Wonder
Faith Practices • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 36:17
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· 20 viewsThe faith practice of wonder helps us glimpse with surprise just how creative, faithful, good, big, and present God is.
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We are getting into the home stretch of looking at faith practices over the summer. There are only three left to go out of the twelve we started with back at the end of May. Today is a faith practice that I must admit I have not paid much attention to before. I guess I have always thought of wonder more as a reaction or a response than something that can be proactively seen as a faith practice.
But that is not all bad because it has given me opportunity this week to dig in rather deeply to considering what the faith practice of wonder might be all about in the first place. Ironically, I might even say that I have spent the week wondering about wonder. What do you think when I mention the idea of wonder? Is wonder about having a sense of awe and amazement? Is wonder about a posture of curiosity and inquisitiveness? Maybe it is a both/and “all-of-the-above” kind of answer.
Maybe a few words from King David in the Psalms can help us wrap our heads around what it means for us the use a sense of wonder as a faith practice.
You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
Friday was a picture perfect day for Michigan, at least by my way of thinking. With mid-west humidity, I prefer summer days that do not get above 80 degrees. I like a constant breeze to keep bugs away. I like clear skies and sunshine. All those things aligned on Friday. As Friday is also the day when I tend to do most of my writing for the week, it seemed perfect to take my notebook computer out on a patio chair under the shade of a large maple tree that grows in my yard. Since my agenda for the day was to mostly stay put and write, it also seemed like the perfect day to roll out the barbecue and slow roast a beef brisket all day long.
So there I sat all Friday writing while set up under the shade of a tree, feeling the gentle breeze of a 70 degree day, smelling the smokey hickory wafting from my barbecue grill, streaming classical music in my earbud headphones. All things wonderful. Of course we may all have different tastes of what we consider wonderful. Maybe some of you like the temperature a little hotter or a little cooler than 70 degrees. Maybe some of you do not care for classical music. Maybe some of you don’t care for smoked brisket. Maybe some of you don’t love writing. But I love all those things, they are wonderful to me. And so I pursued a day in which I knew I still had to work and get things done, but intentionally arranged myself within that day of work to grab hold of and pursue a sense of wonder at the same time.
wonder is not only something that just happens — often we pursue it, seek it out
I know that will be different for each of us. Some of you are filled with wonder and amazement by being in the Big House in Ann Arbor with 100,000 other football fans. Some of you are filled with wonder and amazement by being on a boat out on a lake or river somewhere. Some of you are filled with wonder and amazement by gathering around a table with good friends and family to play board games together. Some of you are filled with wonder and amazement by reading a good novel. There is no one right way to position yourself to be surrounded by wonder. The point I want us to realize is that we pursue it. We don’t just wait for moments of wonder and amazement to fall upon us (although it sometimes happens that way). We go after it; we seek it out; we are people who look for wonder.
This is where some consideration of David’s words in Psalm 139 are helpful. It seems that this is exactly what David is doing in Psalm 139. He is intentionally seeking out wonder; he is looking for it. Let’s pay some attention to how David goes about this in the words of this psalm.
verses 1-6 — the all-knowing God (omniscient)
Notice how David points all the action in this Psalm towards God. Nearly all the verbs describe action that God does. The entire psalm is a address directly to God—a prayer to God—which line-by-line calls out and names all the things that God does which David holds with a sense of complete amazement and wonder. In verses 1-6 David speaks of the ways in which God is all-knowing. In verses 7-12 God is all-present. In verses 13-18 David speaks to the way God is all-loving; embracing the intimacy of God’s enfolding mercy. I stopped at verse 18, but if you were to read the final stanza of six verses (19-24) they speak to God’s just righteousness—the God of perfect justice which balances with God’s perfect mercy.
verses 7-12 — the everywhere-present God (omnipresent)
Altogether, Psalm 139 displays for us the wonder and amazement of God’s perfect attributes. God’s justice and mercy display the ways in which God is all-powerful—something we refer to as God’s omnipotence. God’s endless knowledge of his creation and everything in it displays the way in which God is all-knowing—something we refer to as God’s omniscience. God’s encompassing attentiveness everywhere within his creation speaks to the way in which God is all-present—something we refer to as God’s omnipresence. David focuses his attention on the ways in which all these majestic attributes of God play out into David’s own life.
verses 13-18 — the all-powerful loving mercy of God
(verses 19-24 — the all-powerful righteous justice of God)
all-powerful mercy and justice of God (omnipotence)
It’s one thing to say and acknowledge that God is all-knowing. It’s another thing to meditate upon the wonderful ways in which the omniscient knowledge of God shows up in your own life in very personal and concrete ways. That’s what David does here. He is not just naming and defining theological doctrine on the nature of God. David is making it personal—here are the ways in which these perfect attributes of God take shape and show up in my world, in my life.
main point in the middle verses (13-14)
David embraces all of this as wonder. Many of you have heard me enough by now to know some of the go-to principles of interpreting scripture I often point out. If we want to find the main point of a particular passage of the Bible, where in the passage do we look? The center. Not always, but quite often enough the authors of the Bible used a literary technique in which the main point of a passage is right in the middle. Psalm 139 has 24 verses. That means we take a look at what happens after verse 12 to see the middle of this psalm.
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
Verses 13 and 14 get to the point. In verse 14 you find one of the few action verbs in this psalm which is not an action of God, but an action of David. “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” David’s intentional pursuit of God’s wonder results in praise; he delights in all that amazes him concerning the wonders of God. Look at this response. It is not that God is a mystery to be solved. It is not that God is a puzzle to be unlocked. It is not that God is a power to be manipulated or unleashed. God is simply a wonder to behold.
faith practice of wonder
wonder is childlike
How do we embrace a faith practice of wonder like that? What does it look like for us today. If you have been following along with the workbook with us this summer, you will see in the readings for this week that two features of this faith practice help bring it into our lives. First, embrace wonder with childlike faith. to approach God in a childlike way does not mean to approach God with immaturity. Rather, a childlike posture is trusting, eager, and attentive. Children have a way of being attentive to the moment in ways that adults miss. In a grown up world we often shift our attention to what’s coming next, always focusing on the next thing coming on our agenda or schedule. Or perhaps we focus on the past, thinking and analyzing what has already taken place. Small children know how to simply exist in the moment being attentive to whatever happens to be in front of them at the time.
When my children were toddlers and not yet old enough to start school, I use to take them along with me on errands during the day. A quick stop through Meijer to pick up some groceries meant that I would sit my kid in the cart and work my way down the grocery list. My attention was always pushing ahead to what was next on the list and what aisle I needed to find next. It never seems to fail that the kids in the shopping cart would point out the balloons from the floral department that somehow got loose from their strings and had now floated up to the ceiling. Or the stray bird that makes its way into the doors from the garden center and is now flying around near the rafters.
I don’t notice those things because I am focused on completing my shopping list. I am not attentive to anything else happening. But my kids were. They saw things everybody else overlooked because they were simply attentive to the moment. In this week ahead as you consider how to pursue a faith practice of wonder, let yourself embrace a childlike wonder of simply being in the moment, without distractions of what’s ahead and what’s next or what’s behind and what’s already happened. Be attentive to where God is at in the moment.
wonder is slow
And secondly, be slow. We are people obsessed with efficiency. How can we get more accomplished in less time? The faith practice of wonder is not about efficiency. In fact, it’s about the opposite. Wonder requires unhurried moments. Most of us have had the experience of sitting on a Lake Michigan beach watching the sunset. Enjoying the wonder of a sunset over the lake requires a few moments of slowing down. I cannot make the earth spin any faster to speed it up. All I can do to enjoy the beauty of a sunset is slow down enough to place everything else aside an simply let the wonder of it take place. I cannot rush through all the varying shades of color that slowly turn from one hue to the next as the sun gets lower and lower. I cannot rush through the moments when the circle of the sun becomes a half, and then slowly dissolves to a sliver, and then disappears into the horizon of the water. I cannot force the pace of all the shimmering sparkles on the water as waves catch the rays of light. The wonder of a sunset happens at its own pace. All I can do is slow down enough to take it all in.
For Christmas last year my children got me a pack of reusable chopsticks. It’s not because we make Asian food five nights a week. It is because I eat too fast. If I have chopsticks in my hand instead of a fork and spoon, I am forced to slow down and not eat so quickly. It’s healthier for me to eat more slowly. I can better savor a meal when I eat more slowly. But just telling myself to slow down wasn’t going to do it. I had to change something about the way I eat in order to make myself slow down. Chopsticks force me to eat more slowly. With the exception of a bowl of soup, there are now plenty of meals I eat by using chopsticks instead of a fork and spoon.
be attentive to the moment
Embracing the faith practice of wonder requires slowing down. Sometimes, just telling ourselves to slow down is not enough. Sometimes we need to change something in the way we go about our day to make ourselves slow down. Slowing down helps us to be in the moment and be attentive to the wonders of God which are always around us, yet so often remain unnoticed because we are the ones zipping right past it.
how might David word things if he were to rewrite Psalm 139 on this side of the cross and resurrection of Jesus?
I am amazed that David wrote these words in Psalm 139 before the time when Jesus came to be born and live among his people. David was able to witness and write about the wonder of God even without the example of Jesus in the gospels. I wonder how David might word things if he were to rewrite Psalm 139 on this side of the cross and resurrection of Jesus. What else might David say about the amazing wonders of God which include declarations and statements of delight in what Jesus has done? What might a Psalm 139 part 2 which acknowledges Jesus look like today? What might we say about the wonder of the cross and resurrection?
I spent some time thinking about that this week. I may have even written a few ideas down. But I am not going to share any of that with you here today. I am going to leave that for you to wonder about yourself this week.