“Looking Up”
May 9, 2010
Job 38:1-18
Acts 1:1-11
Late last month the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking warned us earthlings to be wary of contact with aliens. It might not work out so well, he thought, giving us images of conquering extraterrestrial overlords. Did you hear about this? The responses to this have been overwhelming. Google “Stephen Hawking aliens” and you’ll get some 3.5 million links.
In the story from the book of Acts that we heard this morning, those men in white robes asked the followers of Jesus, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
It wasn’t because they were worried about aliens, but they did seem to expect something, didn’t they?
“Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”—so the church has affirmed since ancient times.
Why, however, do we look up toward heaven?
Perhaps we look up because we are a sky-gazing people. Maybe Carl Sagan and Joni Mitchell were both right when they said that we are of “star dust”—and we can’t help but look “up” toward whence we have come.
Or maybe we look up because the heavens tell of a greater reality and in some way connect us to that reality. Walt Whitman, sounding as though he’d been down the street at Van Allen Hall, put it this way:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause
in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountably I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.
The clear and mild spring evenings invite us outdoors again, invite us to look up in perfect silence at the stars. Such star-gazing is enchanting, an awe-inspiring and—ultimately—a religious act.
Why do we stand looking up toward heaven? To look at the stars is to be reminded of our finitude, our smallness. Out own solar system is almost non-existent. The universe is mostly, the learned astronomers of our time tell us, “enigmatic dark matter.” The distance to and empty space between even the nearest stars are so vast that they make us dizzy.
To look at the stars is to be reminded of our limits. We are bound to this earth, bound to these few years, watching star light that started toward us before this church was founded, before the time of Jesus or the Hebrew prophets, in a universe that began some 12-15 billion years ago.
Sometimes to look at the stars is to feel small and limited and painfully alone in it all.
The psalmist expresses something like this in asking:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mere mortals that you care for them?
To look at the stars is also to hope that beyond all that light and all that darkness in the night there is a Creator who still knows us creatures.
We look up to the heavens in the hope that beyond the beginning—and beyond the ending—is One who is both beginning and end, first and last.
We hope. In our finitude and our smallness, we hope.
Modern science has pushed our understanding of the origins of the universe to the limit.
“In the beginning,” Genesis tells us, “God created the heavens and the earth.”
“But,” one modern physicist adds, “No one was there to see it.”
That reminds us of the question God asks of Job out of the whirlwind: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
Nowhere to be seen, obviously.
Our astronomers and physicists, however, have been able to look back in time. Their telescopes have detected light/energy that was given out some 15 billion years ago—give or take a few billion. It is most likely the energy from the explosion that started it all. We are told that in the instant after the Big Bang the universe expanded ultrafast. Galaxies grew from a subatomic state.
We have a creation myth for our time—not one involving a God who throws around suns and moons. We have a story of space and time suddenly coming into existence out of nothing—which, surprisingly, seems possible within the laws of modern physics. This is a story of all the matter and energy of the universe compressed into a small mass that exploded with such force that the universe is still expanding from that initial bang.
One scientist, upon seeing images of that billions-of-years-old light, said, “it was like looking at God.”
That such comments came from a physicist instead of a theologian is no longer unusual. The longstanding chasm between science and religion is being bridged by new developments, especially in physics.
“No one has ever seen God,” the Gospel of John flatly states. But modern science is giving us new insights into the workings of the Creator. As our understanding of the world expands God is not pushed aside. Instead, for many, God is found at the center of all that is.
Modern science pushes our understanding to the limits—and God is there still.
Does it matter?
Years ago I learned that science seeks to answer the question “How?” while religion seeks to answer the question “Why?” Those who search the skies for clues to the origin of the universe, who can explain the Big Bang are able to tell us “how.” And yet there isn’t much practical consequence to all of this. Life pretty much goes on as usual even if we have some scientific explanation of how it all started.
So we turn to religion to tell us what it all means, why we are here. Physicists and astronomers send us back into the night to look again in silence at the stars. We look with awe knowing that science, too, is drawing us closer to affirming some universal mind.
And yet many would still ask if such a God is at all similar to the God witnessed to in the Bible.
As soon as life gets difficult, we again ask about God’s presence with us, God’s concern for us.
Which brings us back to that story about the “ascension.”
This story tells us what we already know: Jesus is not here. He was with us. Now we are without his physical presence. The ascension asks questions that we ask each day: What does it mean to "follow Jesus" when there is no Jesus to follow? How do I affirm life when my friends are dying? Is it possible to stand for love or justice or mercy when money or violence seem to rule?
When we stop thinking in terms of up and down, heaven and earth, when we start to think theologically, this story tells us of God’s continuing presence with us as individuals and as a community of faith.
As a congregation, we are not a memorial society for a dead Jesus.[1] The same force that empowered Jesus is here within us and among us. Jesus is not physically present to a few people—and so God’s Spirit of power and life is given to all who will receive it.
God is here in all the good things in life. And God is also with a creation that suffers, with people who know sin and brokenness. God is present when the cross is heavy to bear.
The ascension of Jesus tells us that God is here and that, yes, it does make a difference.
What I know of God I know from what has been shown in the life and death, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. And there’s not a lot of scientific certainty in that. I know God to be a Creator involved with the creation. I know God as just and loving—encompassing both the predictability and the change, the regularity and the novelty, the order and the spontaneity that science sees in nature.
Science seeks certainty.
Faith, by its very nature, is not certainty. Faith rests on trust. Faith is not belief in what is unbelievable but commitment to the way of love that we discover in Jesus, the visible image of the unseen God.
Faith results not from proof, but from awe.
So that great biblical poet, the author of the book of Job, after probing and examining all the possible reasons why someone might suffer, finally has the Sovereign God, the great Creator, speak question after question—to which Job finally replies: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.”
What does it all mean? Why is there something instead of nothing? Why do we find ourselves living and breathing in this time and place at all? Job seems to say: “It’s beyond me.”
The Protestant Reformers asked, “What is the chief end of human beings?” And they gave the wonderful answer that our chief end is to know God and to enjoy God forever.
All of our knowing—in Christ, through science—all of our knowing grows out of a sense of wonder and finally leads us to awed-filled enjoyment of our Creator.
Go out this week. Look up in perfect silence to the heavens. Be still. You stand in the presence of God—unknown, unknowable, beyond all that is—yet revealed to us in Jesus Christ as the One whose Spirit abides with us still.