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TRINITY SUNDAY

In The Stars

Psalm 8

               In his sermon, “Message in the Stars,” Frederick Buechner wonders, “What would happen if God…set about demonstrating his existence in some dramatic and irrefutable way?”

            Then he imagines a way for God to do this:  that God would take the starry river of the Milky Way and paint across the night sky, “I REALLY EXIST,” or, “GOD IS.”  Buechner further imagines that God would do this every night for several years, just so people wouldn’t think it was a fluke.  God would add splashes of color and celestial music.  And, over time, God would use all the languages of the earth, so that there would be no doubt whatsoever that God really did exist.

            He imagines such a demonstration would elicit delight and praise in some, regret and contrition in others, and conversion of even the hardest skeptic.  He would like to imagine, he says, that this would usher in a time of world peace, an end to crime and the beginning of a great age for churches.

            But he also imagines the end of such a demonstration.  It would be a child, maybe a child with a wad of bubble gum in his cheek.  This child would look up at the sky and turn to an adult standing next to him and say, “So what?  So what if God exists?  What difference does that make?”

            And the sky would go dark and the heavenly music would cease and angels would gasp.  And we might gasp, too.

            Yet that is also a question we have.  It is not enough, in the end, simply to believe that God exists.  We need to know what kind of God exists and we need to know how that makes a difference.  We need to know how that makes a difference to us.

            You could say that it is not writing in the stars, but writing in the scriptures that makes this plain.  Psalm 8 still looks to the stars.

            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?  (v. 3-4)

            This universe is a wonder!  What is most wonderful to us, however, is not merely that God made us, but that – to our astonishment – God also pays careful attention to us.

            How do we know this?  We know it by our place in this amazing universe.  God has made us a little less than angels – or only a little less than God – because of the place that God has given us.  God has given us a place above all other creatures – the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.  God has honored us and given us authority over them all.

            We are made to share God’s work on earth.  This recalls what we are told in Genesis 1.  We are made in God’s image and we are stewards of all that God has made.  We are caretakers or, to us an outdated word (at least, in this sense) we are husbands of what God has made.  (Does anyone study animal husbandry anymore?)

            One of the questions that husbands fear the most is, “Do you notice anything different about me?”  It is a question we generally have less than a 50-50 chance of answering correctly.  For, inevitably, we have gotten so caught up in other things we are doing, other tasks at hand, other concerns more pressing, that we have not been paying attention to our loved one.  We have not noticed anything different because we haven’t been mindful of our beloved.

            Still that is one of the most important things for a husband (or for a wife or for a mother or a father) to do – to pay attention, to notice when anything is different.  Because noticing, being mindful, paying attention is a way of expressing love.

This is what God does for us.  God is mindful of us.  God pays attention to us.  And God doesn’t miss a trick.  As Jesus tells us in Luke 12 – “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?  Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. But even the hairs on your head are all counted.  Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”  This is not merely an expression of love.  It is reassurance in the face of trouble and threat.

So it is also that the peace with God Paul says we now have does not remove us from suffering.  Rather because of God’s love that has been poured into our hearts, suffering is an occasion for growth – “for we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because of God’s love that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

It is love that binds us to God and, even in our sufferings, draws us closer to God.  And this is true of the Trinity.  It is love that binds the Trinity together.  There can be no Father without the Son and no Son without the Father.  There can be no Father and Son without the Spirit to concretize their relationship and to extend their love to us, even as children extend the life and love of their parents.

Calvin Trillin was a man who knew what it meant to be a husband.  He often wrote about her in his regular columns in The New Yorker.  He wrote a loving tribute to her after her death in his book, About Alice.  Trillin catalogues all the ways he loved her – her style, her sense of human, and her childlike sense of wonder.

Near the end of his book, he relates an experience Alice had while volunteering at a camp for children who were terminally ill.  She befriended a young girl whose name she only remembered as, “L.”  L was courageous and optimistic, “a magical child who was severely disabled.”

One day, while L was absorbed in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, Alice spotted a letter that L’s parents had written her.  She couldn’t resist reading the first few lines: “If God had given us all the children in the world to choose from, L, we would have chose you.”

            Alice passed the note to a fellow counselor and whispered, “Quick.  Read this.  It’s the secret of life.”

It is not only good husbands who pay attention.  Parents also pay attention.  And God pays attention.  It may be a child, in Frederick Buechner’s imagination, who wonders what difference it makes that God exists, but it is also children who tell us why God exists.  For God’s fortress against his enemies is constructed out of the praises of children.  And it is children – whether it is their love for us or our love for them – who tell us as well.

For the God of the universe is the God of love.  It is love that binds together Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  It is love that draws us to God.  It is love that is truly the message in the stars.