Count the Stars
Homily delivered the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14; Year C RCL)
The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
7 August 2022; 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)
Readings: Gen 15:1-6, Psa 33:12-22, Heb 11:1-3, 8-16, Luke 12:32-40
God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh.
“Count the stars.” Wow. Those words in today’s reading about Abram have deeper and deeper meaning the more and more pictures we see from the Webb Space telescope!
During the summer when I was 16 years old, I worked as a life guard at the local public pool. In my off hours, I read a lot that summer, including the autobiographies of Malcolm X and of Mohandas K. Gandhi. They made me think a lot about faith, justice, and morals. I also worked through an introductory college text book on logic, to help me prepare for the upcoming high school debate season. I was seized by the idea of parsimony in explanations championed by William of Occam: the shortest and simplest explanation that takes into account all the facts is probably the best. I began wielding “Occam’s Razor” to cut back the superfluous and tendentious when simpler explanations sufficed. One day, out in the summer heat on a life-guard high chair looking out over the swimmers, it occurred to me: I could understand the world without any recourse to the idea of “God.” I had been raised in a religious family, and was full of stories from Scripture that saw the world with God in charge. Though increasingly at school I noticed the conflicting accounts of science and religion on the origin of life, various historical events, and even morality and sexuality, it had never occurred to me to question these stories told me by those I loved. But as I sat there, I wondered if “God talk” were just a randomly extraneous explanation of things better and more elegantly described without recourse to stories seeming to me more and more like ancient myths. Looking up at the sun, I saw merely a ball of superheated gas, not a celestial sign of God’s power and love. The sky around it was an immense sea of atmosphere before empty space, reflecting and defusing the sun’s light to reveal the exquisite blue. In that moment, I was freed from the burden that religion, swallowed whole and without question, had imposed on me. A couple years later, when the song came out, I recognized the deep emotional roots of John Lennon’s call: “Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try. No hell below us, Above us, only sky. Imagine all the people living for today... You may say that I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope one day you’ll join us, And the world shall live as one.”
But by that time, I had run into the despair and fear of meaninglessness that my atheism allowed to grow, and had let those non-Christian autobiographies start me on a journey that led me back to trust in God more deeply, albeit with less certitude. What I had shaved off with Occam’s Razor—the supernaturalist theistic explanations of how the universe works—never grew back. But in its stead had grown a sense not of how but of why. Those God-talk stories seemed to tell “why?” better and more parsimoniously than any of the secular tales. And this, not with a God “out there” somewhere who might break into nature if we did something to impress him, but rather, a mystery of love in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
Today’s scripture lessons are all about faith. Here is my translation of the opening of today’s epistle reading from Hebrews:
“Trusting in God, faith, is what undergirds whatever hope we have; it is what makes things otherwise unseen clear to our view. It was, after all, by their trust that our ancestors gained special distinction. And it is trusting that gives us the ability to truly understand what it means to say that God’s speech called the universe into existence: things visible created by the invisible” (Heb 11:1-3).
The Greek word normally translated by “faith,” is in most cases better translated by “trust.” Such trust—whether quiet or loud—is what lies beneath all hope. It is what helps us see truth otherwise invisible. That’s because meaning grows primarily out of an orientation of the heart, not the opinions of the mind. We call such an orientation of the heart “faith,” or “trust,” openness coupled with confidence.
The lesson from Genesis tells us the story of Abram. In Rabbinic lore, Abram came from a family who for a living made idols, symbols for all the various competing things at work—fearsome or attractive—in the world about us. The One God calls him out of this life of pursuing things before his eyes, and move from his ancestral home. Today’s epistle says he responds by following the call, “not knowing where he was going.” God promises him a new home, and legacy of family. But Abram’s eyes tell him that none of that is possible: he and his wife are sterile and well beyond child-bearing years. God takes Abram out under the night sky, tells him to look up, and “Count the stars. That’s how many descendants you’ll have.” The text says Abram trusted God’s promise, despite it all, and “God booked this trust as Uprightness.”
“Count the stars”: more descendants than the stars in the heavens! But this is more than an extravagant simile. “Count the stars”: after all the glorious visions we have been treated to in the last few weeks from the Webb Space Telescope, we know that this is a call to ponder overwhelming, beautiful, and deep mystery. God here calls Abram to look at one part of the world before him, calls him to visit a thin place, and contemplate the awe-inspiring night sky. The awe leads Abram to trust.
But note: it is impossible literally to count all the stars. Or, if those Webb photos are to be trusted, even count the galaxies, each with billions of stars. There are just too many. You can’t count the stars. But you can try. And in trying you realize that you just can’t do it.
“Count the stars—that’s how my promise will be!” Things impossible now will become accessible. Things invisible now become visible to a trusting heart.
Faith and trust are not the opposite of disbelief and distrust. They are not locked in a life and death struggle. Rather, they are in dialogue. Faith is trusting, despite all the reasons you have NOT to trust. Faith cannot bring the invisible to light without working daily with the fears, frustrations, and doubt brought by the darkness about.
Galileo Galilei famously defended himself against the Inquisition by referring to the continuity of faith and reason, belief and doubt: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
And just as faith grows from doubt, doubt itself reflects the grounds for our faith.
J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote to his youngest son Christopher, “I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water.” His point was that we are generally unaware of the framework of our lives—we take it for granted, and do not question it much. A fish in water is unaware of the water about it: that is just how its world is. It knows nothing of wetness, though wetness is all about it, because it can’t even conceive of dryness. But take it out of the water, and it becomes acutely aware that something—something important and necessary for life—is missing. Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis later wrote,
“My [adolescent] argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A [person] does not call a line crooked unless [they have] some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet... [A]theism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning” (from Mere Christianity). “[Look at how w]e are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘How he’s grown!’ we exclaim, ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal” (from Reflections on the Psalms.)
Trust is a matter of the heart. Where we put our efforts is where our hearts
wind up. If you at times just cannot
muster trust in God, seek out moments of awe, count the stars. But then act as if you already have that
trust, and it will come.
Like Abram counting the stars, be honest about fears and doubts, but set out anyway, even though we don’t know exactly where we’re going.
Count the stars. Look honestly at our reasons for doubting
God, for not trusting in the Love behind all things. God knows the world we live in is full of
evidence of a lack of love. But the very
fact that we find this wrong, that it makes us uncomfortable, tells us that
this is not all there is. The glimpses
of love and beauty and blessing we show and see from time to time actually
reveal the true heart of things, the invisible heart of the world that faith
makes visible. As beautiful and sweet as
this world is, it at times makes us gasp for air, like a fish out of
water. That’s because we are not made
for this world alone, and the imprint of the Creator’s love is in our hard-wiring. It turns us away from despair and back to
the Creator whose image we bear. Count
the stars. And know you are beloved.
In the name of God, Amen.
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