Sermon Title: "Google Earth, and It's the Lord's"
Date: July 12, 2009
Ministers: Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Psalm 24

Prior to the decade in which we live, only astronauts in space have seen the stunning view of earth from far above the earth.  The crew of Apollo 8 were the first to witness the incredible and unanticipated sight of the earth rising over the lunar horizon on Christmas Eve, 1968.

Then, on July 20, 1969, after a four day trip, the Apollo 11 astronauts entered the Moon’s orbit.  As the crew returned from the far side, they captured a photo of the desolate lunar surface with the earth rising in the distance.  Although even the astronauts themselves cannot recall who actually took the picture, it remains one of the most famous photos taken from the space program.

Fast-forward to 2009 and a computer program known as Google Earth.  Even if you’ve never tried it from home, it’s used on television all the time.  This month, as newscasters wanted to show the location of the Neverland Ranch in the Santa Ynez valley, views taken from space showed all of Southern California, then zoomed in on the L.A. area for reference, and then zeroed in right on that particular region of Santa Barbara County and the ranch as seen from overhead.

By downloading Google Earth on your home computer, you can start viewing a site, such as your home or this church, from high above, and then progressively get closer and closer so that you could count the roof vents.

Let’s imagine that we’re back in time, nearly three thousand years.  It is the time of the psalmist, the very one who wrote Psalm 24 which we heard this morning.  This psalm seem to position the writer from a location high above the scene itself; but slowly the focus, starting broad and wide, narrows to the throne of the King who is Lord over all.

The scene first takes in the earth, which belongs to the Lord.  Then the writer notes that the dominion of the Lord extends not only to the earth but to those in it, and the “world”—that is, the society of humankind who “live in it.”  As though to justify the Lord’s dominion over this realm, the psalmist points out that the Lord is the one who “founded it on the seas.”  That was a typical symbol of chaos and disorder, so that, according to Augustine, the “waves of this world… should be subdued by it, and should not hurt it.”

And then, as if using Google Earth, the lens zooms in even tighter to the hill of the Lord, and closer still to the “holy place.”  And here the zooming stops.  The psalmist poses two questions:  “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?  And who shall stand in his holy place?”  That is, who is able to make the climb, and who, having completed the ascent, is worthy to “stand in his holy place”?

The answer is likewise twofold:  Those who are guiltless in deeds (“clean hands”) will successfully scale the “hill of the Lord,” and those who are “pure in heart” are worthy to “stand in his holy place.”  These two qualifications are then each qualified:  Those with clean hands are also those who have not lifted up their souls to vain things.  They have their priorities well ordered and thus do not despair as they make the ascent; they have their souls lifted or set on their proper and true objective.  And the pure in heart likewise do not have a deceitful bone in their bodies.  They’re utterly guileless.  This then, the psalmist says, describes those who seek the “God of Jacob.”

The wayfarer is now positioned to see the “King of glory.” The zoom lens moves again to the “ancient doors.”  They swing open to reveal the Lord of hosts, “The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in battle.”

In this psalm, then, we’re allowed to see the earth and a pilgrimage of those who are moving toward what must have been a reference to the temple.  Quite possibly, it was a procession in which the ark of the covenant was brought to the temple.  The highly liturgical nature of the psalm’s middle and final stanzas suggests that the song was sung antiphonally in a call-and-response format, just as we used for our call to worship today.

When we get to the final resolution, the finite focus, it is not on the worshippers, but on the God to whom it all belongs.  As Rick Warren said in the first line of his mega-best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, “It’s not about you.  If you want to know why you were placed on this planet,” he goes on to say, “you must begin with God.”

As important as that message is for contemporary society, when everyone wants what he or she wants now, the idea is not original with Rick Warren.  A far more famous theologian pushed the idea five centuries ago.  In fact, last Friday, July 10, was the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Swiss Reformer John Calvin, who had great influence on the Reformed movement in the new Protestant branch of Christianity.  He believed that God was acting in love when God created the world and everything in it.  “There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world,” said Calvin, “that is not intended to make us rejoice.”

Calvin emphasized the sovereignty of God and wrote that “God is Lord over all!” (Institutes, 1.14.3)  This was good news then; it’s good news now. He stressed that no human being—whether king or bishop—could demand our ultimate loyalty, and this attracted people who were suffering under the authority of oppressive churches and governments. This belief in God’s sovereignty has shaped Christian thought through the centuries, and it had a dramatic impact before World War II, when a group of faithful Germans took a stand against Hitler in a statement of faith called “The Theological Declaration of Barmen.”  It rejected the attempts of the Third Reich to “become the single and totalitarian order of human life.”  These faithful Germans gave ultimate loyalty to the Lord alone.  Some were imprisoned and even killed for their beliefs.

Not acknowledging the sovereignty of God seems to be the problem with much that is wrong with the world today.  People zoom in on who they are, their wants and needs, and don’t take the wider Google Earth view and realize who it all belongs to in the first place:  “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it…” (Psalm 24:1)

We look at man’s achievements, and think we’re in charge.  Yet today’s text may well be taken as a rebuke to that notion.  All our inventions are discoveries of what is already implanted in nature by the Creator.  Humankind has created nothing material; we have merely found out God’s secrets.  Oil, from which we distill gasoline, has been underground for millions of years.  Electricity was hidden in Niagara Falls all the time; we only came across it and discovered how to use it.  So too with chloroform and penicillin and everything derived from plants and animals, along with all the rest of the benefits which God hid from the beginning of the world.  Science, medical research, is sort of a treasure hunt, with scientists as the hunters.  We honor, celebrate, and are most thankful for their helpful discoveries, many of which save lives, but the originator of the treasure is God.

After the psalmist declares that “the earth is the Lord’s,” it is only the second clause that recognizes “those who live in it.”  People belong to their Creator at least as much as the wealth of material resources which abound on our planet.  We have a secondary, perhaps even subservient, role to perform in utilizing our various gifts and capacities.  Maybe we do something that directly affects the well-being of other humans.  Maybe our role is one step removed—such as the scientist who works not directly with the recipients of some medical miracle, but in the development of it.  As our world has grown larger, the business of the Christian is to discover God’s secrets hidden in the peoples and cultures of very nation and color and draw them out.  We are all affected not only by what happens in our own city, our own state, our own country, but by events that happen in every county in this world.

It will be forty years ago on July 20th that Neil Armstrong was the first human to set foot on the moon, and we were treated to see that walk, with our earth in the background.  If it proved anything—other than our ability to successfully launch a program to put humans into space—it gave us a view of this earth we’ve never seen before.  It served then, and continues to serve, as a powerful reminder of that which the psalmist declared with assurance nearly three millennia ago:  “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it…”  Let’s never forget that.