Powers of Ten

When I was a kid, growing up in a small town in upstate New York in the 1980s, there wasn’t a lot to do on a Saturday afternoon.  After the morning cartoons were over, the only options on TV were watching Pete Weber bowl or Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.  Frequently, if we were home on a Saturday afternoon, I wound up sitting on the floor in the living room, parked not in front of the TV, but in front of my dad’s bookshelves.

He didn’t have any kids’ books, but he did subscribe to one of those book-of-the-month clubs, in this case one offered by Scientific American.  They were all very flippable books—meaning, even if the words were above my reading level, the pictures said even more. 

My favorite book in this series was called Powers of Ten.  It’s a book of mostly pictures, and you can start anywhere in the book.  You don’t have to start at page one.  The book actually encourages you to start about halfway in, with a picture of a man napping on a picnic blanket.  When you turn the page, the view zooms out—by a power of ten, hence the book title—and your view is now hovering some ten meters over him, and you see he is not alone.  A woman is sitting next to him, reading a book. 

On the next page, the view again zooms out, this time so far you can’t see the couple at all.  All you see is a large, green field, bordered by a highway on one side and a marina on the other.  Page after page, the pictures zoom out and out, until eventually you’re looking at the planet earth from space, and then the solar system, and then the galaxy.

It was captivating to me as a child.  I was hooked, unable to look away, going through the book over and over.

Every kid seems to go through a dinosaur phase or a space phase or both, I think because both dinosaurs and space challenge our perceptions of the world in which we live.  We begin to realize there is something so much bigger and so much more amazing than we could have ever imagined on our own.

For the first time, we look at dinosaurs and the universe, separately, and we feel small, not just in physical size, but in our relationship to the whole of creation.

It’s something the psalmist understood.  Listen again to today’s reading, specifically, Psalm 8:3-4 which reads, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”

From our earliest age, we tend to view God as being somewhere far away, somewhere apart from us.  When I was a kid in CCD—that’s a Catholic catechism class—I remember that we were asked one day to draw what Heaven looked like to us.  You might expect a child to draw a picture of the sky, of the clouds, with God, that bearded old man, a white-haired Bob Ross, majestically sitting on a happy little cloud-like throne.

But my picture of Heaven looked like something from the cartoon, The Jetsons.  My Heaven wasn’t in the clouds—it was in the stars.

Unfortunately, this idea of God existing somewhere far apart from us, frequently persists into adulthood.  And it can lead to spiritual hunger.  Maybe we don’t even know it’s a spiritual hunger; all we know is that there’s something going on within us.  It’s like when you were a kid, standing in front of a completely full refrigerator, your mother shouting for you to shut the door, and all you can yell back is, “I’m hungry and there’s nothing to eat!”

That’s what spiritual hunger can feel like.  We know we’re hungry but nothing we eat seems to fill us.

In her book of sermons, entitled, When God is Silent, Episcopal priest, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, "Very few people come to see me because they want to discuss something God said to them last night. The large majority come because they cannot get God to say anything at all.”

For a lot of us, God is still far out there, deep among the stars.  And we are stuck in a Psalm 8 mindset.  Who are we that God should care about us at all?

The answer is in our first reading from today, in Proverbs 8:22-31, which describe Creation.  The poetry of the Bible is beautiful, but I want us to focus on just one word from today’s Proverbs reading.  And that word is “delight.”  It’s there in verses 30 and 31. 

But before we dive into that, we need to address something else first.  I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to give it serious thought.  Okay?

Do you believe that God loves you?

Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, yeah, of course I believe that.  Maybe you one hundred percent totally believe that. Or maybe you have your doubts.

And if that is the case, let me assuage your fears.

God loves you.

God loves each one of you and He loves every bit of each one of you.

When I was volunteering as a hospital chaplain some years ago, I discovered that the most healing words I could say to someone were, “God loves you.”  No matter who they were.  No matter what their situation.  God loves you.  Period.

It’s very important you understand this.

That God loves you.

Because I’m about to take it up a notch—by a power of ten—if you will.

It is not just that God loves us.  Proverbs 8 tells us that God delights in us.  We make God happy.  We bring God joy.  When we walk into a room, God’s face lights up.  Suddenly the room is brighter because we are there and God’s love for us shines as bright as the light of the sun.

God doesn’t love us from afar.

God’s love extends through all space and time.  He loves us now.  He is already loving us tomorrow and He is walking with us, standing with us, running the race with us in every moment of our lives.

God’s greatness doesn’t separate us from Him; rather God’s greatness draws us even nearer to Him.  We are caught up in the gravity of His presence.

God loves us.

God delights in us.

He created us.  He made us.  His brushstrokes are on our hearts.  His fingerprints on our souls.   

God loves because He is love.  And because He made us in His image, we are love, too, even if we sometimes forget it.

That book Powers of Ten that I mentioned earlier—there is a certain magic to the book.  Because if you flip the pages one way, you zoom out from the man on the picnic blanket to the farthest reaches of the universe, but if you flip the other direction, you zoom in on the man, to his hand, his skin cells, his DNA, the atoms and the quantum landscape deep within each of us.

And you discover that the universe within us is just as incredible as the universe outside of us.

That the smallest part of us is just as great as any star or quasar or black hole in the known and unknown universe.

That all of God’s creation is magnificent and worthy.

Yes, sometimes God feels so distant.  And sometimes we feel so small and insignificant. 

There were so many times, as a chaplain, that I would walk into a patient’s room, listen to what was always a tragic story and yet, when I would ask them if they wanted prayer, they would say, “No, that’s okay.  God has more important things to worry about.”

But that’s not true.  You are more important to God than you know.  You are His everything.  You are His reason.  To say that God does not have time for you is to say that God’s love is finite, that God’s love can run out.

But God’s love can never run out.  The well of His living water never runs dry.

In today’s second reading from Romans 5:5, we are told that God has poured His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Key word … poured … He has poured His love into us.  He has fed us.  He has nourished us.  He has filled us.  God’s love is light and life.  Both are inextinguishable.

Believing that God loves us is the foundation of our faith.  Because if we don’t believe God loves us, then nothing in the Bible makes sense, not the crucifixion, not the resurrection, not Pentecost, not Creation itself, not even our reading from Romans today. 

Let’s look again at Romans 5:1-5.  That whole part about suffering producing endurance and endurance producing character and character producing hope … it all sounds good except when you’re knee deep in the worst moment of your life.

It’s the next part that shows the extent of God’s love.  Hope does not disappoint, we are told, because God does not disappoint.  God’s love doesn’t disappoint.  Even in the midst of suffering, God’s love surrounds us and holds us close.

Today is Father’s Day and I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my dad’s role in inspiring this sermon.  It’s not just that I pulled the book Powers of Ten off his bookshelf that day more than 35 years ago because I was bored.  Books are so important.  Every book is a seed.  Every book we read is a seed planted, a seed that may take years to bloom, but even dormant remains something filled with potential.

But again, it’s not just the book on my dad’s shelf.  I have spent the last few minutes talking to you about God’s love and I can tell you, personally, I can’t remember a time I didn’t know God’s love.  And that has a lot to do with my dad.

Let me share a story.  When I was a toddler, my dad would make audio recordings of interviews or chats he had with me.  Mostly, it was just a good opportunity for me to sound very cute and sing songs from the movie Grease.

In one of these recordings, though, my dad asks me this question … “Who loves you?”

Now, my dad is right there in front of me, you’d think I would have giggled—I was a giggler—and then said, “Daddy!” 

But no, when my dad asks me, “Who loves you?” I don’t hesitate.  I say, “Jesus.”

I didn’t just come up with that on my own.  My dad had taught me that.  And I believed it not simply because he told me, but because he showed me.  From the time I was a baby, and he read to me the Bible while I was in the crib, my dad showed me God’s love, by showing me his love, by showering me with attention, by showing me that he didn’t just love me, he delighted in me.  His face lit up each time I toddled into the room.

So who, in your life, has shown you God’s love?

How have you shown God’s love to others?

Who will you show God’s love to today?

Amen.