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Wow! Thanks! Help!
Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5
You should know the name of Anne Lamott, a gifted and successful writer, whose life fell apart
and who became a Christian through a conversion as reluctant as C S Lewis’ and twice as
improbable. She tells the story wonderfully in her book Travelling Mercies,1 and she has gone
on to write other that explore her faith, with titles like Grace (Eventually),2 and Small Victories:
Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace.3
Today’s sermon title was inspired by her book on the subject of prayer. She calls it Help!
Thanks! Wow! The Three Essential Prayers. She writes about prayer, because she’s driven to
it:
It is all hopeless. Even for a crabby optimist like me, things couldn’t be worse.
Everywhere you turn, our lives and marriages and morale and government are falling to
pieces. So many friends have broken children. The planet does not seem long for this
world. Repent! Oh, wait, never mind. I meant: Help.4
Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through. It is the first great prayer.5
She goes on to other prayers—she thinks the other essential prayers are gratitude ‘Thanks’ and
then wonder, ‘Wow!’
You’ll notice my sermon title rearranges the order of these words—deliberately. It’s true that
our first prayer is often a cry for help; I’m not sure it should be.
‘Help’ begins with us and the predicament we’re in, or the confusion we’ve created or the
lostness we’ve wandered into. That places us and our situation at the center of our thinking.
When we come to pray, we shouldn’t be there, at the center.
Psalm 8 teaches us to pray in a different order. Psalm 8 is the first psalm of praise in the bible,
but even a psalm of praise does not begin with thanks, it begins with wonder and then expresses
praise. The order the Psalm suggests, therefore is, Wow! Thanks! Help!
Our first focus should be on God before we turn to ourselves and our situation. That’s how
Jesus taught us to pray: God first: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom
come …
Pantheon Books. 1999.
Riverhead Books. 2007
3 Riverhead Books. 2014.
4 Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow, The Three Essential Prayers. New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin Group) 2012, 11
5 Ib., 15.
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WOW ARISES from a sense of wonder at the mystery of it all, and if the psalmist could be moved
to wonder by the sight of a night sky, we have cause for even deeper wonder at what we
understand of the immensity of creation.
In September, 1977, NASA launched a spacecraft, Voyager 1, to study the outer Solar System. It
has been operating for all those years and still communicates with earth.
In 1990 when it was leaving the solar system, the astronomer Carl Sagan had a brainwave. He
turned the spacecraft around and got it to take a series of photographs of our solar system from
a distance of some 3.7 billion miles from earth. In the pictures, earth is seen as a tiny dot (0.12
pixel in size) against the vastness of space.
Sagan was moved by what he saw. He wrote a book; he delivered commencement addresses on
‘that pale blue dot.’ Like the psalmist, he found the immensity posed questions about the
significance of humans. He spoke eloquently of the mystery of this speck in the universe.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by … generals and emperors so that in glory and in
triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the
endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely
distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their
misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged
position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
That last comment because, unlike the psalmist, Sagan found no room for God.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all
this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from
ourselves.
WE WOULD DO WELL not to be too glib in dismissing Sagan’s doubts about God. The vastness of
creation and the forces of the universe should silence any chirpy chattering about ‘”the man
upstairs” or “the big guy,” or the like. “Immortal, invisible, God only wise” is infinitely vaster
than our ability to comprehend, and later in his letter to the Romans the apostle Paul reaches
the limits of his understanding and exclaims,
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his
judgments and how inscrutable his ways…6
Wow! Those words should find an echo in our hearts.
6
Romans 11:33
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EQUALLY, HOWEVER, we should not be intimidated by Sagan’s doubts about God. There’s a huge
difference between saying “I find no evidence there is a God” and “I find evidence there is no
God.” At the limits of human understanding we are faced with a choice between unbelief and
faith.
At a memorial service for Sagan in St John the Divine Cathedral in Manhattan, the Revd
Joan Campbell said, “He would say to me with a smile, ‘You’re so smart. Why do you
believe in God?’ And I would say to him, ‘You’re so smart. Why don’t you believe in
God?’”7
I’ve just been reading a remarkable book about the person the book describes as “the world’s
most notorious atheist.” Called The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the
Word’s Most Notorious Atheist, it fills in the background of those debates Hitchens held with
believers, as told by one of the evangelical Christians who took part.
Larry Taunton determined not to write a “kiss and tell” expose; he is careful to protect the
integrity of what became a remarkable friendship, marked by a profound respect between both
participants. He has horrible things to tell of the Christians who wrote hateful mail to Hitchens
expressing their glee that he had developed cancer, but it also tells of long conversations about
theology, and bible studies on the gospel of John. Taunton is deliberate:
I make no Lady Hope-like claims regarding Christopher Hitchens. As we have seen,
there were no reports of a deathbed conversion. The whole of my thesis is this:
Christopher had doubts (that assertion alone is enough to cause great consternation
among God-haters), and those doubts led him to seek out Christians and contemplate,
among other things, religious conversion. Whether he did make such a conversion or
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not, is a separate question and one that we cannot answer—that no one can answer—with
certainty.8
The feeling that the book most generated in me is gratitude; gratitude that there are Christians
who have understood the spirit of Christ and are prepared to offer it, even in the face of seeming
hostility and rejection.
And that’s where the Thanks of prayer comes in. I give thanks for my faith and its riches. I give
thanks for my faith and its resilience; that it is strong enough to hold its own against detractors,
and gracious enough to seek, honestly and humbly, to journey with those who oppose it without
conditions: a reflection of God’s unconditional love for all of us.
And that’s the point where my prayer becomes “Help.” Help me be an attractive Christian.
Hitchens was once asked on television about his friendship with avowed evangelical Taunton.
Taunton notes,
Nelson, Dean. Quantum Leap. Lion Hudson. Kindle Edition, p. 26. Citing Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New
York: J. Wiley, 1999), 420.
8 Larry Taunton, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the Word’s Most Notorious Atheist. Nashville: Thomas
Nelson, 2016, 170.
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I braced for the worst. Hitch didn’t hesitate: “If everyone in the United States had the
same qualities of loyalty and care and concern for others that Larry Taunton had, we’d be
living in a much better society than we do.9
I read that as a wonderful testimony to what Paul calls “the grace in which we stand.” As
Christians, Paul writes, “we can boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.” But we can also
boast of suffering and endurance, and the way they build character and the way character gives
birth to hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.10
We need help. Help me Lord to be grasped by the wonder of my faith and the riches of your
grace, that my life may point to Christ and lead others to know him and to love him.
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10
Ibid., xv.
Romans 5:1-5.