When King David stood under a starry sky one night
and wrote “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, mortals that you care for them?” he most likely understood himself to be
standing on a flat earth that was somehow fixed in a huge bubble that God had
created in the midst of primordial waters.
He would have believed that the sun and the moon revolved around the
earth and that the stars were fixed in their places. He would have had no idea that the sun was a
big ball of hydrogen and helium gas set on fire by gravity. He would not have known of the existence of
other planets or even what a planet was.
David lived around 1000 BC.
In the 2nd Century AD a Greek scientist
named Claudius Ptolemaeus wrote a book called The Almagest in which he
described the motions of celestial objects as he saw them. In it he is the first to really describe what
is known as the geocentric or earth-centered model of the universe. Like David he believed the earth was flat and
that the sun and moon and stars orbited around the earth. He also described the movement of objects
called planets or planetes, which
means wanderers. These are lights in the
skies like stars but they wandered around and even appeared to move backwards
at itmes.
Apart from a few wackos’ geocentrism was the way
nearly all cultures understand the universe, from the Chinese to the Arabs to
the Hindi and the Europeans. But, this
all changed in the 1500’s. An expedition
begun by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe
proving that the Earth was round rather than flat. Then in 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus published
his revolutionary work On the Revolutions
of the Celestial Spheres offering a heliocentric or sun-centered model of
the universe in which the planets including Earth and the stars revolved around
the Sun making it the center of the universe.
He was also a proponent of the theory that Earth spun on an axis. It took
a little over 50 years and Galileo’s Telescope, and Johannes Kepler’s discovery
of the elliptical orbit of the planets for the Copernican Revolution to truly
kick in. The Roman Catholic Church,
Martin Luther, and John Calvin all thought Copernicus’ theories to be heretical
contradicted Genesis Chapter One.
If you go outside on a clear dark night you can see
the Milky Way, a thick band of stars that crosses the sky. Galileo was the first to say that the Milky Way
consisted of stars rather than a very distant band of fire. In 1750 on the coattails of Galileo’s
telescope and Sir Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity the Englishman Thomas Wright
suggested that our sun is just one of thousands of stars revolving around a
central point and this galaxy looks like a mostly flat disk. He was spot on but little did he know that at
the center of the Milky Way there lurks a supermassive blackhole. It’s taken the likes of Albert Einstein and
Stephen Hawkings and telescopes that see the light of Gamma rays and x-rays and
radio signals to establish that.
We have since come to accept that the Milky Way
consists of roughly 100-400 billion stars maybe even a trillion if you count
proto-stars and it is between 100,000-180,000 light years across. It is a gross under-estimattion that there
are 100 billion planets in the Milky Way.
40 billion of those like Earth are in habitable zones. Our Solar System is on an inner-edge of a
spiral arm located 27,000 light years from the center around which it takes 240
million years to make a full revolution.
The last time Earth was here dinosaurs were just about to begin their
dominance of life on earth.
On the coattails of Einstein’s work of establishing
the universal constant of the speed of light Edwin Hubble, the namesake of the
Hubble telescope, between in the years of 1922-23 stared into the heavens from
the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California through the monstrous 100-inch mirror
of the Hooker Telescope and discovered that what we had been calling the
Andromeda Nebulae is too far away to be a part of the Milky Way. It is indeed another galaxy, the Andromeda
Galaxy. He then went on to discover more
and more galaxies and also noticed that these galaxies were shifted towards the
red end of the spectrum meaning they were expanding away from each other.
We have very recently, in the last ten to twenty
years come to know that not only is the universe expanding it is accelerating
as it does so giving birth to the notion of something they call Dark Energy
which makes up about 70 percent of the stuff in the universe. There is also Dark Matter out there making up
about 25 percent of the stuff. Its dark
because it doesn’t interact with photons which means it doesn’t light up. Of all the stuff in our universe we can only
see five percent of what is actually there.
What do we know about the five percent? Well, the light from the furthest objects
that we can see took almost 13.8 billion light years to get here. There are approximately 170 billion galaxies
in the observable universe each of which contains anywhere from 1,000 to 1
trillion stars. We cannot imagine the
number of planets that might be out there let alone habitable ones.
Because the universe is expanding most
astrophysicists say that it began with a Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years
ago and they will use the word “created” and the phrase “created out of
nothing”. Many scientists today do
believe in God and like David stare in awe and wonder at the universe God
created. But let’s stop there for a
moment because David was looking at vastness the of the universe and
contemplating how it is that the God who created it could love humans.
When David asked “what is mankind that you are
mindful of him, the son of Adam that you care for him?” he likely believed that
God created a man named Adam from the dust of the earth and a woman Eve from
one of his ribs and from those two came humanity. One thing he certainly sees is humanity’s
apparent insignificance, weakness, and smallness before the greatness of the
heavens. Yet, there is something
remarkable about us. God made us a
little lower than the heavenly beings, yet has given us dominion over his
creation to be his vice-regent.
Even science says we have a special place in the
universe. When we look at the universe
from the infinitesimally small side, it is accepted that all the stuff in the
universe, the energy and particles from which atoms are made were contained in
one very small extremely dense super-particle that God created out of nothing
that exploded to become this big universe.
Early on hydrogen and helium formed and then gravity pulled together
super-massive stars that lived for a few billion years and then exploded. These massive explosions, supernovae,
provided the energy to form the dust of slightly heavier atoms one of these
being carbon upon which life as we know it is based and blew this stardust
across the universe. This stardust
formed into more stars and then planets.
In fact, the particles which form the atoms which form the molecules
which form the cells of which we each consist have been around from the very
beginning getting rearranged by different forces until finally here on planet
Earth there is life, life of varying kinds.
Some life forms here on Earth eat rocks and some even need sulphuric
acid to live. We humans are special in
that we are the part of the universe that is able to understand the
universe. Someone once said, maybe it
was Carl Sagan, “The universe has an interesting sense of irony, in that you
are the universe experiencing itself.” I
won’t mention the possibility of alien life.
We are indeed quite wonderful. In these eyes through which we stare at the
heavens and proclaim the majesty of God, in just one of them, there are about 130
million photoreceptor cells. In just one
of those cells there are over 100 trillion atoms, way more atoms than there are
stars in the Milky Way galaxy in one tiny cell of your eye. When we stare into the stars with these eyes we
are actually looking back in time and can see the very remnants of supernovae
which we call quasars billons of lights years away that may have been the
supernovae that provided the stardust out of which this solar system, this
planet, and each of us is made. Wow!
The name of VBS program this week was “To the Edge:
Encountering the God of the Universe”.
With these eyes we cannot see the edge of the universe, but get this,
with our ears we can hear it. The Big
Bang produced a remnant of sound that permeates the universe. When I was a kid TV stations went off the air
shortly after midnight leaving my little black and white TV hissing with
static. This will blow your mind. About one percent of that noise is produced
by the Big Bang. Through something as
simple as our little black and white TV sets the very beginning of the universe
can say, “Here I am.”
When we consider all this, David was indeed right
when he wrote in Psalm 139:14 we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Yet, we are more than just stardust that has
evolved to be able to observe and understand bits and pieces of this mind-blowing
universe. We are the part of the
universe God has created to know and love him and to give voice to the praise
the Creation offers its maker.
Everywhere, from the biggest galaxy to the smallest particle, every part
of the Creation when you take the time to look at it loudly proclaims, “If you
think I’m wonderful consider the One who made me.” And when we do, we, like David, say, “O Lord, our
Lord, how majestic is your name.”
The awesome
God who created this inconceivably huge and wonderful universe loves us
each. He hears the static of our prayers
and answers. In, through, and as Jesus
Christ by the powerful working and presence of the Holy Spirit in Christian
communities all over this planet God is making humans to look less like a virus
in his good Creation and more like himself in the love we share, the love he
demonstrated in Jesus giving his life for us and which pours into our hearts
with the gift of his very self, the Holy Spirit. Jesus, God the Son becoming human, his death, and his resurrection was a new Big Bang. Each of us in
Christ is New Creation and the God of the universe calls us each his beloved
child. If you think the universe is
awesome, take a look at yourself in Christ Jesus and consider the awesomeness
of that. Amen.
