What Starlight Has to Teach Us
March 9, 2025 First Sunday in Lent
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Luke 3:23-25, 37-38, 4:1-13
“What Starlight Has to Teach Us”
Douglas T. King
If you have ever spent any time far from the city and the suburbs, the night sky is simply miraculous. During those long nights alone in the wilderness, I bet Jesus spent a lot of time looking up into the vast night sky and gazing at the innumerable stars, countless light years away and countless years old.
My favorite movie is “The Lion in Winter” in which the unstoppable force of Peter O’Toole runs headlong into the immovable object of Katherine Hepburn. It is Christmas 1183 and King Henry the Second (played by O’Toole) is getting up in years (50, gasp!) and needs to think about a successor to his throne. He and Queen Eleanor (Katherine Hepburn), whom he has imprisoned, disagree about which of their sons should be the next king. Let the fireworks and intense, brilliant verbal parrying begin. O’Toole bellows and connives and demonstrates every form of Machiavellian earthly power imaginable as he pushes back on the limits of his mortality.
Then there is this odd, wordless scene in this movie full to overflowing with words. The king is on the top of the castle. He looks up into the vastness of the night sky and he cowers. For the first time the king appears to be small and overwhelmed. He is human and limited and mortal after all. When he returns inside he announces, “The skies are pocked with stars. What eyes the wise men must have had to see a new one in so many. I wonder if there were fewer stars then. I fancy there is mystery in it.”
The talk of stars always reminds me of the Jewish Holy Season of Sukkot, the Festival of the Booths. Following the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur our Jewish friends step into this fall harvest festival in which the Torah calls them to “dwell in booths (sukkahs) for seven days so that you will know with every fiber of your being that your ancestors dwelt in booths during their sojourn in the wilderness when they were leaving Egypt.” The booths they are called to live in include “a roof that must admit starlight.” It is a rickety and temporary structure. It is not so much a house as the bare outline of a house. It “exposes the idea of a house as an illusion.” (Lew, p. 266)
Sukkot strips us of the illusions we are capable of creating security and self-sufficiency. We are brought face to face with the vastness of the universe. We are brought face to face with our utter vulnerability. And we are brought before the reality of our complete dependence upon the divine.
“The rabbis of the Talmud told a parable: It is the usual way of human beings to feel secure and unafraid while under the shelter of their own roofs. On emerging from their homes, their sense of security is diminished and they begin to feel fear. Israel, however, is different. While in their homes the whole year, they are apprehensive. But when Sukkot comes and they leave their homes and come under the shadow of the sukkah, their hearts are full of trust, faith, and joy, for now they are protected, not by the protection of their roofs but by the shadow of their faith and trust in God.
“The matter may be compared to a person who locks himself up at home for fear of robbers. Regardless of how many locks he uses and how strong these locks may be, he remains afraid lest the locks be broken. Once he hears the voice of the king approaching and calling, ‘Emerge from your chamber and join me,’ he is no longer afraid. He immediately opens his doors and emerges joyously to join the King, for wherever the King is, no harm can come to him. He then goes wherever the King leads him, and trust and joy never depart him.” (Lew, p. 266)
Now at this point in the sermon you may justifiably be wondering when we are going to get around to talking about Jesus’ temptations and the start of Lent. First a word about Luke’s particular telling of Jesus’ temptations. Luke is the only gospel that introduces Jesus’ time in the wilderness by running through a nearly endless tally of human ancestors. I only read a brief excerpt of the relentless list of sons. In case you may have missed it. Jesus is indeed human.
The temptation must have been great to step beyond his humanity; to feed himself; to wield unlimited power; to wrap himself in protective bubble wrap. But once any of those lines are crossed, he would not have been human at all. Only by stepping forward in complete vulnerability and dependence could he truly walk beside us. His greatest temptation was to not be human.
Perhaps our greatest temptation is to live in denial that we are human. As hard as we may try, and we do try hard, we can never fully provide for ourselves. We can never have enough power to be truly autonomous. We can never totally protect ourselves and those we love from the vagaries of this world. We can never control all of the outcomes.
Lent is often a season when people give something up to be reminded of Jesus’ sacrifice for us. This year I challenge us to give up our illusions that we are anything but human, with all of the limitations that guarantees. Barbara Brown Taylor describes Lent in this way, “Forty days to remember what it is like to live by the grace of God alone and not by what we can supply for ourselves.” (Taylor, p. 66)
We often think about Lent as the parallel season to the ten days of awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. These are the days when our Jewish friends seek to have their name placed in the Book of Life. It is a time of somber repentance. And Lent has traditionally been dominated by that same need for repentance. We have used these days to look into the face of our brokenness. But, in this world of wars and wildfires, so much feels broken these days. I am not sure I can spend forty days focused solely upon my already obvious brokenness.
What if we also saw our season of Lent as a cousin to Sukkot? What if we, metaphorically at least, built a sukkah, a booth, for ourselves, allowing us to see the vastness of the night sky? When we seek to deny our vulnerability we find ourselves consistently in the midst of anxiety (or is that just me and my numerous neuroses?). I propose we lean into the skid. When we are feeling over our heads, let us own the reality of our dependence. And then let us take the next step forward and recognize to whom we are ultimately dependent upon for all things.
In the catharsis of owning our utter vulnerability there is what Alan Lew calls the special joy found in Sukkot. “This special joy is precisely the joy of being stripped naked, the joy of being flush with life, the joy of having nothing between our skin and the wind and the starlight, nothing between us and the world.” (Lew, p. 265)
When I was at Princeton I had a friend who was originally from Iowa. He had a theory about why New Yorkers were so much more anxious than Iowans. He said that New Yorkers, surrounded by tall buildings all the time, rarely got a glimpse of the horizon and rarely noticed any stars in the skies. Everything was so close together, that New Yorkers inevitably believed that their little life was the center of the universe. While people from Iowa had the opportunity to go into a field and see the sky full of stars; to turn their heads and gaze at the horizon in every direction; to comprehend how small they were in relation to the totality of the universe. New Yorkers, with their sense of self-importance could not help but believe they had the power to control all of the outcomes and were flummoxed when they could not do so. Iowans recognized their placement in the vastness of creation and thus had a better understanding of themselves and their actual place in the world. I do not know if his analysis is true or not but it was just one of the ways he sought to teach me that people from Iowa were far superior to people from New York City.
During those nights in the wilderness it does not say whether Jesus looked up into that vast endless sky and caught his breath at those stars so remarkably distant and so eternal compared to the length of a human life. But, alone in the night, how could he not have? How could he not have tasted the depth of our mortal placement and predicament?
Jesus could have chosen to run as fast and as far as he could from being human. But faced with our deep, mortal vulnerability he chose to climb right inside of it and share in every moment of what makes our lives so terribly hard at times.
In this Lenten season we need to learn who we are. We, alone, cannot transform the chaos into ordered creation. We cannot part the Red Sea. We cannot conquer the forces of death. We cannot save the world. What we can do, what we must do, is learn that we are not God. We are human. And when we stop trying to play God, we are given the gift of recognizing our God in our midst.
And our God can create order from chaos, can create pathways to liberation, can conquer the forces of death, and yes, can and will, save the world. We have a God who is so deeply committed to us that they chose to be embodied into our every limitation to lead us beyond our every limitation. Jesus Christ entered the wilderness to lead us out of the wilderness.
As we look around these days there is much that is broken in ourselves and in our world. How can we ever mend all that needs to be mended? But if we allow ourselves to look up into that vast night sky we are reminded that it is not we who can do the healing, at least not alone. What we can do is orient ourselves to our star in the East. We can seek to be like those wise ones all those years ago. And if we want to follow the Savior we are seeking, we are going to need to own our human mortality just as deeply as he did.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Lew, Alan, This Is Real and You are Completely Unprepared,” Little, Brown and Company,
New York, 2003.
Taylor, Barbara Brown, Home By Another Way, Rowman & Littlefield, New York, 1999.
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Luke 3:23-25, 37-38, 4:1-13
“What Starlight Has to Teach Us”
Douglas T. King
If you have ever spent any time far from the city and the suburbs, the night sky is simply miraculous. During those long nights alone in the wilderness, I bet Jesus spent a lot of time looking up into the vast night sky and gazing at the innumerable stars, countless light years away and countless years old.
My favorite movie is “The Lion in Winter” in which the unstoppable force of Peter O’Toole runs headlong into the immovable object of Katherine Hepburn. It is Christmas 1183 and King Henry the Second (played by O’Toole) is getting up in years (50, gasp!) and needs to think about a successor to his throne. He and Queen Eleanor (Katherine Hepburn), whom he has imprisoned, disagree about which of their sons should be the next king. Let the fireworks and intense, brilliant verbal parrying begin. O’Toole bellows and connives and demonstrates every form of Machiavellian earthly power imaginable as he pushes back on the limits of his mortality.
Then there is this odd, wordless scene in this movie full to overflowing with words. The king is on the top of the castle. He looks up into the vastness of the night sky and he cowers. For the first time the king appears to be small and overwhelmed. He is human and limited and mortal after all. When he returns inside he announces, “The skies are pocked with stars. What eyes the wise men must have had to see a new one in so many. I wonder if there were fewer stars then. I fancy there is mystery in it.”
The talk of stars always reminds me of the Jewish Holy Season of Sukkot, the Festival of the Booths. Following the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur our Jewish friends step into this fall harvest festival in which the Torah calls them to “dwell in booths (sukkahs) for seven days so that you will know with every fiber of your being that your ancestors dwelt in booths during their sojourn in the wilderness when they were leaving Egypt.” The booths they are called to live in include “a roof that must admit starlight.” It is a rickety and temporary structure. It is not so much a house as the bare outline of a house. It “exposes the idea of a house as an illusion.” (Lew, p. 266)
Sukkot strips us of the illusions we are capable of creating security and self-sufficiency. We are brought face to face with the vastness of the universe. We are brought face to face with our utter vulnerability. And we are brought before the reality of our complete dependence upon the divine.
“The rabbis of the Talmud told a parable: It is the usual way of human beings to feel secure and unafraid while under the shelter of their own roofs. On emerging from their homes, their sense of security is diminished and they begin to feel fear. Israel, however, is different. While in their homes the whole year, they are apprehensive. But when Sukkot comes and they leave their homes and come under the shadow of the sukkah, their hearts are full of trust, faith, and joy, for now they are protected, not by the protection of their roofs but by the shadow of their faith and trust in God.
“The matter may be compared to a person who locks himself up at home for fear of robbers. Regardless of how many locks he uses and how strong these locks may be, he remains afraid lest the locks be broken. Once he hears the voice of the king approaching and calling, ‘Emerge from your chamber and join me,’ he is no longer afraid. He immediately opens his doors and emerges joyously to join the King, for wherever the King is, no harm can come to him. He then goes wherever the King leads him, and trust and joy never depart him.” (Lew, p. 266)
Now at this point in the sermon you may justifiably be wondering when we are going to get around to talking about Jesus’ temptations and the start of Lent. First a word about Luke’s particular telling of Jesus’ temptations. Luke is the only gospel that introduces Jesus’ time in the wilderness by running through a nearly endless tally of human ancestors. I only read a brief excerpt of the relentless list of sons. In case you may have missed it. Jesus is indeed human.
The temptation must have been great to step beyond his humanity; to feed himself; to wield unlimited power; to wrap himself in protective bubble wrap. But once any of those lines are crossed, he would not have been human at all. Only by stepping forward in complete vulnerability and dependence could he truly walk beside us. His greatest temptation was to not be human.
Perhaps our greatest temptation is to live in denial that we are human. As hard as we may try, and we do try hard, we can never fully provide for ourselves. We can never have enough power to be truly autonomous. We can never totally protect ourselves and those we love from the vagaries of this world. We can never control all of the outcomes.
Lent is often a season when people give something up to be reminded of Jesus’ sacrifice for us. This year I challenge us to give up our illusions that we are anything but human, with all of the limitations that guarantees. Barbara Brown Taylor describes Lent in this way, “Forty days to remember what it is like to live by the grace of God alone and not by what we can supply for ourselves.” (Taylor, p. 66)
We often think about Lent as the parallel season to the ten days of awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. These are the days when our Jewish friends seek to have their name placed in the Book of Life. It is a time of somber repentance. And Lent has traditionally been dominated by that same need for repentance. We have used these days to look into the face of our brokenness. But, in this world of wars and wildfires, so much feels broken these days. I am not sure I can spend forty days focused solely upon my already obvious brokenness.
What if we also saw our season of Lent as a cousin to Sukkot? What if we, metaphorically at least, built a sukkah, a booth, for ourselves, allowing us to see the vastness of the night sky? When we seek to deny our vulnerability we find ourselves consistently in the midst of anxiety (or is that just me and my numerous neuroses?). I propose we lean into the skid. When we are feeling over our heads, let us own the reality of our dependence. And then let us take the next step forward and recognize to whom we are ultimately dependent upon for all things.
In the catharsis of owning our utter vulnerability there is what Alan Lew calls the special joy found in Sukkot. “This special joy is precisely the joy of being stripped naked, the joy of being flush with life, the joy of having nothing between our skin and the wind and the starlight, nothing between us and the world.” (Lew, p. 265)
When I was at Princeton I had a friend who was originally from Iowa. He had a theory about why New Yorkers were so much more anxious than Iowans. He said that New Yorkers, surrounded by tall buildings all the time, rarely got a glimpse of the horizon and rarely noticed any stars in the skies. Everything was so close together, that New Yorkers inevitably believed that their little life was the center of the universe. While people from Iowa had the opportunity to go into a field and see the sky full of stars; to turn their heads and gaze at the horizon in every direction; to comprehend how small they were in relation to the totality of the universe. New Yorkers, with their sense of self-importance could not help but believe they had the power to control all of the outcomes and were flummoxed when they could not do so. Iowans recognized their placement in the vastness of creation and thus had a better understanding of themselves and their actual place in the world. I do not know if his analysis is true or not but it was just one of the ways he sought to teach me that people from Iowa were far superior to people from New York City.
During those nights in the wilderness it does not say whether Jesus looked up into that vast endless sky and caught his breath at those stars so remarkably distant and so eternal compared to the length of a human life. But, alone in the night, how could he not have? How could he not have tasted the depth of our mortal placement and predicament?
Jesus could have chosen to run as fast and as far as he could from being human. But faced with our deep, mortal vulnerability he chose to climb right inside of it and share in every moment of what makes our lives so terribly hard at times.
In this Lenten season we need to learn who we are. We, alone, cannot transform the chaos into ordered creation. We cannot part the Red Sea. We cannot conquer the forces of death. We cannot save the world. What we can do, what we must do, is learn that we are not God. We are human. And when we stop trying to play God, we are given the gift of recognizing our God in our midst.
And our God can create order from chaos, can create pathways to liberation, can conquer the forces of death, and yes, can and will, save the world. We have a God who is so deeply committed to us that they chose to be embodied into our every limitation to lead us beyond our every limitation. Jesus Christ entered the wilderness to lead us out of the wilderness.
As we look around these days there is much that is broken in ourselves and in our world. How can we ever mend all that needs to be mended? But if we allow ourselves to look up into that vast night sky we are reminded that it is not we who can do the healing, at least not alone. What we can do is orient ourselves to our star in the East. We can seek to be like those wise ones all those years ago. And if we want to follow the Savior we are seeking, we are going to need to own our human mortality just as deeply as he did.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Lew, Alan, This Is Real and You are Completely Unprepared,” Little, Brown and Company,
New York, 2003.
Taylor, Barbara Brown, Home By Another Way, Rowman & Littlefield, New York, 1999.
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