Jeremiah 31:7–14 / Psalm 147:12–20 / Ephesians 1:3–14 / John 1:1–20
This is the written version of the
sermon given at Flohr’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Knightstown,
Pennsylvania on January 4, 2026, by Fr. Gene Tucker, Interim Pastor.
“COSMIC STUFF!”
(Homily
texts: Ephesians 1:3–14 & John 1:1–20)
“God don’t make no
junk,
God don’t make no junk,
You’re special the way you are.”
We used to sing this song with our
middle school students who had come to attend our annual retreats in Illinois
during the time we served there. I was the Spiritual Director for those
weekends, serving not only as priest, but also as a sort-of grandfather figure
to these young people.
The purpose of the song was to assure
and to re-assure these young people, who were making their way through the
difficult years during which their childhood is beginning to fade into the
past, and whose adulthood was just beginning to manifest itself, that they were
God’s special and purposeful creation, valuable to God, and worthy of God’s
love.
In much the same way, in his letter to
the Ephesians, St. Paul describes the importance of all those who have come to
faith in Christ Jesus, reminding them that they are part of God’s great, big
and eternal plan. Paul’s intent is to get these early Christians to lift their
eyes heavenward, to see the wider and bigger picture of God’s role in their
lives.
Paul’s perspective is from eternity,
eternity from God’s vantage point. God, who has no beginning and has no ending,
knows and knew from the foundation of the world that those early Christians,
every one of them, was known, by name, to God at the beginning of God’s intent
to create the world and to populate it with the human race.
We could easily put our own names into
a blank using Paul’s understanding. We might try that to see what it does to
our perspectives about our own value to God and to others. Here’s a sample of
what we might say: “From the very beginning of the world, God knew that I,
___________, would be born. God knew that I would respond to His overture of
love, coming into a firm and close embrace of love.”
How does that feel? How does it change
how we regard ourselves? How does it change how we think about the gift of
God’s foreknowledge of our creation, of God’s intentional showering of love
upon us?
This is cosmic stuff, dear friends!
The writer of the fourth Gospel, the
account that bears John’s name, asserts that same divine perspective as it
lifts our eyes toward the things of God. John begins by saying, “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” A bit
later on, we learn that this eternal Word is Jesus Christ, the One who came,
bearing God’s eternal light, in order to cast out the darkness which separates
us from God.
Cosmic stuff, again!
God’s intent in creating the world, and
in creating you and me, centers around the idea that each and every one of us
is of infinite value to God. It follows then, that the creation of the world is
for the express purpose of creating a venue in which God can work with the
humanity He has created.
Cosmic stuff, again!
Paul’s explanation of all this reminds
us that God’s intent is gift-giving on an immense scale. We receive this gift
by faith, it is God’s free gift, accepted by faith.[1]
Our importance to God shouldn’t lead to
some sort of an attitude of superiority, as if to say, “I know the Lord, and
therefore, I’m more spiritually mature”. On the contrary, accepting the
realization that we are of immense value to God, and that God knew each one of
us from the beginning of the world, carries with it the requirement to work
with God’s purposes to bring others into the reality we’ve been blessed to
know.
We have work to do, work done in
gratitude for God’s gift of love.
AMEN.
[1] We would do well to remember that the great reformer, Martin Luther,
came to the conclusion that a relationship with God is God’s gift, saying that
it is “Scripture Alone, Faith Alone,
Grace Alone” that outlines the basis for believing these truths.
