Star Gazing (Psalm 8, June 10, 2012)

2nd Sunday after Pentecost

Psalm 8

June 10, 2012

Star Gazing

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

The old nursery rhyme goes like this:

Star light, star bright,
The first star I see tonight;
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.

I don’t know how old I was when I learned this, but I know that I was glad to get my hands on a technology for getting the things I wised for. (Heaven knows asking my parents wasn’t working out all that well.) It wasn’t just the nursery rhyme. There were rules that went with it. You had to be looking at the first visible star in the evening sky. I suspect that often I was in fact looking at Venus and I’m not sure that counted. The harder part—and it was a part I couldn’t control—was that you had to be the very first person to be wishing on that star that night. The star apparently had only one wish to grant each evening: it was first-come, first-serve. I had a lot of competition. This may explain why stars didn’t seem to be any better than parents for granting wishes.

I was delighted to discover that using a telescope let me see stars long before they were visible to the unaided eye. The trouble was my telescope could only see a tiny fraction of the night sky and I could not be sure that the star I was seeing was the visible first star in the evening sky. That telescope was so frustrating it’s a wonder I ever looked up again.
(May I just say, by way of hard-won advice, that if you are trying to stoke a child’s interest in astronomy—or even your own—do not buy a telescope. Unless you are willing to spend more than three hundred dollars, any telescope you will only frustrate and disappoint. A good star chart is a better investment and then, when you’re ready to move up, a pair of good binoculars.)
Anyway, I did look up again; it’s still one of my favorite things to do. As you know, Carol and I live east of Decorah on Ranch Road, east of the airport down two miles of gravel roads. We live in a little valley that screens the lights of other homes or towns. We have skies that are as dark as they can be in the United States outside of large tracts of wilderness. When it’s clear the night sky ranges anywhere from wonderful to spectacular.
Most of my time spent looking at stars is done with just my eyes. I take Angus out in the late evening, just before going to bed. When we step out into the night, Angus’s attention is focused on the ground. Mine goes upward. I love to find my old friends among the constellations and see where the visible planets are. At ten o’clock tonight, for example, Mars will be in the southwestern sky just below the constellation Leo. Saturn is directly to the south in Virgo just above Spica, that constellation’s brightest star.
Later in the summer, the Milky Way makes its way overhead. If you look toward the south, you will see the constellation Sagittarius. It’s supposed to be an archer, but it looks more like a teapot to me, with its handle to the left and its spout toward the right. Through a pair of binoculars the region around Sagittarius comes alive. It’s filled with clusters of stars and delicately colored gas clouds, star nurseries with hot newborn stars illuminating the dust around them.
But on a really dark moonless night, it’s not the individual sights that impress me; it’s the whole. There is only one proper word for it: awesome. I mean that word in its original sense—that which inspires awe—not in the sense it has when used by a seven year old with a new video game. The night sky gives rise to awe.
At least it would if we were able to experience it more often. A chaplain I worked with when I was in the Army told me that he had never seen the Milky Way. He was from Chicago and had never lived outside of city. On a particularly dark Kansas night I got to introduce him to the galaxy he lives in. He was awe struck. That is the correct response according to the psalmist “What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” was how the psalmist responded.
Awe is the reaction we have to recognizing our own smallness. Merriam-Webster defines it as “an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime”¹ Awe means that we recognize that the universe is very big and very powerful and very beautiful and that we are able to recognize this even though we are very small and fragile. I believe that awe is a birthright of human beings. I suspect that the psalmist agrees.

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?

The psalmist is lost in awe, or nearly so. She can hardly form coherent sentences. There is something missing in these lines, but we can still get it.

Looking at the night sky gives rise to awe. Awe gives rise to wonder. Our puniness in the face of the vastness of the heavens is not the final word. Why should God be mindful of us? And yet, God is:

You’ve made [us] only slightly less than divine,
crowning [us] with glory and grandeur.
You’ve let [us] rule over your handiwork;
putting everything under [our] feet...

Small and weak though we are, we seem to occupy a special place in the world. I say “seem” because when I’m pressed to define just what I mean by that I find that I am not able to do it very neatly. We can alter the environment to suit our needs, but trees do that, too. We can change the world, but so can beavers. We can make and use tools, but so do chimpanzees. We are self-aware, but we cannot be certain that dolphins, for example, are not.

Perhaps it was more impressive to the psalmist, living as he did closer to the time when every predator was a threat and the natural world seemed more dangerous than it does to us. Maybe he better appreciated our hard-won control over animals that otherwise would have been a threat. For him the clearest evidence for our “glory and grandeur” is the respect—or maybe it’s just fear—that other animals have for us. We rule over all the domesticated animals—sheep and cattle—no surprise there. But we also rule over the wild animals, what another translation calls “the beasts of the field,” the fish of the ocean and birds in the sky. Everything except for cats. We don’t rule over cats. But except for cats, we rule over everything. I have no idea what the expression “the pathways of the sea” might mean, but whatever it means, we rule over whatever travels by them.

And this strange arrangement, too, gives rise to awe and then to praise. The psalmist knows what our place in the universe is. We are so small that we are in awe. We are so grand that we wonder. And, above all, our place gives rise to the praise of God. Awe and wonder and praise.

All of this sounds pretty unsophisticated, naive, even. We know so many things better than the psalmist. The universe is big, but it is also cold and mostly dead. If we see beauty in it, that is simply a matter of wishing upon a star, of projecting our own hopes for a welcome onto a universe that offers none, but simply is.

We know better than to think that we are the center of any universe, except for the one that exists only between our ears. We are creatures just like all the other creatures, engaged in a struggle for survival just as they are, finding higher purpose where there is none except for next quarter’s profits.

We have lit up the night sky. Awe is no longer necessary. We no longer wonder that we have seized the world as our own. We did it because we could and there was no one to stop us. In our sophistication and the maturity of our species we no longer need to praise.

The psalmist does not set out two ways of being in the world, except indirectly, by demonstrating one way, the path of awe, wonder and praise. The alternative path, a way we might simply label as “realism,” is lived out all around us every day. In the psalmist’s world we are motivated by the longing to praise that arises from the experience of a world that does not belong to us, is not answerable to us, and yet in which we have a livable home and an honorable place.

In the world that is not the psalmist’s world we are motivated by itchy fingers that grasp everything around us as if it could belong to us for the taking. We may take it do whatever we want to with it and answer finally to no one.

The psalmist has presented us with a world of awe and wonder and praise. We are invited to enter. Such is the gracious summons of the covenant God of Israel. The psalmist invites us to join her in singing, “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

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1Merriam-Webster On-line, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/awe.