A life full of wonders

[AI translation] We just sang, "O most high Lord, our gracious God, how wonderful is your name to us..." If we were to hand out sheets of paper here and ask everyone to write down what they felt, what they experienced while singing this, what would we write on them? Is the name of God, the being of God, really so wonderful to us? Can we really wonder at the world, at life, at the things of God, as the writer of the eighth psalm did? Are we full of that joyful wonder, as we so often are in the Bible? Even the words of the Apostle Paul, which I have read as my keynote, are full of wonder. He cannot get enough of the wonder of what has happened to him by the grace of God: 'It is by the grace of God that I am what I am', he says. On another occasion he writes to the Romans with self-absorbed, almost rapturous amazement: 'O the depths of God's wisdom, riches and knowledge, how unfathomable are His judgments and unsearchable His ways.' Well, can we ever wonder at anything? Is it not the greatest impoverishment of modern man spiritually that he no longer marvels at anything?! There are no miracles for him. Life has become too familiar, too sober, too grey for him. Well, now I want to talk about the meaning of wonder!One of the greatest advantages children have over adults is that they can still wonder. They have a great, wondering interest in the world, in which everything is new, surprising, interesting and exciting to them. And anyone who wants to stay young after decades should retain this ability. To be able to wonder. Then one will always discover new and new wonders that make life beautiful, pleasant, interesting, worth living, in other words, wonderful. Then the whole life will be full of wonders. This world is old, but it will always be new, as long as the capacity for wonder is alive in one. Someone once said it this way: where there is genuine, rapturous wonder, there is the top of the world. And there is also great truth in a saying I read somewhere: 'Do you know when ageing begins? When you can no longer wonder!" A man who can wonder is always waiting for the next surprise with childlike curiosity and is always happy about everything! Because that is what it means to be amazed: to see the wonderful, the beautiful, the good, the novel, the surprising, the interesting even in otherwise dull events, and habituation makes even what was once novel, surprising and interesting grey. Is this not, for example, the greatest tragedy of most marriages? How beautiful it used to be, how full of happy wonder it used to be, and how monotonous, dull, grey and uneventful it can become for the same two people to be together. That's why I said that a happy person is one who can retain the capacity to wonder, even after decades.
But how can you keep this ability for a lifetime? To be able to wonder, to see the beautiful, the mysterious, the wonderful, the new in the old, familiar circumstances? Is it possible to train oneself to do this, to train, to practice, to develop this ability? Well, there are undoubtedly certain things that can help one to do that. For example, when you go on holiday somewhere from home. Let me tell you now, from very recent experience, that the most important thing about such a trip is not the fact that you are travelling from place to place, but rather that you come back with freshly washed eyes. Yes, sometimes you have to leave home to rediscover your home, to break away from your surroundings, to see it as new again, to be happy again. Because habituation blurs the vision of the eyes, and a holiday spent travelling washes the habituation out of our eyes. If someone were to ask me now what my greatest experience of the last holiday was, I could say coming home! To be standing here again in this pulpit, to have a fresh joy and gratitude in my heart for the opportunity to serve again, as I did at the beginning. It is that it is so new, so interesting, so good to be here in my old familiar surroundings, in my church, in my city, in my country, among my loved ones. You have felt this too, haven't you, that you return from a holiday not with the anxious feeling that it is a pity it is over, but with the joyful excitement of seeing your home, your old work, with new eyes.
Yes: that is the secret of wonder: the eye, the vision with which one looks at the things and circumstances of life. And the great thing is that it doesn't necessarily require a trip abroad. One's vision can be renewed without it, because life is full of wonders, we just don't notice them. It's not the miracles that are missing in the modern world, it's the ability to notice them. Shakespeare could have written a play about the smallest everyday events that take place in our most intimate surroundings and which we get over as insignificant, unimportant things... A painter friend of mine once told me that his job as an artist is to reveal the beauty of everyday life that others are blind to. He decided to try to find ten picturesque motifs on the path of everyday life that led to his workplace and had a wonderful time of discovery. It was beautiful when a small child tried with great devotion to help his mother off the bus; a little girl with blonde hair, the sun shining around her head in a golden halo; a street urchin with a cloak of camouflage who stealthily pressed the bell at every gate and strolled on... Interesting pictures on the street... Most amateur photographs fail not because the distance, the time, the lighting is wrong, but because the photographer has no eye for the interesting. Oh, if only our eyes were really open, we would be amazed at how full of wonder the world around us is! And in turn: that wonder would sharpen our vision to see even more wonder.
But not everyone is a painter, to be able to marvel at beauty and interest where otherwise there are only ordinary, boring things. But it's not important to have skills. The secret of wonder depends on the eye, the angle of vision. It depends on the angle from which one looks. A simple example: once, someone visited an old castle museum where, among other things, ancient knightly pallets and costumes were on display. The person was completely absorbed in contemplating what he was seeing, transported back in his mind to the ancient age of chivalry, when suddenly he was awakened from his reverie by a voice: a woman, who was also contemplating the same old armoured armour, spoke up and said: 'Oh God, it would be terrible if I had to wipe these things down every day!' So you really won't discover any miracles in life.
And, my brethren, life is most wonderful when I try to see the world and myself from God's point of view. Then the world is truly full of a series of miracles! And that is the supreme secret of wonder! This is what the psalm we read is about, this is what the Apostle Paul talks about in the Word we read. The psalmist cannot help but be filled with a dreamy wonder that God cares for man. He looks up at the starry sky, his soul shudders at the stunning immensity of the universe, the mystery of immeasurable distances, of billions of unknown worlds - and there he stands, man, the speck of dust of nothingness! Compared to this unimaginably vast universe, indeed, "What is man?" He is indeed but an immeasurable drop in the gigantic ocean of space and time, a microscopic speck in the cosmic distance of millions of light-years and milky-way systems. And yet God cares for it, this nothing, this speck, this droplet! Isn't it a wonder? Oh, how wondrously great is God that he cares for me! And you too! It is indeed inconceivable, but it is so, that He holds us all to account, one by one, personally. He thinks of us, He knows us, He cares for us, as individuals. And just now, in the modern age, when the world's dimensions are expanding, when we have a much better idea of the infinity of the universe than the Psalmist had, when we are beginning to think on a planetary scale: let no one fear that he, the little one, the nobody, is less of a problem to God, less of a concern to Him than the Milky Way systems! Have we ever felt something of the adoring wonder which the Psalmist expressed in this way: what is man that you care for him? Indeed, "O most high Lord, our gracious God, how wonderful is thy name to us!"
Even if we consider that he not only cares for us, but loves us! The apostle Paul is amazed at this very thing! At how much that mighty God loves him! It is as if he were saying, "My brethren, I am then truly unworthy, last, despicable. I have been an enemy of God, I have troubled the Mother Church of God, I am who I am only by the grace of God! It is truly only by God's grace that I am at all, that I live, that I can serve, that I have purpose, meaning in my life. By the grace of God alone! This was the secret of the apostle Paul's whole life, the secret of his ministries of great achievements, the secret of his joy, his joy in the face of trials: this amazement at the grace of God! It was his whole being and all his thoughts: the wonder of God's grace! He could never come to terms with it!
But let me tell you: I know that God cares for me personally, that God loves me, that Jesus walked this earth, this little speck of created universe; and that he died here as he died: on the cross! And he rose again as he rose again on Easter morning. In the person of Jesus, God spoke to me personally, took my hand, looked me in the eye and told me He loved me! And the person, death and resurrection of Jesus is the tangible witness that the eternal God, Lord of infinite time and space, knows and loves you as his child. There is infinite emphasis on the speck of life that you are. You are closer to his heart than the whole universe. Free to reach out to Him through infinite space, He sees and grasps you. Free through the cosmic silence to lift your little voice to Him, to praise His holy name, free to bring your joys and sorrows, your petty little matters before Him, to talk to Him. He hears this child's voice and answers.
It is by the grace of God alone that you are what you are! Try for once to see your life from the perspective of grace: you will make new, surprising, interesting discoveries. You will discover, for example, with joyful amazement, that you have eyes, because even this is not self-evident, for it could happen that you are blind. But lo and behold, you see the sunlight, the shadows, the colours, your child's face. If you imagine that you could be deaf, every sound will seem like a miracle: the buzzing of the bees, the roar of the engine, the voice of your wife. If you look at another person from the perspective of grace, they will be different: new, interesting. You realize that there is no man who is worthless, no man who is nothing, no enemy of yours, only a man whom God cares for as much as he cares for you, whom God loves with a redeeming love as much as he loves you.
Yes, for him who lives life from the point of view of grace, perhaps death itself will be interesting, the most sublime, the most magnificent miracle! Do not let your capacity for wonder fade! Thus let us sing once again the first verse of Psalm 8:
O most high Lord, our gracious God,
How wonderful is thy name to us!
Great is thy glory in all the earth
Shall spread and ascend to the heavens.
(Psalm 8:1)
Amen!
Date: 17 November 1963.