December 30, 2007
John 1
What do you consider solid? What do you depend on? What are the central truths about your universe that are so given....so basic that you don’t even have to think about them? What basic assumptions are the foundation of your everyday life? I’ll go get a cup of coffee and be back in a while to hear your answers.
I have been reading about the development of our Western culture and about our modern view of life, the cosmos, religion and such, and at the center of our modern view is a shift in human understanding of the universe that we all know about, but whose impact upon the people of another ear we can barely imagine.
For a million years, people have walked this planet, climbed its mountains, crossed its deserts, felt the rain and sun on their skin. And at night for all those years, the stars could be seen circling around the great plane upon which the human drama played itself out. In the tiny, most recent little piece of the human story that is recorded history, we read that the movement of the stars was of great interest to early civilizations. The stars brought signs of what the gods were thinking and planning. The stars told stories and captured the imaginations of the earthbound. Humans projected their myths into the heavens and in that way the heavens became connected to the human spirit. The sun and moon, those great lights in the sky, circled the earth on their own paths and on their own schedules. Each year the sun’s life-giving light seemed as if it might fade away with days getting shorter and shorter until as happened just last week, the process reversed itself and the days began to lengthen.
The lights in the sky became central in many religions. The sun and moon became gods. Other gods wandered among the stars on strange courses of their own. Our sacred stories speak of the lights of heaven. In the beginning god made the heavens and the earth....two separate things....and that is important for understanding this earlier way of seeing the sky. At one point in our stories Joshua commanded the sun to stand still in the sky. We still speak of God descending to be with humans and of humans rising to heaven.
What I am trying to impress upon you is that for the vast majority of recorded history, and long before, stars revolving around the earth was basic, undisputed, unquestioned truth. Period.
As much as you count on the step outside your front door holding you up when you step on it as you head out the door each day, ninety nine percent of humanity has understood the stars and the sun and the moon to revolve around the earth.
The other piece of that understanding that I mentioned a moment ago, is that in this way of seeing the stars, the earth is one thing and the rotating spheres of heaven are something else. Humans are here, and all those lights out there really are out there. They are other.
Imagine then what an incredible shift was encountered when Copernicus and a few others realized that the truth about the stars and the earth was something other than what had been believed for all those thousands of years. The gulf between the earth and stars had been removed. Earth was a tiny part of an unimaginably grand dance. Instead of being on a fixed piece of rock at the center of all things, they suddenly understood the earth to be moving along with the other heavenly bodies. I have an image of the kind of jerk into motion that is the beginning of a roller coaster ride, and so it must have been for them. These few scientists possessed a vision, a revelation that would put them at odds with all the authorities of their time. They would be laughed at, dismissed and worse.
Luther and Calvin denounced the Copernican explanation of the universe as did secular scientists who said we would all be blown off the earth if it were moving as Copernicus had said.
What must it have been like to possess such a glimpse into the workings of the universe?
Kepler, who shared in the Copernican revelation and himself expanded theories of planetary motion said of his discoveries:
Now, since the dawn eighteen months ago, since the broad daylight three months ago, and since a few days ago when the full Sun illuminated my wonderful speculations, nothing holds me back. I yield to the sacred frenzy. If you pardon me I shall rejoice. The die is cast. I am writing the book--to be read either now or by posterity; it matters not. It can wait a century for a reader as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.
Imagine standing at the end of all that history-----all that time. Imagine living with the knowledge--shared with only a few comrades--that the basic organizing reality of the universe was different than people had always thought. Had always thought. You have discovered something so exciting that you tremble as you speak of it.
That must have been something of what it was like for those who shared the experience of discovery, the revelation that John speaks of today.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God. ... All things came into being through him.........and the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.
Amen.
JB