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Today is the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost — the year slopes toward All Saints Day and Advent. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I’m frightened. I have spent the last week trying to focus on how I am called to express my faith in a sermon amidst all the insanity, the treat to democracy, the crisis of Christian nationalism, and the growing threat of fascism in the United States. But it isn’t just this week. I’ve been anxious and worried since the rise of the Tea Party after the 2008 election of Barak Obama. Today two things stand out — people are afraid and exhausted. I’m afraid and exhausted. But, as honest an assessment as that is of this moment, it is important to point out that fascism thrives on both of those emotions. In short, the authoritarians among us are achieving their political goal. One of the strategies of fascism is wearing people down. How to push back? Many good people have asked that question in these weeks. Do we as Christians have the answer? The Hebrew Bible readings — Job 38:1-7 and Psalm 104 — in this week’s lectionary offer an answer to that question: Wonder is an antidote to fear. Job 38 is one of my favorite Old Testament passages. As I tiredly considered what to share this week, I stumbled upon a post written two years ago by Diana Butler Bass. The news was difficult then, too. Especially the then-recent Uvalde school shooting. But, amid painful tragedies, something beautiful happened: NASA released the first photographs from the James Webb telescope. She writes: I invite you to recall wonder. The wonder of new discoveries. The wonder of the universe. Let wonder fill your soul. Breathe in wonder. Rest with wonder. We need wonder to make it through the days ahead. Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. — Abraham Heschel I think that every discovery of the world plunges us into jubilation, — Dorothee Soelle “On Stars and the News,” originally published July 13, 2022 When NASA released the first pictures from its new telescope yesterday, the world seemed to stop for a moment to gaze — and gasp — at that which has been hidden from us. “Today, we present humanity with a groundbreaking new view of the cosmos from the James Webb Space Telescope – a view the world has never seen before,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “These images, including the deepest infrared view of our universe that has ever been taken, show us how Webb will help to uncover the answers to questions we don’t even yet know to ask; questions that will help us better understand our universe and humanity’s place within it.” The photographs are beautiful — gas cliffs sheltering new born stars, a four-billion-year-old star cluster appearing to dance across a dark sky, a star shedding its dust toward all corners of the universe, and five galaxies of such luminosity that they seem to be angelic beings. I cried. Wonder. Jubilation. Those are the words of Abraham Heschel and Dorothee Soelle. Such things bring us human beings to our knees. As the Psalmist once cried out, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” Awe is the first response to seeing the expanse of the heavens. And, as a scholar of religion, I’m fairly certain that’s the origin of religion itself. Some ancient ancestor of ours looked up at the night sky and said, “Wow.” But there’s a second response as well — perspective. Looking at pictures of events from four billion or more years ago puts a different frame around our problems, adjusts our attention, and calls us to see our lives more clearly. Yesterday’s news was also filled with an array of really bad stories. Fires in California threatening the world’s oldest trees. The horrible video of the Uvalde school shooting. Fallout from the abortion ruling. High gas and food prices. A black man’s body riddled with bullets. The January 6 hearings. Climate change, gun violence, the rights of women, inflation adding to economic inequality, racial violence, and the crisis of democracy — a single day in America. The specifics may change over days, weeks, or months. But the news seems on a miserable gerbil wheel of the same stories over years — maybe even a decade or two. Nothing changes except the details in this endless groundhog day of despair. People are in a foul mood, unable to process the anger, fear, and pain because it comes at us so fast. If I’m honest, living in this horrible cycle of suffering, even generally optimistic me has become increasingly like Job — the biblical character whose entire life is plagued with one terrible thing after another — in a culture of Jobs. For my sighing comes like my bread, The biblical book of Job is based on an ancient story about evil centered on a question: can faith survive the worst suffering imaginable? In more than thirty chapters, once-prosperous Job experiences the loss of his home, land, wealth, health, companions, and family. “My whole being loathes my life,” Job laments, “Why from the womb did You take me?” To heap misery upon misery, the three worst friends in recorded history try to cheer Job up by offering unwanted advice and lecturing him with the most inane theology imaginable. Job argues and rages, alternating between anguish and fury at his situation, his friends, himself, and God. Finally, when things reach the emotional bottom, God — the Voice from the Whirlwind — speaks to Job’s complaint. The response begins with a question: “Where were you when I founded earth?” Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Can you tie the bands of the Pleiades, Who has placed in the hidden parts wisdom, And there it is: perspective. Lift your gaze, Job. Look to the stars. We’d be wrong, however, if we think God is telling Job to simply stop complaining because God is all powerful. This isn’t a “shut up you foolish mortal and let me fix it” speech. The Voice begins with the stars and extends its lyrical celebration to all of creation — from the birth of the cosmos to the birth of every animal, the courses of nature. In this hymn of the cosmos, God is birthing presence in and through all, from the far heavens to the smallest bird — everything is woven into divine wisdom. The answer to suffering isn’t that Big God will defeat evil. The answer to suffering is that since the creation of the stars, sacred intention and presence is the very essence of existence. We are all of the same stuff — God-stuff, star-stuff, soil-stuff, us-stuff — and this knowledge is what finally vanquishes suffering and evil (called “Behemoth” and “Leviathan” in Job). The complexity and beauty of the cosmos, the deep interrelation of everything, alive with God’s compassionate creativity, is what ultimately saves Job. He learns to see differently; his perspective changes. “By the ear’s rumor I heard of You,” Job cried out to God following the vision of creation, “and now my eye has seen You!” In effect, suffering and evil are the gods that defeat us when we mortals forget the reality of creation and the vastness of the universe. When we lose the sense of our lives in the cosmic web. Only the Voice can call us back to the truth of things — we are part of something much larger than ourselves. When NASA released the pictures, I couldn’t stop looking at them. By the ear’s rumor I heard of You, and now my eye has seen You! And, for just a short time, the universe seemed to reorder itself. I saw things differently, and I knew that more is afoot in the world than the machinations so breathlessly reported on cable news. “Awe,” wrote Abraham Heschel, “enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.” To truly see the universe is a great gift — and a transformative responsibility. In seeing, we widen the horizon of possibility of caring for each other, of committing ourselves to healing and peace, of living free from hatred and violence. When we see the very dust clouds in which our own world was born, the ancient stardust that may have fallen through space to make the earth and us puts things in perspective. The “veil of triviality” has been rent. May we never go back to the old way of seeing. Look to the stars. For this land in all its wonder, for each city, farm and town, For your peace and love unending, breaking barriers that divide; For your hand to lead and guide us, for your work in history, May we be a nation seeking ways that are both wise and fair, |