Merry Christmas!
If you happen to have been here Christmas eve—I was, I go to church a lot—you might recall that yesterday’s readings and pageant were all about shepherds, angels, and the baby in the manger. The familiar—if peculiar—story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is a tale of wonder and courage and extraordinary generosity on the part of God. And at the same time, it’s also a tale of doubt and risk, pain and political instability. And of a birthing center populated by farm animals. Which serve as an intimate reminder of how messy the life of God in our midst can be.
But today we’ve traded the animal stench and human intrigue of Luke’s gospel for John’s version of God come among us. And suddenly there’s no more cows or crying baby, but rather the specter of the cosmic Christ who was with God and was God from the beginning of creation. It’s as if we’ve gone from stable to supernova in less than 12 hours.
As the daughter of an astrophysicist who has dedicated his life to researching stellar evolution, I have actually managed to learn a thing or two about supernovae. And in a very real sense, the stable and the supernova are not foreign to each other. Since one of the effects of exploding stars is to distribute matter throughout the universe, it would be entirely reasonable to say that every earthly stable contains the dust of a supernova. Scientists and mystics alike agree that the ordinary—the ground we walk on, the gardens we plant, the waste we discard, the art we admire—it is all shot through with the extraordinary, with the stuff of stars.
Recall that a supernova is an explosion that can occur near the end of a massive star’s life. At its brightest, a supernova event may be seen in broad daylight. If it is visible from earth, it will—for a matter of weeks or months—look like a brilliant new star. Which is why one theory of the myth of the Star of Bethlehem is that it was a supernova.
The observational records to support that theory are not conclusive, but I am still intrigued by the degree to which scientists and theologians use similar language to describe things that may well have been happening at the same time some two millennia ago. Note that the word supernova does not mean big star or even massive explosion; etymologically it simply means a big new thing. A phenomenon that John himself was trying to describe when he used language like “What has come into being in him was life, the life was the light of all people.”
A big new thing, this Jesus Christ. Baby born in a manger, cosmic co-creator with God, God’s very self; however we understand the one whom we celebrate this day, we do know that he was a supernova in the theological universe. The birth of Christ exploded the myth of a dispassionate God, and—two millennia of Christmases hence—the church still holds in reverent wonder the possibility that the same God who created all things also chose to dwell in creation. Most particularly in that most vulnerable aspect of creation, a human child born in an unstable Middle Eastern country.
Children are anything but omnipotent: they need a lot of help. Ask my dad! I think he was worried when he heard I was going to be preaching astronomy, because he’s been calling to check my work, as it were. This week he reminded me that the gravitational rules of the universe made star formation inevitable, which meant that heavy elements would be distributed through the universe, which ultimately made compounds and cells possible. And then the rules of chemistry and natural selection made complex life inevitable. Which makes us the culminating self-awareness of the universe, dad said confidently. But then, with more humility, he admitted that the biggest gap in our scientific knowledge is how life actually came to be. “In the beginning, God…” might be as good an explanation as any.
In some curious way, we are cut from the same cloth of cosmic longing, my scientist dad and I. He looks to supernova to learn about the origins of the universe, just as I look to Jesus to learn about the heart of God. And we both have to rely on the tools of patient observation. The common challenge for both of us being that the very things we are looking for may be the hardest to see.
We who seek after God have all had times in our lives—some of us may be having them right now—when we look long and hard for the one who is the light of all people, and yet find ourselves wondering if the darkness has overcome it. Maybe our inability to see is because the holiday season is shrouded by memories of people or traditions lost, or maybe because we worry about the state of our common life, or about the health of this fragile earth, our island home.
But here’s a funny thing. Supernova—despite the fact that they are defined by their brightness—are actually very hard to see, too. They’re almost never visible from earth because the dust of our own galaxy obscures our view. Detecting supernovae takes enormous telescopes and computational power, or… it takes enormous patience and singular commitment. Like that of Bob Evans, an Australian Methodist minister who holds the world’s record for visual supernova discoveries, mostly using a homemade telescope in his backyard in New South Wales.
I met Bob a few years ago at a conference that my dad was keynoting, and—being the only other clergy person at the gathering—I had to ask why. Why spend years watching the mostly unchanging sky, night after night? “There’s something satisfying,” Bob said, “about the idea of light traveling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.” Like John, Bob knew that “he himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.”
Bob is also a scholar of evangelical revivals in the southern hemisphere, so he’s a person who has made a life’s work out of searching for the big new thing, spiritually as well as astronomically. But what intrigues me most of all about Bob’s twin passions is that he has unfailingly found the big new thing by patiently watching the small old things. Movements of the spirit in small churches in the outback. Tiny points of light in the southern sky. Night after night he went out to look at the same old field of stars, expecting that if he stuck with it, an event of extraordinary magnitude might be seen.
Like the supernova-seeker, like the shepherds and the magi watching the skies, like the brave holy family looking for shelter, the work of people of faith is to trust that the light is actually is here to be found, even in the darkest of times and places. Here to be found in our complicated families. Here to be found in our divisive politics. Here to be found in the hurting corners of our city now, just as it was in occupied Bethlehem then. Sometimes we might have to look very hard for it. Surely we will have to exercise enormous patience. But I exhort you, people of God, do not tire in your search! Because the good news of Christmas, proclaimed year after year, is that the light of the world really is in our midst to be found, and—in truth—has been seeking us all along.
