| — |
“The heavens
are telling the glory of God; the firmament proclaims God's handiwork.
Day to day
pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no
speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard;
Yet their voice
goes out through all the earth, and their word to the end of the world.”
|
| I've read these words from
Psalm 19 many times over many years. If I interpreted them at all, it was
as a statement about the nature of the Holy, that God does not communicate
with speech or words or voice. |
| The mystical truth of these
words came to me in a fresh way during our recent trip. We were going across
the New Mexico desert, near the Continental Divide, when we came upon a
whole bunch of what looked like giant, white satellite dishes. There were
27 of them, on railroad tracks that reached out for 13 miles. |
| We stopped at the “Very
Large Array” visitor's center to take a look. |
| These telescopes magnify
radio waves several million times and result in pictures of star formations
in Galaxies 10 – 15 billion light years away. |
| What these radio waves tell
us is where we came from and something about how life began. |
| I am in absolute awe. |
| As you ponder the whole
thing, the greatest wonder is the fact of LIFE. |
| Every moment of our lives
we should be aware of life — what an amazing thing it is — that we exist
at all — that any form of life exists. |
| Not just atoms and molecules,
but cells and plants and insects and rodents and fish and animals and —
in just the last few seconds of time — human beings with capacity to realize
the wonder of existence. |
| I think of the Christian
text that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that
whosoever believes in him might be saved.” How puny and self-centered that
text is. It does not recognize that all of us “whosoevers” are connected
with every other living thing. We have no right to survive while other
life perishes—at least no more right to survive than any other life. The
tragedy of Christianity is not the crucifixion of Christ, but Christianity's
wanton crucifixion of other people, religions, nationalities, tribes, animals,
land, forests and countless species. Pardon me for preaching. |
What I wanted to say is
that the Psalm-writer, perhaps on a desert hillside, sensed more than he
knew when he wrote those words:
“The heavens
are telling the glory of God; and firmament proclaims God's handiwork.
Day to
day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.
There is
no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard;
Yet [by means
of these desert watchers in New Mexico, with radio telescopes]
Their voice
goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”
|
It makes us want to revise
Christian teaching to say:
“God so loved
the universe that God gave it life, that whoever receives
it must love it
as does the
God who made it.”
|
