Proper 23 – Ted Hackett
I am going to ask you to do two things this morning.
I will frame two pictures for you…
And ask you to remember them both at the same time…
I don’t think you will find it hard…
They are memorable images.
The first is an image of first century Palestine…
Imagine a little band of Jews…blue collar guys..
Walking along a dusty, hot road…
Passing through an area which was neither Samaritan nor Jewish.
They have just entered a little village…
A cluster of small, simple houses and maybe a workshop and an Inn…..
And as they go they hear tinkling bells…
It is a small group of Lepers…
They have banded together because
they cannot associate with any “clean” people…
They are “unclean”…thought to be sinners who are contagious.
They are in dirty, tattered clothes and must wear bells
to warn people to keep away from them.
O.K. …Hold that picture…
Now…picture some of the astounding images you have probably seen taken by the new James Webb telescope…
Images of things that happened a quarter of a billion light years ago…
And light travels one hundred and eighty six miles…per second!
Do the math, as they say…
There are so many zeros in that computation
that I can’t wrap my mind around it…
That’s why physicists use the letter “C” to indicate
the speed of light…as in Einstein’s E=mc2
This means we will be able to see an estimated 200 Billion other Galaxies in our Universe.
And maybe…some empirical clues to such phenomena as
Dark Energy and Dark Matter
which make up about 85% of the universe’s total mass…
And to make it even more complicated…we don’t have a clue about
whether the Dark stuff came into being with the Big Bang
or there was Dark Matter before the Bang and was the medium
in which the Big Bang took place!
Furthermore…Webb can get us perhaps a
quarter of a billion years from the Big Bang.
The Big Bang…the point at which something…
An inconceivable sub atomic something which
contained all the detectable energy that moves the
universe, exploded and the Universe literally exploded into being…
And at this moment that explosion is still in
process as the universe expands…
Blowing out…everything in it moving
away from everything else…
Literally…space expanding because space and time
are functions of the universe and were “born” with the Big Bang…
All of it evolving in enumerable ways…
Running on energy from
That cosmic explosion billions of light years ago
Begun from an infinitesimal bearer of energy…
In a nano second!
These are numbers…
Scales…
Events…
Which our brains are not capable of comprehending…
As the philosopher Noam Chomsky rightly says:
“Our brains are not designed to comprehend some things…”
But we are curious, we human beings…
We want to know, we want to understand…
Some theologians have suggested that our curiosity…
our drive to understand…
Is the basis for the original sin…
The snake in the Garden of Eden told Eve…
if she ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge…
She would be like God!
But I don’t think so…
The early Church theologians called the sin in the Garden
“Felix Culpa”… “Happy Sin”…
Because it started us on the great adventure
of discovery…
The Sin is not the curiosity…
The sin is the misuse of what we discover!
And what seems to be the case is that…
The more we discover…
The more we uncover the
more we find we don’t understand!
The search is a marvelous adventure…
If we don’t destroy ourselves in the process!
But…back to the Big Bang…
If there was a Big Bang…what “Banged”?
If there is an explosion…
Something had to “explode”!
But the Big Bang theory seems to assume there was…nothing…
Years ago, Emory had a series of “Interdisciplinary Faculty Dinners…
Someone in the Academic Deans’ office discovered
that the various “Schools”…Business, Arts, Physics, Medicine, etc.
kept to their own disciplines and didn’t talk to each other…
We were all in our own, self enclosed “silos”…
except for a few individuals who talked to one another…
So the Dean took this model…
Individual scholars talking to each other as a model
and set up a series of interdisciplinary dinners
and invited a mixed bag of faculty…
At one of them, I was next to a physicist…
A nice guy I enjoyed talking to….
We got on the subject of the origin of the universe…
and he tried to explain what Physicist were thinking about that.
In the process he talked about stuff like “Cosmic Inflation” and
“Cosmic Vacuum”…and at one point about “alternate theories”
which seem to point to an everlasting system of
multiple Universes we can’t know…
Something about String Theory…
But with each answer…there was another question…”
For there to be a Cosmic Vacuum, there has to be an absence
of something…an absence of air for instance…
And that is something.
Finally he said to me, with a smile:
“You are the theologian…that’s your field.”
I said: “Yes…the Question of Why is there Something
rather than nothing at all”
He lowered his voice and said: “Einstein asked that question…
and said being was eternal. He didn’t know and we don’t either
I think we never will!”
The more we try to solve the Mysteries of the universe…
The more we think of them as “problems to be solved.”…
The more of the problems we do solve…
We find that the very solution produces yet more problems to solve!
An endless chain of problems…
Each one an adventure of the Human Spirit…
But none of them ever answer to the Question:
“Why is there something rather than nothing at all”
Now the easy …and tempting…thing to do is say:
“Well, of course…the basic Something is God!”
And in one sense that is true…
But that’s a bit easy…
I could say… “But why is God?”
It seems the more we question…
The more we look to solve problems…
The more we find unanswered questions…
Till finally we say…
“That’s a mystery”
And though we usually mean: “that’s a problem we can’t solve”…
That is not what the Church means by “Mystery.”
Now…
Go back for a bit to the start of this sermon….
Remember the image of that little bunch of poorly fed Jews
trudging on a dusty road toward Jerusalem…
Remember the pitiful, filthy little band of lepers
with their tinkling warning bells…
Jesus’ fame has spread and they recognize him…
But the rules are that they can’t come near…
So hoping for some money they cry: “Jesus, Master,
have mercy on us!”
But instead of giving them money, Jesus says: “Go show yourselves to the Priests.”
In that moment they must have recognized something about Jesus because….
Against all experience…
Against all reason…they obeyed!
They turned and went…
And as they went…
Their skin turned pink…
And they realized…
They were…cured!
They were well!
The priests would ask them to make a thanksgiving sacrifice and then certify that they could rejoin society!
They could hug their family…
They could eat with friends…
They could live!
Something that only God could do… had happened!
The Church would come to understand that this…
and other…miracles that Jesus did were because
he bore the power and authority of God…
In fact…
Against all reason and experience…
He did them because he was and is God…
God and yet fully human…
That is not a problem to be solved…
That is a mystery to be lived into…
Not a proposition to understand intellectually..
But a mysterious reality to trust…
To give ourselves up to…Mystery…
In which to find faith…
John says at the beginning of his Gospel … ” No one has ever seen God, it is God the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart who has made Him known!”
That means…that the unknowable Mystery that is
at the beginning and end of all that is or ever will be…
The power and mystery that we glimpse in the Webb telescope pictures …
The awful…awful and fearful One who is the author of all that creation
we see before our eyes in those pictures…
God …
Almighty and unknowable…
Has made himself known in a Galilean carpenter from an enslaved people…
To see Jesus…in his ordinary humanity…yet in his healing power…
To see Jesus, naked and alone…on the cross…
Hanging in helpless, agonizing death throes…
Is to see God…
God…who stooped to be one of us!
And who can understand that?
And to see in our mind’s eye…
The empty tomb…The Angels…
The risen Christ coming through closed doors,
yet eating as the human He is…
Risen…both God and human…
Who can solve the problem of how that was done?
To know the man Jesus is to know the unknowable God…
who for us and our salvation became fully human
The way we treat other people…is how we are treating God.
And it matters to God…
It matters so much that God became one of us…
It matters so much that God died as we die…
And rose that we might live… forever…
Us…a little, passing speck in the incomprehensible universe…
For us…us…he did all this…
In the words of the hymn we sang moments ago:
“My God, how wonderful thou art, thy majesty how bright, how beautiful thy mercy seat, in depths of burning light!
How wonderful, how beautiful the sight of thee must be….thine endless wisdom, boundless power and awful purity!
Oh how I fear thee, living God, with deepest tenderest fears, and worship thee with trembling hope and penitential tears.
Yet I may love thee too, O Lord, almighty as thou art,
for thou has stooped to ask of me… the love of my poor heart!”
Sing thanks…
Transient and tiny as we are…
Sing Alleluia!
The source of all that is…
Knows us by name…
And stoops to ask us…
For our love!