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A very big, very small God

Mt. Lebanon UMC
February 8, 2009

Isaiah 40:21-31 (NRSV)
40:21 Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? 
40:22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; 
40:23 who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. 
40:24 Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble. 
40:25 To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One. 
40:26 Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing. 
40:27 Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God”? 
40:28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. 
40:29 He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. 
40:30 Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;
40:31 but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

One week ago today, the Pittsburgh Steelers won Super Bowl 43. One thing you may not have known about the Steelers is the faith of their coach, Mike Tomlin. In a story by Art Stricklin of Baptist Press, Tomlin talked about the lessons he learned from his mentor, Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy.
In a press conference, before hundreds of reporters, Stricklin asked a question, and Tomlin had this to say:
“First and foremost, I want people to know who I am and what the most important thing is in my life, my relationship with Jesus Christ … Football is what we do; faith is who we are all the time.”
Some people are uncomfortable when sports figures talk about their faith, especially in locker room interviews after a big game. The comedian Bill Maher has complained frequently about such interviews, mocking the idea that God, if Maher believed he existed, and I don’t think he does, would be interested in the outcome of a football game.
But people like Maher miss the point. Most of the coaches and athletes I’ve seen in such interviews aren’t under the delusion that God wanted their team to win or the other team to lose. They’re simply thanking God for having given them a safe and successful day in their chosen profession. Unfortunately, in sports, for your team to have a good day it may be necessary for the other team to have a bad day. But don’t confuse an athlete’s gratitude with the arrogance of thinking that he plays for God’s team.

In fact, at some NFL games, groups of players from opposing teams gather together on the field to pray after the final whistle has blown. You don’t see it on the TV broadcasts, but it happens. Obviously, these opponents don’t believe that God favored one side over the other. They’re just happy for the chance to do what they enjoy. And what’s wrong with that?
But if we ask ourselves whether God cares about the outcome of a football game, we have to ask ourselves this: just how small is God?
We all know how big God is. Isaiah, in today’s Bible passage, says that God “sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers.” That doesn’t sound like a God who cares about football games, or about whether you’ve got gas in the tank, or whether you got that promotion you wanted at the office.
We are reminded from time to time how big God is and how small we are.
Let’s start with the size of the universe. In 2004, astronomers reported that they estimate the universe to be at least 156 billion light-years wide. If you measured that in miles you would need a 9 with 23 zeroes after it.
And if God created the universe, and is everywhere in the universe, God is as large as the universe. Our passage tells us that God knows exactly how many stars there are:
“Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.”
And on top of that, God is eternal. God has all of the universe to worry about, and all of eternity to do it.
Sometimes, as we get swept up in the forces of this universe that God created, it’s easy for us to forget that God cares for us as individuals, or even to deny that God cares for us at all. Over the past decade alone we have seen great man-made calamities, in the form of war and terrorism. We have seen tsunamis and hurricanes that have displaced countless families. The 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed an estimates 230,000 people and displaced 1.1 million. More than 40,000 are missing. Measured in lives lost, it is one of the 10 worst earthquakes in recorded human history, and the single worst tsunami in history.
Today, we see poverty and need here at home as economic hardship causes factories to close and puts people out of work.
In times of great struggle, it’s easy to become discouraged and think that God is somewhere out there looking down on us like grasshoppers.
We recently got new computers at the newspaper, and one of the images you can choose to put on your desktop is an image of part of the earth as seen from overhead. It took me a few seconds to look at the photo a little more carefully. It noticed the giant swirling white cloud in the center of the photo and realized it was a hurricane. From the satellite photo, it was a thing of beauty, white and round and graceful.
I can’t tell from the photo exactly where the hurricane is on the earth. But if it was over land, you can probably imagine that the white, fluffy clouds you see from above are nothing like what the people on the ground were going through at the time that photo was taken. They may have been frightened, worried, forced out of their homes. Some may have lost their homes to flooding or high winds.

The God that Isaiah seems to describe in the first part of this passage is a big God, like me looking down at the pretty white clouds on my computer screen.
And yet, the God of Isaiah is also the God of Matthew. In Matthew’s gospel, he quotes Jesus as saying, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.”
It’s hard for us to reconcile the notion of an infinite God – a God who is larger than the universe itself – with the idea of an intimate God, a God who knows and cares about our every struggle and our every triumph. Our experience is that big things tend to be impersonal.
But all of our experience, all of our imagination, sometimes fails us when we try to conceive of God. I don’t know if any of you have read “The Shack,” a novel by William Paul Young that is on the best-seller lists. It’s not without some controversy. The Sunday School class I attend is studying the book right now.
In “The Shack,” the main character, Mack, lives through terrible tragedy and, to some extent, withdraws from life. But then he gets a mysterious note inviting him to return to the site of his great heartbreak. When he gets there, he meets God in a very unusual way. God appears to him as three individuals, representing the three parts of the Trinity – but two of those parts are quite different from the way Mack, or we, usually imagine them.

Young uses this gimmick, if you want to call it that, to tell a story. It’s just a work of fiction; even the author wouldn’t claim that it’s the whole story of who God is. While God can and has chosen to reveal himself in unusual ways – such as the fourth man in the fiery furnace – the truth of the matter is that our minds, in this worldy existence, aren’t anywhere near big enough to encompass the truth about who and what God is. We see through a glass darkly, as it says in I Corinthians 13.
One of my favorite musical groups is a band called Daniel Amos. They once had a song, and an album, called “Darn Floor, Big Bite.” That sounds like a strange name for an album, but you have to know the story behind it. It has to do with a gorilla who had been taught sign language as part of a scientific experiment. You may have seen stories like that on the news. Anyway, there was an earthquake in the area where the experiments were being done, and a researcher – curious to see how the gorilla would respond – used sign language to ask the gorilla what had just happened. The gorilla made the signs for “darn, floor, big, bite.”
Terry Scott Taylor, the songwriter, used that phrase to compare it to our attempts to describe God. Just as the gorilla had no word for “earthquake,” and couldn’t quite describe the concept of “earthquake,” we have to use our limited language and our limited thought processes to describe a very big God.
But that’s OK. Because while our minds aren’t big enough to capture God, God is able to inhabit the small places that make up our lives. Isaiah tells us that his understanding is unsearchable. He’s able to count the number of the stars but also the days of our lives. He can be big and small at the same time.

But that leads us back into questions. God knows our struggles, cares about us, and yet he doesn’t give us the immediate relief that we seem to think we need and that – even though we won’t admit it – that we seem to think we deserve.
God cares about every aspect of our life and invites us to bring our requests to him, no matter how trivial.
I had a little bit of car trouble this week. Happily, it turned out to be nothing serious. But I’m sure that all of us, at one time or another, has wondered about a vehicle and has prayed to God to get us to the end of our trip, or has prayed that whatever was wrong can be repaired inexpensively.
Sometimes we pray for very strange things.
I’ve been active over the years in a program called “Mountain T.O.P.” which places volunteers into the Cumberland Mountains for short-term missions camps. Most of the volunteers in our adult ministry spend the week working on home repair projects for needy families in the mountains, mostly in Grundy County. Others work with children or youth from the mountains.
In the evenings, when we’re all back in camp, we take some time to share what happened at our work sites during the day. Often, people will have prayer requests. I’ll never forget one year when someone from one of our home repair teams stood up to share a prayer request.
“Please,” he said, “I want you to understand that what I’m about to say is not a joke. We’d like you to pray for the iguana at our work site.”

Well, he certainly had our attention. He explained that the child living at their home repair site had been through a lot in his young life – a terrible family situation or what have you – and, to make things worse, the child had seen several pets die over a period of just a few months. Now, the only pet left in the household – an iguana – was suffering, and the volunteers wondered what the impact would be on the child if it, too, abandoned him.
Needless to say, we prayed for the iguana, for the sake of the child.
The Bible makes it clear that God wants us to bring our requests to the holy throne – even if that means praying for an iguana.
But God is not a Coke machine, as a college friend of mine once told me. Sometimes the answer to our requests is “no,” or maybe “not yet.” Sometimes things happen that we don’t understand, or that we find hard to reconcile with our beliefs that God is all-powerful and all-good. That problem, the problem of evil, is part of what “The Shack” is all about.
We may not know, in this earthly existence, why such terrible things happen. But we do have God’s assurance that he will be with us in the midst of the storm. The mighty and terrible God who is the size of the universe is also the merciful and comforting God who lives in our hearts. Listen again to the end of the passage:
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
“He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. 

“Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
The critical point there is that we must wait for the Lord. Our renewal may not come as soon as we imagine or in the exact form that we imagine.
And while God wants us to bring all our requests to him, no matter how trivial, I think part of our growth as Christians is that, the better we get to know God, the more we learn what’s really important, and what we really should be praying for. Maybe what we need to pray for is not the quick-and-easy solution, but the patience and wisdom to wait for, and work out, the right solution. Maybe as we grow in compassion, and our priorities change, we will begin praying more for the needs we see around us and less for our own needs.
When that happens, we can truly mount up with wings like eagles, secure in the fact that our flight is guided by our very big, very small God.

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