The Diocese of Connor

Connor Diocese :: Hymns in St Anne’s Cathedral

A Moment for Thought

Creation by the Ven Dr Stephen McBride, Archdeacon of Connor and Vicar of Antrim.

From the dawn of time humankind has tried to look beyond itself and asked the question, what is this all about? Why are we here? In order to try and find an adequate answer, some worshipped the sun or the moon or the stars as a way of trying to fill that God shaped void that exists within each of us.

Others created elaborate shrines and bowed down to deities made of gold and silver. The gods which were the fabrication of finite human minds were often depicted as powerful and vengeful deities, or else they were portrayed as uninterested and detached from humanity. But these characteristics are so far from what we see revealed in Jesus, the human face of God.

Come see his hands and his feet, the scars that speak of sacrifice,hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered. The words are from a verse of one of my favourite hymns, The Servant King by Graham Kendrick, who reminds us that that the God who designed and created the vastness of the universe set all this power aside and became one of us.

We worship a God who created on a macro scale, such is the immensity of the universe. The light we will see this evening shining from the Pole star left it four hundred years ago, just about the time when the King James version of the scriptures was being translated and has been travelling to earth at the speed of 186,000 miles per second ever since.

But if we think that we are too insignificant for God to worry about the tiny detail of our own problems, he also is the God who takes the trouble to create on a micro scale. Every snowflake is individually patterned, every hair on our head numbered and on our body, every piece of skin the size of a postage stamp has four metres of nerves and 100 sweat glands, 15 oil glands and a metre of blood vessels and three million assorted cells. He is the God of the detail who cares deeply about you and me.

One of the greatest 20th century theologians, Karl Barth was asked what it was that made him tick as a theologian and the audience waited for a lofty answer from such a brilliant mind. His answer was ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’ With over 6 billion people alive on the earth today, that is a huge number, but God loves you and he loves me individually as if there was only one of us to love. May you be conscious of that love today.