Midweek Meander for Kirwan Uniting Church, Weds 20 May 2020

Lo, Vimeo now worketh, and you can watch and listen to a video as usual

https://vimeo.com/420941727

And if that is unintelligible, here's the Thought-for-the-Evening:

Twinkle twinkle, little star,

I know precisely what you are:
An incandescent ball of gas

compressed into a solid mass.

Pondering meandering, my mind turned to stars, specifically those which God suggested that Abraham should look at when he, Abraham, was doubting God’s promise that he would have a son and heirs.  Genesis 15, our reading:

He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars —if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

There you go, I thought, let’s cheer ourselves up in lockdown by considering, along with the Psalmist, that He who made the moon and stars to govern the night; His love endures forever. And then I remembered that it’s been raining and overcast for days, and will be for a few days yet, and we can’t actually see stars when we look up at night, we just see clouds and what BJ Thomas saw:

Raindrops are falling on my head
And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed
Nothing seems to fit
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep falling.

That seems to sum up lockdown blues better than forced cheerful references to heavenly bodies, or their heavenly creator, which we can’t see through the clouds of social isolation anyway, doesn’t it.

But you know, those stars are still there. Call a friend in Western Australia right now, ask, look up in the sky, please mate, can you see any stars? “Can I see any stars! Can I see any stars? It’s like a blooming lit-up Christmas tree up there here in Esperance”. And so perhaps it’s not such a silly idea after all to use stars, obscured as they are for us in the east of our continent just now, as a teaching model for those times, those many times if we’re honest, when we can’t see how on earth God can be at work or even in control of our struggling circumstances. Because the stars are there, whether we see them tonight or tomorrow or not. When we do see them, it’s only because it’s dark. They’re there in the daytime, too, in a different part of our visible sky as the earth spins from west to east, but we don’t see them then either, because we’re too busy enjoying and taking for granted the daylight to consider the heavens, the work of God’s hands – what is Man that you should consider him the son of man, that you should care for him? Those hands which flung stars into space, to quote Kendrick, still plead for you and for me, still carry us in love. His mercy endures for ever. How does the old refrain put it, about where our Saviour is when we can’t see Him?

Standing somewhere in the shadows, you’ll find Jesus
He’s the One who always cares and understands.
Standing somewhere in the shadows you will find Him
And you’ll know Him by the nailprints in His hands.

God grant us X-Ray vision tonight. We have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him.