Reverence

Astronomers have found the brightest known object in the universe—a glowing core of a galaxy, called a quasar, located 12 billion light-years away. Quasars are the brightest objects in the cosmos, each consisting of a supermassive black hole that’s actively devouring an orbiting disc of gas and dust. But the black hole in this record-setting quasar is gobbling up more than a sun’s-worth of mass every day, making it the fastest growing black hole scientists have ever seen.

The gargantuan object stretches about seven light-years across, and it puts our sun’s luminosity to shame—the quasar shines more than 500 trillion times brighter than the star in our solar system.

Christian Wolf, lead author of the new study, said, “This quasar is the most violent place that we know in the universe. It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now.”

The black hole in the quasar is ravenous, consuming an amount of material equivalent to as much as 413 suns each year, and its black hole weighs about the same as 17 billion suns.

Wolf said, “It looks like a gigantic and magnetic storm cell with temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, lightning everywhere and winds blowing so fast they would go around Earth in a second. He told reports that he doesn’t think anything will ever top this record for the universe’s brightest object.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This newly identified object is 500 trillion times brighter than our sun! How can anything be that bright? Thinking about this star gives us a sense of what the glorious presence of God is like, for Scripture says that God is a being who "lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see."

Musician and author Carolyn Arends shares a story in an issue of Christianity Today magazine:

On a recent trip, I had a conversation with a man who learned I was from Vancouver. He had lived there years earlier, and after asking if a particular music shop was still in the city, he told me a story.

His wife was a piano major at the University of British Columbia. When they went piano shopping as newlyweds, the saleswoman led them straight to the entry-level models. The man told me, “She had us pegged exactly right. We didn’t have two nickels to rub together. We were going to have to borrow the money to get the cheapest instrument there.”

Everything changed, however, when the name of the prospective buyer’s mentor—a world-renowned master teaching at the university—came up in conversation. The saleswoman was panic-stricken. “Not these pianos!” she exclaimed, herding the couple away from the economy section and into a private showroom of gleaming Steinways. “I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating, horrified at the thought of the teacher finding out she’d shown one of his students an inferior instrument. Try as they might, they couldn’t persuade her to take them back to the pianos they could afford. Once the master’s name came up, only the best would do.

I said “Hallowed be thy name” this morning mumbling my way through the Lord’s Prayer. I’ve prayed that phrase countless times. But today, I find myself thinking about the reverence a flustered piano saleswoman had for a teacher’s name, and the prayer begins to change shape.

What does it mean to “hallow” God’s name? I’ve heard about the extreme care taken in branches of Judaism: Pages containing the name of YHWH are never thoughtlessly discarded but rather buried or ritually burned. When I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer, I’ve tried to cultivate that kind of personal reverence for his name—even while living in a world prone to profane it.

I’m glad I was taught to avoid blasphemy. But I’m beginning to suspect that my understanding of what it means to hallow God’s name has barely scratched the surface. But if we pray as he taught us, our reverence and care for his name will grow. That’s when we’ll begin to exchange our cheap instruments of self-interest for the costly Cross of Christ—the only instrument worthy of our Master’s name.

Fender Musical Instruments Corporation sold a record number of guitars in 2020, driven in part by people forced to stay at home during the pandemic. The company calculates that nearly a third of those new musical instruments were purchased by people who play in praise and worship bands. This may not be surprising to anyone who knows a worship leader who are always wanting to “up” their guitars.

No one knows the first person to bring a guitar into church, but it became common in charismatic congregations in Southern California in the 1970s. Folk-rock went to church with the hippies who converted during the Jesus People movement. Guitars became staples of the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard church style before spreading to other evangelical churches.

The style signaled openness and authenticity to baby boomers raised on the Beatles. But guitars also had some practical advantages. They were portable. When a new church started in a school, or someone’s house, or even on the beach, no one had to haul over an organ. Guitars are also easier to learn to play than the pianos and organs traditionally used in church music.

Duke Divinity student Adam Perez says, “People joke about how simple it is—three chords or four chords—but that was a strength, not a weakness. You could have a beginner guitar player who learned to play to lead their small group or even a new church. You’re democratizing access to the sacred.”

Worship music in the 2020s is not all guitar-based, but industry experts know there is a lot of money in church guitars. According to Ultimate Guitar, an estimated one million guitar players are “gigging” at churches every weekend, and more people play praise and worship music than any other genre in the US.

There are two kinds of magnifying: microscope magnifying and telescope magnifying. The one makes a small thing look bigger than it is. The other makes a big thing begin to look as big as it really is.

When David says, “I will magnify God with thanksgiving,” he does not mean, “I will make a small God look bigger than he is.” He means, “I will make a big God begin to look as big as he really is.”

We are not called to be microscopes. We are called to be telescopes. Christians are not called to be con-men who magnify their product out of all proportion to reality, when they know the competitor’s product is far superior. There is nothing and nobody superior to God. And so the calling of those who love God is to make his greatness begin to look as great as it really is. That’s why we exist, why we were saved, as Peter says in 1 Peter 2:9, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

The whole duty of the Christian can be summed up in this: feel, think, and act in a way that will make God look as great as he really is. Be a telescope for the world of the infinite starry wealth of the glory of God.

Think for a moment about the mysteries of just one of God's creatures—a whale. These big, beautiful creatures spend 95 percent of their lives in the ocean, one of the deepest and darkest places we know about. And without warning, they pull 30,000 pounds of blubber against gravity and leap out of the water for unexplainable reasons. Some baby whales gain 100 pounds an hour while nursing. The song of a humpback whale, lasting for 10-20 minutes and being repeated for hours at a time, is produced for no apparent reason. Biologists speculate it may be related to mating, but truthfully no is quite sure. The reason they breach is also a mystery. For show? For mating? For fun? There are speculations, but no one really knows why.

Behold them for a second and you feel helpless, out of control; not the terrible kind of helplessness, but the beautiful kind where we feel small and God feels big, and the mysteries of the world are acceptable to be unexplained.

Writer Philip Hoare tried to describe his sense of awe as a huge finback whale swam underneath his ocean vessel:

In that one motion, my entire presence is undermined. I feel, rather than see, this eighty-foot animal swimming below. Knowing it is there tugs at my gut, and something inside makes me want to plunge in and dive with it to some unfathomable depth where no one would ever find us.

Herman Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Caine Mutiny, spoke to The Wall Street Journal about his childhood. Wouk was especially grateful for one simple pleasure: waking up to the sunlight streaming through his bedroom window. He said:

By luck, my childhood bedroom faced the sun. I grew up on Aldus Street in the Bronx, where my family lived on the top floor of a five-story walk-up in an apartment way in the back. Each morning from my bed, I'd see a beam of sunlight with motes dancing through it pass through the window. I felt good right away. The morning sun is cheering, no matter what mood you're in … I do have the same excitement each morning when I see the sun. That sense of enjoying being alive is still very real. When you reach 100, you're glad you're alive. Very glad.

Author Philip Yancey describes a moment of profound wonder and awe in Alaska's wilderness. He was driving down the road when he came upon a number of cars pulled off to the edge of the highway. Like any of us would have done, he stopped to see what everyone was looking at. Yancey describes the scene:

Against the slate-gray sky, the water of an ocean inlet had a slight greenish cast, interrupted by small whitecaps. Soon I saw these were not whitecaps at all, but whales—silvery white beluga whales in a pod feeding no more than fifty feet offshore. I stood with the other onlookers for forty minutes, listening to the rhythmic motion of the sea, following the graceful, ghostly crescents of surfacing whales. The crowd was hushed, even reverent. For just that moment, nothing else—dinner reservations, the trip schedule, life back home—mattered. We were confronted with a scene of quiet beauty and a majesty of scale. We felt small. We strangers stood together in silence until the whales moved farther out. Then we climbed the bank together and got in our cars to resume our busy, ordered lives that suddenly seemed less urgent.

In 1900 a Japanese writer named Natsume Soseki visited England for the first time. While he was there he was surprised to discover that few of the locals appreciated or even noticed all of the beauty that he saw. Soseki was so captivated by the snow that he invited some friends over for a "snow-viewing," but they just laughed at him. When he told another group of that the Japanese are deeply emotional about the moon, they looked at him with confusion. Then Soseki told the following story:

One day, when [my host] and I took a walk in the garden, I noted that the paths between the rows of trees were all thickly covered with [beautiful] moss. I offered a compliment, saying that these paths had magnificently acquired a look of age. Whereupon my host replied that he soon intended to get a gardener to scrape all this [ugly] moss away.

Researcher Christian Smith's book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, concludes that many young American adults have a faith characterized by "moralistic, therapeutic deism." According to this view of God, if we live good lives and if we're kind to others, then God will provide "therapeutic benefits" to us like self-esteem and happiness. Other than that, God is not involved much in our world.

This view of God has a profound effect on prayer. Smith found that American teens personally prayed frequently; 40 percent prayed daily or more, and only 15 percent said they never prayed. However, their motivation for prayer largely focused on meeting their own needs. Some of the teens interviewed said: "If I ever have a problem, I go pray." "It helps me deal with problems. … it calms me down for the most part." "Praying just makes me feel more secure, like there's something there helping me out." "I would say prayer is an essential part of my success."

But Smith also found that many young Americans' prayers lacked any sense of repentance or adoration. Smith writes, "This is not a religion of repentance from sin." Again, Smith concludes that this "distant God" is "not demanding … because his job is to solve problems and make people feel good. There is nothing here to evoke wonder and admiration."

In 2012, a 19-year-old man from Washington state named Dakoda Garren was charged with stealing a rare coin collection worth at least $100,000. After Garren had completed some part-time work for a woman living north of Portland, the woman reported that her family coin collection was missing. Her collection included a variety of rare and valuable coins, including Liberty Head quarters, Morgan dollars, and other coins dating back to the early 1800s.

Initially, Garren denied any involvement, claiming that the police didn't have any evidence against him. But then he started spending the coins at face value, apparently unaware of the coins' worth. He and his girlfriend paid for movie tickets using quarters worth between $5 and $68. Later on the same day, they bought some local pizza with rare coins, including a Liberty quarter that may be worth up to $18,500.

The news article reported, "Garren has been charged with first-degree theft and is being held in jail on $40,000 bond. Which, technically, is an amount he could easily afford if the valuable coin collection were actually his."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Our Relationship with God—We honor God (or the things of God) when we treat him with the value he deserves. We dishonor the Lord—in our attitudes or in our actions, such as worship—when we treat God like an ordinary or even a cheap object. (2) Our Relationships with Others—In the same way, we dishonor other people (such as our spouse, our friends, our children, even our enemies) when we treat them as cheap objects. They should be treated according to the value God has placed on them. (3) The Importance of Rightly Setting Value on Everything in Life—We need to place ultimate value where it belongs, in the things of God that endure forever. The ability to discern true value is crucial, as seen in the story of Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of stew.

The word geek is a slang term for (a) A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy; (b) A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially incompetent.

The word usually isn't intended as a compliment. But if you have a problem with your computer, cell phone, gaming device, or television, that's when you really want a geek around. There's even a company called "The Geek Squad" which proudly advertizes, "We're geeky, yes, but we also know what you're going through, because nobody is more into technology than we are." When you need The Geek Squad, you give them a call, they fix your problem, and then they leave you alone.

Is it possible to treat God in the same way that people treat the Geek Squad? In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis described approaching God in a similar way. At a young age, when C. S. Lewis learned that his mother was dying, he remembered that he had been taught that prayers offered in faith would be granted. When his mother eventually died, Lewis prayed for a miracle. Later, he wrote:

I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Savior nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when he had done what was required of him I supposed he would simply—well, go away. It never crossed my mind that the tremendous contract which I solicited should have any consequence beyond restoring the status quo.

Anytime we expect God to fix our problems, restore the status quo, and then go away so we can live without him, we've treated God like the Geek Squad.

John Polkinghorne, a theoretical physicist and a minister, claims that the equations that guide physics point to a Creator. Polkinhorne said,

Physicists are deeply impressed with the order of the world. It is rationally beautiful and structured, and the feeling that there is a mind behind it is a very natural feeling to have …. I think the feeling of wonder, which is fundamental to the experience of physicists … is fundamentally a religious experience, whether people recognize it or not.

Manhattan, New York, pastor Tim Keller once said that in 1970 a Sunday school teacher changed his life with a simple illustration.

The teacher said, "Let's assume the distance between the earth and the sun (92 million miles) was reduced to the thickness of this sheet of paper. If that is the case, then the distance between the earth and the nearest star would be a stack of papers 70 feet high. And the diameter of the galaxy would be a stack of papers 310 miles high."

Then Keller's teacher added, "The galaxy is just a speck of dust in the universe, yet Jesus holds the universe together by the word of his power."

Finally, the teacher asked her students, "Now, is this the kind of person you ask into your life to be your assistant?"

In the [distracted] digital age, it may be the case that the classical debates about the presence of Jesus Christ in the [Lord's Supper] have been inverted. The question with which we may have to wrestle is not "In what way is the Lord present in the Supper?" Instead, the question is "In what way are we present?"

G. K. Beale writes in “We Become What We Worship”:

When my two daughters, Hannah and Nancy, were about two- or three- years-old, I noticed how they imitated and reflected my wife and me. They cooked, fed, and disciplined their play animals and dolls just the way my wife cooked, fed, and disciplined them. They gave play medicine to their dolls just the way we fed them medicine. Our daughters also prayed with their stuffed animals and dolls the way we prayed with them. They talked on their toy telephone with the same kind of Texas accent that my wife uses when she talks on the phone … .

Most people, I am sure, have seen this with children. But children only begin what we continue to do as adults. We imitate …. Most people can think back to junior high, high school, or even college when they were in a group, and to one degree or another, whether consciously or unconsciously, they reflected and resembled that peer group … . All of us, even adults, reflect what we are around. We reflect things in our culture and society … .

The principle is this: What we revere, we resemble, either for ruin or restoration. To commit ourselves to some part of the creation more than the Creator is idolatry. And when we worship something in creation, we become like it, as spiritually lifeless and insensitive to God as a piece of wood, rock, or stone.