STAR THROWER

December 15, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Luke 1:39-45
Matthew 2:1-9

"...they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star...
until it stopped over the place where the child was."
-Matthew 2:9 (NRSV)

It is the hour before dawn on the beach of a small island
off the coast of Florida - that wonderful time of eerie half-
light, when you can hear but not quite see the ocean, and sky and
sea blend into one. For an early morning beach walker it is the
best time, the quietest, the most reflective. But from a biolo-
gist's perspective, it is a fascinating scenario of nature at its
cruelest, most violent and most efficient. The night tide, now
receding, is leaving behind a fantastic treasure-of-life: shells
and mussels and mollusks and crabs, and loveliest and most vul-
nerable of all, starfish. To the disciplined eye of the scien-
tist, it is Darwin's survival of the fittest - in microcosm.
Most of the life littering the sand will die there, unable to
make it back to the sea. Soon the gulls will appear, obeying
their own genetic coding, diving, devouring everything in sight.

And then, in the half-light another predator appears.
Hunched over with flashlights, baskets and iong-handled tongs,
first professional shell collectors, working efficiently, picking.
up the conch shells and starfish; and then the tourists, less
efficient, picking up everything.

At the tourist hotels the Darwinian drama continues. Oout-
side there are large boiling kettles for cooking away the inhabi-
tants of the shells, to prepare them for their future on fashion-
able New York and Chicago coffee tables.

Charles Darwin told us that this is the way it is. Life is
a struggle. Only the strong survive. And then, reflecting
philosophically on what he observed, he said that nature is
absolutely and unalterably selfish. If there was any evidence of
a species that acted differently, a species of life that acted in

compassion, kindness and self-sacrifice that others might sur-
vive, he would have to reexamine his entire system, he said.

Ahead on the beach, alone and far away, framed by an early
morning rainbow, is another figure; bending over, reaching down,
examining something and then hurling it back into the sea...

The teller of this story was the late Loren Eisely, Profes-
sor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, a distin-
guished scientist, and also a poet and author whose observations
of the natural world consistently bordered on religion and spir-
it. One of the last things he wrote before he died waS an essay
with the wonderful title, The Star Thrower.

"'A starfish... it's still alive,' I ventured...
"Yes,' he said. 'It may live...if the offshore
pull is strong enough. The stars throw well. One
can help them. '!'"

Eiseley walked on, leaving the man to his curious task.

"I turned as I neared a bend in the coast and saw
him toss another star, skimming it far out over
the ravening and tumultuous water. For a moment,
in the changing light, the thrower appeared magni-
fied, as though casting larger stars upon some
greater sea.

"It was as though at some point the supernatural
had touched hesitantly, for an instant, upon the
natural." [The Star Thrower, Loren Eisely,
p. 169-185]

Or, aS another writer put it nearly 2,000 years ago:

"And there ahead of them went the star - until it
stopped over the place where the child was."

And so Christmas, a lovely year-end celebration of generosi-
ty and warmth and color, a time to breathe in deeply and enjoy
aromas of fresh pine, and scented candles and delicious food; a
time to hold our dearest ones close, lift hearts and heads and at
least once look up into a night sky full of stars and wonder.
And shining above it all is that mysterious star.

Christmas is about hope. Christmas is a new and different
word about us, about the human condition, about human history.
Once we think our way through the tinsel and sentiment of Christ-
mas, we encounter a strong and bold notion that there is hope,

_. hope for the world and hope for us. Once we send all the greet-

ing cards and open all the gifts and, as W..H. Auden quipped,
“eat and drink entirely too much," after the celebrating,

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Christmas is about the bold and very hopeful notion that in the
ebb and flow of life there is a Star Thrower. In those times and
places in human history that look like that littered beach, there
is a power moving and acting in the other direction. And that
includes the slice of human history which is your own life.

There is a Star Thrower. There is hope.

It has been suggested that hope is absolutely essential to
human life. "Without hope the people perish," the prophet noted
long ago. It is an observation that plays out in front of our
eyes. Take hope away and people become desperate. Physicians
struggle with the ethical dilemma caused by the conflict between
their desire to tell the patient the truth, and the knowledge
that without hope people are inclined to give up. Studies of
urban violence document the connection to hopelessness. When
there is no hope that things are going to get better, human
beings are inclined to act less than humanly.

The hope of freedom kept hostages alive. The hope for
release, return and reunion with loved ones; i.e. the hope that
there will be a future, in some cases - mentally imaged down to
the smallest detail - a complete family trip with specific
hotels and food ordered from the menu at the restaurant and the

amount of the gratuity even became the power to sustain human
life for another day.

Ernest Gordon, former Dean of the Chapel at Princeton, a
Scotsman, served with the British Army in World War II and was
captured by the Japanese. He wrote about his experience ina
prisoner of war camp, Through the Valley of the Kwai. Gordon
describes the gradual deterioration - physical, mental and spir-
itual - among the prisoners as the reality of their isolation
sunk in. The camp was in the middle of a jungle, there was
almost no possibility that anybody even knew they were there, or
whether they were dead or alive. They didn't know where they
were. Slowly, the vestiges of civilized life eroded. Men became
selfish, unkind, cruel, uncaring - even about themselves - a kind
of desperate, cynical fatalism characterized once proud and
gracious human beings. The turning point came on the day they
heard the engines of a plane high overhead. It was an Allied
plane. As they watched, it circled, and dipped its wings in

recognition. They were seen! Someone knew they were there.
There was hope - and the effect was immediate and powerful. Life
suddenly had possibilities again, therefore purpose. Order

resumed, so did kindness, compassion, pride, even politeness.
The good power of hope. For Gordon, it became a religious expe-
rience; an encounter with a new idea of God, not simply as a
reality of the past encrusted in old stories about a bygone era,
even very nice stories, but God as a reality in the future beck-
oning, calling, promising a God of hope.

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That's what Christmas is about; not merely generosity and
warmth and festivity, but an incredible notion that there is a
God of the future, a God of hope, a God who in the debris and.
tragedy and randomness of history, and individual human lives
like yours and mine, throws a star.

It is a haunting idea. You can hear it in the lovely old
Testament readings for Advent. Isaiah, for instance. Isaiah
whose unenviable task it was to write something to a people whose
immediate future could not have looked more dismal. Caught in the
middle of an international power struggle, their homeland about

to be invaded, their prospects were very bleak. And Isaiah wrote
about hope:

"The wilderness and dry land shall be glad, the desert shall
rejoice and blossom; like the crocus." In the middle of a cruel
and unfeeling and violent present, Isaiah held out the hope of
peace, when the wolf shall live with the lamb, and the lion and

the calf, and there will be no more violence, and a little child
will lead them.

Centuries later, that same people were captives again, this
time in their own land, occupied by Roman troops, and one of
their unmarried peasant girls had a vision.

"'Greetings, O favored one!!

The angel said to her, 'Fear not!
You will conceive and bear a son.
He will be great...the Son of the
Most High...

He will reign forever.'"

A generation later, the Roman Emperor himself decided that
the people who were calling themselves Christians were convenient
Scapegoats for his failed policies and so Nero called them trai-
tors and hunted them down and threw them into the arena to be
killed. Frightened, discouraged, huddled together in Corinth,
Ephesus, Philippi, and the catacombs of the capital itseif, with
the whole might of the Empire dedicated to their eradication,
they read the words of a martyred preacher named Paul.

"For in this hope we were saved."

Those people were not naive sentimentalists. They knew,
perhaps more clearly than anyone since, that their faith was not
going to protect them from harn. Religion was not an insurance
policy for them. They had seen too many of their dear ones
thrown to the lions to engage in adolescent naivete. Their hope
was profound. They endured because they believed and trusted

something deeply hopeful which Paul had written not long before
his own execution.

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"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?...
hardship,...persecution, famine,... peril. No, in all these
things more than conquerors through him who loved us."

The Theology of Hope is what it is called and its most
eloquent contemporary advocate is a German, Juergen Moltmann, who
wrote an important book under the title, The Theology of Hope.
"Christianity," he said, "from first to last, is hope, forward
looking and forward moving." [p. 16]

Now - the hope we are discussing is not merely what someone
has characterized as "pie in the sky bye and bye." It is not
merely what Karl Marx once identified as the opiate of the peo-
ple, the narcotic which keeps people docile and manageable who

are suffering in life, because they hope for a better deal in the
next world.

Hope in the Bible, the Hope of Christmas, is timely - this
worldly. Moltmann observed that "Faith, whenever it develops into
hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience."
[p- 21] Hopeful people are not patient at all. Hopeful peopie
are always pressing for change in the world and in their own
lives. People full of Christmas hope, are not self-satisfied,
placid celebrants, but the very ones who in the name of Jesus
Christ, are out on the edge, pressing for change, working for
justice, praying for peace, building houses, tutoring youngsters,
feeding the hungry, clamoring for change. People who know about
Christmas hope do their celebrating and adoring and worshiping
in situations as complex and as political and economic and social
as the census in the middle of which he was born and the crowded
little town over which the star shone. And so more often than
not, you will find them - Christians - wherever there is hopeful
ferment - South Africa, Central America, Eastern Europe. To know
there is hope is to work for its fulfillment.

It is not always easy to be hopeful. In fact, there is a
sense in which hopefulness is not very fashionable these days.
As we celebrate the birth this year, there is a gap of unreality
widening between the festively decorated department stores and

the economic facts of life. The "new narcissism" of the 80s
didn't work. We got richer but no happier and now, a newspaper
editor noted, as America mopes and the economy slumps, the "new
narcissism" has become the "new cynicism." Columnist William

Rasberry wrote a devastating article about how it is easier
Simply to walk away from the problem of homelessness, for in-
stance, because the resolutions are so complicated and so expen-
sive and so unlikely. His social conscience has been trans-
formed, he said, into cynicism. This problem isn't going to be
solved anytime soon so it's best just to walk away from it.

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Rasberry, of course, was trying to get under our collars and
he did just that. But I do believe he's right: that the absence
of hope turns us all into cynics. And I do believe it's what
Christmas is about, about a theology of hope which will never
settle for cynicism, no matter how complex,.or potentially trag-
ic, or grim the outlook, or monumental:the-problems.

Hope is strong in us. Hope is sometimes strongest in us
when the situation is most difficult. In fact sometimes it takes
a tragedy for us to know how deep hope is in us. American poet
Henry Longfellow was devastated by the news that his beloved son
had been wounded. serving with the Army of the Potomac during the
Civil War. It often meant death. He wrote a poem -

"I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carois play.

And in despair I bowed my head

There is no peace on earth, I said.
For hate is strong and mocks this song
of Peace on earth, good will to men.

"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep.
God is not dead, nor doth he sleep,

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."

Hope is strong in us. It keeps showing up in unlikely
circumstances: in visions of crocus blooming in the desert, in
persecuted Christians acting like brave conquerors, in concentra-
tion camps and the cells of brave hostages, in apartments at
Cabrini Green, and in board rooms of banks downtown. Hope keeps
showing up - stunningly this year in a world re-birthing itself,
in unthinkable developments, like politicians and military lead-
ers talking about ways to destroy the accumulated nuclear arse-
nais of four decades. Hope shows up in the most unlikely circum-
stances - like a stable in a little town in Judea over which a
star was thrown into space and time and history.

Out on the beach Loren Eisely thought he heard a voice.
"Call me another thrower." The task was impossible. Ahead he
Saw the thrower, hurling the stars -

"I never looked again. The task we assumed was
too immense for gazing... I picked up and flung a
star. Somewhere, far off, across fathomless
abysses, I felt as if another world was flung more
joyfully... Somewhere, I felt the Thrower knows...
Perhaps he smiled and cast once more into the
darkness."

Among the last words Eisely wrote were these:

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"Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine
star was similarly seized and thrown. Somewhere
there is a hurier of stars!"

And so for you this day, there is a word.of.hope. Regard-
less of who you are or where you are, there is hope. Regardless
of how the future looks to you today, there is hope.

"Fear not" the angel messenger says to everyone who hears
about it. Do not be afraid...be of good cheer...be of good hope.
There is in the long story of humankind - in your own life - a
Star Thrower.

For to you is born beneath that mysterious and wonderful
star, a savior who is Christ the Lord. Amen.

+++ te tetet

May we know again the wonder and mystery of Christmas, oO
God. May we know deeply your love for the world and the hope
that is ours, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

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