Love and Astronomy—August 1, 2024
“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge, so that you may be willed with all the fullness of God.” [Ephesians 3:18-19]
There was a time when the brightest minds in scholarship thought the Earth was the center of the cosmos, and that the whole cosmos didn’t go beyond the night sky, where they assumed the sun, moon, and stars were placed like holes in an upside-down colander.
Then there came an age when Copernicus shifted our view to see the sun at the center of a much larger arrangement, with the Earth and other planets going around the sun in what we call now “the solar system.”
At some point later, we discovered that our seemingly gigantic solar system was just a tiny pinprick of light in a vast celestial pinwheel of stars that we call our home galaxy, the Milky Way (and that the light colored strip across the night sky was actually a spiral structure that we were ourselves a part of.
Now, with space-based telescopes sending us images from the furthest reaches of space, we are learning that there are countless galaxies, each one teeming with billions of stars themselves, and each of those stars potentially a host to planets orbiting them in solar systems of their own. Those same telescopes are showing us, too, that there are objects in the universe that cannot even be seen with the kinds of eyes we have, but are only visible in infrared, or gamma, or x-ray radiation. And while we are on the subject, they are also teaching us that the space in between those galaxies—the actual empty space itself!—is expanding, almost like air bubbles expanding in a growing loaf of bread as it proofs and then bakes in the oven.
The universe, in other words, is getting bigger all the time; and it is getting bigger in dimensions and measures we did not even have words for at an earlier time in our history. So to a large extent, being a scientist in one of the fields that studies the universe (say, astronomy, or cosmology, or the physics of interstellar space and forces like gravity) requires a willingness to let your mind be increasingly stretched by an ever-widening awareness of just how big the universe actually is. It’s not so much a matter of learning you thought one way and then were proven wrong (like you thought the cosmos was 7 units big when it was really 8), but more like realizing that the scale of the universe is constantly growing, and along with that growth, your mind itself has to adapt to bigger and bigger frame of reference.
For the really good scientists out there, that constant expansion of their awareness is a good thing, not something to get frustrated about or angry over. It is a source of wonder for them, and it doesn’t lead those scientific minds to give up on the search for deeper understanding, but rather spurs them on to learn more while humbly preventing them from thinking they have the Final Answers.
And in a very real sense, that’s the way the writer of Ephesians talks about the goal of the Christian life—for all of us. In these words which many of us heard this past Sunday, we hear the apostle pray that his readers, along with “all the saints” (that is, all of us who belong to the people of Jesus) would come to comprehend the sheer vastness of the love of Christ in every dimension: “the breadth and length and height and depth” until we ourselves are filled with the fullness of God. It’s like the way astrophysicists keep revising their understanding of how big the universe is, and the way they humbly come to realize that the cosmos didn’t need their permission to get bigger. Rather, they discover that the universe has been expanding in every direction all along, and they have come, like guests late to the party, to realize its infinite scope. To be a part of the people of Jesus is to constantly have our sense of the scope and scale of God’s love in Christ stretched wider, always bigger than our frame of reference, and always beyond our capacity to contain or control. This is what the New Testament writers pray we would all have.
In other words, this isn’t just a discovery for the so-called experts. It’s not just for theologians or pastors to ruminate in ivory-tower conversations while they debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s an awareness for all the people of Jesus, because only with an expansive understanding of God’s love in Christ can we rightly understand our place in the universe. Only when we realize, both how small each of us is within the endless expanse of God’s love, and how deeply beloved each and every one of us is within that love, can we rightly follow Jesus or make sense of our lives. And I suspect a good number of the ways we human being screw things up in life arise from our insufficient awareness of the unlimited vastness of God’s love in Christ. Maybe that’s why the writer to the Ephesians makes this his prayer, rather than for power, wealth, status, or a leg-up in the next battle of a culture war.
So often, our fear and animosity toward other people boils down to some gut assumption that “THOSE PEOPLE” are outside of the scope of God’s love—and therefore are “dangerous” or “suspicious” or “negligible” and unworthy of our care or compassion. All too frequently, our focus on who has the most money or influence is a matter of our thinking that only the well-heeled and widely-known matter to God’s purposes. And every time we draw a line around “Me and My Kind of People” to separate us from “outsiders” in whatever ways they differ, we keep trying to fence in God’s love to stay within the boundaries and borders we have drawn. In other words, so many of the troubles we human beings get ourselves into (the usual churchy word is “sin”) are consequences of our failure to comprehend, as Ephesians puts it, breadth, length, height, and depth of the universal scope of God’s love in Christ. Genocides and holocausts, territorial wars and religious crusades, all metastasize from a cancer that starts as a myopic view of God’s love.
All this past month we have been exploring what it means to be the people of Jesus. And I hope over the course of these reflections, it’s been clear, on the one hand, that belonging to the people of Jesus is an utter and complete gift, with no tests, points, or prerequisite accomplishments on a theology exam. And at the same time, on the other hand, I hope it has been clear, too, that as we discover we are indeed a part of the people of Jesus, we will find ourselves like astronomers peering out at an expanding field of vision to see the growing universe, and we will have our understanding of God’s love grow in breadth… and length… and height… and depth. And like star-watchers who realize that we ourselves are a part of the universe we observe, we will realize, too, that we are located already within the sweep of God’s infinite love in Christ.
Probing those vast reaches just might take us a lifetime, maybe even an eternity. But it’s worth exploring today. Open your eyes.
Lord Jesus, open the eyes of these hearts from squinting out a small circle to see the stretch of your love in every direction and all dimensions.
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