References: Genesis 1: 1 – 2: 3; Matthew 6: 25 – end
Lord God of all creation, open our eyes to see where we are heading and open our hearts to respond to your gracious offer of life. Amen
In the beginning when Man (because it is usually man rather than woman) created what he wanted for his heaven on earth he looked around him and saw all that was beauty and good. And behold, it was very good. And man went travelling to see more of it and discovered the dodo. And lo, it did not fly away and man saw that it would be very meaty and tasty when put on the barbeque. And man said, “I’ll have some of that.” And soon there were no more dodos. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
And man (because it was usually man rather than woman) … and man discovereth that if he didst take the wool from the sheep and the cotton and the flax from the plants he could make warm and fulsome garments, and behold, some looked better than others, and that was where woman did say her piece as well, and they didst wear the good stuff that did make bystanders turn their heads and whistle and the other bits they did not need they did discard somewhere else and thought about it not at all. And man didst say that is was good. And there was evening and there was morning the third day.
And lo, man did think that others may benefit from his good fashion sense and he did toil and build a large building which he did call ‘factory’ to make, out of the goodness of his heart, and for the goodness of his pocket, lots of garments and covers. And he did need help because the worry was too great for him so he driveth many who had few garments into his factory to make more. But he did not give them more than a little because after all times are hard and he hath a lot of mouths to feed therein. And behold man saw all that he had done and it was good. And there was evening and there was morning the fourth day.
And man (because it was usually man rather than woman) did prosper and grow sleek and fat and did need more people to help him. So he travelleth far and wide and buyeth more humans to work for him. But he payeth them not. And sometimes he feedeth them not if they worketh poor. But that was only fair because he did not spare them the rod at all. And man thought in his own tiny brain that this was good. And he did purr with pleasure at all that he had made. And there was evening and there was morning the fifth day.
And man did worry that someone else would come and take all that he had made and he would be left sore opprest, so he created armies and guns and bombs to keep himself safe. And he did dig big holes into which he did put all the stuff he had made that he needed no longer and they did smell and cause lots of things to leak and lots of animals to die. But it did not matter very much to the man because it was a long way away. Although, what he created this day did last for a very, very, very long time and didst spread slowly far and wide across the face of the earth into the oceans and the rivers and onto the crops and all things that were growing. And the earth in which he lived began to die but man was too busy to be able to do anything about it. And man saw what he had made and much of it was not very good so he continued throwing it away. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
And on the seventh day man did not rest because he had so much still to do. He gave names to all the things which he had made, things that he flattered himself that God had never even thought of, and he called them things like car and jumbo jet and mobile phone and central heating and next day delivery Amazon Prime and laptop and waste paper basket and poverty and war and online box set and Tesla and work appraisal and nuclear reactor and YouTube and Ketamine and ultra-processed food. And man became so important that he did have any time and he worried more and more about how much he needed to produce just to keep up with progress. And he wondered where God was in all this. But how could he do without all these things? And the evening and the morning were the seventh day.
And God was weeping about his wonderful creation and the creative forces of the human beings he had made in his image and beginning to have a conversation about future job prospects with his Son.
Need I say any more? Can I leave you to work out the rest for yourself? Looking at the sorry history of humankind above, and just in case your minds are consumed with however you’re going to manage the next few weeks, and what’s the point anyway, I’ll carry on.
Compare the 877 word story of the creation by humanity above with the 876 word story of creation by Almighty God in Genesis 1 and 2. Don’t get stressed by whether God’s creation is a historically truthful account in Genesis 1. Neither is the story of creation by humanity I started with. But I challenge you to find anything in either account that is not true in isolation if you remove the timelines we’ve imposed on them. It’s the principles behind them that are so vital. We could look at dozens of these. I want to mention just four and then to draw some conclusions that tie the Gospel into the story.
First the holiness and beauty of God’s creation. The wonder of a snowflake and the power of the tides. It is a creation that works in everything from its pressure releasing volcanos, to the answer to the question, “Which came first the chicken or the egg?” And in this extraordinary creation there is no waste. It really works and is apparently self-sustaining, except of course that it has the hand of God behind it. I challenge you to think of one thing in God’s world which is wasted and not recycled. God did not create dustbins. We did! All of God’s creation matters. Nothing is wasted unless human beings get their hands on it.
Second in the account of creation in Genesis chapter 1, there is gender equality. ‘So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’. At the same time. It’s human beings who create division and it’s out of their creation that racism, sexism, and all sorts of unfairness arise. He didn’t create us all the same but he did design us to live with each other and to help each other and to love each other and that’s where the equality comes in.
Third, he intentionally gave us a pattern of life to follow that included rest and relaxation as well as work and toil. If you look at the change in society since shops were allowed to open on Sundays it’s easy to see how tempting it is for human beings to ignore this. Has life really got better? Would you really keep the convenience of being able to pop to Co op for some milk on the way home from church at the cost of the low paid workers who are required to work? And that’s merely the tip of the ice-berg.
And fourth, it’s hard to deny that at the moment, human beings are dominating creation and using it for their own ends instead of reverencing it and giving glory to God. Some try to justify this in the wording of the Creation story in Genesis 1. For are we not told in the irrefutable words of Holy Scripture, ‘God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’’? But there is a world of difference between dominating and having dominion. A violent partner dominates whereas a benevolent king has dominion. To dominate normally indicates a value judgement, it is generally a pejorative word whereas to have dominion leaves the possibility of good or ill.
With all that background, perhaps the Gospel reading begins to make a bit of sense. For I have a problem when Jesus talks about worry. I’ve heard dozens of sermons telling me that Jesus doesn’t want me to worry, but actually that doesn’t stop me worrying. If anything I worry more that I can’t seem to stop worrying. And that leads to sleepless nights and I start feeling I’m carrying the weight of my own particular world on my shoulders and it’s even harder to stop, take it off and give it to Jesus. And I feel depressed and inadequate and my self-imposed ever decreasing circle of despair heads downwards.
And even if I can stop worrying, I find myself acutely aware of, for instance, a refugee about to embark on a small boat with a hungry family. Is Jesus really telling this refugee not to worry when he says, ‘do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.’ I appear to be just as much part of a broken society as anyone else and I worry about it!
Remember Jesus came to bring us back to the Kingdom of God that God created in Genesis 1 when he was present. His life’s work was one that would mean he would not be human if he did not doubt, or question or worry that he’d got it right from time to time. From those lonely 40 days in the wilderness to his anguished prayer in Gethsemane: who would not have worried in his position? And Jesus may have been the Son of God but he was also the son of man and human in every respect. What Jesus appears to have done is to return to his Father and put his trust in him that his plan of salvation which included the cross and the empty tomb was correct. The uniting of heaven and earth and the Kingdom of God here and now. Forgiveness for human beings and all our misguided and selfish creating, and a reorientation of creation back to focussing upon God and his providence.
I believe it’s no accident that the passage we had today from Matthew is just a few verses further on from Jesus’s prayer for the Kingdom, which he taught his disciples. The Lord’s Prayer. Focus on the Kingdom, God’s Kingdom, not your own, when you pray ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ Remember that God’s plan is that you are a vital part of this work to live in the Kingdom of God and stop dominating creation and start having a good-intentioned dominion and renew this bleeding planet. And see if that has an effect on how much you worry.
Andrew Holford
8 February, 2026 – Sandy
