If you read yesterday’s blog on Road Signs, perhaps you thought, as I did, of Frederick Buechner’s great sermon, collected in his book The Magnificent Defeat, where he ponders our desire to have God prove himself to us in some “objectifiably verifiable and convincing way”. He writes:
“Suppose, for instance, that God were to take the great, dim river of the Milky Way as we see it from down here flowing across the night sky and were to brighten it up a little and then rearrange it so that all of a sudden one night the world would step outside and look up at the heavens and see not the usual haphazard scattering of stars but, written out in letters light years tall, the sentence: I REALLY EXIST, or GOD IS. If I were going to try to write a story or a play about such an event, I would start, of course, with the first night that this great theological headline appeared there in the stars, with suns and moons to dot the i’s and the tails of the comets to cross the t’s. And I would try to show some of the ways that I can imagine people might respond to it. I would show some of them sinking to their knees, not because they are especially religious people but just because it might seem somehow the only natural thing to do under the circumstances. They would perhaps do it without even thinking about it, just crumpling down on their knees there in the tall grass behind the garage….”
There’s more, much more. As I was typing, I wondered where I would stop and realized I would want to quote the entire sermon. And driving duties call, so I will leave you with this and the encouragement to read Buechner’s exhortation. And a promise to quote a little more of it tomorrow. Until then, think about whether or not it would change things for you if God did write such a message in the stars. Oddly enough, sometimes He really does. See yesterday’s blog if you don’t know what I mean:)
