God of Stars, God of Small, God of Humans, One and All

When we read the 19^th Psalm today, we heard two different deeply interwoven themes.  We heard of the glorious handiwork of God all around us in the universe, both large scale and small.  But we also heard another story.  A story of relationship between the creator and humanity.  When I imagine the glorious majesty of God, I imagine the vast and imponderable universe as God’s eye, reflecting the beauty of God back to us in so many ways.  As the Psalmist says, there are no words to fully express the expansive glory of God.  God is reflected in each of our eyes also, in God’s relationship to us, referred to as the Law in this Psalm.  God’s precepts, God’s commandments of love, God’s glory, are all beyond human understanding.  And Paul’s First letter to the Church at Corinth answers back; human wisdom is not great enough to perceive God’s full glory.  Human wisdom laughs at the expansive, open, audacious, radical love-message of the cross.  And so today we simultaneously ponder the glory of the universe, and the foolishness of humanity—and God‘s amazing response to all of this in the Good News of God’s unconditional love for us.

Will you pray with me?  “God of Stars and God of Small, God of Humans, One and All, Teach us love and teach us grace.  Love us God, the human race.  Amen.”

When I was growing up, my second-generation American-Irish grandma had a prayer for every household chore.  This little prayer about large and small and love and all was Grandma’s prayer when something would make her angry.  “God of Stars and God of Small, God of Humans, One and All, Teach us love and teach us grace, love us God, the human race.”  Grandma would say the prayer over and over until her heart lightened, her mood forgot why she was angry, and she would remember that our lives are a cyclical pattern of coming back home to God, a life-long series of mini-Lents.  The pattern was first the flash of Irish anger, then repentance, then remembering that we are saved by God’s grace alone, and then finally falling back into God’s loving embrace.  She would tell me of the ‘thin space’ between this world and God’s realm.  Anger would make the space thick and heavy she said, like armor, and her prayers and meditations would ask God to slowly remove the armor until she lived in that thin space right next to God again.  Psalm 19 reminds me of Grandma O’Connor’s thin space between nature, God’s Law of Love and humanity.

Grandma lived a cycle within three Books of Life, and she lived them with her every breath.  First, she taught me to carefully observe the Book of Nature that reflected God’s majesty.  Every small speck of creation sings God’s glory.  We are all completely connected to one another by the invisible thread of God’s love, each creature love-stitched and woven into every other creature.  Each of us is not a part of the web, instead each of us ARE the web, the heavens and us are telling the glory of God!  Every brilliant sunrise and pollen-soaked honeybee shouts God’s love and grace. 

Grandma taught me the second Book of Life like this:  God invites every one of us to ponder the Book of God’s Love that saves us.  Like many Irish-Catholics, grandma lived in a perpetual Lent, constantly re-turning back to God and re-engaging her life as a follower of Jesus.  Our lives are a book, a story, a journey she would constantly remind me.  “How is your story of God’s love for you going today?” she would always ask.  The Book of Love is the Good News of God’s unconditional love for all of us.

And then, whenever I was feeling down, Grandma would encourage me to consider the third Book, the Book of the Human Heart.  Grandma said our lives swing like a grandfather clock pendulum between the thin place with God and the thick place of hardened hearts and greed, selfishness and anger.  “Mind the Book of your Heart my little peach pit,” she would say when I would stray.  Grandma fondly called me her little peach pit because she wanted me to remember the seed of God’s love was always left, even after the world had eaten the peach!  And Grandma would say a small prayer like our little prayer today to cleanse her heart, just as the Psalmist prayed four thousand years before when the Psalmist said, “Clear me of my hidden faults!”  Grandma lived her life as a Psalm with every breath as a prayer.  And here in Psalm 19, she lived her favorite Book of the Heart prayer: “Let every word of my mouth and the constant meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, my rock of salvation and my ever-present redeemer.”

I have often wondered what my grandma would say to St. Paul if they were to meet, just this side of heaven.  She would glance over her shoulder, as if to make sure the constant presence of her Priest wasn’t listening, and then she would say that Paul made her angry when he said some of those “crazy things,” as she would put it.  “Why should a woman be silent as Paul commanded in 1 Cor 14:34?” she would glower, “God gave me a fiery heart and a strong voice for a reason!”  When I would respond that Paul probably had a loquacious and irascible Irish grandma, she would reach over and flick my ear, saying, “Silence is an important lesson for SOME people to learn.”  But in our passage today, Paul starts in the first chapter of his First Letter to the Church at Corinth by summing up Jesus’ life-work by calling it first the Gospel and then the cross in verse 17 just prior to the beginning of our reading today.  Listen to verse 17: “For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the Gospel, and not with elegant wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.”

So when Paul starts our passage in verse 18 by saying, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us being saved, it is the power of God,” Paul is saying the message of the cross is that we cannot find God through human wisdom.  Instead the Book of our Human Heart finds God through God’s Book of Love.  We cannot go to school and get master’s degree in God-finding, and thus be certified holy.  Instead, we are saved through grace, through God’s gift of love to each one of us!  Paul calls this gift the power of God, the power of God’s love.  Grandma called it God’s Eternal Book of Love.

I love the last part of verse 18, listen again, “but to us being saved, it is the power of God’s love.”  Did you hear that?  Being saved.  Ongoing action.  The verb tense here in the Greek is the aorist tense, which means simultaneously being saved in the past, being saved now, and always being saved into the future.  This reminds us that salvation is not a one-time decision.  Salvation is living in perpetual Lent, always returning to live in God’s Book of Love, just like Grandma O’Connor returned and lived.  Or as we studied last week, a life-time of repenting, picking up our cross, and heading back to follow Jesus, over and over again.

In this season of Lent, we are invited again to walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem.  Last week we remembered Jesus as he walked into the fury of the religious and political leaders of Jerusalem, facing certain condemnation and death.  It was complete human foolishness for Jesus to make that final journey, but it was complete divine wisdom from the perspective of God’s Realm.  Somebody had to prophecy truth to power, and Jesus was the one.  Jesus was not doing human things on this trek, but divine things.  Jesus kept walking, knowing that walking in the power of God’s Book of Love was his cross to bear.  As we consider these last weeks of Jesus’ life this Lent, let us continue to ponder the Books of Life that Jesus held close.  The Book of Nature that reminded him, like in the 19^th Psalm, that the heavens are telling of the glory of God.  The Book of the Law of Love, where God teaches us the good news of God’s everlasting and unconditional love.  And the Book of the Human Heart, where Jesus teaches us to repent, to change our heart, to pick up our cross and follow Jesus back to God’s Book of Eternal Love. 

So, every time that Jesus got tired as he walked that dusty road back to Jerusalem, or whenever he got frustrated or angry or just plan hurt because the journey was so completely exhausting, I imagine Jesus stopping along the way to say a little prayer to get back to a thin place close to God.  “God of Stars and God of Small, God of Humans, One and All, Teach us love and teach us grace, love us God, the human race.”  I love you grandma, and Amen.