Job 38:1-7, (34-41)
Mark 10:35-45

Big God, Great God, Magnificent God
The invitation here is for us to think about how big God is, to consider the bigness of God.
We read again from the Book of Job this week. There are only two or three times during the church year that readings from Job appear in the lectionary. And that is probably a good thing. And yet, somehow, the Book of Job makes us think. This week’s readings make us think about how small we are, in the grand scheme of things. God asks Job this humbling question, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” And the reading from Mark’s Gospel is in a similar vein. The disciples argue about who is the greatest, and Jesus tells them not to be concerned about greatness, but to be concerned about serving others.
What is God? Who is God? How are we to think about God? Does God exist? Does God not exist? This morning, I want to explore these questions, and not necessarily answer them directly, but rather, see if we can perhaps develop some new insight, or open the door to some new way of experiencing God.
If you go to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and look up at the ceiling, you will see Michelangelo’s famous painting The Creation of Adam in which God is depicted as an old man with a white beard, floating in the clouds with angels. And so many of us grew up with this idea of God, the old man with a beard in the sky. But just because we may outgrow this idea of God doesn’t mean there is no God at all.
To completely deny the existence of God is atheism. It’s a shortsighted view. If a person cannot believe in God, then I think it’s much more plausible to say, “I don’t know,” rather than to say, “Absolutely there is no God.” To say “I don’t know” is to keep an open mind on the question.
You see, atheism has done a great deal of harm to our society. Atheism in its most negative form is a spiteful hatred of everything that has to do with God, any language about God, or serious discussion of God. Atheism is more than simply non-theism, it’s not agnosticism, but rather it goes beyond a simple “I don’t know.” It is against theism. The “a” in atheism means against. Atheism is a knife edge pointed against theistic views. And this is a particular view of reality that causes a lot of problems because, at least, in my estimation, it is based on anger and hatred of the whole concept of God, and it demeans and diminishes people who believe in God. Atheism is often accompanied by arrogance and a condescending attitude toward people of faith, and this is unfortunate because people get stuck in this view, and they miss out on experiencing life as a divine mystery.
When it comes to belief in God, the problem is not that God does not exist. The problem is that our ideas about God are inadequate. J.B. Phillips famously expressed this in his book, Your God is Too Small. He writes, “The trouble with many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas of God have remained largely static.”
Our ideas about God are too small.
Last week Shari and I went for a drive at sunset. You know, these days, the sun sets around 5:45pm, and I wanted to look for a comet in the evening sky, a comet that has been in the news lately. Perhaps you have been following the news about this comet. It’s called Comet A3, or Tsuchinshan-Atlas C/2023.
A comet, as you probably know, is a thing that orbits our sun made of dust and ice. A comet typically shows up in the night sky looking like a ball of light with a streaming tail, almost as if it were a kite flying on a string. Comets are ancient leftover debris, remnants from the formation of our solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. They are not planets, but they orbit the sun like planets do.
Astronomers tell us that there are different kinds of comets. The “short-period” comets, the quick ones, orbit the sun in less than 200 years. These comets are way out in the solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune, in a place called the Kuiper Belt. There are some other comets, though, that travel in bigger orbits, from a place called the Oort Cloud, on the complete outer edge of our solar system, 50 times farther away from the sun that the Kuiper Belt. These comets are “long-period comets” because they take so much longer to complete one orbit of the Sun. The longest known comet’s orbit takes 250,000 years.
The most famous comet is Halley’s Comet. You’ve probably heard of it. Halley’s Comet lives in a place called the Kuiper Belt, out past Neptune’s orbit, but the sun’s gravity pulls it back toward the sun about every 76 years. So, Halley’s Comet goes rushing in toward the sun, going faster and faster, then loops around the sun in an elliptical orbit, and flies back out to the Kuiper Belt. Halley’s Comet was last visible on earth in 1986, and before that, in 1910. Halley’s Comet was first documented by Chinese astronomers in 240BC, and it will appear next in 2061.
The comet Shari and I went out to see on Friday night, the comet A3 is a “long-period” comet. First spotted early last year with big telescopes in China and South Africa, nobody knew about it. It had never been seen before. And that is because its orbit takes 80,000 years.
So, Friday evening, we drove up to a ridge, up above Camden over by the Snow Bowl ski resort, and we found a place with a view of the horizon unobscured by trees where we could just see the fading orange of sunset in the west. Turning in the other direction, looking east, we saw the enormous orange moon rising. As we waited for the comet to become visible, we saw Venus low on the western horizon. Then, the constellation Cassiopeia appeared overhead, then the Big dipper and the North Star, all appeared for us.
As the light of dusk darkened to night, we could sense the great Earth turning, this big sphere we live on, turning, rotating slowly, like clockwork. Venus dropped down to the horizon. And the moon rose up higher. All rotating on the 23-degree axis of the north-south pole.
We never saw the comet. But we didn’t need to. We were out there, under the dome of the sky, staring up into infinity, and we could actually get a sense of being on this moving Earth, this moving, rotating planet, as Venus fell below the horizon on one side, and the moon rising on the other side, the whole thing moving, like a gigantic space ship, moving, rotating, and the sky rotating overhead, and the two of us, standing there, under the sky, taking it all in, being there, in a complete miracle and mystery, as it was happening, as it happens every night, in fact, as it happens all the time, for billions of years, happening, since the formation of the Solar System: and our solar system only one of many, many others in the universe.
Just think about this, and consider, the next time you look up at the stars in the night sky, what could we really know about God? How could we say there is no God? Perhaps you have been out on the ocean, and you have seen the vast wide expanse of the ocean. Or you look up at the night sky and see the vast wide expanse of the infinite universe with its numberless galaxies, millions and billions of light years away, and yet, immediately present to be seen. In fact, we are living and breathing and having our very being in God. The problem is, our God is too small.
Amen? Amen.