Seeds: Where it all begins Sermon text: Psalm 8 University United Methodist Church, Fort Worth

Transcription

1 Seeds: Where it all begins Sermon text: Psalm 8 University United Methodist Church, Fort Worth I m glad to be back in worship with you today! Last week, I was out of town for my younger brother s wedding which was a very exciting and joy filled experience. They got married successfully and there was cake, so we couldn t ask for much more out of the experience. I did learn something from my time there, though. My two other brothers and I were groomsmen and, as is tradition, Tate gave us each a gift to thank us for shaving and putting on tuxes and standing in one place during the ceremony. It was at the rehearsal dinner and as Tate was passing out the gifts he said that while each of us had gotten the same thing, he matched the style of it to our personality. It turns out that the gifts were these very nice pairs of suspenders. I watched as my oldest brother opened his and pulled out a pair of suspenders striped in blue and green. My youngest brother pulled out teal and salmon suspenders. Both very suited to their personalities. I opened my box and pulled out a pair of brown suspenders. Apparently, I have a brown personality. I asked my brother later, how did my personality evoke images of brown? Apparently, he pictures me as a pastor, sitting alone in a dimly lit study, reading books and thinking deep thoughts and writing and praying and that sort of thing. Everyone in the immediate vicinity agreed; I have a brown personality. Which is all fine and I ve come to terms with it, except that I m afraid I have crafted a brown sermon series for you to endure. The intent behind this sermon series is to explore the foundational elements of the Christian faith. Essentially, me and my brown personality sat through a semester of Systematic Theology and thought, Wow, wouldn t this be fun to preach? So, we planned it out and found three different foundations of the Christian faith for the three weeks of this series: God and us (today), sin and redemption (next week), and then our response to God s saving grace. I tell you all this because part of my goal is to make this all as much fun as it can be. I m not going to let you fall asleep if I can help it! But I don t want us to forget that what we re talking about matters at the core, this stuff is brown. Let s pray: Almighty God, as we rest in Your presence, we pray that You might make Yourself known in color and in brown. Equip us to hear Your words and to center our faith on the truths that You provide. We pray in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Let us turn to Psalm 8: Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name throughout the earth! You made your glory higher than heaven! From the mouths of nursing babies

2 you have laid a strong foundation because of your foes, in order to stop vengeful enemies. When I look up at your skies, at what your fingers made - the moon and the stars that you set firmly in place - what are human beings that you think about them? what are human beings that you pay attention to them? (CEB) This past Friday, there was a rare triple feature of solar phenomenon a penumbral lunar eclipse, a full moon, and a comet flyby. This is the sort of thing that excites me. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I d read everything about space I could get my hands on, admire pictures of the planets, watch space shuttle launches, everything. I loved the Hubble Space Telescope, because it took these beautiful pictures of outer space that were nothing like I had ever seen. Realizing the depths and beauty of space can completely change your perspective. Astronaut Mike Massimino tells a story about a perspective changing experience on his first flight to space to repair the Hubble telescope. He was one of the crew lucky enough to get to do a spacewalk, to see the planet 250 miles beneath them without a spaceship to get in the way. Pilots don t get to do spacewalks, so the pilot of this crew came to Massimino and asked him for a full report as soon as he came back inside, a fresh description of what it was like to be in space and see the Earth. When Mike Massimino came back from his spacewalk, he said to the pilot, Digger, you re never going to believe it. The Earth is a planet. Outside the spacecraft, he realized that the Earth wasn t held up by anything, wasn t supported by anything, and certainly wasn t standing still. Writing about it later, he says: The Earth is a planet. It s a spaceship. We re zipping around the universe, hurtling through the chaos of space with asteroids and black holes and everything else, and we think we re safe but, boy, we are right out there in the middle of it. 1 And the universe is a big thing to be hurtling through. Our solar system is plenty big enough. If you were to take Chisolm Trail from here to the sun, you d be driving for about 150 years. Although it does depend which part of the sun you re going to, considering that the sun is big enough to fit over a million Earths inside of it. We are very small people living in a galaxy of great magnitude. 1 Mike Massimino, Spaceman: An Astronaut s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe (New York: Crown Archetype, 2016),

3 Every thought we ve ever had, every memory we ve ever made, every sight we ve ever seen, every life that s ever been lived, has been done on a small planet orbiting a medium sized star in a tucked away corner of the universe. We are very small people living in a galaxy of great magnitude. Looking out into the night sky, the psalmist sees this magnitude but says, you know what? To God, all of this is so delicate that God had to form it with God s fingertips. God placed the stars in the sky with the same precision it takes for us to thread a needle. When God placed the moon in space, God did so firmly not because it was so heavy for God, but to prevent a stray breath of wind from God s mouth from sending it careening out of orbit. There s a song we sometimes have our kids sing you might know it: He s got the whole world in His hands. I m afraid that s not quite right. Apparently, God is bigger than that. God balances the whole world on God s fingertips. In comparison, we are very small indeed. Is it any wonder the psalmist asked, What are human beings that you think about them? What are human beings that you pay attention to them? Our faith is founded on this great mystery: that a God big enough to make the universe look small would pay attention to us, these tiny created beings. But God does. Notice that the psalmist never asks if God thinks about human beings. Never asks if God pays attention to human beings. Only wonders what it is in us that makes it worth God s while, because there must be something, because God does notice us. Neither I nor the psalmist have any satisfactory answers to the question. Love can rarely be pinned down like that, especially the infinite and overflowing love of God. We don t know why, only that it is. You can tell because we have been made only slightly less than the divine. All the rest of creation holds its beauty in the reflection of God s handiwork. But we border on the divine. We toe the line between the created and the angelic. We have been crowned with glory and grandeur. In other words: We matter. We matter to God. You can tell because God has let us take charge of God s creation. All the sheep and the cattle, the wild animals, the birds, the fish, everything in the ocean is ours to lead and guide and protect and care for. God cares for us enough that God would take everything God made, everything God declared to be good, and place it in our tiny little hands. In other words: What we do matters. What we do matters to God. We sometimes forget it, but that makes all the difference in the world.

4 When I was getting my undergrad degree at TCU, we learned about a study that took place in a Western Electric factory outside of Chicago in the 1920 s and 30 s. The workers at this factory assembled telephones basically by hand connecting wires, fitting together pieces, screwing together the assemblies, everything. To try to improve productivity, the factory brought in a sociologist who started making changes in the work environment and measuring the changes in productivity. At first, things made sense. He started by improving the lighting in the factory and productivity went up. But then, he switched the factory lighting to a lower level. Productivity went up. He added breaks for the workers. Productivity went up. He took them away. Productivity went up. With every change, productivity went up. They concluded the study by changing everything back to the way it was before and productivity hit the highest level the factory had ever seen. Telephones were flying out of that factory left and right. In fact, the only thing that decreased productivity at this factory was ending the study altogether. Before the study, these workers were a mindless part of a larger machine. But when someone came in and started watching and asking questions and changing things, they learned something deeply important: they mattered; what they were doing mattered. That made all the difference in the world. 2 As human beings, we need to know these things. That we matter and what we do matters. So we could not rest our faith on anything other than this incredible truth: the God of infinite magnitude notices us, thinks we matter, and thinks what do matters. But there s one more piece to this foundation, this seed. The psalmist ends his song the same way he begins: O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. In Hebrew, that first word is Yahweh, a word that comes from the story in Exodus when Moses tells the burning bush that nobody will believe that God sent him if he doesn t even know God s name. And God says, I am who I am, which turns into the word Yahweh. But God continues and says, Say to the Israelites, The Lord, the God of your ancestors, Abraham s God, Isaac s God, and Jacob s God, has sent me to you. This is my name forever; this is how all generations will remember me (Exodus 3:15). And so it was that the word Yahweh described the God of the Israelites and the Israelites alone. But in this psalm, we are reminded that the name of the Lord, our Lord, is majestic across the face of the Earth. The whole Earth. 2 This is known as the Hawthorne effect.

5 Our God s name, the name intended for the Israelites, the name intended for God s people, resounds in the ears of all people. God s majesty cannot be contained and neither can God s thoughts or God s gaze. God thinks of all people. God sees all people. God cares for all God s people. For the people we like and the people we don t. The people we vote for and the ones we vote against. The people who look like us and sound like us and eat like us and think like us and dress like us and the people that don t. The people who live here, the people who live far away, and the people who aren t given home or shelter anywhere. Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, caring, selfish, and everywhere in between. Sometimes, we try to divide ourselves into groups. We sometimes find comfort in splitting humanity up as though some of us matter more than others. We find comfort in the boundaries that separate us, the roads, the train tracks, the clothes, the accents, sometimes even the walls. I visited China last spring where I had the chance to stand on top of their great wall, built to protect one group of people from the other. It has stood for millennia, an impressive testament to humanity s craftsmanship and resolve. But it s interesting to note that despite what you may have heard, you can t see the Great Wall of China from space. There is absolutely no distinction between the land on one side and the land on the other. Looking down, you can t tell where one group of people stops and the other begins. I imagine that a God big enough to hold our little blue planet on a single fingertip sees us in much the same way. All of us together, in one big group, matter to God. We all do. And what we do matters. What we do to creation and what we do to each other what we do to the other people that matter so deeply to God. That is the first seed of our faith, the truth where it all begins: we might be dwarfed by the universe around us, but we all matter to God and what we do matters to God. Friends, each of the seeds we explore over these next three weeks can sprout in any number of ways. I d like to highlight today a way that I see this seed sprouting in our conference of the United Methodist Church. The Central Texas Conference is beginning a program that teaches children from difficult situations that they matter by giving college students and local churches a chance to do something that matters. I d like to introduce you to this ministry and encourage you to pray and consider ways that this seed might sprout in your life.