A week or two before Easter, several of us adults sat with the members of the Youth Communicants Class as they put into words the meaning of their faith. They had been asked to write their own faith statements, a difficult assignment at any age, and the adults admitted they were glad the roles were not reversed that day. Some statements were short, some were long, and the beautiful poetic one from Brian George served as the cover of the Easter Sunday worship bulletin when the youth publicly joined the church. With it, he included a drawing of one hand reaching up and another reaching down with the fingertips just touching. You may remember seeing it. The central phrase in his statement of faith reads, "Faith is the heavenly hand of God, Reaching out to heal my wounds." It is a wonderful sentence that captures so much in so few words: that God initiates the reaching out rather than waiting for us, that the reaching out is an on-going process, that we can trust God to be present, that God sympathizes with our pain, with our wounds, and that God wants us to be healed and offers us healing. It is a personal statement. Brian didn't write that God "reaches out to heal wounds" but "Reaching out to heal my wounds." It implies that, at his young age, he and God have a relationship, that Brian has had personal experiences that have affected his understanding of who God is in his life. Can you think of what words you would use to express your own experience of God?

This is the eighth in our summer sermon series exploring the theology in some of our hymns. Today's hymns focus on our understandings of God and we will look at the two that we have sung this morning. Words that we memorized as children or heard so often that they found a permanent home in our heads are words that deeply influence what we believe. Without a tune with it, most of us memorized the Apostle's Creed, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." That is the only sentence in the short creed that describes God. I know as a child I usually thought of God as a male figure sitting on a large chair or throne above me somewhere in "heaven". Maybe, this creed helped to create that idea in my mind. Now, as an adult, I understand the explanation that the use of "Father" indicates God's personal nature and the term "almighty" assures us of God's constancy, God's faithfulness. However, this short sentence does not capture my complete experience of God even though, along with a child's understanding, it is deeply ingrained in my memory. A much more contemporary creed, "A Brief Statement of Faith" was written in 1983 and became part of the Presbyterian Book of Confessions. We use a portion of it today in our Prayer of Adoration and Confession in the words, "Loving us still, God makes us heirs with Christ of the covenant. Like a mother who will not forsake her nursing child, like a father who runs to welcome the prodigal home, God is faithful still." Those words have Biblical references and paint a picture of God that we can visualize and understand.

The Apostle's Creed and the Twenty-third Psalm are probably the only two church documents that I fully retained from various memorization assignments at Brentwood Presbyterian Church in Southern California. However, the many hymns I learned are deeply imbedded in my brain. Even if I can't sing them on command, when you give me just a bar or two, the rest comes rolling off my tongue. Though my adult faith in this new millennium doesn't completely agree with the words of all the old hymns, they still are precious to me. A few weeks ago, we looked at Onward, Christian Soldiers to see if there are ways to salvage it for contemporary use. Many of us don't want to be reminded of the occasions of Christian militancy in our history and we certainly don't want to celebrate them. So, even if we look at the warlike terms as metaphor rather than reality, it is still too close to home, distasteful for some of us after the anti-war years of the Sixties and early Seventies. I did have some important responses from some of you about the sermon and I thank you.

What hymns do you remember that helped form your ideas about God? Most of us sang Martin Luther's famous one, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God". Another favorite often requested for memorial services is "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me." Our vocabulary is different today than when these hymns were written. If you walked into a church for the first time and found yourself singing hymns in our hymnal, would you be able to understand their meaning with today's ears? Martha and Doug and I work to select music that is inspirational to sing and also has words that are understandable and theologically relevant for all of us. Sometimes, it is a challenging assignment.

Today, we are looking at two hymns that have very similar themes but were written at different periods in church history. I invite you to think about the ways that each one speaks to you. You might find it helpful to have your hymnal open to number 467 and have your bulletin in front of you resting on the page. The first, "How Great Thou Art," is familiar to most of us. It is a Swedish hymn created in 1885 and set to a Swedish folk melody. The English words were written in 1953, by Stuart K. Hine and popularized during the Billy Graham Crusades. Some of us first sang it in a crowd of thousands of young people in a huge football stadium. I was there in the coliseum in Los Angeles. However, when I hear it now, I find myself right back at church camp in my seventeenth summer at the Forest Home Christian Conference Center in the San Bernardino Mountains. It is special to me not so much for the words but for the tune that truly sends me soaring when I sing the chorus. I remember singing it among the tall pine trees, the mountains, the lake, and all the stars that we could see at night so far from the city lights. It is a personal prayer, a communication between pray-er and God that doesn't really consider or include other people. You can hear it in the words: "O Lord my God! when I in awesome wonder…in forest glades I wander…He bled and died to take away my sin…when Christ will come to take me home…" The focus is on God and me, what God has done and will do for me. It is a picture of God from the perspective of personal salvation.

The second hymn, "Creating God, Your Fingers Trace," was written in the nineteen-eighties and appears in our hymnal for the first time. For me, the music doesn't fill me with the same majestic sense that I feel from "How Great Thou Art". However, the words that focus on the same subject of God and almost in the same format, communicate God's relationship with all humanity in a way that reflects current Biblical and language studies of the original Hebrew and Greek. As Brian's statement used the word "reaching" as an on-going action, many of the verbs describing God's actions in the Hebrew are present participles and can be translated as on-going action as well. In Genesis chapter three, when Moses asks God what he should say to the Israelites when they ask him the name of his god, Moses is told to tell them, "I Am Who I Am Becoming" implying God's continuing action. The hymn on our bulletin cover this morning uses the following words for God: Creating, Sustaining, Redeeming, and Indwelling. These are continuing, on-going actions.

"Creating God, Your fingers trace The bold designs of farthest space. Let sun and moon and stars and light And what lies hidden praise Your might." We all remember the incredible picture of the earth shot from one of the early Apollo missions. Now, the Hubble Space Telescope sends us images of places in the universe hundreds and thousands of light years away that were hidden until the last decade and are constantly changing even now. Only fifty years ago, when all we knew of the universe is what we could see from the earth, Stuart K. Hine penned the words, "I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder, Thy power through-out the universe displayed." Humanity has always been curious and intrigued by God's role in creation, when the world began and as it continues to unfold.

The second verse reads, "Sustaining God, Your hands uphold Earth's mysteries known or yet untold; Let water's fragile blend with air, Enabling life, proclaim Your care." Recognizing the environmental issues that have become so much of our consciousness, we thank God for all that sustains life as we sing this verse. We are also reminded of our own responsibility to work with God to maintain that fragile blend of water and air. This hymn inspires us to consider what should be our role in solving the global warming problem or influencing our government to be more pro-active? As we examine the ethics of cloning, the words, "Enabling life" take on new meaning to each of us individually and as a species. Fifty years ago, before so many new scientific developments, Stuart Hine reminded us in a simpler way of God's sustaining care of the fragile blend in the words, "When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze."

The third verse takes a much more contemporary look, still very Biblically based, than the earlier hymn. "Redeeming God, Your arms embrace All now despised for creed or race; Let peace, descending like a dove, Make known on earth Your healing love." As young Brian wrote, "Reaching out to heal my wounds," this verse recognizes the sin and pain in our humanity and acknowledges God's continuing redemption and desire for peace through forgiveness and love. As Christians, Jesus Christ is our Redeemer and Hine expressed it in the traditional words of our faith: "That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to take away my sin." The redeeming is an on-going action offered to all with embracing arms. As we recognize and accept it and let ourselves be changed, it continues to affect our own lives and those of all humanity.

The final verse reads, "Indwelling God, Your gospel claims One family with a billion names; Let every life be touched by grace Until we praise You face to face." We hear through these words the universal aspect of God's presence spoken of by the prophet Jeremiah as well as by Jesus. We are reminded of the passage in Matthew 25, when the disciples asked, "When did we see you homeless or without food or clothing or in prison?" and Jesus said, "Whatever you did for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me." The verse also opens for us the possibility in the phrase, "One family with a billion names. Let every life be touched by grace…" that there might be other ways to worship God, to express and receive God's love and grace in addition to those are part of our personal history. Again, Hine's words, in How Great Thou Art, express the same concept but in a more traditional, more individual way. "When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart!"

It has been said that Words Create Worlds. What words most influence your understanding and beliefs today? As we teach our children about our faith, what words most help them learn about and experience God's love for them? If you were committing yourself to Jesus Christ and to a life in relationship to God and a church congregation today, how would you express your faith? I sometimes think that the words that touch our intellect and the words that touch our emotions are each and all important but not always the same ones. That is for each of us to sort out individually. As we close, let us thank God again for creating, sustaining, redeeming, and dwelling within us as we soar one more time singing the chorus of How Great Thou Art.