Pentecost 13 (NL4) John B. Valentine
Genesis 1:1 – 2:3 September 7, 2025

“WOW! WHOA! YIKES!“

And so it begins! Today we start the cycle anew.

Years ago ... we would have called today “Rally Day” ...

• a day to “rally the masses” for another academic year ...
• a day to celebrate kids being back in school ...
• a day to re-open Sunday School after a long summer break ...

But that’s not the way things are any more ... no ...

• We can’t celebrate the end of summer because ... just now ... the folks at PGE are reminding us that we’re just starting into the Public Safety Power Shutoff ... PSPS ... season ... and

• We can’t celebrate the return of kids to classrooms because they’ve already been ‘back-to-school’ for a month now ... and

• We can’t celebrate the kick off of our Sunday School program because that got postponed for a couple of weeks ... on account of the fact that we’re celebrating Pastor Pam today!

Nonetheless ... today we DO start our annual worship cycle anew.

We’re at the starting point of our annual walk through the Bible ...

We’re going back to the beginning ... all the way back to the book of Genesis ... chapter 1 ...

And between now and just Christmas ... we’ll be re going touching on some of the key stories and big ideas in the Old Testament.

So let’s get after it ... and see how this Word of God might be a word from God to us.

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“In the beginning ... when God created the heavens and the earth ......”

I trust you’ve heard those words before ... a time or two ... or maybe fifty.

It’s Genesis ... chapter one ... verse one ...

• the beginning of a story that becomes a book ...
• the beginning of a book that becomes a library ...
• the beginning of a library that become a cultural treasure ...
• the beginning of a cultural treasure that is ... for us ... the Word of God.

So let’s begin our look at the beginning by thinking for just a moment about “the heavens and the earth” and this story about the creation of the heavens and the earth .... and consider for just a moment how colossal God’s Creation is.

And ... in order to get into that story ... I’m going to borrow from the title of Annie Lamont’s book that I referenced a couple of weeks ago ... that one entitled “Help, Thanks, Wow!” ... and come up with three words that you’re going to need to have at the ready ...

• WOW ... and
• WHOA ... and
• YIKES!

You got that??? “Wow” ... “Whoa” ... and Yikes!”

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Anyhow ... I was reading an article the other day about the work of NASA ... and all of the space missions that are slated to be terminated due to the pending federal budget cuts ...

And happened upon the details of a space probe that NASA sent up back in like 2006 named “New Horizons”.

They ... errrr ... ‘we’ .... sent that New Horizons Space Probe up in 2006 ... back in the day when Pluto was still on the list of planets.

And ... since that time ... it has been traveling at a rate of something like eight miles per second ... about 36,000 miles per hour ... for more than 15 years.

Now ... this New Horizons probe ...

• has actually made it past Neptune ...
• has made it past Pluto ...
• has made it past the collection of cosmic dust on the far reaches of our solar system ...
• and is now headed out into what can actually be classified as “Deep Space”.

So any ideas about how long it would take for this ‘New Horizons’ contraption to reach the next nearest star??

About 100,000 years!

Then consider that there are approximately one hundred billion stars just in our Milky Way galaxy.

Which means ... if our solar system were relatively the size of a quarter ... the Milky Way would be about the size of ...... North America.

And ... if you were to count the stars in the Milky Way .... one per second, it would take you twenty-five hundred years just to count them all.

And THEN try to envision that there are somewhere’s between one hundred and two hundred billion galaxies in the universe!

How does that make you FEEL???

Like maybe you just want to say “Wow!” .... as in “That’s so cool” ... or maybe “That’s so incomprehensible.”

It seems to me that the first thing this opening story from Genesis is trying to get us attuned to is “WOW!”

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But “Wow!” isn’t the only word that this first chapter of Genesis invites us to put to use. The second word on our list is what?

“WHOA!”

• “Whoa” ... as in “That kind of puts things in a different perspective.”

• “Whoa” ... as in “That kind of resets my visions about my importance in all this.”

• “Whoa” ... as in “It’s a scary big world out there ... and I’m just dust in the wind.”

I mean ...

Imagine you’re standing in Yosemite Valley ... looking up at El Capitan ...

There’s a part of you that wants to say “Wow!” to be sure ...

But isn’t there a part of you that also wants to say “Whoa”???

Or imagine you’ve traveled up the North Coast to Redwood National Park ... and you’re standing at the base of a towering redwood tree ...

There’s a part of you that wants to say “Wow!” ...

But isn’t there a part of you that also wants to say “Whoa”???

There’s that great line from Psalm 8 that says:

“God, when I look out at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars ..... I’m left with a puzzler: Why would you care about us???

“We’re just specks on this speck of a planet in the speck of a solar system in this speck of a galaxy in this one little corner of the universe! In the face of the vastness of all that ... what difference do we make ...really?”

“WHOA!”

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Now ... honestly ... it would be easy to leave it all right there.

To just say “Wow!” and “Whoa!” and leave it at that.

I guess then:

• We could just despair at our insignificance ...

• Or maybe just “try not to think about it” and go on living in our delusional delusions of some self-concocted self-importance ...

• Or just give up and say “Whatever!”

But we’ve got one more word still to deal with .... that word “Yikes!”

You see ... toward the end of Genesis chapter one ...

• After God made the sun and moon and stars ...
• After God made the oceans and the air and the dry land ...
• After God made fish and birds and animals ...

After all of those things ... God “saw that it was “good”.

But after God makes human beings ... after God entrusts human beings with ‘dominion’ over this amazing creation which God has made ... then ... and only then ... does God say that it is VERY good.

That that’s the way God created it to be.

And I don’t know how those words ring in your ears ... but to me ... that’s definitely a ‘Yikes!’

• That you and I have been entrusted with the care of creation is a ‘Yikes’.

• That you and I are called by God to be stewards of this planet on which we live is a ‘Yikes’.

• That you and I are tasked with “having dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” is a ‘Yikes’.

Because when we look around at this world in which we live ... it’s doesn’t look to me like we’re doing a very good job of the first job that we were ever asked to do.

Now we may well disagree about how best to care for creation ...

And we may well disagree about how best to good stewards of this planet on which we live ...

And we may well struggle to understand how best to live into our responsibility to “the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” ...

But while we may disagree about HOW we do it ... we may not disagree THAT we do it.

Because ... ‘Yikes!’ ... that’s our job!!

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Speaking of stewardship ... and the care of creation ...

Maybe the best example I’ve EVER seen of somebody embody that spirit of ‘care of Creation’ was right outside the front door of this building in right now.

It was during the height of the Pandemic ....

And there was a family of bees that came visiting our campus in search of a new church home.

So we talked to a whole bunch of pest-control companies ... and every one of them told us that there was nothing we could do ....... nothing short of extermination.

Even though the honey bees of the sort that those bees were are a protected species.

But Jerry Perry said “Not so fast!!”

And ... patiently and ingeniously ... Jerry devised a way to get the worker bees to move out of the front wall of our Sanctuary of their own accord ...

And finally to get the queen to move out of her hive on her own accord ...

And so it came to pass that those church bees got moved to the hillside overlooking the Perry home in north Orinda!

And ... to me ... Jerry’s efforts were and still are an invitation to all of us to work at being better stewards of this amazing creation which God has entrusted to us all!

For that ‘Yikes’ is a reminder that we are created for a purpose ... that we have been entrusted by our Creator with responsibility to care for this universe that God has made.

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But then .... maybe just maybe ... this text is also an invitation to add one more word to our list ...

For even though the wonder of it all may lead us to say “Wow!” ...

And the immensity of it may lead us to say “Whoa!” ...

And our shared responsibility for it may lead us to say “Yikes” ...

And the end of the day ... maybe the most important thing we can say in the face of it all is “Thanks” ... as in “Thank you, God, for the wonder of your Creation ... and thank you for our place in it!”