St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, April 10, 2005
The Song of Sky
God’s
Starry Night – Rev. David Mundy
Psalm 19 John 3:1-8, 16-21
One of the greatest artists of the
nineteenth century, and the one with perhaps the most tortured inner life was
Vincent van Gogh. Even if you aren’t an art aficionado, you will probably know
his name and one of his most famous paintings called The Starry Night. Van Gogh painted
it in, 1889, the year before his death at the age of thirty-seven. He
was in an asylum at the time because of his mental illness and eventually he
took his own life.
Vincent Van
Gogh was a deeply spiritual person, despite the turmoil of his spirit. Not many
people know that he trained for the ministry, but he really wasn’t very good at
it – too intense and earnest– and so he was asked to withdraw from seminary. He
turned to painting and during his lifetime it could have been argued that he
wasn’t very good at that either. Although he was prolific in his output he only
sold one painting and he depended on his brother Theo for financial support. It
is ironic that today his paintings sell for millions of
dollars.
The painting Starry Night is in the Museum of Modern Art in
New York City. The museum describes it in this way:
Van Gogh's
night sky is a field of roiling energy. Below the exploding stars, the village
is a place of quiet order . . . "Looking at the stars always makes me dream," Van Gogh
said . . . The artist wrote of his
experience to his brother Theo: "This morning I saw the country from
my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which
looked very big." This morning star, or Venus, may be the large white
star just left of center in The Starry Night.
Van Gogh knew that the starry night he
painted so brilliantly was God’s starry night.
Last Sunday
morning we began a four-week exploration of the importance and meaning of God’s
creation. We made the connection with the physical gardens many of us tend, as
well as the metaphorical Garden with a capital G which we are to care for as
co-Creators with God.
This
morning rather than casting our gaze downward to the earth we will look up and ponder the heavens in a song
of the sky. There is plenty of scriptural support for us to do this, both in
the Old Testament and the New Testament. The gospel of Matthew tells us that
students of the sky called the Magi followed a star to the place where Jesus
was born in Bethlehem. These “wise men” combined astronomy and astrology and it
has been speculated that what the gospel calls a star could have been a meteor
shower or even the Aurora Borealis, what we call the Northern Lights.
In the book
of Revelation Jesus speaks in John’s vision saying “I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning
Star.” Revelation 22:16
As
Christians we have borrowed the dates of
our celebrations of both Christmas and Easter from other religious
traditions. The Roman observance of the winter solstice was adapted to become
our observance of the birth of Jesus. We really don’t know what time of the
year he was born but the early Christians cleverly hid behind the Saturnalia
festivals to avoid drawing attention to their celebrations. And the Jewish
religion has always observed the moon to set its festival days, a tradition
that we have included in our Christian faith. Easter was early this year
because the first full moon of the Spring equinox was early.
For many
centuries theologians have told us that there are two books from which Christians “read” in order to
appreciate their relationship with God. We hear from one of those books every
Sunday morning in worship, the scriptures of Old and New Testaments we call the
bible. The other book, the first book, is the created order. Whether we are
watching a honey bee working busily at a clover blossom in the heat of summer
or looking up at the vast expanse of the Milky Way on a cold winter’s night, we
are given the opportunity to be aware of the glory of God.
The psalm
for this day, Psalm 19, reminds us that both books, the book of nature, and the
book of the scriptural law teach us how to be in relationship with God. The
words of the last verse are probably familiar to you because I repeat them as a
prayer virtually every week before I begin my message. But it begins with
praise for the heavens and earth which reveal God’s glory to us.
This psalm
was written in a time before there was any real concept of the solar system,
let alone our galaxy or the universe. There were no telescopes, no realization
that our planet is spinning on its axis and moving in its orbit around a star
which we call the sun. Yet there is an appreciation of the progression of each
day which is likened to a bridegroom moving toward the bride on wedding day. It
is a poetic image of wonder and joy for the people of God.
Do we
experience the wonder and awe of each day and night that God gives us? Psalm 19
tells us to look up and offer a big “wow” of appreciation but that exhortation
is easy to ignore. In our busy lives we can forget to look up both literally
and figuratively and ponder the magnificent universe with its millions upon
millions of stars. We scurry around from day to day feeling the urgency of our
tasks, supposedly in the quest for the “good life” but losing sight of the
bigger picture.
In February
I spent time on retreat at a Benedictine abbey in the foothills of the Rocky
Mountains in Colorado. The physical setting of the hills and streams was quite
beautiful but there was another benefit. Because the abbey is many miles from
any major centre, the night sky was spectacular. One evening I stood outside
the retreat house, head back as I made my rather feeble attempts at identifying
the constellations. One of the other guests was a pleasant man named Ken, who is
the administrator for a fairly remote Roman Catholic parish in New Mexico, the
state to the south of Colorado. He drove up while I was staring upward and I
could tell he was mildly amused when I told him what I was doing. Of course,
his home state New Mexico is one of the least populated in the US and there is
very little light pollution. There is an area of the state which has been
declared a “sky preserve” because it is a natural observatory but there are
also sophisticated radio telescopes as well as an observatory that belongs to
the Vatican. It may surprise you to know that the Roman Catholic church has an
official astronomer, especially after all that unpleasantness with Galileo. Ken
was too nice a guy to say “you crazy Canuck” but I know he was thinking
it! He is a devout Christian but the beautiful night sky is something he can
see any time.
We are
intended to lift our gaze to look up
both figuratively and literally and appreciate that God has brought everything
into being. If we take for granted the world and the worlds around us we may
begin to take one another for granted and even our relationship with God.
Surely we don’t want to be so overwhelmed with our earthly concerns or to
become so blase about what is around us that we lose
our ability to be “lost in wonder, love, and praise” as the hymn says.
You might
agree that it is God’s starry night, but aren’t we people who worship the God
who was revealed to us in the love of Christ? We can stare out into the
vastness of space and miss the importance of our restored relationship through
the cross and resurrection. We could forget our responsibility to care for one
another in Christ’s name.
It is never
a matter of “either/or” for Christ’s people. We follow the Jesus of history and
the Cosmic Christ who is the Morningstar. Thomas Merton, one of the great
Christian contemplatives of the 20th century made the connection
between what he saw in the sky when he arose early for prayer and his faith in
Christ.
This morning . . . seeing the multitude of stars
above the bare branches of the wood, I was suddenly hit, as it were, with the
whole package of meaning of everything: that the immense mercy of God was upon
me, that the Lord in infinite kindness had looked down on me and given me this
vocation out of love . . .
In recent
years we have heard that astronomers have discovered the existence of planets
in orbit around distant stars. They can’t see them yet but they can “feel”
their presence. The likelihood is that children who are here this morning will
grow up with a very different understanding of outer space than their parents
and grandparents. In my youth humans visited the moon. Who knows what
explorations and discoveries will unfold for the next generation? Our hope is
that they will also appreciate, through what they learn from the bible and from
their observation of creation that the God who was before time brought all this
into being and did so in love.
Our gospel
reading today from John told us about the nighttime
encounter between Jesus and a Jewish leader named Nicodemus who came to him as
a spiritual seeker, as well as what Martin Luther called “the gospel in
miniature, ” verse sixteen: “For God so loved the world the world that
he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but
may have eternal life.” Christians
who are environmentalists like to point out that this verse doesn’t say “For
God so loved human beings to the exclusion of all else.” It says God loves
the world, and we might paraphrase it to include the universe. Perhaps those
distant planets contain life forms that also respond to God’s love, the love
that sees a falling sparrow.
The
encouragement to all of us is to lift up our heads and appreciate God’s starry
night, then live with gratitude and joy and compassion. I’ll finish this
morning with a psalm in Edward Hays book Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim
Slowly
we are turning once again
to
look into the dark, star-sprinkled space
through
which our planet is travelling.
All life
is aware of the approaching view,
and the
sunset beauty of this day’s end
is an
overture to the awesome grandeur
of the
eternal vision that awaits us.
As the
earth turns outward
may my
thoughts turn inward
to the
Sacred Mystery that dwells in my heart.
At the
end of this day
I sing a
song of thanksgiving
for the
wonder of life.
I lift
up my voice in gratitude
for all
this day has held for me
as I
turn my memory to its flood of gifts.
Amen!