The First Presbyterian Pulpit A sermon by the Rev. Dr. David E. Leininger

GOD THE BOGGLER

Delivered 1/2/2000 Text: Psalm 8

To read endnotes, click on the the note number, then click on the to return to your place in the text.

We made it!!! Pass out the tee-shirts that say "I survived Y2K!" Some have probably had to deal with millennium-sized hangovers, others are still in the process of sweeping up millennium-sized piles of confetti, and the rest of us are generally relieved that millennium-sized fears of Y2K-related disasters never happened - no computer blow-ups, no terrorist attacks. We made it!

No Rapture either, by the way. Some of those who sport the bumper stickers on their cars warning, "In case of the Rapture, this car will have no driver," were predicting that 12/31/99 would be the day. Just before Christmas, a 60-year-old American street preacher dressed in long black robes and a baseball cap that says JESUS IS LORD who called himself "Bobby Bible," walked around Manger Square outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and warned all the Muslims going to Mosque, "On December 31 [Jesus] will part the sky and come partially down...Dead and living Christians are going to go up to meet him. It's going to be a catastrophe for you and wonderful for me. You will come under the wrath of God. You are going to get a spanking."⁽¹⁾ Nice fellow. Sorry, Bobby, you were wrong. And there were no driverless cars careening all over the road mowing down all the sinners left behind.

Instead, it was simply the biggest world-wide celebration this planet has ever seen - a 25-hour romp starting from one South Pacific island and circumnavigating the entire globe. And the absolutely amazing thing is that I sat in the safety and comfort of my own recliner and watched it all unfold before my mesmerized eyes. Perhaps you did too. The grass-skirted dancers in Kirabati, the fireworks in Moscow, the lights on the Eiffel Tower, the illuminated Washington Monument, the Waterford crystal ball in Times Square. We saw it all, live via satellite, as it was happening. Mind boggling.

Perhaps that is just a function of my getting older. That old adage about "the older I get, the less I know" gets more and more true every passing year. And that means that the older I get, the more my mind gets boggled. Things change so much. When I was growing up, drugs were something you got at the drugstore...gay meant happy...aids were people who helped nurses. Some of you can remember when electric lights were a new treat...indoor plumbing...radio...TV...not to mention computers and rockets and and space shuttles and those satellites. The mind reels at how much has changed in this century that we leave behind.

Y2K. Really? In the paper the other day was a cartoon showing the moon addressing the earth wearing a party hat and sporting a noise maker. The moon says, "Get a grip! According to my calendar, it's the year 4-BILLION, give or take a few hundred million."⁽²⁾ Hmm.

That helps me hear something else - a message from somewhere familiar, something about boggle and dazzle and God. It is that old Psalmist friend of ours saying, "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them?"

O Lord, my God, When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made;
I see the stars; I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.⁽³⁾

Boggling! Six million stars in just one corner of a galaxy and a million galaxies so far away that it will take a million years for the light from one of them to show up in my Carolina sky some night. And the God who made all that cares more for us than about all THAT! There is BOGGLE for you!

And when I think that God, His Son not sparing,
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in.
That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Here is where the boggling really gets into high gear. My mind can hardly go on when I try to think how people could make themselves take a mallet and drive nails through the gristle and bone of men's hands and then hang them up on crosses along the roads of their empire and call it PAX...PEACE - strange kind of peace, that; and that almost 2,000 years later, in the year 2000, my life is affected profoundly by one of those crosses, the one with the young rabbi from Nazareth on it, the one who is called the PRINCE of peace, the one who, of all things, conquered death by dying. It is hard to imagine.

I have told you before of Sam Shoemaker, one of the great preachers in the first half of this century and this story he told on himself. He confessed that during his seminary days, as he studied and reflected on God and creation, that he found it difficult to imagine how the Lord could even THINK about these little specks of life called human beings. How could God have time for us when there was so much more to demand the divine attention? Shoemaker explained his thoughts to one of his professors, an eminently wise man. "Mr. Shoemaker," he said, "your problem is that your God is too small. God takes care of the sun, the moon, and the stars with just a word. Now, God has all the time in the world just for you and me." God the boggler.

And now we are called upon to be boggled once more. It has nothing to do with getting older or dealing with Y2K issues. No. This time it is a simple invitation to a meal. The boggling comes when we realize just who it is who has asked us. We who so often think of ourselves as not much more than a grain among the sands of time are invited to the table of the one who created all the sand. It does not compute. But then, it does not HAVE to. We can simply accept the invitation by faith.

That does not mean we ignore the fact that we do not understand it all. We admit it, and come anyway...just as we do in so many areas of our lives. We do not understand how brown cows eat green grass and give white milk, but we still pour it on our cereal. We do not understand a mother's love or a father's patience, but we count on them and cherish them. We do not understand how pain can help us grow, but we know that it does. Yes, there is much we do not understand, and this is just one more thing.

Then sings my soul, my Savior, God, to Thee;
How great Thou art; How great Thou art.

God the boggler. Y2K with all its potential for disaster is behind us. Now we can relax a bit. The Creator of all the universe is inviting you and inviting me to dine. That's right, the same God who boggles the mind...but hallelujah, also the God who saves the soul.

Amen!

1. Christine Hauser, "Bobby Bible' Warns Jesus Is Coming to Holy Land," Reuters News Service, 12/20/99

2. Auth, Greensboro News & Record, A-11, 12/30/99

click and send us mail