Photo by Lee Hamilton.
In the beginning was the Big Bang. Thirteen billion years ago, the first galaxies exploded forth in the rapidly expanding, brand-new universe. Like our Milky Way galaxy now, their light wavelengths back then were mostly in the ultraviolet and visible areas of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Now, today, out here in the boonies, on the inner side of the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way galaxy, that same extremely ancient light from those extremely ancient galaxies is flowing. But after billions of years of expansion, these wavelengths of light have stretched out, longer and longer, and so they are no longer visible, or ultraviolet. They are infrared.
Early this morning, the James Webb Space Telescope left Earth, tightly packed into the nose cone of an Ariane 5 rocket. Over the next 29 days, it will make its way to a point about a million miles from here. It will unfold itself along the way, extending an unprecedentedly large 21-foot mirror, and a sun shield the size of a tennis court. The JWST is an infrared telescope, and it will allow us to see some of the oldest light waves in the universe.
This is how hard our ingenious species works to see through to the first moments of the universe. This is how delightfully curious we are, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And this is how hard it is to do that: there are 300 discrete things that need to go right for the telescope to launch, open, and function properly. The JWST, when on Earth, weighs 13,700 pounds. It cost $10 billion. If it fails, there will be no foreseeable Plan B. And so the astronomers and other scientists running this mission are … a little freaked out. Planetary scientist Peter Gao put things vividly in a recent tweet, in a couple of frantic run-on sentences: “...JWST is the biggest telescope to be sent to space it will help find life and tell us how the universe started isn’t it amazing??? / astronomers: my entire career hinges on this bucket of single point failures I’m so nervous I’m crying and throwing up everywhere.”
As a recent article put it, “The astronomers are not all right.”
Now, it would be a massive disappointment if the JWST failed, but it would not be an unmitigated catastrophe. The infrared light waves will be moving through this region of space for an incomprehensible amount of time to come. Humanity could try this again a thousand thousand more times. These infrared waves are patient. They extend themselves across immense distances of space and time. Our scientists may not be all right, but these light waves are chill.
They are also an image for God that can’t be beat.
Beginning with a cataclysm we can hardly imagine, these light waves now stretch serenely across the universe, flowing through everything. They were present at the creation of the universe itself, and now they are everywhere, though unseen. John the Evangelist might say it this way: Apart from these light waves, “not one thing came into being.”
And so it is with God, the One whom we imagine as Three; the Creator, the Word, and the Spirit; the Source and Beginning of all things; the End of all things; the Alpha and the Omega. God is more hidden from our sight than even those long, infrared light waves. And if we happily drop $10 billion and stake the careers of many of our best scientists on a chance to observe those light waves, imagine how much we would give to see God.
On Christmas Day, we do our best to make sense of God: Creator, Word, and Spirit. We begin by singing one of our most ancient hymns, Psalm 98, in which God bares God’s holy arm. Think of a muscular arm, a jacked arm, an arm worthy of Thor’s hammer, an arm that shatters our enemies. But then we set next to that mighty image the tiny arm of an infant, strong enough only to support an even tinier hand as it uses its brand-new prehensile grip to cling to its mother. Even when we set aside the Bethlehem story for the solemn prologue of John, the one that shrewdly locates God beyond the cosmos and calls God Light, even so, we are inevitably preoccupied by that tiny infant in an animal feedbox, and the incomprehensible mystery that this helpless baby is God.
In the beginning, God bared God’s holy arm, flinging suns across space, setting in motion all things across this vast universe. But now, God becomes flesh, helpless like us, vulnerable like us, present not as a hammer-wielding superhero, but in the very body of the most vulnerable person in our midst. Visible light lengthens over time, flowing down into the infrared band, hard to detect but everywhere. And so maybe we can imagine that God’s presence and power moves through the universe like this, too.
God does not crash down upon our lives, determining for us all outcomes, arranging and fixing all things. And even though that may be our deepest desire at times (I for one would be okay with God zapping all coronaviruses out of existence, and cancer, too, while God is at it), if God came down to crush our enemies, we would be crushed, too. The universe flourishes; it grows in serendipitous ways; life is created freely, and humbly, by God. And that means life is precarious. It is unsafe. It is heartbreaking.
One time a therapist told me that my heart will be broken open again and again “until it stays open.” That sounds like something you’d embroider on a pillow, but it stuck with me. I think I agree. It’s no use anxiously trying to avoid the searing pain of existence, because that pain is embedded in the awe and the joy, in the wonder and the love, of this glorious universe. And God flows through all of this, meekly and humbly, yet suffusing everything with God’s own presence and power.
God in Jesus even stoops down to take on human flesh, entering into the searing pain of existence that we know so well, in the centers of our broken hearts. Once there, God’s presence and power moves us toward one another, and toward the stranger. Once there, God’s presence and power creates the world again, and again, everything flowing outward in beauty, everything extremely ancient, and everything reborn anew.
I have shared with some of you one of my favorite quotations, in a faith-formation zoom meeting. A few months ago, I burdened the staff with this quotation, and they listened with admirable patience. This is a reflection on the sublime humility of God. Here at the edge of the universe, gathered in prayer, searching for the Christ child, nurturing hope, I offer you this reflection, written by the theologian Katherine Sonderegger. (I should mention here that Dr. Sonderegger is a feminist theologian, even as she uses masculine pronouns for God.) Here is what Dr. Sonderegger has to say about God, the One whose mighty arm becomes the delicate limb of an infant.
She writes:
“God … [stands] not openly on the thoroughfares and wide avenues, proclaiming Himself and His glory; the Lord takes rather a hidden place, standing a far ways off, pointing not to Himself but to the creatures He has made. The Lord God, the Almighty, is content, even in creation, to be the One for others. And this is His Holiness. He is content to hold the cosmos in being, yet not be an element within it. He is content to be the Truth, the Wisdom, the Reality of all things, yet to be unrecognized in the manifold truths and discoveries and insights of an age. He is content to be unseen. When the visible and manifest and embodied dominate our human senses, the Unique Lord sits in that lowly place. He does not cry out or lift His voice in the marketplace; we pass Him by as of no account; from Him we turn away our faces. And He bears this. He is present in this way. As with His own living creatures, the flocks of ten thousand on the hillsides, the beasts of the fields and winged birds, the night predators who creep back into their lairs at the dawn — all these living beings find their way without the Lord God’s visible direction. The young ravens, when they cry, are fed by this free God; yet it is the mother bird who flies to the nest with morsels in her beak. The luminous night sky, burning with lesser lights, moving silently in their ancient paths, the planets arcing across their vast preserve — all these turn on their axes, rotate around their giant suns, are born and die in limitless ages, without direct sign of their Maker or the visible, masterful hand of their Guide.
“We mortals, in this sophisticated age, join the stars in their courses and the night animals in their prowl: we too do not see or witness the Lord God as He and His glory pass by. Our explanations for the natural world are entirely natural. The methods and findings of astrophysics, of evolutionary development, of population genetics and adaptation, of paleontology and its geologic formations, of plant science and animal husbandry and agriculture: all these scientific studies of the natural world are fully naturalized, secular and atheistic, in method and content. God remains hidden and lowly there. In our intellects, the One Lord is willing to exercise this great patience, not to be seen or recognized or worshiped. God is that gracious. God is humbly present to human culture and society and history, even to be present as the Invisible One, who is not noted by the actors on the stage. So, we may say that human history, even in its godlessness, rings out with the gracious and holy humility of the One God. In all these ways of His, the One Lord is most free; He is the Subject, the Living One, in all His Deity, the One who is personal in His very Nature. Such is the glorious Invisibility of the Divine Omnipresence.”
May the blessings of the Humble One, born human for our life and for our salvation, be yours this Christmas.
***
Preached on Christmas Day, December 25, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 98
Hebrews 1:1-4
John 1:1-14
Sources cited and consulted:
Jaime Green, “Why Astronomers are ‘Crying and Throwing Up Everywhere Over the Upcoming Telescope Launch,” Slate, https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/james-webb-telescope-launch-astronomers-risk.html, accessed December 25, 2021.
The Christmas-morning comparison of God’s arms was suggested by Gail Ramshaw in her book, Under the Tree of Life: The Religion of a Feminist Christian.
Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, v. 1: The Doctrine of God.