Reading the Bible with the Webb Telescope
Photo by James Webb Space Telescope from NASA
A version of this post was shared in a sermon at St. Andrew Lutheran Church and published at Faith+Lead and Enter the Bible from Luther Seminary.
Do you ever get so zeroed in on a project that you completely lose perspective?
A few weeks ago I was stuck in one of those spirals, looking after draft upon draft upon draft of a proposal that would mean a lot to the start-up organization that I lead. I would spend hours on a single paragraph or a few line-items in a budget. If someone snuck up on me at my desk, I’m certain I looked like this guy. The room smelled like burned coffee. I had books half opened all over the floor around me. I was muttering nonsense about footnotes and line-items.
And if you asked my friends? Or my spouse? Or my kids? They couldn’t wait for the project to just be finished.
I’ve been trying to work on getting perspective this year, stepping out of the details to see the bigger picture. I need to make sure that I’m still a present dad for my kids and don’t get too consumed by whatever pressing challenge takes a claim on me first.
I recently stumbled on a set of images that can really put things back into perspective - the images coming back from the James Webb Telescope.
These stunning photographs have returned from this school-bus sized telescope floating in the middle of space, looking as far into space as human beings have ever seen.
The images make for great screen-savers and are shared free for the world from NASA. But I didn’t start gaining perspective until I started to learn a little bit more about these images and the technology that makes them possible.
Take these two images, for example. The image on the left was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1996. It is perhaps one of the most iconic pieces of space photography and it’s titled “The Pillars of Creation.”
A strangely theological title for an image of deep space, isn’t it?
The image on the right was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope just this year. Images like this one are reframing the ways that scientists understand how stars are born. For the science-types, there is endless reading on these topics and more at NASA’s blog. But the story of how we can receive these images is just as compelling.
On December 25, Christmas Day, 2021, the telescope, roughly the size of a semi-truck, blasted off on the top of an Ariane 5 rocket. A little over a year later it arrived at its final destination, one million miles from Earth. Once there, it took nearly six months for giant mirrors to fold out into space like a giant piece of origami. Eighteen hexagonal mirrors, each roughly height of my six-year old folded out into this massive mirror pointed out into space. If you want to learn more about this feat of engineering, take a listen to its coverage on The Daily.
It is the size of this mirror and the fact that the Webb Telescope is in the cold of space that allows it to peer into the deepest, darkest corners of the universe.
The Pillars of creation, for example, in the Eagle Nebula, is roughly 6.5 billion light years away. For perspective, if we imagine the distance between Earth and the Eagle Nebula were shown as the distance between New York and Los Angeles, the Earth would be roughly the size of the point of a pencil. For reference, the James Webb Space Telescope can see more than twice as far as the Eagle Nebula to nearly 14 billion light years away.
It gives us perspective. If we are just one tiny point of a pencil, on this tiny planet called Earth, in all the Webb Telescope can now witness (and beyond!), how might we endeavor to hear God speaking to you and to me?
Well, it happens in a story we call the Bible, this collection of ancient texts passed down from generation to generation. Like Psalm 78 sings, “We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation, the glorious deeds of the Lord and his might and the wonders that he has done.”
For many folks raised in Mainline (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.) or Roman Catholic traditions, the Bible was something that the professional Christians talked about. Or as Jacobson, Jacobson, and Wiersma say in their delightful and Not-So-Stuffy Dictionary of Biblical Terms, “a book that Christians believe is so holy and inspired that they almost never read it for fear that it might draw them closer to God and neighbor or change their lives in some other inconvenient way.”
The Bible was that family heirloom on the coffee table that grandma told you never to touch. Or it was that book that the priest (or pastor) hauled out into the middle of church with all the reverence and pomp and circumstance that comes with it. I didn’t grow up with this understanding of Scripture.
For me, and perhaps for you if you were raised in a more evangelical world, the Bible was a constant companion. It was the rule by which we were judged. It was a manual for morality. It was a script to be rehearsed and memorized over a lifetime.
I attended a conservative parochial (church-based) elementary and middle school. I loved this school. The teachers knew me and loved me, prayed for me and my classmates, corrected me gently when I would get disrespectful (sometimes with lines to write, old-school), and taught me the state capitals, the times tables, and the classics of literature. But as I grew up, I realized that some of this upbringing was unique.
For example, at the beginning of eighth grade I received a full sheet of paper printed on both sides with three columns on each side of all of the scripture verses that I would be expected to memorize by the time the year was finished. We had a verse for each day, a set for each week, a section for each month, and a cumulative test at the end of the year with every single verse on it. My kids will certainly call this my “walking to school uphill both ways in the snow” story.
Not quite that dusty tome on grandma’s coffee table.
At times this long list of Scripture verses has felt like baggage to me, hauling around the bumps and bruises from the constant reminder that “the wages of sin is death” or the strange and disquieting stories from the Old Testament. In eighth grade, it was hard work, and though I frequently rose to the challenge and achieved an “A” in religion or in memory work (what a strange thing to ace!), I just as often resented it.
As my faith evolved and I began to question many of the traditions I was raised with, the memory verses sometimes stung like fresh cuts or ached like purple bruises. I vividly remember Paul’s edicts against “homosexuality” (a word that a new documentary suggests never occurs in the New Testament, at least in any semblance of our contemporary understanding). I can remember highlighting portions of my leather-bound Bible, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it from you.” While it wasn’t only the words of judgment that were marked with orange highlighter, those are the ones that still seem to sting.
“Genesis Quote at memorial site,” George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street Art , accessed March 14, 2023, https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/items/show/1720.
But as I have walked a little further down the road that many are calling “deconstruction” these days, I am starting to understand how generous this inheritance can be. Some of those edicts of judgment call me out of apathy toward the ache of justice: “What does the Lord require of you, O mortal? But to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Or from the words from the Genesis story of Cain killing his brother, Abel, painted on Chicago Ave in Minneapolis, the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered.
Scripture still has something to teach and is still speaking to me, even if I have tried to outrun it at various times in my life.
I’ve come up with my own definition of scripture so that I can be clear with people I teach how I understand its role in my life and the world: “Scripture is our witness to the living voice of God.” Not quite as witty as Jacobson, Jacobson, and Wiersma, but it helps me stay focused on listening for God amidst these ancient verses that indict, dream, haunt, surprise, and prod me.
When I bump into things in my life, seemingly out of nowhere a passage will smile at me, mid-conversation, mid-thought, mid-dish-washing.
(Ask my spouse, it can be annoying!) Here’s an example.
We bought this hibiscus tree at Costco this summer, watered it diligently, rotated it for sun exposure, and eventually brought it inside for our cold, Minnesota-winter. At that point, I completely forgot about it for more than a month. It’s a miracle anything can live close to my gardening incompetence. After all the leaves fell and the tree looked all but dead, I decided to try watering it for once. With a little attention and love, the leaves started to sprout, and the first bloom came out, just like the prophet Isaiah, dreaming of the lineage that was all but chopped down, “A shoot shall come up from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”
How many places in our lives do we leave behind, lifeless, devoid of meaning, just a chopped off stump? But with a little warmth, a little love and attention, and perhaps the call of a gardener present at the first whispers of creation, blooms might just come forth. God gardens in the lifeless places in our lives and in the world, bringing forth possibility where there was no hope for tomorrow.
And for another example.
My mother-in-law is obsessive about the condition of the roads in the upper-midwest where we live. Dissatisfied with the Department of Transportation’s classifications of pink, blue, and green, she is wont to say, “They say blue, but these roads are definitely pink!” Every Friday, my mother-in-law sends a family text message with a little encouragement, some thoughts on the weather, and often, a verse or two from Scripture. Just before Christmastime, she sent this one:
“It's almost Friday. This weather drove Grandpa Jim absolutely bonkers. He'd be yelling, ‘Just stay home.’ And he loved his whole family together more than any gift. I have no advice for this kind of winter driving because I'm in the passenger seat with my eyes closed. But I'm praying for your wisdom and safety and your travel ahead whenever, wherever you go. If grandpa were here, he'd do the same. He might also share with you how as a child they'd hook up the horse and sleigh, wrap up in blankets and ride the maybe four miles to Emanuel Lutheran Church. It was here that the live trees were decorated with lit candles. Sounds dangerous. Anyway, amidst all the planning, changing and unpacking and stressing, let's not lose sight of the amazingness, of the birth of Jesus and all that has brought to us all hope, love, peace. You are loved. You are blessed.”
That text message isn’t a dusty family heirloom sitting untouched on a coffee table. It isn’t a list of to-do’s or a manual for morality. It isn’t the pomp and circumstance of a beautiful volume floating out into the assembly.
It’s alive. It’s a living, breathing, active word.
Active in the absolute mundane moments of deciding whether or not to drive in a snowstorm; alive in the haunted hallways of a new diagnosis; moving in the daring dreams of a child who wants more for this world; singing in the final breaths of a matriarch who looks back on a life well-lived and greets death with the smile of an old friend.
These passages knit my stories together as much as they stitch my sinews. They’ve rattled around in my bones long enough that they seem to spring out when I least expect them and perhaps when I need them the most. But they only crawl out of my body because I’ve dusted off that volume, spent time wrestling, and walked away, like Jacob did in Genesis, with a bit of a limp.
Contending with Scripture is a bit countercultural these days. But, in my estimation, it’s worth it.
It’s worth it to have hope on the tip of my tongue.
It’s worth it to see a story that stretches long before I’m here and will be around long after I’m gone.
It’s worth it to dance with the generations of witnesses who have written, wrestled, dreamed, and dared to speak of God.
It’s worth it because it’s how we can hear this living voice of God, still speaking to us today.
You might be thinking what all this has to do with the James Webb Space Telescope?
Well, a bit of something.
When they were looking to give a title to this, one of the most famous photos of deep-space, astronomers looked nowhere else than someone I can’t believe I’m quoting: Charles Spurgeon. A lion of fundamentalism, full of all sorts of problems that I could list, but preached a sermon featuring this image in 1859. My late grandmother, Phyllis Fleming, who knit Psalm 1 into the first stole I was given, would be proud of me for quoting Spurgeon! The astronomers knew they needed a bigger story than the precise science of how stars are formed.
The Pillars of Creation sparkle with the love of God that shimmers in every moment of our existence. It swings around every corner of creation from the microscopic speck of a point of a pencil all the way to the edges of the universe that we can't even imagine. These Pillars of Creation sing of a God who is breathing in the Eagle Nebula and singing at my corner bus stop.
The New York Times commented that this image looks like the very fingers of God, reaching out of the heavens. I think I see it too, God daring to breathe creation into being, to spark change in our pencil-point-of-a-world, and to trust the frailty of human language to speak to us still today.
Rev. Matthew Ian Fleming
Matthew Ian Fleming is a recovering evangelical who opens up his Bible bruises with curiosity, wonder, and a fair amount of irreverence. He is the founding director of Church Anew, an international platform equipping church leaders to ignite faithful imagination and sustain inspired innovation. With four colleagues, Matthew launched Alter Guild, a podcasting network with over 350,000 downloads that now features four shows including Cafeteria Christian with Nora McInerny and New Time Religion with Andy Root. Matthew is ordained in the ELCA and serves as teaching pastor to St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. At home, Matthew sings unrequested car-duets with his spouse, Hannah, jams on banjo with their two daughters, and religiously bakes sourdough bread.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.