Crops and Constellations

If you know me at all, you’ll not talk to me very long before you find out that I enjoy Astronomy as a hobby - not the physics of it, mind you, that’s far above my level, but the personal exercise of worship in observing and appreciating them as a work of our Creator as they turn above my head.  I often hum along to the words of Psalm 19 set to the familiar tune, "Rejoice the Lord is King,"

“The spacious heavens declare, the glory of our God,
the firmament displays His handiwork abroad;
Day unto day does utter speech,
and night to night does knowledge teach;”  

When someone else pipes up with anything like a similar interest, I’m keen to engage.  So keen, in fact, that it can try the patience of some around me, I’ll admit.
I have a good friend (another minister) who, whenever we talk on the phone or meet up in person, once we have dispensed with “business,” seem able to go on for hours (as our wives patiently watch us or listen to us) about what we have been seeing lately “up there”.  Our wives understand what motivates us, but sometimes our interest in the details can seem (admittedly) overly enthusiastic.

On the surface, there is a shared passion and fascination between my friend and me in a common interest, but underlying our conversation is something much more. There is is an almost unspoken affirmation that our understanding of Faith is one of a shared frame of reference for encountering the whole world around us, both visible and invisible.  Looking at the stars and galaxies and planets is not just a innocuous hobby on which to spend our time and conversation.   To my friend and me, “religion” or “spirituality” is not a private compartment of our personality but is a controlling way of life encompassing all we do and think and say.

To both of us, “Faith and reason, doctrine and life, sacred and secular are on speaking terms,”* and they are perfectly compatible ideas.  It does not seem out of step with all of what we understand about the world and the things in it to spend our time tracking the stars with the same wonder and fervor in any given week in which we also write a sermon or article or poem or hymn on a biblical theme or offer as praise to nature’s Creator or Redeemer.  It is no separate endeavor or subordinate pursuit trying to catch the transit of Ganymede across Jupiter in our telescope to working through the Greek or Hebrew grammar of a passage we’re trying to understand or communicate.  “Truth, goodness and beauty draw all things together in a unified body of knowledge.  No less when exploring the heavens than when poring over Scripture, one (is) engaging in pious meditation upon God’s works.”

This being harvest time in South Dakota, I think the same thing can be also said of the life of many I know in my congregation who share this frame of reference called Faith.  What I see and marvel over in the stars, they behold in the rows of beans and corn brought forth from the earth by the same Power and Majesty.  I can only hope (and do assume) they are humming along with the Creator’s work (Psalm 65:12-13) as they gather the fruit of this season,

“The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain,
they shout and sing together for joy.”

Let all that has breath praise the Lord!

*I owe the inspiration for the thinking here to Michael Horton’s introduction to “Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever” Crossway, Wheaton, IL, 2014: pp 13-15.