How big do you feel today?
That’s not a rather rude personal question about whether you
should have eaten that second doughnut … It’s just a recognition that some days
we can feel really quite grown up, in control, capable, and on other days we
can feel as if there is really no way we are equal to the challenges life
throws at us - like ants in the pathway of a herd of elephants.
The person who wrote Psalm 8 was having one of those growing
and shrinking moments as he contemplated the vastness of the world around him,
and became aware of his own place within it. This ancient poem is probably at
least 2500 years old, but it can still communicate as vividly to us as when it
was first written. In fact, bearing in mind the huge advances in our scientific
knowledge it is perhaps even more relevant now than it was then.
The ancient Israelites assumed that the cosmos consisted of
the earth as a sort of flat plate across the middle of a sphere. The dome of
heaven arched over it, studded with sun, moon and stars, and a shadowy
underworld was below it. Outside that sphere was water, which leaked into the
world through the windows in the heavens and rose up in springs and oceans.
Beyond the waters was the domain of God. But though it was big, but it was
nothing like the size of the universe astronomers contemplate now. Arguments
rage over how big it is, and whether it has any end at all, but everyone agrees
that it is quite mind-bogglingly huge. At the other end of the scale we are now
aware of tiny subatomic particles – quarks and Higgs Bosons and the like -
which even a hundred years ago were unthought of. And all the time we are
learning to see further out into space, and further down into the structure of
atoms.
To give us some ideas of scale that we now know about, did
you know that you could fit a million earths into our sun and still have room
left over? It is over a million times bigger. Did you know that to get to the
nearest star to us in the fastest space ship we now have would take over 10,000
years? And that is just the very nearest star; our next door neighbour. My
husband, who is a physics teacher, tells me that the biggest thing we know about,
the universe itself, is 10 to the power of 40 bigger than the smallest thing.
If you are as numerically challenged as I am that might not mean too much to
you, so perhaps we need to get some idea of what that number looks like. [Unfold
numbers printed on long sheet - 1 with 40 noughts after it - it looks like this 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000]…. And that is just the things we know about.
The universe could be infinitely big, or there could be an infinite number of other
universes for all we know…
When I consider
your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have
ordained, what are mortals, that you should be mindful of them; mere human
beings, that you should seek them out? says the Psalmist.
Amen to that…!
When we think of these sort of immense distances, immense
sizes, it is no wonder that we feel overawed and overwhelmed, completely
insignificant.
And yet…
That isn’t the end of the story, or the end of the Psalm.
However small we sometimes feel, we aren’t actually at the
bottom of this scale, right down at the tiny end. Philip tells me that we are almost
half-way up. See that 0 with the blue stars around us – that’s us. While the universe may seem unimaginably big
to us, we are unimaginably big in comparison to much of the rest of creation.
And we are by no means powerless. In fact, we have a power that is in some ways
apparently unique. As far as we know at the moment, we are the only being in
the universe that can make truly conscious, free choices about how it treats
the rest of that universe, the only being that can think about what it is
doing, philosophize about it and make moral judgements. The sun has no option
but to shine. The oceans have no choice about battering the shore line.
Non-human animals don’t sit about pondering and discussing ethical dilemmas.
Sure, some of them may have more powers of communication, reasoning and learning
than we have suspected, but it is only us who seem to be inclined really to
wonder about ourselves and our place in the universe. It is a human trait.
Volcanos are destructive because they are volcanos. When people are
destructive, it is because they choose to be, and they can, equally choose to be
creative, caring and loving, even if it doesn’t seem to be in their own
interests.
As the Psalmist put it, we look up into the heavens and
think that surely we are beneath God’s notice, utterly insignificant. But
actually that’s not the case; not only does God notice us- something which
Jesus reminds us of in our Gospel reading - but he has also entrusted us with power over many
of the other creatures he has made – the cattle, the oxen, the fish in the sea…power
we can use for good or ill.
The Bible often uses the sort of language of dominion that
we see here, and there has been a tendency to feel a bit embarrassed by that,
as if it is an invitation to lord it over the rest of creation. Certainly in the
past it has been used to justify the indiscriminate exploitation of the Earth’s
resources, the ill-treatment of other animals, and of people too. But it’s no
good us pretending that we don’t have power, because we do. We may not be Masters of the Universe, able to
do everything, but we can really make a difference not only in small, but also
in big ways. We are learning, perhaps too little and too late, that we are
having a real impact even on something as vast as the climate, and we are
realising that we need, urgently, to take seriously that power. This year the
Arctic icecap shrank to its smallest extent in modern history, and scientists
are increasingly sure that is because of the greenhouse gases we are pumping
into the atmosphere – it is not just a natural variation. That shrinking icecap
is likely to have all sorts of effects on the sea temperatures around the
world, and that will affect ocean currents, the winds that blow over the
oceans, the moisture they pick up, and the patterns of rainfall in lands far
from the Arctic… These sort of changes are already being felt, and are having a
profound impact on the most vulnerable people in the world, those who don’t
have our buffer zones of money in the bank or insurance policies against
disaster.
That’s why I am glad to see that many of the Poverty and Hope projects that our harvest collection will go to support have a very
definite focus not just on alleviating individual poverty, but on restoring and
sustaining the ecosystems on which those individuals and communities depend.
So, there is a project in Sudan which enables local people to pass on sound
agricultural techniques to others. These include things like planting trees
which prevent soil and water run-off. It’s simple, but it works. Or there is a
community association in the Dominican Republic learning to make its own
organic fertiliser rather than depending on expensive artificial fertiliser
made in oil-hungry factories. Or the ultimate in recycling, a scheme in
Cambodia helping people to turn the dung from their pigs into biogas for
cooking and lighting. I don’t know how it works, but apparently it does, and
presumably it doesn’t smell as bad as you might think it would! Certainly the
families who have started using this are great fans. One woman, a shopkeeper,
says it has transformed her family’s life. She can keep her little shop open
later, she no longer has to spend hours each day looking for firewood and their
home is free of the unhealthy wood smoke that used to choke them. Her daughter can
see to do her school work in the evenings… and the pig dung no longer has to be
disposed of! Success all round. It is a small thing, in many ways, but that
family’s life has been changed completely by the ingenuity of those who
designed the simple engineering it relies on, and the donations of those who
funded it – people who had never met those who benefitted and perhaps never
will. That’s an example of using the power and responsibility that comes with
being human in the way God intended us to.
Harvest time is always a time for thanksgiving; thanksgiving
for the glories of creation, for the immensity of the universe, for the turning
seasons, produced by the circling of planets and stars, for the whole great
interdependent web of life, from the smallest sub-atomic particle to worms and
whales and worlds beyond our world. But it is a reminder too of the skill and
compassion which are God’s gifts to us, gifts we are called on to use
generously and with care. We are not simply insignificant, mindless cogs in a
vast machine but creatures made in God’s image, reflecting his nature, capable
of love which can change the lives of others, love which can enrich and sustain
them. The best harvest thanksgiving we can make is to do just that.
Amen
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