Hilton Head Island, SC – September 21, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 145:1-21
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. – Psalm 145:3 (RSV)
The Greatness of God
A couple of weeks ago, I announced in the sermon that today I would preach the last of a 10+-year series of sermons on the Book of Psalms. I realize that may have little or no significance to you folks, because every Sunday you are stuck with listening to whatever sermon I preach from whatever text in whatever book of the Bible, and therefore you need give the matter no thought whatever ahead of time. I, on the other hand, obsessively ponder these issues, and since The Chapel Without Walls started nearly eleven years ago, I set a goal for myself to preach from nearly all of the 150 Psalms. Today is my last hurrah to the Psalms as your full-time-part-time parson.
No doubt I shall come back to the Psalms occasionally when my status changes to being one of our four co-pastors at the beginning of 2015. Furthermore, Psalm 145 is not the last of the Psalms. However, on August 10 I referred to Psalm 150, which is the last of the Psalms. I wanted to save Psalm 145 as the final Psalm in this decade-long series, because I wanted our text today to be the grand finale of our thoughts which evolve from the Bible’s hymnal, which is what in reality the Book of Psalms truly is.
Psalm 145 is the last of the Psalms in the Book of Psalms to be identified as a Psalm of David. Psalms 146 through 150 say nothing about who wrote them. They are the Songs of Hallel. Hallel in Hebrew means “praise.” Each of the final five Psalms begins with the exclamation, “Praise the Lord!” In Hebrew that is Hallelujah!
The Songs of Hallel don’t sound as though David was their author, but Psalm 145 certainly does. From verse 1 through verse 21, there are echoes of thoughts and ideas previously found many times in the Psalms ascribed to David. He begins with a very Davidic declaration, “I will extol thee, my God and King, and bless thy name forever and ever. Every day I will praise thee, and praise thy name forever and ever.” And then he wrote that wonderfully memorable statement which is the text for this morning’s sermon, “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable” (145:1-3).
A few miles southwest of the Dead Sea in Israel is a town called Arad. Arad is located at the northern edge of the Negev Desert. The Negev stretches from about forty miles south of Jerusalem all the way south to the narrow Gulf of Aqaba, where Israel, Egypt, and Jordan come together in an uneasy triangle. There isn’t much in the Negev, nor is there much in Arad either.
Our tour group happened to be staying in a small tourist hotel in Arad. We arrived there after it was getting dark, so we didn’t see much of the town. The next morning, when it was light, we discovered there wasn’t a whole lot to see. But that night, after we finished dinner, some of us went out and sat under the stars. As I remember, the hotel was on the outskirts of town, and there were no streetlights close by. It was an absolutely clear night, with no clouds anywhere.
The atmosphere above a desert is usually very dry, with almost no humidity. That was the nature of the night sky above Arad thirty or more years ago. There seemed to be thousands or even millions more stars than I had ever seen before, because of the singular clarity of the night sky. They shone down upon us in the most glorious profusion of starlight I suspect I shall ever see; I will never forget the distant brilliance of all those simmering suns.
The closest star to the earth, of course, is the sun, which, as we all learned in school, is ninety-three million miles away. Probably no one here absolutely knows that for a fact, but we believe the astronomers and astrophysicists who tell us that. Most of the stars above Arad, which is to say most of the stars above anywhere, are thousands or millions of light-years away. Again, ordinary people don’t know that, and can’t really comprehend it, but we believe those who are capable of knowing such things when they tell us the distances.
“Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.” Who, even among astronomers or physicists, can properly grasp the immensity of God’s universe? And beyond that, who can grasp the greatness of God? The world is big, 25,000 miles around we were told, but it is a mere cosmic speck, a microcosmic molecule, compared to the size of the ever-expanding universe or multiverse or whatever else is out there.
A few weeks ago I asked you to give me a list of hymns you would like us to sing. Only two people thus far have done it, and both selected what shall be our last hymn today, How Great Thou Art. I had resolved to use How Great Thou Art as our last hymn even before these ladies wrote it on their lists, but I am pleased to please them with what all of us would agree, I presume, is the only proper hymn for ending a service which focuses on the greatness of God.
There is, however, a problem with How Great Thou Art. The four verses are found on one page, and the refrain is on a second page. To take two full pages for one hymn messes up the word processing template we use for our bulletin. Alas, the sole solution would be to have two two-line hymns to fit everything in. But there is no way we can have two two-line hymns when thinking about the greatness of God. We need big-sound, big-thought, big-verse hymns. Therefore today you have a separate insert for the last hymn. My own difficulties were exacerbated by the fact that I have only one hymnal with How Great Thou Art in it, and besides having four verses in English, it also has four verses in Korean, a language I presume no one here knows. So Larry Mercer found our finale in one of his trusty, and perhaps rusty, Methodist hymnals. Now you have the whole background for why we have a white, two-page hymn rather than a one-page gold hymn. So when the time comes to sing it, reach for the rafters, dear hearts.
“O Lord my God!/ When I in awesome wonder/ Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made/ I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder/ Thy power throughout the universe displayed/ Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee/ How great Thou art/ How great Thou art!” “Of the glorious splendor of thy majesty, and of thy wondrous works, I will meditate. Men shall proclaim the might of thy terrible acts, and I will declare thy greatness” (145:6).
Matthew Parris is a regular editorialist for The Times of London. Recently he told of being at a dinner party in a village in Derbyshire. They were discussing the issue of why moderate Muslims do not seem to speak out about extremist Muslims. He said someone asked, “Isn’t the problem not specifically Islam, but monotheism? Doesn’t a supreme supra-national being tend to draw loyalties away from the secular state?” Later in his column Mr. Parris wrote, “I left invigorated by a new idea. Maybe monotheism, at least when seriously believed, is the problem?”
One of the things I like about the large envelopes of Times clippings I receive fortnightly or so (as the Brits would say) is that frequently the writers touch on religious themes, and not always in an orthodox fashion. Rupert Murdoch is the owner of the London Times, but he seems to give the editor-in-chief carte blanche to permit the writers whatever they choose to write, and there are several skeptics about religion or outright atheists among the stable of regular writers.
Few American newspapers allow serious discussion about religious matters, either pro or con, in their pages. The attitude here seems to be well expressed in a cartoon in the last issue of The New Yorker. It showed five angels in heaven playing baseball. We know they are angels, because they have small wings, and halos, and they are standing, not on an ordinary baseball field, but on a field of small, puffy clouds. The catcher has walked out to talk to the pitcher, and he says to him, “Look, I know you think you’ve got the stuff, but I’m telling you: walk God.”
Don’t mess with God, or His greatness. When He gets up to bat, walk Him, or He either literally will crush the ball with His bat, or knock it all the way to hell and back. That’s the safe way to think about God and His greatness.
But what about illness? Why would a great God allow it? Or having allowed it, why wouldn’t He always, or at least almost always, cure it? The unsearchable greatness of God does not give an answer that is acceptable to everyone for those questions. Or why does God allow addictions? We claim that God gives us free will, and if so, we are free to become addicted, and that’s a problem, isn’t it? But the unsearchable greatness of God does not give an answer to that quandary that satisfies everyone about the issue. Why does God allow huge meteorites to smash into planets, destroying or obliterating nearly every living thing? Why do stars burn out? Why do climates change, threatening the existence of every being in those climates? The questions are huge, but the lack of clear answers is greater still. God’s greatness cannot be satisfactorily be comprehended by those of us who are mere humans. We might like to think we can grasp it, if we were ever given a fair chance, but we can’t. God’s greatness is ultimately unsearchable, and that can be both a humbling reality and a major spiritual and intellectual challenge.
Every spring, Jews all over the world engage in what is known as the Passover Haggadah. It is a written ritual for the celebration of one of the most important Jewish festivals, and it is used in conjunction with the Seder meal.
As part of the ritual, the leader says a phrase, and the family or group or congregation answer, Dayeinu, which means “It would be enough for us.” There is a whole series of these statements, one leading into the other. The first declaration says, “Had God brought us out of Egypt, and not divided the sea for us:” “Dayeinu.”
Had God divided the sea and not permitted us to cross on dry land: It would be enough.
Had God fed us with manna and not given us the Sabbath: It would be enough….
Had God given us the Torah and not led us into the land of Israel: It would be enough.
Had God built for us the Temple and not sent the prophets of truth: Dayeinu.
Had God sent us the prophets of truth and not made us a holy people: Dayeinu.
The greatness of God provides us far more than we deserve or can even properly appreciate. God’s blessings toward us are boundless, His love is endless. Try as we might, we cannot fathom the immensity or the infinity or the eternity of God’s nature. If we dismiss it, knowing how limited we are to try to understand it, we do no favors either to God or to ourselves. But if we think we have finally grasped what it means, we have deluded ourselves. If, on the other hand, we think about God and conclude there is far more not to be known than to be known, and we therefore conclude God surely must not exist if we cannot adequately comprehend Him, we may fall into one of the greatest examples of human arrogance. Easy atheism is intellectual indolence; serious atheism requires even more deep thought than the most advanced of theologies. Genuine atheists understand the greatness of God better than many of the most dedicated believers.
Birth defects call the greatness of God into question, but they do not negate it. Tragic accidents, in which no one is at fault, and which injure or kill people, raise questions about the greatness of God, but they do not negate it. National votes which threaten to destroy a larger national union may pose questions in some minds about the greatness of God, but in fact they have no bearing on the matter, because they are totally human-oriented issues, so they certainly cannot negate God’s greatness. Sometimes we wonder about God’s greatness when His magnitude is not the question at all. But wanting an explanation other than the obvious one, we suppose an omnipotent God should straighten out what limited human beings can and should straighten out on their own.
However, ponder God’s greatness in a more positive, even if perhaps less obvious, way. The fact that any of us lives beyond two years of age is astonishing, considering all the things that can go wrong with us. The fact that humans have not destroyed the earth years ago suggests that God’s greatness is far, far more potent than humanity’s folly. That the expanding universe has not flung itself into oblivion billions of years ago is a testimony to the unfathomable greatness of God. That mosquitoes or coral snakes or poison ivy exist and yet the natural order is not irreparably damaged tells us that God surely must be great, even if factors such as that make us wonder about it. If there were only prophets sent from God to a faithful but also rebellious people, it would be enough to establish the greatness of God. That a simple carpenter from an inconspicuous Galilean village should invite the rest of the human race into the greatness of God illustrates, as nothing else can, the greatness of God.
It is arrogant foolishness to imagine that any of us has fully understood the greatness of God. But it is spiritual and intellectual cowardice to give up the quest simply because we know we cannot completely succeed. Of the glorious splendor of God’s majesty, and of His wondrous works, we must meditate. Not to do so is to diminish what it means to be human, and also indirectly to diminish our perception of the greatness of God.
Because we live, God is great. Because we live in a beautiful community of fascinating people, God is great. Because we live in a state with a rich and proud, if also occasionally skewed, history, God is great. Because we live in a nation which has risen remarkably quickly from a thinly populated wilderness to what is currently the strongest nation on earth, whether we really approve or not, God is great. Because we live on a planet which is the proper distance from a smaller-than-average star, God is great. Because the universe exists with an ineffable precision of mathematics and physics, God is great. Because God is love, God is great.
Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and because of this, His greatness is ultimately unsearchable. Live in the immensity. Live in God.