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| "*Dark Starry Skies*" by Parée, on Flickr |
Genesis 15:1-6
After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” But the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-12
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old—and Sarah herself was barren—because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, “as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.”
Luke 12:32-40
[Jesus said:] “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves. But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
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Do you remember the first time that you looked up and saw the stars? And I don’t mean saw a few stars up in the sky, but the first time that you really saw the stars?
When you grow up in the Chicago suburbs like I did, you don’t really understand what stars are all about. You can look up and see some on a clear night, sure, but they are always hovering above the orange glow of city light pollution across the horizon. You see stars, but you don’t understand the vastness of the sky.
You have to go on vacation to rural Wisconsin, or a mission trip to El Paso, Texas, or take a summer job that requires a weekend retreat at a camp north of Duluth, Minnesota, or lead a church trip to Tanzania and sleep outside your tents one night. For me, those places are where I really saw the stars for the first time all over again. They are the places where I could see stars stacked on top of stars, where constellations blurred into a background of relentless specks of light, where the stars were truly uncountable, swirling into patterns, shimmering with different colors and strengths of light, where shooting stars cut across my view over and over and over again.
Stars have always captured the imagination of artists and poets and philosophers.
Vincent van Gogh, for example, once said, "The night is even more richly colored than the day. . . . If only one pays attention to it, one sees that certain stars are citron yellow, while others have a pink glow or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expiating on this theme, it should be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.”
And Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal, "When I consider how, after sunset, the stars come out gradually in troops from behind the hills and woods, I confess that I could not have contrived a more curious and inspiring sight.”
And then we have rocket engineer Wernher von Braun who reminisces, "For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.”
The stars and the sky capture our imagination in a way that many other thing cannot. The wideness of the sky reminds us of our smallness. The movement of the stars across the sky reminds us of the turn of the earth, the days, the seasons. The depth of stars beyond stars opens our imaginations to the infinite reaches of the cosmos. And if we let it, the night sky can open our hearts to the impossible vastness of God.
We might today consider Abraham our Biblical patron saint of stargazing.
Here is a man who has been plucked from his home, following God into a new land and a new future beyond anything that he can imagine. God promises Abraham the impossibility of conceiving a child at his advanced age - a child who who will not just be an heir, but will be the beginning of a legacy of ancestors too numerous to count - and this is a miracle promise beyond anything Abraham has reason to trust or expect. God makes a covenant with Abraham, that he will be the father of many nations and that God will remain faithful to these people whom he has chosen - a covenant that is unprecedented, a promise of which Abraham cannot hope to see the fulfillment.
Abraham is held up as a model of faith because he puts a reckless trust and hope in God’s future even when that future, like the sky itself, is too vast to take in, too open-ended to understand, too impossible to comprehend.
Anna Shirey, in her reflection titled, “A Definition of Faith: Seeing What Isn’t There,” talks about Abraham’s star-gazing as the moment of his coming into true faith. She writes,
“God directs [Abraham] to look to the heavens, to comprehend the vastness, the infinity, of the stars….[Abraham’s] mind is overwhelmed and silenced, so his heart can open to unanticipated blessing. This is the moment, I think, when Abram’s faith goes from…[merely] believing [that] what has occurred in the past will happen again…to something deeper [that is,] believing [that] what has never occurred will happen for the first time.…If we want to walk on this faith journey we must look beyond our comprehension, set aside our history or prediction for the future, and allow ourselves to be swept up in the mystery of new creation. Looking at the stars is a good start!When Abraham looked up at the stars, he did not see a clear vision of his future, laid out in neat and rational terms. He looked up and saw a clear vision of sky without end, a world too vast to comprehend, and a God all-surpassing who could be known and loved but never boxed in or fully understood. For Abraham, true faith was not merely a matter of trusting God to be faithful in all the ways that God had already proven to be faithful. For Abraham, true faith meant trusting that God would be faithful in new ways and unexpected ways, ways yet to be seen or imagined.
We have that beautiful opening verse in our Hebrews reading today: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This verse speaks Abraham’s truth and our truth, because it reminds us that faith opens our hearts to the vast power of God to speak light and life into being, and the vast wonder of God to speak amazement and miracle and possibility into a world of impossibility.
Faith is not merely trust that God exists. Faith is not just hope of what might be. Faith is not just a comforting assurance of God’s presence.
Faith is the deep hope that God will act beyond our imaginations; faith is deep conviction that the future is wildly open-ended but yet in God’s hands. Faith is the space between the known and the unknown. It is the distance between what is what will be. Faith is the courage to tell to our rational brains that surprises and miracles do exist. Faith is the courage to tell the world that good will yet prevail over evil, no matter how impossible it seems.
Faith is clinging with unwavering trust to the promise of the future that God has given us - a future that we cannot yet see, but a future grounded in a loving relationship with a Creator who has proven, time and time again, to remain faithful and gracious and compassionate to all that he has made. For no matter how wide open and vast the future, God has put us and our world on a trajectory of salvation.
Because generations past Abraham, God again defied the expectations of his faithful people. While they were still in exile, God promised the Israelites a savior, one who would restore peace, who would bring justice and wholeness and order to the world, who would repair and reestablish the people’s relationship with God. The exiles, bound as we all are by our limited human imaginations, believed that God would send them a wise, mighty, compassionate political hero who would bring about this revolution.
But defying all expectation, God instead birthed his kingdom through the birth of a tiny baby who was no political warrior but who, instead, was God himself, in-the-flesh, Jesus Christ. And while the people expected revolution, God acted bigger and more impossibly and gave them resurrection instead. God in Christ promises us a future bigger than merely returning the world to working order; God promises to carry all creation from death into new and everlasting life.
This is why we can’t just talk about faith in the past, looking backward to the ways God has proven faithful. This is why we can’t just define faith as belief in God. Because God is too big for that, and creation and salvation are too big for that.
Look up at the stars and count them, if you can! How much greater is the God who created them! How much greater is this God who exceeds expectation, who acts beyond our wildest dreams, who shows up in creation in ways we could never have anticipated! Faith means believing that nothing is impossible for God. Faith means believing the vast and unlikely promise of life after death. Faith means walking with our heads held high into a future that God is preparing for us - a future that is beautiful and unexpected and impossible to chart, but a future that is filled with promises of life and restoration and salvation for all things.
Jesus says, "Do not fear, little flock, for it is God's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." This is the assurance of our faith. We do not fear, because we, with Abraham and all our ancestors in faith, are already inheritors of God’s kingdom and inheritors of all of the unimaginable, impossible, extraordinary, unfathomable unknowns therein.
We have faith and this is why we do not have to fear. If we trust that it really is God's good pleasure - and intention - to give us the kingdom, then we are free to carry less with us, to build up fewer barns around us; free to make fewer "worst case scenario" plans, free from the a politics of doom, free to set aside our fears....and free to ready ourselves and our world for the the coming of God’s kingdom which is out there ahead of us, even if we cannot see the ending. Because Jesus assures us that everything that has been promised to us is certain to be ours.
Like all our ancestors in faith, we find ourselves living as strangers in strange land, where our hope for God’s future makes us strange and reckless people who commit unwaveringly to a politics of hope, who devote ourselves wholly to lives of generosity and service, who stand strong to the conviction that all people and all things were created good and will one day be restored.
Living by faith means taking the risk to live as citizens of God's kingdom in the middle of a world that has its own rules for citizenship.
We take the risk of loving one another even when it puts us at odds with "acceptable" patterns of discrimination or retribution. We take the risk of standing up for peace in an increasingly militarized world where we are becoming more and more lenient about what constitutes a "last resort" for entering into wars and conflicts. We take the risk of forgiving seventy times seven times even when it puts us outside the usual functions of our criminal justice system. We take the risk of seeing our wealth and our possessions and our very creation as gifts of God to be stewarded and shared even when the world tells us that we have every right to keep what we have earned and to store it away so that no one can take it away from us.
We take all of these risks because God is bigger than all of it. We walk by faith and not by sight, because God is vast and God is good. We live as strangers in a strange land, yes…but here’s the thing: in this land, we see the sky. And it is filled with stars. We cannot count them or call them each by name. But here, under this starry sky, God has already counted the hairs on our heads. God has already named us children of God.
We have a future. We have hope. We are not afraid. Take heart, my friends. And keep the faith. Because God is faithful beyond measure. Let faith be your assurance of hope, your conviction of God’s power to do the impossible, and your promise of an open-ended future filled with light and life and salvation. The future is big, but God is bigger.
Don't believe me?
Go outside tonight. And look up at the stars.
Amen.
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