology). It represents a supposedly medieval cosmology, including a flat earth bounded by a solid sky, or firmament.

Flammarion had been apprenticed at the age of twelve to an engraver in Paris and it is believed that many of the illustrations for his books were engraved from his own drawings, probably under his supervision. Therefore, it is plausible that Flammarion himself created the image, though the evidence for this remains circumstantial.

In the book, the image refers to the text on the facing page (p. 163), which also clarifies the author’s intent in using it as an illustration:

Whether the sky be clear or cloudy, it always seems to us to have the shape of an elliptic arch; far from having the form of a circular arch, it always seems flattened and depressed above our heads, and gradually to become farther removed toward the horizon. Our ancestors imagined that this blue vault was really what the eye would lead them to believe it to be…

A naïve missionary of the Middle Ages even tells us that, in one of his voyages in search of the terrestrial paradise, he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met, and that he discovered a certain point where they were not joined together, and where, by stooping his shoulders, he passed under the roof of the heavens…

You can see the man, clothed in a long robe and carrying a staff, who kneels down and passes his head, shoulders, and right arm through a gap between the star-studded sky and the earth, discovering a marvellous realm of circling clouds, fires and suns beyond the heavens. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery bears a strong resemblance to traditional pictorial representations of the ‘wheel in the middle of a wheel’ described in the visions of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel.

Bishop Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh in the mid-17^th Century, worked out the timetable of the Creation, in his snappily-entitled ‘Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world…’, etc., etc.   In his chronology, the first day of Creation was precisely dated to the 23^rd of October, 4004 BC.  There are those who still hold to this dating, and the wonderfully-informative WikiPedia, in a rather understated way, says, ‘Modern proponents of the interpretation hold that the creation date 4004 BC could be inaccurate’ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussher_chronology].

Nowadays, our imaginations are fired by thinking about rather longer time-spans: the creation of the universe in the Big Bang 13.75 billion years ago, and of the earth, about 4.5 billion years ago.

Earlier this week I was in Swanage for a couple of days, and detoured on a walk along the appropriately-named ‘Priests’ Way’, to see the Dinosaur Footprints at Keates’ Quarry, now managed by the National Trust.  These are amazing – 140 million years old, and discovered by the Quarrymen a few decades ago.  To put one’s feet where the Brachiosaurus walked is extraordinary.

How we look at the universe has varied over the ages.  And no doubt our modern ‘scientific’ view of the whole of creation will continue to grow and develop as we learn more and more about it, and especially about Deep Space, worm-holes, dark matter, and so on.

But some things don’t change: everything was created by God, and is loved by him;  we are placed on the earth as stewards of creation, as far as we know, the only conscious beings on the earth who can reflect on our place in creation, and our relationship with its Maker; and we have a responsibility to care for it, to love the earth, to look after it, to use its resources wisely, and, as good stewards, to hand it on in as good a condition as we can to the coming generations.

That is a huge challenge for us, and a good reason why this Creation Sunday is an important one to have in our Church’s Calendar; and it’s also appropriate in this season of praying and thinking about stewardship here in the Cathedral – stewardship of our own finances and our care of creation, individually and as the Cathedral as a whole.

O praise God in his holiness… Let everything that hath breath, praise the Lord.    AMEN.