Saint Paul’s Pod: God's Grandeur

The book of Revelations depicts a new heaven and earth full of the grandeur of God. How can we keep hope as we exist in the meantime? We sustain our hope through Jesus’ commandment to love one another. We live toward the new world by loving one another and keeping an eye out for the good that breaks down barriers of evil and shines through into the present world.

Fun fact: This week’s sermon was inspired by the Gerard Hopkins poem, “God’s Grandeur”.

God's Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins

1844 – 1889

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.