If you’ve never looked at them before, you should, although these images can unsettle your world. Pictures of galaxy after galaxy of every imaginable shape and unimaginable size, as seen by the Hubble space telescope (hubblesite.org), provide an inkling of why the 16th century discovery by Copernicus that the planets revolved around the sun so upset the prevailing view of the earth’s centrality that it caused his follower Galileo even a century later to be brought before the Inquisition.
The Hubble’s images are a reminder that although our everyday perspective is earth-centered, the universe that is revealed from our vantage point clearly is not. It makes me wonder whether, as I sit here writing, there are not billions of sentient creatures in those far-flung galaxies who are at this very moment contemplating the unsettling possibility that they are not alone in the universe! The Hubble telescope allows us a voyeur’s peek at “all that is, seen and unseen,” granting us glimpses from a God’s-eye point of view, although we have become so blasé about such things that most times we just yawn and change channels.
What the Hubble telescope does for space the liturgical season of Advent does for time. Advent reminds us that we are as swallowed up in the temporal immensity of eternity as the Hubble telescope shows us to be swallowed up in the vast expanses of space. Our self-centered vantage point in time, the seemingly privileged present that consumes virtually all of our attention, is placed again between beginning and end, bracketed by the earliest memories of history and the completion of time itself in God’s unending Kingdom.
The lectionary readings in Advent take us on a whirlwind tour — from post-Exilic prophets, to the anticipation of Jesus’ birth, to his death and the church’s proclamation that in being raised from the dead Jesus has conquered time itself, opening up eternity. Our Sunday lessons place us into the long perspective of time — from now to “the end,” when Christ at the “second coming” is to be shown as the ruler of all things, for all time. Like Hubble, it should take our breath away.
Galileo was condemned for removing our world from the center of what people thought to be the Biblical picture; fundamentalists do the same with Darwin, condemning the dethronement of humanity from the pinnacle of the great pyramid of creation. So it is no wonder that Advent is so often neglected, for it is a season of unsettling realizations that a God’s-eye view of time, like that of space, requires a rethinking of most of our daily assumptions. In the long run, what is most important may not be what my computer calendar keeps reminding me about today. God may be far more concerned with the right time than with the precise time our atomic clocks say it is, down to the millionth of a second.
In the child in the manger on Christmas day there is shown to us what really matters from God’s view. At the heart of the universe is a love as fragile as an infant, as painful as childbirth … and later, as the cross. This love re-centers us to be able to view “all that is” the way that God does – as so loved by the maker of all things that it will take absolutely forever for that love completely to unfold.