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June 10, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Fire

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
John 16:12–15

“You have made them a little lower than God
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion.”

Psalm 8:5–6

If I should ever die, God forbid,
let this be my epitaph:
The only proof he needed
for the existence of God was music.

Kurt Vonnegut

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O Lord, how majestic is your name. When I look at the moon and stars . . .
who are we that you are mindful? Yet you have made us little lower than God,
crowned us with glory and honor, given us dominion.

It’s difficult to see the stars if you live in the city. A full moon rising over the lake will stop you in your tracks, to be sure, but there is just too much ambient light to see many stars. And so one of my favorite things to do each summer when we are at the ocean is to lie back on the deck, at night, and look up into the night sky. There are millions of them up there, twinkling. The sky is full.

We called down to the Adler Planetarium this week and talked to educator Michele Nichols. I had a question: just how many stars are up there? Michele told me there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. I think I heard that right. And she told me there are 100 billion to maybe 100 trillion galaxies.

PBS correspondent, poet, and good friend Judy Valente says that when she was told that there were 100 billion galaxies in the universe, she remembers thinking that “this fact alone ought to be proof of God” (Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul, p. 178).

From the beginning of time human beings have looked up into the night sky full of bright stars and wondered: wondered about who is out there, wondered if anyone is out there, who put the stars there? And, always, immediately—standing or lying down beneath that beauty and mystery—wondered who we are.

Two-thousand-five-hundred years ago, a poet wrote a hymn:

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name. . . .
When I look at your heavens, the moon and stars,
who are we?
What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

It is, of course, the philosophic-theological question. And the scholars have always known that the question of God—who’s out there?—and the human question—who are we?—are, in some way, the same question.

John Calvin and Karl Barth taught that you can’t inquire into the nature of God without, at the same time, inquiring into the nature of humankind. Theology is always, in some way, anthropology.

Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall writes, “No question plagues the contemporary spirit so much as the human question.”

The late Kurt Vonnegut, who all his life pondered and wrote about the anomaly of human grandeur and beauty and the human propensity to violence, visiting death and suffering on one another—as in the Allied fire bombing of Dresden in World War II, for instance—asked with characteristic bluntness, “Just what the hell are people for?”

It is a question powerfully explored and addressed in Cormac McCarthy’s current best-seller, The Road. The Road is about a father and son who have survived a horrendous cataclysm, perhaps a nuclear holocaust, that has destroyed almost all living things and left the world an empty, bleak, ashen, mostly lifeless place. The man and boy are walking south, pushing a few belongings in a grocery cart, scavenging what they can to survive. I think it is an important book. It is not an easy book, because it looks honestly at the worst, but also the best, human beings can be—on the one hand destructive and cruel but also courageous and tenacious and tender enough to keep life alive in the face of an ultimate threat. The father is critically ill and determined that his son will live on and somehow find a future.

God is mentioned twice. Near the beginning overtly. The father wakes one morning in the woods beside the road, while his son is still sleeping, wrapped in a blanket. He kneels in the ashes, lifts his eyes to the gray sky, and whispers, “Are you there? Will I see you at the last?” “Oh, God,” he whispers. “Oh, God.”

And again, near the end, indirectly, not by name, but with a symbol, a metaphor: the Fire.

The man took [the boy’s] hand, wheezing. “You must go on,” he said. “I can’t go with you. You need to keep going.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s all right. . . . Keep the gun with you.”
“I want to be with you.”
“You can’t.”
“Please.”
“You can’t. You have to carry the fire.”
“I don’t know how to.”
“Yes you do.”
“Is it real? The fire?”
“Yes it is.”
“Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”
“Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”

The Fire. The essence of life. The potential and promise, the glory and honor given to each of us that must not, and cannot, go out.

Traditionally Christianity has emphasized the negative side of the story: the sin, the fallenness, the human propensity toward selfishness and violence. Our “total depravity,” the old Calvinists called it, our inability to get anything right.

In the psalms preceding the familiar words of the Eighth Psalm, human beings are described as a rather sorry lot: beset by many foes, in disaster, suffering shame, sighing, languishing, struck with terror, weary, weeping, pursued and threatened. All in all it is a dismal portrait of the human enterprise: hopeless, helpless, under siege from forces over which people have no control—not unlike the father and son in The Road.

And then, without warning, remarkably, Psalm 8:

How majestic is your name.
When I look at the stars,
who are we that you should care?
Who am I?
Yet you made us a little less than God,
crowned us with glory and honor.
You have given us dominion.

It is a remarkably positive statement about the human prospect.

“Who are we?” We are a little less than God, that’s who.

“What are we supposed to do? What are people for?” Our job is to exercise dominion over the work of God’s hands. We are supposed to be managing the place, responsibly stewarding the creation, starting with our own lives.

The biblical answer to who we are and what we are for is on the first page. Human beings are made in the image of God and are given the high responsibility for the rest of creation. Adam and Eve get to give everything a name. They are in charge of the garden. Things are fine until they start to renege. The woman allows a snake to talk her into doing something she’s not supposed to do. Adam allows Eve to talk him into the same disregard. When the creator calls them to account, Adam blames Eve—the woman, “she made me do it”—and Eve blames the snake—“It was the serpent’s fault.”

Human beings are given dignity and honor and the high responsibility of managing creation, beginning with their own lives. And things start to go badly when they forget that honor and glory and dignity and responsibility, when human beings forget who they and who other human beings are and start to treat them as less than the magnificent creatures God made them to be.

Don Imus’s ugly, demeaning, racist on-air description of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, playing for the national championship, not only demeaned and degraded women and African American people in general, but also was a sobering, depressing reminder of the ugliness of racism and the remaining power of racial and sexual stereotyping. But what a great moment when the players and their coach began to speak, what a magnificent affirmation of our common humanity. Coach Vivian Stringer: “I see ten young ladies who have accomplished so much, valedictorians, doctors, musical prodigies, girl scouts . . . the best the nation has to offer, articulate, brilliant” and she added, appropriately in light of the Eighth Psalm, “God’s representatives.”

Sophomore Heather Zurich told about the championship season: how it had started poorly but, after the team met and decided they could be and were champions, ended magnificently. “What hurts,” she said, “is that Mr. Imus doesn’t know us. Doesn’t know that Mat is the funniest person you will ever meet. Kia is the big sister you never had. Piph will be an unbelievable lawyer one day.”

And Essence Carson, contrary to Mr. Imus’s degrading comments: “We are student athletes, students first,” but even before the student, “the daughter.” We are somebody’s daughter. That’s what the Bible says: a mother’s and a father’s daughter. God’s daughter, created in the image of God, crowned with glory and honor, given dominion.

Things go wrong in creation when people forget who they are. Things go wrong when people forget their God-given responsibility to exercise dominion, to faithfully manage God’s creation, the world, nation, city, community, family, personal life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer watched in dismay as the German intelligentsia, the academic community, the lawyers and judges, finally the church, sold out to Nazi ideology and turned away as thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of Jews were crowded into ghettos, herded into boxcars, and delivered to extermination camps. Bonhoeffer, a pacifist, raised his voice in protest, joined the resistance, was arrested and executed. From his Nazi prison cell he wrote, “The sin of respectable people is fleeing from responsibility.”

In the aftermath of the murder of a fifteen-year-old high school student on a CTA bus, coming home from school, and the acknowledgment that twenty-seven Chicago Public School students have been murdered this year, national attention focused on our city and our schools, on how easy we have made it for gang bangers and drug dealers to have access to guns, lethal automatic weapons, on how Illinois continues to be near the very bottom of state funding for public education, how we continue to refuse to address the built-in inequities of a funding system based on property values. CNN’s Anderson Cooper visited Chicago, interviewed sixteen-year-old dropouts, standing on a street corner, in the middle of the day, with a bottle in a brown bag in one hand, unemployed. The dropout rate for African American males in our city is horrendous, higher by far than any other ethnic group and, in virtually every case, a human tragedy waiting to happen.

The sin of respectable people is fleeing responsibility, Bonhoeffer said, and so I was overjoyed last week to read a newspaper report about the new Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, a new Chicago public school in Englewood. The school opened last fall with 160 freshmen under the leadership of Tim King, a dedicated and visionary educator. Students come from tough neighborhoods, walk through streets littered with broken beer bottles and tiny plastic baggies once filled with crack. The school uniform—blazer, khaki pants, white collared shirt, and red tie—makes them easy targets for gang members, so most of the young men carry their clothes and change in the school hallway. D’Angelo Gardner didn’t like it at all when staff members told him to tuck in his shirt, pull up his pants, straighten his tie; didn’t like unfamiliar black men telling him what to do at all. His own father died of a heroin overdose when he was nine. His mother knew what was at stake. On the admission application she scribbled, “Please pick my son. We need you.”

D’Angelo is making it, has become a leader. Grades are up. Students are gaining self-confidence, pride, self-respect. Each day the Urban Academy begins and ends with an assembly at which the school creed is chanted. I tried to excerpt it and couldn’t because it is so good. It is a good paraphrase of Psalm 8:

We believe.
We are the young men of Urban Prep.
We are college bound.
We are exceptional, not because we say it, but because we work hard at it.
We will not falter in the face of any obstacle placed before us.
We are dedicated, committed, and focused.
We will never succumb to mediocrity, uncertainty, or fear.
We never fail because we never give up.
We make no excuses.
We choose to live honestly, nonviolently, and honorably.
We respect ourselves and, in doing so, respect all people.
We have a future for which we are accountable.
We have a responsibility to our families, community, and world.
We are our brothers’ keepers.
We believe in ourselves.
We believe in each other.
We believe in Urban Academy.
We believe.

That’s the Fire. That’s the glory and honor with which God crowns every child, every boy and girl, man and woman. Potential, promise; glory and honor and dominion; responsibility.

In Jesus Christ, we Christians believe, we have seen how much God values human life. In him we have seen how far God goes to demonstrate the glory and honor of each of us: we are worth the life of God’s Son. And in Jesus Christ, we Christians also see what a full human life, crowned with glory and honor, exercising dominion and responsibility, looks like. For us, Jesus is God’s love and our value acted out and also God’s hope and intent for each of us: life lived out in commitment and passion and self-giving.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established,
what are human beings?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.

Over the years, the life of our family has been enriched and blessed by our friendship with Dick and Anne Lodge, their family, and their youngest, a young woman, now in her forties, with Down Syndrome. We’ve known Mary for more than thirty years. And she has blessed us and taught us, over and over, the lesson of human dignity and worth and God-given glory and honor.

Mary lives with several other young women in a group home, goes to work, uses public transportation, shops, cooks, cares for herself, loves her videos and CDs, and has an active social life, including a weekly Bible study led by a minister and a fellowship time or party following. Recently they studied King David. The minister told the story of David’s escapades with wild beasts, the story of David and Goliath, his slingshot and five smooth pebbles, his music, his military career, and his reign as king. “God chose and loved and anointed David,” the minister told Mary and her friends. “Do you know what that means?” One of the students responded, “Anointed means God told David he was really special.”

The minister continued, “God told David he was very special and made him a king. God says the same thing to each one of you. God loves you. God cares about you. You—each of you—is very special to God.” And he pulled out a stack of cardboard crowns he had found at Burger King and gave each of the dear young women and men, a crown and one for the parents who were there, and they all put their crowns on—Mary and her friends, Dick and Anne—and enjoyed ice cream and cake—and their God-given glory and honor.

“Is it real? The fire?” the little boy asked.
“Yes it is.”
“Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”
“Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name.
When I look at the heavens, the moon and stars . . .
what are human beings? Who are we?
Yet you made them a little lower than God.

Crowned with glory and honor.
Gave them—us—dominion.
The Fire.

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church