And Yet

 

And Yet

August 2, 2022

 

There have been a great many stories in the media lately about astronomy. The Webb telescope, though in operation for only a short time, has already given us images of the universe that are simply stunning. The scientists say that over time the Webb will give us images of galaxies farther away and therefore farther back in time than any we have ever seen before. That telescope, parked what seems so far from us, truly is a marvel of contemporary science and engineering. The scientists who work with it say it has hardly scratched the surface of what it is capable of doing. It truly is amazing.

All of these stories about the Webb telescope and outer space have got me thinking about the universe. It’s not that I’d never thought about it before. I have, and I don’t really have any new revelations about it today. Yet some things about it have been particularly vivid for me lately. First of all, what the astronomers tell us about the size of the universe is simply incomprehensible. The light or other radiation we detect from the farthest known galaxies has been traveling at 186,000 miles per second for billions of years. Our minds simply cannon grasp the distance that radiation has traveled. The distance that light travels at 186,000 miles per second for billions of years is, for me at least (and I suspect for everyone) beyond our ability to conceptualize. We can express it mathematically, but we can’t visualize it. It is simply too great for that.

Not only is the universe immense beyond our understanding, it is filled with more things than we can even begin to imagine. Scientists tell us that the universe holds billions of galaxies and that each galaxy holds billions of stars. We can express the number of stars we know or at least believe to exist only mathematically. I have trouble getting my mind around the number one billion. The extent of billions upon billions is way beyond the ability of my little mind to comprehend. I’m quite sure it’s way beyond your ability too.

Then the astronomers tell us about our planet’s place in the universe. We live on a rocky planet that seems in itself to be utterly insignificant. It orbits around a thoroughly unremarkable star near the outer edge of one of the arms of a thoroughly unremarkable spiral galaxy. Even seen just from the moon the earth looks lonely and isolated in infinite space. Pictures we’ve seen taken much farther away than the moon show the earth as a nearly invisible dot amounting to absolutely nothing. We are so small relative to the size of the universe as to be utterly without meaning as far as the universe is concerned. It all makes us humans and our problems seem so small. So petty. It looks to us, or at least to me, that we are nearly infinitesimally small. It would matter to the universe not at all if some death star were to blow up planet earth the way Darth Vader’s death star blew up Alderaan. Relative to the whole universe our planet isn’t even a speck of dust. It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that we mean exactly nothing to anyone but ourselves.

That sense of our smallness even gets expressed in the Bible. In Psalm 8 we read:

 

When I look at your heavens, the work

     of your fingers,

          the moon and the stars that you have established;

what are humans that you are mindful

     of them,

          mortals that you care for them? Psalm 8:3-4 NRSVue.

 

The question is of course rhetorical. The clearly intended answer is: Nothing. We’re nothing. We’re so much nothing compared to God’s heavens that it makes no sense for God to see us and care about us at all.

And yet. And yet, small as we humans are, we have always known that there is a reality far greater than us that really does care about us. We humans have known for a very long time of a greater reality with which, despite the infinite size disparity between us, we are eternally in covenant. Psalm 8 expresses that truth too. Speaking of God as “you” and us humans as “them,” Psalm 8 continues:

 

Yet you have made them a little lower

     than God,

          and crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

     you have put all things under their feet….Psalm 8:5-6 NRSVue.

 

God, Psalm 8 says. God is what we call the transcendent reality which humans have known for so long. We know that women and men have long known God because all human cultures past or present have had a system of myths and symbols that point their people toward God and express their experience and understanding of who God is and what God wants. Christianity is the system of symbols and myths that we Christians use to do just that. And like humans of all times and places, some of us have had our own experiences of the transcendent reality we call God.

It makes no sense of course. Yet we know through personal experience and the experience of all humankind that God never dismisses us because of our lack of size. Small relative to all of creation is, after all, how God created us. The planet earth is where God has put us, its cosmic insignificance drawing the decision to do that into question notwithstanding. If our cosmic insignificance doesn’t matter to God, and it doesn’t, we shouldn’t let it matter to us. Yes, our knowledge of the universe can make us seem small and insignificant indeed. And yet. And yet we know that to God we aren’t insignificant at all. It makes no sense of course, but that lack of sense doesn’t make it false. We are tiny, God is infinitely big. And yet God knows us, cares about and for us, and even loves us. And for that cosmic truth let all of us tiny, seemingly insignificant people say, “Thanks be to God!”