The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 19, 2010
The Rev. M. Anthony Seel, Jr.
St. Andrew’s Church
Psalm 19:1-6
Crazy Love 1: “Stop Praying”
“Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival…”
Do these words sound faintly familiar? Perhaps if I add the first line that I purposely omitted you will be able to place them:
“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” [Cosmos, p. 1]
These words were penned just up the road from us in Ithaca by the world-renowned astronomer and Cornell professor Carl Sagan. He died in 1996. Sagan had an infectious enthusiasm for the cosmos and his contempt for religion is also well known.
Our psalmist also exhibits an infectious enthusiasm for the cosmos and also a great appreciation of the Creator of all things.
v. 1 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
The heavens above and the earth beneath our feet and all around us speak of the glory of God.
About his childhood, Sagan writes,
“When I was little, I lived in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in the City of New York… Even with an early bedtime, in winter you could sometimes see the stars. I would look at them, twinkling and remote, and wonder what they were. I would ask older children and adults who would only reply, “They’re lights in the sky, kid.” I could see they were lights in the sky. But what were they? Just small hovering lamps? Whatever for? I felt a kind of sorrow for them: a commonplace whose strangeness remained somehow hidden from my incurious fellows. There had to be a deeper answer.
“As soon as I was old enough, my parents gave me my first library card. I think the library was on 85th Street, an alien land. Immediately I asked the librarian for something on stars. Se returned with a picture book displaying portraits of men and women with names like Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. I complained, and for some reason then obscure to me, she smiled and found another book – the right kind of book. I opened it breathlessly and read until I found it. The book said something astonishing, a very big thought. It said that the stars were suns, only very far away. The Sun was a star, but close up.
“Imagine that you took the Sun and moved it so far away that it was just a tiny twinkling point of light. How far away would you have to move it? I was innocent of the notion of angular size. I was ignorant of the inverse square law for light propagation. I had not a ghost of a chance of calculating the distance to the stars. But I could tell that if the stars were suns, they had to be very far away – farther away than 85th Street, farther away than Manhattan, farther away, probably, than New Jersey. The Cosmos was much bigger than I had guessed.” [ibid., pp. 133-134]
Psalm 19 is attributed to King David of Israel. David, living some 3,000 years before Carl Sagan, demonstrates the same kind of wonder for the cosmos.
v. 2 Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
Day and night reveal God to those who have eyes of faith.
Last week at Pavilion #4 in Arnold Park for our church picnic you could look out and see
tree tops, mountains, hills, and a valley – greenery all around. You could hear birds
chirping, you could feel a light breeze blowing. There was a bit of chill in the air.
When you step outside, what do you notice? What do you experience? What do you
observe? The psalmist hears a great anthem of praise to God emanating from the
heavens.
There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.
Johannes Kepler endured two lonely years in Maulbronn, Germany, but it was there that
the young Kepler was set on his life’s course. Aided by the findings of the proud and
pretentious Imperial Mathematician of the Holy Roman Empire, Tycho Brahe, Kepler
discovered the laws of planetary motion. He recorded his observations in a book he
titled The Harmonies of the World, where he wrote about a “symphony of voices” of the
planets in motion.
v. 4 Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
In the cosmos as on earth, nature speaks though not with words. The ancients called the
song of the cosmos the music of the spheres, the universal music, just as music has been
called the universal language. For Kepler, who lived on the cusp of the seventeenth
century,
“The heavenly motions… are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived
not by the ear but by the intellect…” [John Banville: Kepler]
For the greatest scientists in history the universe pointed to a Creator. This is true for
Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Michael
Farraday, Kelvin, and Max Planck. Today we can point to Francis Collins who leads the
Human Genome Project and many others who see no incompatibility between science
and Christian faith.
What captures the news is Carl Sagan or more recently Stephen Hawking. However, there are many world class scientists today who are Christians.
So, again, when you step outside, what do you notice? What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? When you step outside, do you “taste and see that the Lord is good?” When you observe creation do you have a sense of awe?
God gave us two books to read – the book of nature and the Bible. By the way, in theology we call these two books general revelation and special revelation.
David looked at the sky and observed,
vv. 5-6 In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.
In the great cosmic sea of the heavens God made a place for the sun. Every day we can observe the sun’s trek from east to west. For David, the heavens, the earth, day and night were awe-inspiring. They were awe-inspiring in themselves, and even more so because they pointed to the Creator of all things.
In the first chapter of our companion book, Crazy Love, Francis Chan mentions that there are 350 billion galaxies in the universe, Isn’t that an extraordinary number? Did you know that the average elm tree has approximately six million leaves? That’s a lot of raking! The God who created all things is infinite. The other book, the Bible, tells us that.
In a few sentences before and after the first four verses of Psalm 19 on page 28 of Crazy Love, Francis Chan writes,
“Whatever God’s reasons for such diversity, creativity, and sophistications in the universe, on earth, and in our own bodies, the point of it all is His glory. God’s art speaks for Himself, reflecting who He is and what He is like…
“This is why we are called to worship Him. His art, His handiwork, and His creation all echo the truth that He is glorious. There is no other like Him. He is the King of Kings, the Beginning and the End, the One who was and is and is to come. I know you’ve heard this before, but I don’t want you to miss it.”
On page 30, Chan quotes A.W. Tozer:
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
What comes into your mind when you think about God?
If your view of God is big, you’re going to want to worship and praise Him. Our God is more immense than our greatest thoughts of Him and when we realize that our love for Him grows. Our desire to serve Him expands.
The title of chapter one of Crazy Love is provocative. The title is “Stop Praying.” The idea behind the title is to stop talking at God and spend more time listening to Him. This thought is captured in the first verse of Psalm 62 – “For God alone my soul in silence waits, from him comes my salvation.”
In silence allow your view of God to increase. Allow His presence to fill you.
This will without question change your life!
