Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon.
Laying on your back taking in the stars.
Sitting wrapped in a blanket watching the sunrise against the earth.
Moments like that are filled with wonder and awe. Moments in which words are few and the experience in which emotions are more ample than thoughts. Creation speaks forth the truth of God to us all without words
It was the words of the Psalmist in Psalm 19. Psalm 19 includes some familiar verses, perhaps, even ones that you found yourself wording as it was read. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” Perhaps you learned the prayer at the end of the psalm, “May the words of my heart, and the meditations of my heart be pleasing to you, My God.” This familiar psalm teaches us as it taught long ago about the relationship between God and humanity. The Psalm is divided into three parts – the revelation of nature, the revelation of the Torah, and the response of the individual.
The Psalmist suggests that all of Creation, inaudible and ineffable, is an incredible visual aid that consistently keeps the immensity, the majesty, the transcendence of God ever before us. Creation that calls us again and again to mind God. Do you remember that phrase? Mind your mother. Mind your manners. Minding here means to keep or pay attention. Creation calls us to pay attention to God. It is no accident that persons, who have not found a home in the church, have found connection to God in nature. The church fathers and mothers declared that God’s second revelation was in nature. In watching the stars by night, the clouds by day, we are awe-struck by the realization that this world, this creation, our very lives are part of a bigger understanding than anyone of us can articulate. This book of revelation speaks to those who are spiritual, but not religious, who worship God at the golf course and in the mountains. God is creative and creates many ways in which God’s self is known.
The Psalm connects the majesty of the created world with the Torah, the scriptures. Hear the verses 7-9 from the Message version, “The revelation of God is whole and pulls our lives together. The signposts of God are clear and point out the right road. The life-maps of God are right, showing the way to joy. The directions of God are plain and easy on the eyes. … The decisions of God are accurate down to the nth degree” (Ps. 19:7-9, Message). We live out the commitment as God’s people with clarity. The beauty and immensity of the sky drive us to faithful creation care as acts of praise and worship.
Frederick Buechner writes, “Glory is to God what style is to an artist. In the words of Psalm 19:1, “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” It is the same thing. To the connoisseur, not just sunsets and starry nights, but dust storms, rain forests, garter snakes, and the human face are all unmistakably the work of a single hand. Glory is the outward manifestation of that hand in its handiwork just as holiness is the inward. To behold God’s glory, to sense God’s style, is the closest you can get to God this side of paradise, just as to read King Lear is the closest you can get to Shakespeare. Glory is what God looks like when for the time being all you have to look at him with is a pair of eyes.”[1]
Transcendence is the theological term for the God’s existence beyond the physical world. Immanence is the theological term for God’s intimate presence with us. We have often imagined that God is one or the other, completely outside of us and disinterested in us or enmeshed solely in the personal. As Christians, we have an understanding that part of the mystery of God is both. God transcends, or above, distinct from God’s creations as well as dwells with us through Jesus Christ. When we find ourselves only affirming the creator God without the immanence of God, we arrive at Deism and focus on God as the Clockmaker who created and set the world in motion, but has no interest in the future motion and action thereof.
When we only affirm the personal immanence of God without the transcendence, we find ourselves as pantheists saying that there is no God outside of the created. All things contain divinity and that God is the sum of all things. Pantheism is the view that God is everything and everyone – and consequently that everyone and everything is God.
But we look towards the sky and find ourselves wordless in the starry night and inarticulate with the glowing morning sky and wondering all the day through. Signs always point beyond themselves to something or someone else. Creation’s signs witness to the Creator, not as proofs for God’s existence, but as visual aids. Because creation is being re-presented day by day, we catch a glimpse of the ongoing work of the Creator. This has long been the language of poets, the experience of dreamers, and the curiosities of wonderers with eyes fixed skyward.
Kathleen Norris, modern poet and observer of God, said this, “the best description that I know of the Dakota sky comes from a little girls at a local elementary on the Minot Air Base, a shy black who had recently moved from Louisiana and seemed overwhelmed by her new environment. She wrote, “the sky is full of blue and full of the mind of God.”[2] Is this not the budding work of a possible astronomer or poet, theologian or physicist? It is certainly the words of one who understands awe. The incredible, overwhelming feeling that what you have just seen or experience takes your breath away.
It is the experience we have as we see images from space. The Hubble Space Telescope has shown us spectacular photos that would be impossible with the naked eye. The beauty leads to awe and amazement. Here is NGC 6565, a planetary nebula in the constellation Sagittarius. Planetary nebulas are glowing shells of gas given off by old stars at the end of their lives, potentially tens of thousands of years. The second image comes also from the Hubble Telescope. The horsehead Nebula has graced astronomy books ever since its discovery over a century ago. The nebula, shadowy in optical light, appears transparent and ethereal when seen in the infrared, represented here with visible shades.
We have done ourselves a disservice, by imaging that there is necessarily a disconnect between science, the study of nature and religion, the worship of the creator of nature. We have limited our understanding of God by allowing fear to divide the world of science and theology. We have told our children half-truths when we suggested that we know all that we want to or can know about God’s world and additional scientific exploration is necessarily antithetical to our faith. There is nothing in our biblical witness that suggests the curiosity and exploration is not the very thing to which God calls us.
In fact, scientists of days gone by have studied as a way to know God better. Isaac Newton said, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”[3] In more modern times, we hear the words of Albert Einstein, “The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books – a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.” Scientists who have followed the trail of breadcrumbs from curiosity to curiosity, wondering how the world works and exploring all of the corners of that which is known and beyond.
From the learned science to the experienced event, astronauts, those who venture into the sky are often dumbfounded by the immensity of God’s creation. Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell said, “When I went to the moon I was a pragmatic test pilot. But when I saw the planet Earth floating in the vastness of space the presence of divinity became almost palpable and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident.”
God has filled creation with beauty and intricacies. We are apt cultivate awe and wonder as we notice and mind the world around us. Whether you are travelling to the Grand Canyon this week or peering out your window at sunrise, I pray that your week will be filled with moments that lead you to discover or rediscover the immensity and transcendence of our God. The God of all!
This is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, thanks be to God, Amen.
[1] Buechner, Frederick. Wishful thinking, under glory
[2] Norris, Kathleen. Dakota. Mariner: Boston, 2001. 21.
[3] Isaac Newton (“General Scholium,” in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton. 1687)