A Dot in the Night Sky

A Dot in the Night Sky

            Want to feel insignificant or perhaps just the opposite?  Here is what one of the Psalms says about us.

Psalm 8:3-6New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

³ When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars that you have established;
⁴ what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
    mortals^[a] that you care for them?

⁵ Yet you have made them a little lower than God,^[b]
    and crowned them with glory and honor.
⁶ You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
    you have put all things under their feet,

            So in 1990 the Voyager space craft, which is most distant man-made object from us now, turned its camera backward and took a picture of earth.  That picture is now known simply as “the pale blue dot.”  You can look it up on Y tube if you want.  All you will see is a pale blue dot that is our planet.

            The picture was taken from 3.8 billion miles “out there.”  Out there are around 170 billion galaxies, we think, give or take a few.  When the Hubble Space Telescope looks at them they are a little bit bigger than pale blue dots but not much.

            The dots we see out there are images from the past since it takes light years for the light to get here.  That means the “old” dots appear from light sent our way as far back as 13.7 billion years ago when, according to an old story, God said let there be light and there was light.

            No, there is not a conflict between religion and science if you let religion be religion and science be science instead of trying to put a square peg in a round hole.  Trying to make the first two chapters of Genesis into science is to create not a round hole but a black hole; to stretch my analogy a bit.

            The beauty of Genesis is diminished by trying to use it to counter everything from  evolution to climate change.  Give dinosaurs their time and place and do not try to tell me that they lived alongside people.  And of course those people I suppose looked like Ken and Barbie and not like the character scratching his armpit and swinging from a rope in a Zoo.

            God is not stupid and can use evolution as well as beautiful stories like the ones in Genesis that tell why God created and not how.  Science tells us that we are made of star dust.  Genesis tells us that we are made of dust.  Both are true and real.

            The 400 billion stars that make up our little galaxy are shinning lights in a cosmos that is 95% dark; dark energy and dark matter.  As a pastor I dealt all the time with people who asked some form of the question, “Why is it so dark out there?...Why are bad things happening to me?...Why did I get cancer…Why did my child die…Why is it so dark out there?”

            Well, it has been dark from the very beginning.  Even though the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago created a heck of a lot of light, and God said “it was good” even so the explosion left 95% of what was created dark.  That may sound like bad news but the God whom the above Psalm wrote about was not finished.

            We hear later that, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it.”  The 95% is real but could not overcome the Light.  That is why it is called “good news.”  Hey, but it is still dark and according to science always has been dark.

            The Word mentioned earlier is the “word,” Logos in the original Greek in which the Gospel of John was written.  The first chapter of John is called the prologue and is meant to be both John’s “creation story” and Christmas story. Logos is the creative power of God that has always been even before the Big Bang.  Just think, that Logos became flesh and joined us in our neighborhood on our pale blue dot.  No, that is not science but it is even better than science because trust me it is sure true.  I shared that “light in the darkness” with countless people in my 45 years of being a pastor.

            I sure love science but I love the truth even more than the facts.  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness…even though it is damn dark out there…cannot overcome it.   Thanks be to God, and that is both science and religion.  God created with a burst of light and yes with evolutionary timing, but God created.

            So we are but a pale blue dot barely visible in the dark background of the cosmos but read on; we are created a little lower than God and given dominion. We are God breathed star dust.  What shall we do with our dominion?  Will we act like we are the creators and treat each other and our pale blue dot as commodities?  Or will we act like we are created a little lower than the Creator?

            Will we see each other as God created star dust or will we use our dominion to label each other as if we are not created in the image of God but are a kind of god who selects who is in and who is out?  Are we still evolving or are we going backward and deserve to wallow around in the mud from which we came or stand on a mountain and gaze at the stars from which we are made?

            What are human beings that you are mindful of them?  Does God sometimes wonder just what we are and what we have become?  On the next dark night go look up at the stars and breathe in the life that was given as gift.