We had our first Wedding of 2009 on 20th February - although, we had a Marriage Blessing on New Year's Day - the very first of some fourteen get-togethers in the year. The bride on the occasion was Sharon Greer who was a member of my first Confirmation Class as Vicar of Glencraig. I hope she’ll not mind me telling you this, but when I had found out her marriage for the Parish Register, it turned out that she was nearly thirty! I was shocked at this and I replied, “Sharon, you’re nearly as old as I am!” That’s perhaps stretching the truth a bit. This thirteen year old girl when I arrived here, was not much more than thirteen in my mind’s eye, even after all the years had passed by. You know what I mean! Another member of that same class is getting married on 28^th August, Leanne Jones. So, it is such a pleasure to be marrying people who I have known for so long and have been a part of this Church practically all their lives - in a sense, ‘home-grown’ brides.

Yet other Weddings this year include couples from England, Australia, and the USA. It’s not the first time we’ve covered the globe, from home-grown to about as far away as you can get, with hatch, match and sadly dispatch, but increasingly world communication and organising is becoming so simple and easy and it continues to help make the world a very small place indeed.

When my mother’s family left Dublin for America in 1928, there was a kind of wake in the house; it was as if there had been a death in the family, because they were not expected to see certain family members ever again.

That’s one perspective.

Yet, however large or small we perceive the world to be, in the great scheme of things, the world is actually just a blip on the landscape of the galaxy; like a grain of sand on the seashore. The vast distance from splitting the atom to the furthest star is immeasurable, and our finite minds cannot really take it in. How can a blot on the universal landscape be of such importance and beauty? Our little world is, seemingly, literally light years in development and intelligence compared to what we know, at present, of the rest of the universe.

I have often quoted to you that verse from the Psalms that Buzz Aldrin read out on his way to the first moon landing in 1969 – as a child, one of the most phenomenal, breathtaking, events ever to have happened, and forty years on this year, it still is! “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him.

What is man? If the cosmos was created by our loving God, why should he spend so much time and energy on this tiny little blot on his cosmic landscape? How can we be of such seemingly huge significance, given the scale of it all?

It’s great just throwing out random questions to help us all think and ponder upon! It’s easy to ask the questions, but slightly more difficult to provide straightforward answers.

I’m not proposing a ‘Science verses Bible’ debate which is a favourite hobby-horse of mine, and one I’ve gone through before. I just want us to consider the wonder of, for example, such an event as the Transfiguration, as we have it in our Gospel reading this morning. It is some kind of cosmic event. It is a revealing to ordinary mortals the importance and significance of this person called Jesus of Nazareth. The disciples could not believe or understand what they were witnessing, and we can hardly get our heads around it two thousand years later. You know, God only speaks twice in the New Testament and both times he says the same thing! “This is my Son, whom I love!”

I’m often a gasp at the lines in Graham Kendrick’s well-known Hymn, ‘The Servant King’, “Come see his hands and his feet, the scars that speak of sacrifice, hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered...” How can that be?

You know, just as the vastness of the universe blows my mind, the fact that “hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered” equally just blows me away. ‘What is man that you are mindful of him?’

I have a lot of time for Rev. Dr. Ron Elsdon, Rector of St. Bart’s in Stanmillis. He gives the evangelical wing of the Church a good name, because he is prepared to think! He took a Holy Week series here in Glencraig a few years ago. In an article he wrote in the Church of Ireland Gazette, entitled, “The Genius of Charles Darwin”, he writes, “The integrity of science education is at stake on the one hand, and the voice of reasonable biblical Christianity on the other. But who is going to do the fighting? Where are the Christians whose intellectual grasp of their faith has moved on since their days in Sunday School?” Good question!

Has your intellectual grasp of your faith moved on since you days in Sunday School? I hope so; in fact, I know so! In a lecture Ron Elsdon gave quite recently, he said, “What is urgently needed from the Christian community, including its evangelical constituency, is a far more rigorous handling of our scriptures”. Isn’t that a great word, ‘rigorous’? That statement has huge implications in how we interpret Scripture in our modern world and how we view certain conditions of men and women.

It’s nice to have everything sown up in nice neat little parcels; to have pat answers for every eventuality. However, such a stance as that leaves no room for mystery, wonder and awe. Life and science and intellect tell us that there is so much more to come, and I look forward to it with great excitement and joy. To ‘rigorously study the scriptures’ has huge implications for all of us and the way we behave and the way we treat various factions of our Church community, and, indeed all those we meet with other faiths.

When you read your Bibles, it is meant to blow your minds. It is not meant to endorse previous, traditional prejudices that you may have been brought up with; it is meant to do quite the opposite. It is meant to blow your mind! Read it with an open mind, ready to learn new things and see what happens.

I leave you with and amazing quote from one of the greatest scientists that has ever existed on this planet, and his name is Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder, and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.