The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
Sunday January 2nd, 2022
Christmas II: Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84:1-8; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:1-12
You very likely missed it, since it happened at 7:20am on Christmas morning. Perhaps you were still sleeping or lingering over your morning coffee. Perhaps you were already knee deep in ripped up wrapping paper, as we were in our house by that point. But after decades of preparation, countless hours of work, billions of dollars, and numerous delays, NASA launched “the most ambitious [space] observatory ever built,” The James Webb Space Telescope.[1] It is meant to replace the long and nobly serving Hubble telescope which, for over 30 years, has provided humanity with the most incredible images of the cosmos we have ever seen. The Webb telescope aims to exceed Hubble in every way. It will go further, see farther, transmit better. And because the speed of light is finite, the further distance we can see means the further back in time we can see, so scientists predict that Webb will allow us to see the first luminous objects ever to appear in our universe. Wow. That is, of course, if it works, which we won’t know until this summer.
It wasn’t scheduled to launch on Christmas morning. But weather delays pushed it to this rather auspicious date; a date when we hear tell of others who are searching the stars. The Magi, the wisemen of the eastern empires of the ancient world, men schooled in the rhythms of the planets and the movement of the universe, who traced meaning in those twinkling arrays. They could know only a tiny fraction of what Webb will tell us, and yet they shared the human need to seek, to know, to go. Outer Space has long captured the imagination of our earthbound minds. In metaphor, and in reality, it is the great unknown, the magnificent mystery that prods at our consciousness and beckons us with the promise that maybe, just maybe, somewhere out there, answers are to be found.
In many ways, the cosmos serves as a rhetorical stand in for one of the most common, and most incredible attributes of human beings: we cannot help but wonder. About space, certainly, but about anything and everything. Human beings have an intellectual restlessness, a curiosity, that has generated information and insight for us at an unparalleled pace. The amount of knowledge developed by our species in its short existence is truly extraordinary. But human history has shown that it’s not just knowledge we are hungry for, it is meaning. Our restlessness is not solely intellectual, it’s existential. We don’t just want to know what or how, we want to know why. “Why?” is what makes philosophy “the queen of the sciences,” because it’s the question with the hardest answers to find, answers that go beyond the strictly scientific.
This all sounds very grand and exciting, but usually this existential restlessness, our hunger for meaning, does not manifest in such lofty feelings. More often, in my experience, it comes as a bothersome feeling of dissatisfaction; like an itch you can’t quite scratch or wearing clothes that don’t quite fit. It’s a sense that something is not quite right. That things are incorrect or at least, incomplete. This niggling discontent can be personal, or grander in scale. It’s the sense that the world could change, that it could be different, that it could be better than it is. That we could change, could be different, could be better than we are. That is what propels us out into the desert night chasing after the stars, not sure exactly where we are going or when we will get there but trusting that when we do, we will know it.
Of course, as with any quest, on this search for meaning there are dangers along the way and chances to be pulled astray. We are tempted with superficial, easy answers to our hard questions and in our hunger, we often accept them as true. These temptations come in many forms: promises of pleasure, success, ease, comfort, power. The Magi, after all, did not first arrive at the home of the Christ child. Before they find the King of Kings they find the King of Judea, Herod, surrounded no doubt by all the trappings of glory that money could buy and power could secure. He is an impressive, if ruthless ruler whose lies and conniving ways come this close to working. So too our restless souls will be offered countless impressive answers to assuage their dissatisfaction. There will be promises of power, pleasure, personal gain and so on. And yet, the story makes clear that to follow those roads will lead to ultimately to destruction, not satisfaction. Those false promises will not be able to satisfy that restlessness, that dissatisfaction with the person you are, or the world in which we live.
No, the answer our restless souls seek lies in a much humbler place: in one who is weak, who is lowly, who is nothing and yet everything. The Magi came searching, as we all go searching. And they were presented with two answers, two places to put their trust. One looked like power. The other looked like love. And though it made no sense by earthly standards, they placed their gifts at the lowly altar of love. Gifts fit for a king, given to a baby instead. It was absurd. And it was profound. And the message seems to be this: you who go searching for meaning, who seek after truth; you who are dissatisfied with how the world is and how you are as a part of it, if you can find your way to a life, to an attitude, to a place that honors those who have nothing with gifts and prayers of praise, then you will have found your way to a happier, holier place. You will have found your way to God, who came with nothing but love that we might live by nothing but love. It was in that knowledge that the journey of those holy seekers finally found its end, and where we too may find a resting place for our ceaseless strivings. In the lowliness and the loveliness of that humble home. That is the profound truth of Christmas, the why of our existence if we are willing to hear it: a God who comes to us and gives everything to us, for us, in love, that we might do the same. That we were created in love, for love is the knowledge in which our questing spirits will only ever find their rest. To accept that in no way prohibits us from continuing to ask questions that will expand the edges of our understanding. But it does give us the answer that we seek. An answer that lies beyond even the reach of the first and farthest star. Amen.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-launched-now-comes-the-hard-part1/