The Moon, the Stars and Me

A Sermon by

The Rev. Paul Debenport

May 30, 2010

Here we are, at an interesting “point in time.”  For weeks now, we’ve been watching with mounting alarm and frustration as an ecological nightmare plays across our TV screens and our coastline in oozing, seemingly unstoppable slow motion.  Yet this week-end also signals the beginning of summer, the time when as many of us who can, get outside and get more and more in touch with the re-creating wonders of God’s good creation.  And into this point in time, this point of paradox, up pops in our lectionary readings for the day the exuberantly profound prayer of praise of Psalm 8.  We’ve already recited the New Revised Standard Version’s translation, and the King James Version is printed on your bulletin cover to take home, and now I’ll read from the poetic interpretation of Eugene Peterson’s The Message.  Please tune your hearts to this wondrous proclamation:

O God, brilliant Lord, Your name reverberates throughout the earth!

Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you; toddlers shout the songs

That drown out enemy talk and silence avenger babble.

I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous, your handmade sky-jewelry,

Moon and stars mounted in their settings.  Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,

Why do you bother with us?  Why take a second look our way?

Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods, bright with Eden’s dawn light.

You put us in charge of your handcrafted world, repeated to us your Genesis-charge,

Made us lords of the sheep and cattle, even animals out in the wild,

birds flying and fish swimming, whales singing in the ocean deeps.

O God, brilliant Lord,

your name echoes around the cosmos!

The Word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.

+     +     +

          There used to be a film at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. that was truly wondrous.  It wasn’t the gigantic IMAX film Flight that made me queasy, but one in a smaller theater on the second floor where you could go to discover the wonder of life in all its glory, from the smallest molecule to the vastness of the entire universe.

          As the film started, the camera hovered just over Miami, focused on a group of sunbathers.  This was long before Google Earth, but the film used Google’s now familiar technique.  Like a telescope in reverse, slowly the camera would pull back from the sunbathers, and suddenly, the whole of Miami Bay came into focus and then all of the United States.  Within seconds, you had lost sight of the sunbathers and were looking at a picture of the whole planet.  Then it got even better!  After a few minutes, the picture (still focused on the spot where the sunbathers lay) brought the solar system and then the whole Milky Way galaxy into focus.  In another few minutes, the galaxy had become just a tiny speck in the middle of the other 99 million galaxies that make up the universe.  Jaw dropping awe was the only possible response.

          But the film wasn’t over yet, for gradually the camera started to hone in on our galaxy, our solar system, then on the earth, the United States and finally back to Miami, with the sunbathers coming into full focus once more.  But this time the camera kept going.  It continued to magnify the picture, and after a few more minutes, it had entered the skin of the sunbathers right down to the molecular level.

Talk about “awesome wonder!”  Talk about a powerful testimony to the awesomeness of God’s creation, and even more significantly, what a powerful proclamation of the awesomeness of God the Creator, and the wonder that, insignificant atoms that we are in the grand scope of things, still the Sovereign Creator of all that was and is and shall be, cares about us, about you, about me, about all humankind![1]

          This is the kind of experience the author of Psalm 8 was reflecting upon, testifying about, wondering about.  This Psalm proclaims a deep truth that we all know—at least from time to time—but can’t really explain and don’t really understand in the intellectual sense of understanding.  When these “a-ha” moments happen, like the Psalmist, we just “stand under” it, swaddled in its profundity.  As one theologian puts it:  “The wonder of life defies explanation.  Yet there is wisdom, there is understanding.  Sometimes these come through articulation, but most often they are felt through inspiration.  The heart knows what minds suppose.”[2] So, when the holiness and graciousness of God shatter our defensive little shields, we spontaneously respond like the Psalmists here.  We simply exclaim a dumbstruck “Wow!” or a whispered “Thank you!” or sigh Help me!” or utter new resolve, praying: “Let me help you, God of Earth and all stars!”

God, the Creator of all, is so unfathomably great, and we are so ridiculously small.

Yet the God of moon and stars and molecules, is also the God of me, of you, of all.  God chooses a relationship with even us.  Why?  Or as Eugene Peterson put it:  “Why do you bother with us?”  Well, it’s not really explainable, but it is knowable.  I can only put the Psalmist “why” question with some other knowable mysteries:  Why does a parent choose to love a rebellious child?  Why sacrifice riches to help the poor?  Why preserve a wilderness for the flocks and flies, the minnows and muskrats, when it’s obviously not expedient or even explainable.  Because God cares.  Because it’s in God’s gracious nature to care.  Because we care.  Because, as creatures created in God’s image, it’s in our nature to care for earth and all stars, for crying babies and suffering seas, for everything God created and pronounced “good.”

          We do matter to God.  Not because of anything we have done.  No, too often we are so focused on ourselves as the center of everything, on expedient, immediate, self-gratification that we desecrate rather than sanctify God’s good earth and peoples.  That we matter to God can only be because of God’s amazing Grace and mind-boggling love.  And when awareness of God’s wondrous love crashes in on us, like the Psalmists, we can on sing and pray:  “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

+     +     +

          Remember that remarkable film that I described earlier?  It clearly makes the point that we humans matter.  It begins and ends with a picture of sunbathers, placing them in the context of the universe at one end and then in the context of molecules at the other.  The camera’s focus always comes back to them.  But it begins and ends with us only because we directed and produced it.  The message of our sacred text, however, is vastly different.  The Psalmist begins and ends with God.  In the beginning, God spoke and the creation came into being.  In the end, in Revelation 22, God speaks again, saying, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end,” which is why the Psalmist both begins and ends not with exclamations about sunbathers or any other human, not even with himself or herself, but  God.[3] 

Today’s gushing oil that reminds us of our propensity to contaminate God’s gift of the good earth and moon and stars and people is neither the first nor the last Word.  So open your hearts and eyes to God’s re-creative grace all around, over, and even in us.  Wonder at the full moon tonight.  Sometime this summer, stand under the stars on a moonless night and fail trying to count them all.  Be awestruck by a baby’s babbling; be made more tender and caring for all the earth and its peoples, laughing, praying, singing God’s praise:

“O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is you name in all the earth!

Amen.

At the Benediction:

          Crying babies?  Why did I include that?  Because the Psalmist included it, in Peterson’s version, “Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you….”  This line of the Psalm settled deep within me this week as I was privileged to share an “a-ha”, holy moment with one of our young families.  It happened in the most unlikely of places, a place laced with both terror and hope, but swaddled in love and faith—the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at UNMH.  Our newest members, Jaiden and Benjamin, each the size of my hand and wrist, weighing in at just over a pound each, are there valiantly fighting for life, surrounded by their loving parents, grandparent, pastors and deacons and caring Doctors and nurses and medical students throughout the week.  Frankly, it’s not the place one expects to perceive the grace and love of God.  But their mother did.  And we all did.  As we tenderly gazed at their tiny, tiny features, she sighed with wondrous awe:  “God is here.  How could anyone gaze at all these babies and not know God is here?  God is here with my babies.  They matter to God.  They matter to God.”  We circled their life-sustaining, plastic cocoons, holding hands, and prayed:  “Hold Jaiden and Benjamin in the palm of your hand, loving God.  Help them live.  Strengthen them, strengthen us, for they are safe with you, Gracious God, and so are we.  In Jesus name and power.  Amen.”

          Pray for Benjamin and Jaiden this week, and for their parents, for all in harms way all over this wondrous earth.  They and we matter to God, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last Word, now and forever.  And may the Lord bless and keep you and give you peace.  Amen.