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Sunday after Ascension Day - 1 June 2025

Have you ever wondered why Christians write God with a capital G? And why many Jews don’t write the word at all, just G-D with a slash? It’s sometimes said that the ancient Hebrews were the first monotheists, which is not quite true. And that they were the first to believe in a God who was the maker of heaven and earth, which is also not quite true. What is true is that they were the first to agree that the maker of heaven and earth was the only object of worship. God with a capital G, because there is no other god.

But to worship the Creator alone is not easy. And it’s just as difficult now as it was 2 and 3 and 4 thousand years ago. Baal and Marduk and Zeus no longer claim our worship. But sex does. Good looks. Money. Status. Other human beings - Jordan Peterson, or whoever we happen to be in love with, or (most frightful of all) our precious perfect children.

As an American novelist, the late David Foster Wallace, famously told a group of graduating students: everyone worships. You don’t get a choice about whether to worship. But you do get a choice about what to worship. So: why choose the Maker of heaven and earth?

First let’s define our terms. If I asked you who is the founder of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge - easy. Edmund Gonville and John Caius. But if I asked you: who is the maker of this college? We’d say: Architects made it. Builders made it. Donors. The fellows, over generations. And those who study here. Not to mention the staff who keep it fed and clean and running. All makers of Caius.

Now let’s go back even further in time. 17 hundred years ago, in AD325, the bishops of all the churches got together, and agreed a statement of what Christians believe. The Creator of heaven and earth - so the bible begins, as we’ve just heard, and so the creed does too. But the word the creed uses for Creator is not the word you’d expect. The obvious choice would be ktistes, Greek for “founder”. However, that word is tied up in problems about how the second person of the Trinity is involved in creation and thus the status of his divinity, so instead they choose a more general word, unbiblical but suggestive: “maker’. In Greek poietes. God the poet, God the craftsman, of heaven and earth.

Conjuring whole new worlds is certainly the vocation of poets, as well as founders. But while a founder has authority and power and stability, all attributes of God, a founder seldom gets his or her hands dirty. A craftman, though - she has the paint under her fingernails. As God in creation divides earth from land, sea from sky; so the craftsman separates out these words, this shade of oil, or piece of timber. Discerning, shaping, and not just tending
- attending. So that there is not one letter or quaver or chip of stone anywhere in what he has made that he does not know to last molecule.

To worship that - the minute attention, the scarcely recognised being that holds each tiniest thing in being - that is a radical act. We live in a world of antagonisms, fuelled by the idiot-boxes in our pockets that let us indulge the worst of being human. Display, tribalism, sanctimony, the vicious ganging up bred of total callousness towards people who are no more to us than pixels on a screen, a generic opinion, gone in a moment; fair game, then, in the violent video game our interactions have become. Hatred has always been a product of these things: distance, and generalisation.

To recall ourselves to the divine miracle of a thing’s sheer existence, the mystery of each corner of them, good and bad and every tiny nuance in between. To know them as the maker knows them - with intimacy. That is supremely costly. And - it makes violence impossible. Intimacy is the only truly radical perspective.

And at a particular moment that intimacy of the Maker with his creation takes a new form. God becomes a human being, an event imagined by the great queer theologian James Alison as Rossini first conjuring the entire world of an opera. And then one day, walking on stage himself to sing the tenor part. The reason why the whole thing exists, is there, sharing the breath and sweat of the singers, their weariness and elation, one of them.

It shouldn’t surprise us that when the Maker of heaven and earth is born into a human family, it’s a family of craftsmen. Joseph is a tektwn, someone who works with his hands. And Jesus learns to work with his hands as well.

Perhaps laying bricks or smoothing wood with his father. Perhaps from his mother. One of my favourite paintings, in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, shows Jesus sitting on the ground with Mary while she teaches him to use a needle and thread. Women’s work. Making. Mending, joining, strengthening, beautifying.

Jesus remembers those lessons. All his life, that’s what he did. Touch, heal. Unite, restore. Bring to life. We see it in today’s reading from John’s gospel. Jesus re-creating the creation. Taking the dust of the earth in his hands and re-fashioning a man, whole and sentient. The work of God.

And Christ, in turn, teaches us. Attending to things in all their complexity. Nurturing them in their fragility. Defending their existence as if existence were the highest good. The Maker of heaven and earth not telling us, but showing us that we - our hearts, our hands - are part of that divine project of making.

God established the heavens and the earth - and he goes on creating it. Who alone knows perfectly, loves unstintingly, heals completely. He is the reason by which everything exists. And he gives us reason to decide - do we believe that Being itself is to be honoured and treasured above all else? And all beings honoured for God’s sake?

Well, if you believe something, you live as though it were true. You align your thoughts, your words, your actions with it. You risk things - your desires, your body, your money - stake your all on that truth. I don’t know what you believe. It may be that you don’t yet know what you believe. But I believe in one God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the wildly inventive, gloriously unstoppable artist of new life, new life, new life. I’m only one person. But two and a half billion people believe in the Maker of heaven and earth. And no one who puts their trust in him has ever been sorry.