The launch of the Artemis 2 mission has re-ignited in our national consciousness the wonder of our planet and of the human race. The four astronauts on board Artemis who returned to earth on Friday travelled farther from earth than any human being before them. Seeing the earth we live on from that distance does something to your perspective. In 1968, the first humans to orbit the moon in Apollo 8 immediately quoted Genesis 1 to the world. From their far away perspective, they could clearly see the beauty and order in our Earth that spoke of a Creator. Almost 60 years later, Victor Glover the pilot of the Artemis 2 was asked to say something to the world about Earth on Easter morning. He said, “We are so far from Earth and looking at the beauty of creation. I read the Bible and I read all the amazing things that were done for us who were created. We have this amazing thing, this spaceship called Earth, that was created to give us a place to live in the universe. You think what we are doing is special, but you are special. In all the nothingness of the universe, we have this place where we get to exist together." That was the perspective 230,000 miles from earth. The ironic beauty of Glover’s long distance perspective was that meanwhile on that blue spaceship called Earth, war was raging, people were suffering, people were dying. Those two different perspectives on the morning celebrating Easter when everything changed for the human race makes us ask the question, “What do we do with the world God made? How should we see it?” It’s easy to wax hopeful in wonder when you are hundreds of thousands of miles away. But what about when we are living down here? After Genesis 3, and until Revelation 21, our world is now a world of wonder, goodness and beauty mixed with chaos, death and evil. Like the astronauts’ perspective, Genesis 1 allowed us pull way back and look in wonder at the creation of Earth as a whole. And this morning, Genesis 2 will zoom in on earth on Day 6, to a close up of when human life was born. Genesis 2 helps us begin to answer the questions: “What happened to that wonderful world that God made?” and, “How do you love something beautiful and wonderful that has been ruined and not yet fully redeemed?” The answer is what Glover told the nation in an earlier interview: ”We all need Jesus, whether on Earth or circling the moon.” Let’s look at Genesis 2 this morning.
