"Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.”
Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine the night sky, uninterrupted by even a hint of daylight, streetlight, or building lights. Can you see it in your mind? The field of stars…the heavens flung brightly against the dark night sky? The stars shining, their light along with the moon the only thing piercing the darkness.
Now…imagine that you are alone, standing looking up at the stars and suddenly you feel someone’s arm slipping around your shoulder and they say…See all these stars? This is how your family will be. This is your future.
Open your eyes.
I have a love affair with the stars. I love to stand out underneath a black velvet sky and see the constellations scattered above my head. I sing to the stars- songs from camp as a kid- “In the stars His handiwork I see…” or songs from Broadway:
Stars
In your multitudes
Scarce to be counted
Filling the darkness
With order and light
You are the sentinels
Silent and sure
Keeping watch in the night
Keeping watch in the night
You know your place in the sky
You hold your course and your aim
And each in your season
Returns and returns
And is always the same
The stars are a touchstone. A reminder of God’s presence and power. And in the case of today’s words from Genesis- a reminder of a covenant.
God and Abraham made a covenant…that God would ensure that Abraham’s descendants would be as many as the stars in the sky. But why would God speak of stars, and why does it matter during lent?
See, Abraham doesn’t believe that this is happening. Abraham doesn’t get it. But, God doesn’t sit down and try to argue with Abraham, to try to convince him that the covenant is a good idea. God doesn’t draw a map. God doesn’t argue. God simply points up and asks Abraham to look. And there Abraham was, surrounded by the blackness of the night, the only thing in his vision was a blanket of stars. Looking up, he could see the light of a thousand…even a million…futures to come. He could see the creator's plan revealed in the created. He could see what God meant. In the face of his doubt…in the face of his wife’s infertility, Abraham could not believe that he would have a family. But, when the creator of the universe puts an arm around your shoulder and says… “Look what I can do,” suddenly believing the impossible gets a little easier.
Lent is a time of contemplating the “bigger picture” of trying to figure out what God meant on Good Friday…trying to figure out what God meant on Easter. It’s a time to contemplate the impossible—the miracle that we know is coming. During Lent, we have a glimpse of what is to come. We know the story and we know how it ends. Despite that, we get lost in our own day to day vision of life as we know it. We put on our blinders and get a case of tunnel vision. We can’t see past the Lenten journey to what lies beyond. We can’t see the light because we are too busy staring at the darkness.
And oh…there is plenty of darkness to stare at. There is a world at war with itself. There are children who are hungry. There are families with no homes. There is sickness. There is famine. There is hatred and scorn. There are legislators trying to outlaw everything from Drag Shows to gender-affirming care for children. There are people spewing hate on street corners and gun wielding maniacs shooting up schools, shopping centers, and churches. There is a growing wave of anti-semitism that has temples sending out warnings and protestors at broadway shows. Oh yes…there is plenty of darkness. But the message of Lent is that darkness will have an end if we just believe. We have been shown the whole picture…season after season, year after year, we KNOW the capacity of God’s love. We know how infinite the universe and possibilities are. After all, we have a God who flung the heavens into existence, who provided for and still provides for countless promised generations, and who gave us hope in the form of a man called Jesus.
But there is a bigger picture. God has a great picture in mind for humanity…for the whole world…for each of us. Now, I’m not one to say that God has our individual lives all planned out, but I deeply believe that God has a big picture in mind for us. A picture of peace and unity and love. A picture of people standing together to work for the common good. A picture of humanity living up to its own potential. Understanding that big picture is hard in the face of darkness. It’s hard in the face of the world that we live in. But, we don’t necessarily have to completely understand the bigger picture, sometimes just knowing that it’s there and thinking about it is enough. There is a song by Ginny Owens that points to this very idea. The song is called “I Am” and it tells the stories of various people in the bible who are faced with the impossible, and when they ask God, “Are You Sure?”, God replies:
There's a bigger picture, you can't see
You don't have to change the world, just trust in me
'Cause I am your creator, I am working out my plan
And through you, I will show them, I Am.
That is what this story from Genesis is all about. It’s about Abraham trusting God and understanding that there is a bigger picture, a bigger plan in mind. And when Abraham can’t quite understand what this plan is, God says, “Look to the Stars”. Abraham then knows that there is a bigger idea in place, that God has more in store for him. No, he doesn’t necessarily understand the picture as a whole, nor does he really “get it”. But looking to the stars, He gets an idea of what God might have in store.
We are in the heart of the Lenten journey. We are in the middle of the darkness. Christmas was too long ago, and Easter is too far away. We are here in the middle of the darkness of the Lenten season…and we feel the darkness pressing down on us. We are at the point where our Lenten devotions get harder, where we struggle with the things we gave up or added, where we are faced with our own failure, our own sin, our own inability to repent. We are in our darkest hour and the miracle of Easter seems so far away. We know we must make it through the next few weeks and re-remember the pain of that Friday and his death before we make it to that glorious Easter morning. We know what’s waiting on the other side of Lent, but right now…today…on this cold Lenten morning the warmth and beauty of Easter seem impossibly distant. It seems impossible that we will make it…it seems impossible that spring will come…it seems impossible that the miracle will arrive. And yet…we feel that comforting arm around our shoulders. And we look up…
We see the stars…and we are reminded of the promises that God has kept for generations. Staring into the abyss of space, we know we can make it. Because, when the creator of the universe puts an arm around your shoulder and says, “Look what I can do”, suddenly believing the impossible gets a little easier.
Amen.