August 10, 2025 · Rev. Gracie Paterson · Genesis 15:1-6; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Rev. Gracie Paterson reads God's promise to Abram of descendants as many as the stars alongside Hebrews' roll call of the faithful, and finds three kinds of star power in our ancestors, whether by blood or by inspiration: awe, assurance and guidance. And we are all becoming ancestors for someone else.
Transcript
Will you pray with me? O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. For you are our rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
How is the view of the stars from here in Rockport? A pretty good like out on the ocean. In my experience, some of the best views of starlight I've ever had have been along the coast. When you don't, we don't, you know, there's light pollution in Boston. The view is iffy at best, but I have a very clear memory of a time when my family was down in Hilton Head, South Carolina. We're from Virginia originally, so going down to South Carolina was a great kind of yearly getaway for us. And I remember it was during a season that the sea turtles were coming up onto the shore and laying their nests. And so the state or the county or the local government had a law that anyone, any properties along the beach had to totally turned their lights off. And so I went out onto the beach one night when both no lights coming from the shore, obviously no lights coming from the ocean. And the view of those stars were just, wow, just amazing. So I hope that you guys can catch some glimpses of those stars out here too. I to be honest, I'm quite jealous of you.
Today we're going to be talking about stars a little bit because these two scriptures that the lectionary has given us are two perspectives on a promise, a promise that God has written in the stars, a promise that features a metaphor for stars. Stars as an inheritance, an inheritance as abundant as the stars that dot the sky. And so this week I was thinking a lot about that view from Hilton, head of the Promises of God.
And so in our first text, we have the receiving of the promise. Abram, who we know maybe better as Abraham. This was even before Abraham received the promise, the covenant with God that established this relationship that runs through our entire tradition. Abraham receives the promise from God that though despite his old age, he will indeed bear offspring, bear a nation more than the grains of sand on a Rockport beach, more than the stars in the sky on a Rockport night. Amazing. We also have reflections from thousands of years later from this mysterious author of the Hebrews. We scholars nowadays think it probably was not actually the disciple Paul who wrote this letter, but somebody else. So we have this mysterious author here speaking about the importance of this promise written in the stars that was received thousands of years ago. And it's interesting, I feel in looking at these texts together, you can imagine that Abraham probably looked up into the sky and thought of the stars as connected to his progeny, his descendants, people he would never know. Whereas the readers of Hebrews would look up into the sky and maybe see a reminder of ancestors, the people who came before them, also people they never knew.
And so today, even thousands of years later, after the writing of Hebrews, I think the invitation is open to us to also reflect on the star power, particularly the star power of our ancestors and their testimonies. The text from Hebrews says that it was by faith that the ancestors received their approval. But I think a better translation of this here is that the faith is how the ancestors testified their lives. Faith was their testimony, and we can see it, and we can be reminded of it every time we look up into the sky.
So I want to invite you today to consider the ancestors, and I want to acknowledge that maybe not all of us have a very cohesive relationship with our ancestry or our lineages that came before us. A lot of us are divorced from that over time, kind of slowly and culturally. But I've learned that ancestors can be anyone who has impacted you in your life. Anyone you know, they don't have to be blood related, but for me, example, there are queer activists in the past who really inspire me, or theologians who unlocked a different type of theology that I had never known before. Those people are ancestors to me too. So I want to invite you in this moment. I know it can be hard, but to take on an expansive view of ancestors as we consider the starlike power hidden within.
So I have three different types of powers. I was thinking of what do stars, what do stars evoke in us? That is kind of like the power that ancestors hold within us. One I think is most basically. Or you look up into the sky. If you're on a beach in Hilton Head, maybe you're on a beach in Rockport. And the first thing is just wow. There's the number, of course, which the scripture alludes to the number of stars endless. You could reflect on the awesome fact that the starlight we see may be from stars that don't even exist anymore. Just how far away they are. Awesome. You can reflect on the awe that through generations, humans have meticulously picked out patterns in the stars, made images of them, kind of made the stars reflect back onto us. The awe of stars. There's something in the connectedness of that. Also that these massive fireballs out in the universe, the stardust that emits from them, those run in our veins. We are made from this same material. We are connected in this massive web of stars.
I think the same is true with our ancestors and our lineages and those we come from you. If you've ever tried to investigate the roots of your ancestry. You may find one person, and that person connects you to eight others, and those connect you to thirty six others. And I'm not a math person, but it gets big, fast. And you realize maybe for the first time just how connected you are and just how expansive your community of ancestors is. So that's one power. The big, bold, awesome power of stars and the big, bold, awesome power of our web of ancestors.
I think the second power that stars have over us is an assurance. An assurance that, yes, we see these out at night, and maybe we don't see these stars out in a big Boston skyline, but we know that we've seen them. And because we've seen them, we know they're there. We have a very limited viewpoint of the skies. NASA estimates that there are One septillion stars in the universe, which is ten with twenty four zeros after it. So we have a nice little you have a nice little plot of that, but we know that even without seeing some stars that they are out there, that they shine regardless, bigger and more beautiful than our entire Milky Way and galaxies. It's the. It produces a faith of things unseen, something that we've seen in Hebrews here.
And I think when I think about the ancestors, as I said, a lot of us may not be connected to particular ancestors or lineages in the moment, but that doesn't mean that they're not there. That doesn't mean that their blood that was running through their veins doesn't now run through yours. There's something hidden within you that once belonged to something greater than you and I. I find comfort in that, because it can feel foolish sometimes to hope, to have faith to come every week to something like this and think about big things like our souls and the stars and the ancestors. But I think the stars teach us that it's not such a foolish thing to be assured of the presence of things that are unseen.
The third thing that stars do, stars have the power to do is that they can guide us. We have a story in the Bible of Guidance by Stars. I saw last week that it was Christmas in July here. I love that. So it's a great time to remind to bring in the Magi people who followed a star not knowing where they were going. Spurred on by faith. We have that as an example. We also have. I passed the sign going into Gloucester on the way up here. America's oldest seaport. I don't know if that's debated here in Rockport or whatever, but that's what they say. Stars were key navigation tool for the early seafarers, and even today the stars have an essential guiding function for us, as do the ancestors.
Ancestors give us an example of many things of grace and hard times of perseverance. Think of anybody that you know, maybe somebody you love who has passed recently. Stories of them living by example that you follow today. Unseen but present awesome. Guiding you to where you wish to go.
The thing about stars and the thing about ancestors is that. We can look on one side of the scripture and consider the stars in the sky like our ancestors, but we can also consider that we still have much more progeny to come after us. There's a Buddhist meditation that invites you to come home. Seven homecomings, and one of them is coming home to the ancestors. And one mentor was running through that meditation with me, and she reminded me that I am also becoming an ancestor. You are also becoming an ancestor. Everything that we look back and reflect on from the people that we have loved, the people we feel connected to. Every time we look up to the stars, we can think of them And we can think about where we're going. We can think about the ancestors that we are becoming for someone else.
There's a lot of things unseen in this world these days, and that's really scary. But there's a lot of things unseen in this world that are really beautiful, too. And they're capable of guiding us to where we need to be. So I hope you can leave this place with a sense of awe, with a sense of assurance, and with a sense of guidance. That's the thing about stars. That's the thing about faith. I hope you continue to hold on to that. And when your stardust will inevitably return back to the stars, you'll know that you've become an ancestor for somebody as well. Thank you. Amen.