Look to the Heavens

Have you ever looked at the sky on a clear, moonless night while far away from a city? It is just amazing, isn’t it? The stars just leap out from the blackness. The Milky Way really does look milky.

Imagine what nights were like for thousands upon thousands of years. There were no cities. There was no artificial light at night. Unless there was cloud cover, the sky put on a nightly show. What were those dots of light? Why were different stars up at different times of the year? Why did the stars disappear every morning? Why did the moon have phases? What did it all mean? No wonder people came to imagine shapes of animals and humans in the constellations: Ursa Major the bear, Orion the hunter, the swan, the eagle. No wonder our ancestors imagined that the stars affected events on earth. 

Early civilizations built observatories to understand better the changing of the seasons and the right time for planting the year’s crops. One of the birth stories of Jesus has astrologers following a star to find the new king of the Jews.

Today we rarely see the stars the way people once did. We live in cities. Electric lights pollute the viewing, making only the brightest stars visible. I grew up a city kid. I remember how amazing it was to see the sky on a dark night in the country for the first time in my 20’s.

What an irony it is that while most people rarely see the stars clearly, we live in a time when astronomers can see the sky as never before. Even amateur astronomers can look through telescopes that are far better than anything available a few hundred years ago. Alas, most of us see these wonderful images in magazines and on the internet. You and I live in a time that historians will call a golden age of astronomy. Modern instruments make it possible to see and measure the night sky in ways that have shaken our view of the universe. Not only can we see stunning new detail in the very narrow spectrum that is visible to our eyes. We have also created new eyes that see what our eyes cannot see: x-rays, gamma ray bursts, microwaves and radio waves.

Just like our ancestors, we are creating new explanations of what we see. Just like our ancestors, we stand awestruck before the mysteries of the night and speculate about what it means. At one level, this is science: physics, astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy. At another level, finding meaning in the mysteries of the night sky is a religious challenge. We cannot help but ask the questions human beings have always asked: where do you and I fit in the scheme of creation?

I want to tell you a wonderful story that somehow has received little public attention. This is a story about the Hubble Space Telescope. As you might imagine, getting viewing time on the Hubble is very competitive. I mean, you and I can’t just pick up the phone and ask NASA to point the Hubble at Jupiter or the Andromeda galaxy tonight because we think it would be cool to see new images of them. Committees of scientists evaluate hundreds of proposals by teams of scientists and decide how the precious viewing hours will be allocated.

So imagine somebody proposing to spend ten full days (ten days!) looking at a tiny speck of absolutely nothing. And I mean absolutely nothing. Astronomers have mapped the sky for centuries. Modern sky maps have a stunning amount of detail. Imagine a research proposal that said, in essence, after a careful study of the sky, I want to point our most sensitive deep space telescope at a tiny dot in the sky that is the most empty and uninteresting speck of sky I can find. And I want to point the camera at this tiny speck for ten solid days.

This is exactly what Robert Williams did. And he got away with it. Williams got away with it because he was the director of the Hubble, and the director gets discretionary viewing time. This time is usually assigned to other scientists. But Williams reserved the time for himself and pointed the Hubble at a tiny black speck about the size of a tennis ball at one hundred meters. The spot he aimed the telescope at is about one millionth of the sky.

What Williams was really asking was, what can we see if we look as far out in space as possible without any interference from closer stars or galaxies? And, as you all recall, space and time are ultimately the same thing. Time is space; space is time. When we look far away we look back in time. (I am reminded of a marvelous T-shirt I saw in Boulder recently that said: “Time exists so everything doesn’t happen at once; space exists so that everything doesn’t happen to you.”) 

The image that came back is now famous. It is called the Hubble Deep Field image. This image a decade ago showed that this speck of nothing actually contained 3000 galaxies. The story gets better. A few years later an improved and more sensitive version of the camera, the Ultra Deep Field, was able to resolve 10,000 galaxies. Ten thousand galaxies. These far away galaxies take us back about 87 percent to the beginning of time.

Now bear with me while I do some quick math. If this is a representative part of the sky (and later studies taken in the opposite direction have shown that it is), then there are something like 10,000 galaxies in every one millionth of the universe. Let’s see. A million is a one with six zeros. Multiply this by 10,000. That’s easy; just add four zeros. That is something like ten billion galaxies in the universe, give or take. Now, the Milky Way (our cozy home galaxy) has around a hundred billion stars. A billion is a one with nine zeros, so a hundred billion has 11 zeros. That’s easy. Now in order to get a rough estimate of the number of stars in our universe we can multiply ten billion by one hundred billion. Are you still with me? So, the number of stars is something like a one with 21 zeros. More or less. Of course, stars are still being born. Some are exploding. Some burn out. Somebody in here probably knows the name for a one followed by 21 zeros. I don’t. Let’s just call it a bazillion. There are that many suns. Imagine how many planets there might be.

Actually, because there are lots of galaxies not in the visible spectrum, the latest estimates of the number of galaxies shows that my calculation turns out to be low. But at this scale, what does it matter if my estimate is one tenth or one hundredth the final estimate?

After a while it just becomes zeros. The truth is that the human mind is not able to imagine such a quantity. We can calculate it, but it is literally beyond our power to imagine. Our universe is unimaginably huge.

And, of course, the opposite is also true. From the perspective of the universe, you and I and our little planet and our unremarkable sun are unimaginably tiny.

We are also newcomers on the scene. Our universe began a little under fourteen billion years ago. Let’s imagine a time line with one meter equalling a billion years. That’s roughly from here to the last row of the sanctuary. So think of time starting back there and the present being here at the pulpit. The last billion years is the equivalent of one good stride. The last million years is one millimeter. Slice that last millimeter into a hundred pieces and one slice is the amount time civilization and agriculture have existed. All of human history is less than a hair’s breadth.

So not only are we tiny, but we have only been around for a cosmic blink.
What does all of this mean? 

One answer is that “it” doesn’t mean anything. Meaning is not what “it” does. The universe does not mean.

A better question is what meaning you and I give to this. Today, when we look to the heavens, we see more than humans have ever seen. We know more than humans have ever known. Yet the great questions remain. Who are we? What is our place in creation?

The great questions remain, but the old stories no longer suffice. The old myths, told in culture after culture, are stories with us at their center. The myth our culture tells is of a universe created in a matter of days. It is a story of a garden created for us. We are given dominion.

Not so long ago people believed the earth was at the center of the universe. The sun and stars revolved around us. Earth was the center of creation. God had created the earth for us. It was a nice myth.

Today, when we take a long and honest look at the heavens, these comforting myths are shattered. Some people are frightened by this new picture. They refuse to believe what is before our eyes. They choose to cling to the old myths.

Humanity is having to learn what every one of us learned as we grew up: we are not the center of the universe. We are cosmic newcomers. Our place is tiny. Our time is brief.

Today any religion worthy of its name must be able to take a long, hard and honest look at the Hubble Deep Field image. A religion that cannot speak to the undeniable truth of the Deep Field is a religion that is refusing to grow up.

  What shall it mean to us that we are an imaginably tiny part of creation?
Let me share what it means to me.
When I reflect on all that modern astronomy and science has taught us in the last few generations, I find myself in a new world.

When I look at the Deep Field image, my initial reaction is a primal human feeling: I am simply awed. I urge you to go home and Google the Hubble Deep Field. Just look at a photo of an image filled with galaxies. I am filled with an awe that is at the core of all religious experience. Awe is a good thing. It stops us in our tracks. When I look at the Hubble Deep Field image my petty concerns seem infinitely more petty.

When I think about how our view of the universe is changing, I wonder how much more it will change in the coming years. When I was born we did not realize that there were other galaxies, much less billions of them. A lifetime ago we did not realize that our universe is expanding. Today most of the universe is still missing. Dark matter and dark energy remain mysteries. We can measure their effects, but we do not know what they are.

I don’t know about you, but I think a little humility about our ideas is in order. This is an old religious value, and one we need to cultivate. There is just so much we do not understand. We have learned so very much in recent years. One of the things we have learned is how very much we do not know.

When I think of all the people around the world who know the Truth and are so very sure that God is on their side, I just shake my head. I feel like shouting, “Look at the Deep Field image, for heaven’s sake!” You and I are specks of star dust. What in the world makes any of us think that God is on our side? What makes any of us think that God, if he or she or it exists, has any interest in taking sides? Grow up! You are not the center of the universe. Neither am I.

Look to the heavens! You and I are tiny, and very probably accidental. There is simply no evidence that all this was created for you and me. And there is no evidence that anybody knows we are here.

When I think about time, I cannot help but realize that my life is so very short. And so is yours. Surely you and I can find better things to do than to fight with each other. Poets, prophets and mystics have been trying to get this through our thick skulls for centuries. This violence we perpetuate is sheer madness. It is sin.

When I see the universe expanding and cooling, I realize how precious life is. Life is a gift you and I have done nothing to deserve. We are one form of life. What in heaven’s name are we doing by destroying it with our recklessness? Rather than fight each other we should fight disease, hunger, poverty, pollution, global warming, and oppression.

You and I are stardust. We are made up of byproducts of thermonuclear fusion that occurred in stars now dead.

Life is a mind boggling gift. Our time is brief.

Take my hand. I’ll take yours. Let us be gentle with one another. Let us use the time we have been given to lead lives that are filled with wonder, filled with purpose, filled with love. Let us not waste this little time that we have been given. As our reading states, “Tomorrow, you and I could awake invisible.”

Look to the heavens. Let us see our place in this great universe. Let us live with awe, with humility, with love and with joy.

Amen.