Unreliable Starlight

Unreliable Starlight--October 17, 2016

"But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings." [Malachi 4:2]

The Shirelles were asking a good question--maybe the essential question of faith.  They just didn't know it in 1961 when they sang it:  will you still love me tomorrow? 

Of course, when it's asked of a boy in a Motown song, it's a reminder of how flighty and fickle the professed promises of a teenager with moonlight and hormones on the brain can be.  But it's also the question of each of us when we hear the promises of "a sun of righteousness" who will "rise with healing in its wings."  The promise of grace healing the world can't help but make us ask the question, along with the Shirelles, "But will my heart be broken when the night meets the morning sun?"  That is, when God promises a "sun of righteousness" to dawn, will its healing prove as reliable in the morning as we were hoping for in the darkness of the night before.

I have been enthralled lately with a science news story that is both fascinating and deeply troubling.  It is the story of  KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's star, in honor of the astronomer who uncovered the odd things going on with this astronomical oddity.  The mysterious and inconclusive (so far) findings are really quite interesting on their own, but I'll spare you the nitty-gritty.  The short version is that Tabby's star is losing light.  It is dimming--the output of its light that reaches Earth is literally dimming, and it has been doing so in strange fits and starts and spurts.  For a while, this was making scientists entertain the question of whether it was a sign of alien life by a race of extraterrestrials who had figured out how to tap the energy of their star with something like giant solar panels that were blocking the light from us here on Earth.  But even though that doesn't seem to be a likely explanation, it is even more haunting, in a sense, to think that for some mysterious and unexpected reason, a star might just stop shining. 

Mind you, these are scientists who know when to expect a star to die, or to explode, or when it is getting on in years and is ready to go to the stellar nursing home.  And Tabby's star isn't one of those.  It isn't "supposed" to change.  It isn't "supposed" to be fluctuating or varying or dimming.  And yet--there is the data. The scientists don't know if the star itself is shrinking or if something is blocking it, or what. There is less light from this strange star, and nobody on Earth knows why.

I think I find that so troubling first because we think of stars as these virtually eternal objects, and we assume that they will be constant and equally bright forever.  Scientists measure the life-span of stars in terms of billions of years, and they say that our sun has even fuel to keep on chugging for another five billion.  We think of the light of the sun as this unchanging thing... and then here come some scientists who have discovered that even stars like our sun can fail.  Even their bright lights in the cosmic darkness can dim unexpectedly, even when nobody knows how or why, much less how to get them to brighten again. It seems like just about everything we think of as solid, as constant, as reliable and unchanging in this life--even the light of the sun or the stars--can be dimmed without warning.  And yeah, that is rather unnerving to me.  I count on that light--and so do you, and so does every animal and plant on earth.

Well, I wanted to take this little excursus into contemporary astronomy news because of this image from Malachi and the picture of healing it offers.  "The sun of righteousness will rise, with healing in its wings," the prophet says.  And it's a beautiful--but also strange--image, largely because we don't picture the sun having wings anymore in the first place, so we don't know how to picture "healing" in those non-existent wings, much less how to know if we can trust the promises of the light to be there.

The poetic promise from Malachi, that God will send "the sun of righteousness," has usually been understood to be a prediction of the coming Messiah--that one day God would send a divinely chosen person to bring about that "healing."  So the prophet has decided to picture the coming Messiah like the sun rising to start a new day.  A lovely image... but one that raises my newfound fear.  Will I be able to count on this sun?  Will the savior God sends really be dependable?  Reliable?  Will the "sun of righteousness" shine a constant, faithful light, or will it dim over time? Will something get in the way between me and its light?  After all, if it can happen to Tabby's star, what gives me any assurance it won't happen to the Source of Light I have staked my entire life on?

Malachi, perhaps surprisingly, thinks that's a fair question.  In fact, Malachi doesn't get a lot of credit usually for the way he embraces skeptics and makes room for those with questions and doubts.  It's a bit earlier in the book that bears his name that Malachi, speaking in God's voice, dares his readers to give their offerings to God and then "see if I will not open the windows of heaven to you."  In fact, God invites the people to "put me to the test."  It's rather like Malachi is so confident that God will come through that the prophet says, "God will double down on the promise--dare to trust God, and you'll see how God comes through for you, and for all."

In a world like ours in which people make big promises and wild claims to us, often only grounded in, "Believe me!" or "I will do such a great job--you'll see!" maybe we have reason to be skeptical.  We have heard the big claims of hope and healing before--politicians are making them at full tilt these days--and we know (if we are honest) that they will not live up to their own hype.  They cannot, even though they keep on making talking big talk.  We cannot help, knowing what we know about real life suns and stars like Tabby's star, that the light isn't always as constant and reliable as we had been led to believe.  We cannot help worrying, too, if the promise of God will turn out to be the same--that maybe there really won't be healing for our broken places in the end... that maybe God's love won't be there in the morning.

The prophet names our doubt--and he makes room for it.  "Go ahead--risk it," the prophet says.  "I get it: you have been let down before.  I get it: the promise sounds too good to be true.   I get it: you are worried God's word will turn out to be just one more sales pitch like every other sales pitch from every other salesman in history--all talk, all a front, all pretending, just to get us to sign on the dotted line."

And we say, basically, like the Shirelles, "Ok, God, despite all my doubts and all the build-up, will you still love me tomorrow?  Will the light of this sun of righteousness of yours really be there in the morning with healing in its wings."

As you know, when the Shirelles asked it 55 years ago, they never got an answer: after two and a half minutes of singing, the question fades underneath the string section. 

God doesn't leave us with only a string section.  God makes room for our doubts, and still makes the promise all the same.  "The sun of righteousness will rise... with healing in its wings."  There really will be grace to heal.  Bring your doubts and skepticism, and they will see.   Unlike every other star, every other sun, every other voice and promise and person in this life, my light will be the same in the new day.

Well, a new day is here... let's find out.

Lord God, be faithful to your promises, and let your light dawn on our darkness today without dimming or fading.