New Ark United Church of Christ,
Newark, DE
Christmas Eve 2013
 |
| Earthrise from the Apollo 8 mission December 24, 1968 |
Keep surprising us God.
Keep
coming in ways and people
we don’t expect.
Amen.
“In
the beginning was the Word”. And what
was that Word? The word logos, Greek for ‘word’, can also be
translated as message, theory, motive, reason, wisdom, and probably the best
one of all—story. In the beginning there
was a message, a theory, a motive or reason, there was wisdom, there was a story,
and this story was with God, and the story was God. All things came into being through this
story. Without
this story not one thing came into being. What has come into being through this story was life, and the life was the light of all
people.[i]
In order to accomplish this story, to write this story,
to have this story in the flesh, certain ingredients were necessary. One of them was gravity, a necessity for not only life on earth but
for the existence of this universe. I’ve
been reading Col. Christopher Hadfield’s book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. One of the characters in the Christmas story
is a star, and I thought it would be interesting to read about someone whose
job it is to live amongst the stars and to explore space.
It was also 45 years ago tonight that the Apollo 8 crew
broadcast greetings from their orbit around the moon, the first ever. As the crew took turns reading from the first
chapter of Genesis, there were perhaps some who remembered Yuri Gagarin’s
infamous statement that he didn’t see any God in space.
It’s true, there’s not a lot of room for God or faith in
the unknown in space. Chris Hadfield
writes of the numerous simulations and multiple years’ worth of training that
he went through before he would go into space.
There’s no room for mistakes in zero gravity and zero atmosphere outside
a wall that’s only 10 cm thick. In
space, prayer just might be the last refuge of an astronaut.
There’s not a lot of room for the Holy Spirit in space:
that unpredictable dance between us and God.
There’s not a lot of room for grace, if most mistakes are accounted for
before even leaving Earth’s gravity. The
incarnation, God’s story in human flesh, needs gravity, that force which also
brings stars into being.
Almost all of us will never be in space. All of what we do and feel and experience is
here on Earth. We are grounded. Most of what we do and feel and experience is
not life or death, like it is in space. We
don’t need to control the human factor not nearly as much, try as we might most days. We need to leave room, indeed, a wide
spaciousness for the Holy Spirit. There
is not only room but a great need for grace and forgiveness, because we can’t
foresee or simulate all the mistakes we might make from now until we leave this
Earth.
But in space the view is one of wonder and awe at the
expansiveness of God’s creation that includes tiny, insignificant, precious,
and rare little us.[ii] Each of us is a story enfleshed within a
cosmic story of grace and love, justice and peace. Each of us is made of the same stuff as stars,
and through our lives light can shine.
And tonight we celebrate the One who came to show us the way.
The incarnation is earthy, with a gravitational pull that
pries us off of ourselves and puts the outcast, the poor, and the forgotten at
the center of the universe. Holy Jesus,
may the force of love draw us to your lowly birth, to your life lived for
others, to your cross, to your story of justice and peace for all
creation. Amen.
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