Sermon: Earth and All Stars

Psalm 8, Acts 17:22-34
Cynthia O’Brien
"Earth and all Stars"
August 28, 2005

PS 8:1 O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
PS 8:2 From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise
because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

PS 8:3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
PS 8:4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
PS 8:5 You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
PS 8:6 You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
PS 8:7 all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, PS 8:8 the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

PS 8:9 O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

AC 17:22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

AC 17:24 "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28 `For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, `We are his offspring.'


In Sunday School, the little ones were learning about creation. The teacher asked, “Who made the sun?”
The students said, “God!”
“Who made the moon?”
“God!”
“Who made the stars?”
“God,” they all said, except for Tyler, who said, “Grandma.”
When the teacher asked him about it, Tyler stuck by his story, that Grandma made the stars.
Later the teacher caught up with the grandma and told her about it. The grandma reacted with surprise: “O, my stars!”


When was the last time you were out at night and looked at the stars? Has anyone been camping this summer or away from the city and looked at the stars? I did when I was up in Leavenworth earlier this summer, since the artist’s guild is located in a valley where there is hardly any artificial light. Also, earlier this summer there was a night when I heard the weatherman on the late news say that the moon appeared very large, and I hadn’t seen it, and since I live on the northwest side of Gresham Butte I had to get in my car and drive around in the middle of the night looking for a good view.

Psalm 8 reminds me to look up.

PS 8:3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

This is a night time scene. Over the last couple of weeks, we have reflected on some texts that have beautiful daytime imagery, “For the beauty of the earth,” “the birds their carols raise, the morning light, the lily white”

But I see the opening of Psalm 8 as a night time scene. In the day, you can look around at what God has made on the earth. But at night, when you lift your eyes you look far beyond the earth.

We are fascinated by space. When Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau returned from a flight on the space shuttle, someone asked him what was most memorable. He said, “The view of the Earth! It was incredibly beautiful. The hardest thing I had to do up there was tear myself away from the window.”

Fewer than 500 people have had that view. Only 12 have actually walked on the moon. But now, our generation has been able to reach out to space through robot probes and powerful telescopes and photographs.

The night sky has a powerful attraction for us, at least for me. When I was about 12 years old, my mom went to work for Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA in Pasadena, and over the 20 years she worked there she brought home all the latest color photographs from Voyager, pictures of the moon and planets and space. In college I took an astronomy class and subscribed to Astronomy magazine and went out late at night to look through telescopes. Even now, when I read that the Perseid Meteor Shower is coming, I always mark it on my calendar even though I can’t usually go out to Rooster Rock in the middle of the night with the astronomy club.

When you look at the stars, you are seeing history. You are not seeing what they are now, but what they were, decades or centuries ago.

If you are 75 years old and you look at the Big Dipper, you are seeing those stars as they were when you were born. It takes that long for the light to get from there to here. They are 75 light years away.

Other stars you see are 7,000 light years away, yet they are still part of our galaxy, the Milky Way. There is one other galaxy that you can see with the naked eye. It is the nearest one to us, the Andromeda Galaxy, and you can find it in the late fall sky directly south of the constellation Cassiopia’s famous W shape. It looks hazy because it is two million light years away. And that’s the nearest galaxy.

Now, the Hubble space telescope can detect galaxies 13 billion light years away. In 1996 it made a landmark photograph – They pointed the telescope at an unremarkable piece of sky that is about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, about the size of a dime 75 feet away. They made an exposure for 275 hours – Most pictures you take are a fraction of a second, this was 10 days. This image penetrates deep into space. Everything you see here is a galaxy. This yellow spiral galaxy is about 800 million light years away.

We marvel at supernovas and quasars. We wonder at black holes and dark matter.


People in ancient times had many questions about the universe. Carl Sagan said, “Finally, in our generation, the answers we seek are within our reach.” I say, some of them are, many are not. Our increasing knowledge about the universe does not stop us from wondering how it all began, who, if anyone, created it, and what our place is in it.

PS 8:3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

This is God’s work. It rolled off God’s fingertips. God set the moon and stars in place.

Space is mostly empty space, even though the photographs make it look like there’s a lot there. In one episode of “Cosmos,” Carl Sagan took a big straw and a bowl of soapy water to demonstrate this. He blew bubbles in it and explained that the galaxies are arranged as if they were on the surface of bubbles in your bubble bath. The stars are on curved planes, with lots of empty space in the bubble, and they bump into other curved planes of galaxies. But, he said, he wasn’t saying whether he knew if there was a bubble blower who arranged them.


You may have heard how some people are advocating teaching “Intelligent Design” in the schools. Proponents of ID say that life was created, although it is silent about who that creator might be.

It doesn’t flatly reject evolution. The movement’s main positive claim is that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart.

All of which puts I.D. squarely at odds with Darwin. Darwin’s theory of evolution was meant to show how the fantastically complex features of organisms—eyes, beaks, brains—could arise without the intervention of a designing mind.

We believe that God designed and created our universe, and not only that, but God made human beings. When David wrote this, he juxtaposed the greatness of the heavens with his small self.

PS 8:4 what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

This line demonstrates tremendous humility, but people haven’t demonstrated a tendency towards being humble. We believe we are special because we are naturally self centered. Ancient people believed that the sun, moon, planets and stars all revolved around us, and who could blame them? When astronomers discovered red shifts that indicated that other stars and galaxies were moving away from us, not slowly, but at millions of miles per hour, who could blame them for believing that our galaxy was the center of the universe?

Now we know that we spin around on this medium sized planet around a medium sized star that is located on an edge of a spiral galaxy that is one of an unrecordable number of galaxies.

If a man is small in comparison to creation, a man’s son is even smaller. Let’s look back at verse 2

PS 8:2 From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise
because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

Little weaklings are powerful to God. Nursing babies and toddlers can silence the enemies of God. We are learning something complicated about humanity: We are weak, but God has given us a place of honor, and the responsibility to care for the creation.

By the universe’s standard’s we are insignificantly small and unimportant. But God has given us a speical place in this universe. We have the ability to know God and understand our world. This should do two very important things for us. It should makes us humble, and it should also remind us that we are special to God, the apple of his eye. In ourselves, we are nothing. To God, we are precious. And that is perhaps even more wondrous and awe-inspiring than the greatest mysteries of the universe.

The hymns that we are singing today remind us of these mysteries, if we will pay attention.


JOYFUL, JOYFUL WE ADORE THEE was written by Henry van Dyke graduated from Princeton, served as a pastor for 20 years and became a professor of English Literature. While serving as guest preacher at Williams College, he wrote a hymn, and presented it the next morning to President Garfield saying, "Here is a hymn for you. Your mountains were my inspiration. It must be sung to the music of 'Beethoven's Hymn to Joy.'" which is from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The poem was first published in 1911 and it was called “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.” It included these words:

All Thy works with joy surround Thee, Earth and heaven reflect Thy rays, Stars and angels sing around Thee, Center of unbroken praise.

Later, van Dyke wrote about it: "These verses are simple expressions of common Christian feelings and desires in this present time, hymns of today that may be sung together by people who know the thought of the age, and are not afraid that any truth of science will destroy religion, or that any revolution on earth overthrow the kingdom of heaven. Therefore these are hymns of trust and joy and hope."

EARTH AND ALL STARS

The hymn “Earth and All Stars” by Herbert F. Brokering is a modern treatment of psalms such as Ps 19 “the heavens are telling the glory of God.” It was written for a Lutheran University and has many more verses includingClassrooms and labs, Loud boiling test tubes Sing to the Lord a new song! Athletes and band, Loud cheering people Sing to the Lord a new song!