This sermon was preached at First Presbyterian Church in Ashland, OR on Sunday, February 5, 2012. The lectionary texts I used in the sermon were Psalm 147:1-11, 20c and Isaiah 40.21-31. This was the first time, since I began preaching, that I’ve been assigned to preach on the same texts that I preached 3 years ago. That sermon was entitled “God of the Grasshoppers.” I think there were some similarities, but it was a different sermon.
In one of my seminary classes, our professor led us in an activity where we took a piece of paper and folded it into three sections. In the first section, we had to draw what our image of God was as a child. In the second section, we drew what our image of God was as a teenager, and in the third section, we drew what our current image of God was. It’s a really interesting, and eye-opening, activity to have to try and draw your images of God, and then share them with other people. If we had time this morning, I’d ask you to do the activity, but feel free to draw them on your bulletin if you’d like.
Doing this activity caused us to really reflect on who God is…and whenever we do that, we’re also reminded a bit about who we are.
I think both of our passages this morning present us with an opportunity to reflect on who God is, and who we are. Astrophysicist and cosmologist Carl Sagan has written extensively about our place in the world and the universe. This past week, while the college group met for dinner and had a discussion about this passage from Isaiah, one of our students, Grant, brought up Carl Sagan and referenced a quote from Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot, which refers to a photo that Voyager 1 famously took of the earth from 3.7 billion miles…and that pale blue dot is Earth. Sagan writes:
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.â€
Carl Sagan is also quoted as saying:
“For as long as there been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.â€
I don’t know if you relate to those quotes from Sagan or not, but that is definitely one way of thinking about humanity and our significance, or insignificance in the cosmos. The passage from Isaiah seems to convey something similar in verse 22 when it says that the inhabitants of the earth are like locusts…the NRSV says “grasshoppers.†We are like grasshoppers…which grow to about 1-7cm in their adult lives…and…that’s not all that impressive.
What is impressive, according to both the Psalmist and the prophet Isaiah, is the creator God. The Psalmist tells us that God counts the stars by number, covers the skies with clouds, and makes rain for the earth. The prophet Isaiah instructs us to look up at the sky and consider: who created these? Isaiah answers for us: “The one who brings out their attendants one by one, summoning each of them by name. Because of God’s great strength and mighty power, not one is missing.â€
In these passages, we get a sense of the awesome and mighty power of God. To use a fancy theological term, the transcendence of God. We are told of the mighty deeds of God, the creator God, the God who can be compared to no one…the Psalmist sings “Praise the Lord! Because it is good to sing praise to our God.â€
And perhaps we could leave it at that. Humanity, God’s creation, is small, and rather insignificant…like the grasshoppers…everything we know about our existence and our history…happening on an insignificant little pale blue dot in the universe…and God is transcendent and filled with majesty and awe and wholly other from us…and that’s what our relationship looks like.
But I think we’d be missing something there…we’d be forgetting the part where we read that God summons each of them by name. The Psalmist writes that God counts the stars by number, giving each one a name. The Psalmist goes on to say the Lord helps the poor…God gives food to the animals – even to the baby ravens when they cry out.
That’s the beauty of our understanding of God and how we relate to God. God, the almighty Creator, is still a God who summons each one of us by name…a God who cares for us, watches over us, and who knows each and every one of us.
For the Israelites who were in captivity in Babylon during the time when Isaiah 40 was written, that was just what they needed to hear. That while their situation was not at all what they had hoped or dreamed for…they needed to be reminded of the fact that the God who had orchestrated the heavens and the cosmos, that same God was going to call each of them by name and would forever be with them.
“Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard?â€â€¨â€¨This is the refrain from our passage in Isaiah…a refrain for those in exile who, at one point in their lives, DID know…they HAD heard. But the weight of their captivity had bore down on them so much that they had, indeed, begun to forget…they had a memory problem.
There are times in our lives when we have memory problems more than others. Being new parents, and having a son who is now 5 weeks old, Sarah and I have begun to have memory problems. In fact, the first week we were back home, Sarah did the laundry, and was taking the clothes out of the dryer when she realized she had forgotten to put any soap in the washing machine.
I also tend to have a memory problem when it’s 3am and I’m holding a screaming, writhing little baby boy who won’t stop fussing and calm down…and I tend to forget that this is in fact my son whom I love and would do anything for…my memory tends to fail me in those moments and I don’t find him to be that cute…at all, and I can forget how much fun he is..
We all have times in our lives when we have memory problems. When financially difficult times because the norm, when marriages and relationships break up, when friends and loved ones get sick, when we lose our jobs, when natural disasters strike and innocent people are killed…and on, and on, and on…these can be some of the times when we forget that there is an all-powerful God who calls us each by name.
When the weight of our daily problems and struggles become too much for us, we too might join the Israelites and cry out, “My way is hidden from the Lord, my God ignores my predicament.†Our memories can fail us and we can forget that the God who created us and redeems us, is the same God who promises to sustain us and be with us through all things.
And so sometimes we need people in our lives who can ask us, “Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you understood since the earth was founded?â€â€¨â€¨In a sense, it’s a reality check. It’s the reminder and the realization that while God is an awesome, powerful and transcendent God…God is also here, with us. To use another fancy theological word, we can talk about the immanence of God. God is immanent, involved, present, comes alongside all of us on our journeys of faith, wherever those journeys take us, and calls us by name.
That reality check is one way that we can help our memories.