Synod School’s closing worship preacher wasn’t so sure he’d get to witness the rare cosmic event
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
The Rev. Brendan McLean, associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Tyler, Texas, preaches during closing worship at Synod School Friday. He displayed pictures he and his friends took of the April 8 solar eclipse. (Photo by Kim Coulter)
STORM LAKE, Iowa — The Rev. Brendan McLean is associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Tyler, Texas, one of the communities shrouded in darkness for nearly two minutes during the April 8 solar eclipse.
Only just before it happened, someone forgot to urge the clouds over Tyler to go away.
“I felt like I had a front-row ticket,” said McLean, the preacher during closing worship at Synod School on Friday. “But I was watching it from the balcony behind a pillar.”
But at 1:43 p.m. Central Time, the sky grew dark like twilight, the clouds parted, “and I could see the total solar eclipse,” he said. “How incredible it was to see it with my own two eyes — with solar eclipse glasses on.”
For two minutes, McLean and millions of other North Americans “experienced a world fundamentally different than the ordinary world we experience every day, a world where we experienced the shadow of night when we virtually always experience the light of day,” he said. “It was other-worldly.”
Later, he and his friends shared pictures of what they’d seen via social media. He called the nearly two minutes “unadulterated and unfiltered communion with the cosmos,” and he preached Friday using Job 12:7-13 as his text.
“This passage from Job tells us the whole of Creation — every part of the universe — calls us to awe and reverence of God.”
Job’s “beautiful theological statement” is the answer to Job’s “friend,” Zophar, who’s sure Job did something wrong to justify all his suffering. “Job knows this is entirely untrue,” McLean pointed out. “Our suffering is not connected to God’s retribution.”
The wisdom of God is not something we can grasp, “and yet all of Creation — the entirety of the cosmos — has something to tell us about God,” McLean said. If we want to encounter God, “all we need to do is simply ask the cosmos, the world around us, at any given time. We are surrounded by the beauty of Creation that calls to us … We are made and claimed as God’s children and are redeemed and resurrected in Jesus Christ.”
“Friends, all of Creation is waiting to tell us something about God,” he said. Unlike that solar eclipse, “the window of opportunity to observe something about God is as wide and big as you can imagine — and yet more.”
“All we need to do is stay curious and ask, open our ears and our eyes to see that God is good and that Christ died and rose for us, all of us,” McLean said. “The God who is more than we can ask or imagine — it is that God who loves you, who cares for you, and who wants you to flourish — not because you’ve earned anything, but because you are you, and God loves you for it. Amen.”
As part of worship, children and youth were given special sunglasses and told, “When you put them on, you can see the kingdom of God.” They and all the others in worship were the recipients of a reproduction of a two-sided watercolor signed by most of the 540 people who attended Synod School and bearing this saying: “Remember, God is able to do more than all we ask or even imagine.”
Synod School celebrated its 70th anniversary this year. It’s put on each summer by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies and held at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Learn more here.
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