Seeing Stars

Scripture Readings

The LORD is my light and my salvation;
whom then shall I fear? *
the LORD is the strength of my life;
of whom then shall I be afraid?

Of all the powerful stories in the Hebrew Bible, today’s reading from Genesis is one of the very most significant. This story is the story from which all those after it will proceed, the moment when God makes a solemn and binding covenant with one man and all his descendants, marking them as chosen by God. This is the story that was told around the campfires and dinner tables of those chosen people for generation upon generation until it was finally written down several centuries later. 

But even though Abram is ultimately remembered as the patriarch of the Hebrew nation and the father of faith, his story was recorded in such a way that we can see that he wasn’t exactly chosen because he had his act together. Abram obeyed God’s initial call a couple chapters earlier to leave his home and everything familiar to settle in the land promised to him in Canaan, but he ended up in Egypt for a spell, where he tried to pass off his wife Sarai as his sister so she could join Pharaoh’s household and gain his favor. And after getting kicked out of Egypt, Abram separated from his nephew Lot, the only family he had left. On top of all this, Abram and Sarai have never been able to have a child. So when God re-appears in this morning’s passage, Abram has been wandering in the wilderness, literally and figuratively, and he’s had just about enough.

God shows up in a vision with words of reassurance and promise, but for Abram those words are hollow, because in his culture God could give him the entire world, but it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t have offspring to pass it on to. Without a son, the inheritance of land that God has promised is basically worthless. So even though Abram has in many respects just won the lottery – he’s an ordinary and sinful guy who has been hand picked by God for an amazing inheritance – he doesn’t rejoice or even say ‘thanks.’ Instead, he vents! “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless?” Dialogue in Hebrew is typically back and forth, with people politely taking turns, but Abram interrupts God to take another turn, in case that last point wasn’t clear. “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born of my house is to be my heir!” In other words, this makes no sense! God has picked the wrong guy!

God waits like a patient parent for Abram to finish his fit and soon realizes that words are not getting the point across. So God gently nudges Abram out the door and asks him a trick question: “Can you count the stars?” Unfortunately, most of us are usually in places where we can count the stars, but Abram would have seen a whole sky-full, so dense they looked like a gauzy film across the dark sky. God doesn’t explain the meaning of this exercise right away, so I imagine this space between sentences as the time where Abram actually tries to count, and you can just imagine him craning his neck, leeeeeeeeeeaning back to try to get a good look.

A couple summers ago my husband and I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to look at the night sky from Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. Some of the largest telescopes in the world reside at Mauna Kea’s summit – it is 300 miles away from the nearest big city, and at over 13,000 feet its views are unpolluted by light or obstacles. Our guide for the evening, Buck, spent two hours mapping out the night sky for us: all the major constellations of the zodiac, Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades, and a special treat – the Southern Cross. I have never seen so many stars, and I probably never will again. But, since then, every time I have been far enough out of a major city to see more than a handful of stars, I have been transported back to that wild, amazing place, and I can hear Buck’s voice explaining how those stars are all connected in an intricate and beautiful pattern.

Most of the stars I saw that night are the same ones God pointed out to Abram. And when Abram saw them he suddenly understood that God was serious, that God hadn’t chosen the wrong guy. He understood that he wasn’t expected to do anything except move forward as if God’s promise was true, even if it didn’t make sense, and that’s how he came to be known as an example of faith. And every night a visible reminder of that promise appeared in the sky above him, so when he forgot, when he felt unworthy, when he felt like he would never be a father and would never have a home again, all he had to do was look up. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would we believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their smile.”

Abram didn’t receive offspring right away, and he was still surprised when he did, but for the rest of his life, when he looked at those stars, he could remember that vision, he could remember God’s voice showing him the map of his inheritance, that intricate and beautiful pattern. When he finally had a son, he told him this story, and the son told his son, and he told his son…on and on until this very morning. And each of us is one of those stars, an heir of God’s promise.

But here’s the catch: To see an infinity of stars, you don’t have to be an ancient Middle Eastern shepherd, and you don’t have to be on Mauna Kea, but I think you do have to be in the wilderness. It is hard to see the stars from, say, Times Square, where we are surrounded by a glow of prosperity. When we are surrounded by light, when we are surrounded by prosperity and fulfillment, our eyes are clouded and the sky may look dark and empty. God sent Abram into the wilderness so that his vision could become clear. And as Abram’s story continues through his descendants, the wilderness is where the Israelites will always encounter God. That’s why Jesus spent 40 days in the desert, and that’s why we send ourselves into a metaphorical wilderness during this season every year.

Last year during Holy Week I joined a few folks at seminary in doing a juice fast. From the afternoon of Palm Sunday all the way until the evening Maundy Thursday service, we drank only juice and broth. It was kind of crazy, and to be honest I didn’t really think I could make it through the week without cheating, but it seemed like an important thing to try at least once. The fasting got really hard every evening around what would have been dinnertime, and that’s when I came the closest to running to the cupboard to have just one little bitty Cheez-it, or maybe two. 

On the second night of this, I was sprawled on the couch in misery, trying not to think about my kitchen cupboards, feeling weak and certain that I would not get through the rest of the week. But at that moment my eyes fell on a statue I had brought back from a seminary mission trip to Myanmar last year, a statue of a woman who is kneeling in fervent prayer, with her hands raised up and her face gazing straight up toward heaven. It reminded me of all the people I met there who are hungry every day, and not by choice, who live in a type of wilderness that I will never know. And so that hungry time each evening, when I wanted to throw in the towel, became a time of prayer for me, a type of raw, vulnerable prayer that I hadn’t experienced before. I probably sounded something like Abram, listing off the things that were just not adding up. But overall that is a week that I remember as having great clarity. I wasn’t ravenously hungry all the time, but I became keenly aware of food, and I realized how often and how much I eat during a normal day. Suddenly I was able to see the abundance that had been existing all around me, abundance that I had never asked for: food at my fingertips all the time, my loving family, opportunities to travel and explore and study. I saw God’s grace in my life. I saw stars.

I’m not recommending that you try juice fasting at home, and the jury’s still out on whether I’ll do that ever again, but it helped me to see the importance of separating ourselves for a time from the abundance and light that can cloud our vision. Whether our wilderness is something symbolic that we undertake during this season, or the dark places of our lives that we already inhabit, God will meet us there. That is how we too become people of faith, by allowing that hand to lead us outside, by craning our necks to look toward heaven. There is no wilderness that is too dark for God’s light. In fact, that is where we are most able to see it.