Two weeks ago, I spent a week of study leave at the Chautauqua Institute, an amazing summer vacation learning community that was started 150 years ago by a Methodist minister and a businessman to provide training for Sunday School teachers and other lay leaders. Still going strong, the community includes denominational houses like the Presbyterian House where Kerry and I stayed, but the community now also includes multi-faiths and people of no faith. Each week during the summer people gather to have recreational fun alongside the lake, enjoy plays and concerts, attend daily worship (if you want to), and hear presentations on important topics. The theme for our week was “Wonder and Awe.”
Dr. Feryal Ozel, who is chair of Astrophysics at Georgia Tech, was one of the speakers. Twenty years ago, she and a team that would grow to 200 scientists sought out to do what seemed to be impossible: capture an image of a black hole. The task seemed impossible because the closest black hole is 53 million light years away. While black holes are incredibly dense because of the exponential force of gravity in them, they are not that big. And the gravity within them is so strong that no light escapes. As a result of all that, what they were trying to do, she said, was the equivalent of taking a picture of a doughnut that is sitting on the surface of the moon.
No telescope can be built to see the edges around that black hole – not even one launched in space. So, what the team did was to try to make it possible to link 8 telescopes around the world to see the image at exactly the same time – creating, in effect, a telescope nearly as big as the earth. To do that, they needed hardware, software, and computing power that exceeded anything that then existed. It would take supercomputers and the development of graphic processing to make it possible to do the millions of necessary computations. That is why it took nearly 20 years.
But then in 2019, they showed the world this…
For the first time, we are seeing the black hole, the edge of where the light of nearby stars disappears because it is sucked in by the black hole. Remember: it took 53 million years for this light around the edges to reach us. Isn’t that amazing! …
Some Christians and some scientists like to talk about the divide and incompatibility between science and faith. Whichever camp they are in, they tend to disdain the other for being either too secular or too superstitious. But most people in our Presbyterian tradition have not found science and faith so incompatible. Indeed, scientists like Dr. Ozel, whatever their faith beliefs, share two things in common with the psalmists and Jesus in the three Biblical passages we have heard today in the Call to Worship and Scripture readings.
First, like Dr. Ozel and her colleagues, the psalmists and Jesus pay attention to God’s creation. Listen again to Psalm 8: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established…” Can’t you just picture the psalmist laying on the ground looking up at the sky on a star-filled night? Or consider Psalm 104: “O Lord, how manifold are your works!…Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great.” Again, can’t you picture the psalmist looking out to sea?
And then, there are the words of Jesus: “look at the birds of the air” and “consider the lilies of the field…” He is teaching outside and points to what is right in front of the crowds and disciples if they take the time to look. Like the psalmists, like Dr. Ozel, Jesus pays attention to God’s creation.
Do we? Louise Patrick, a Presbyterian pastor, once wrote, “We are running into it every day, and yet somehow it escapes us. We see the silvery rain peppering the pond. And we smell the incense of honeysuckle at the end of a hot and bothered summer day. And at night we listen while the waves lull the shore to sleep, or while some whippoorwill makes its call out of a deep, dark wood…[We] catch the wonder that lies deep down in things – where life consists not in the number of breaths we take, but in those times when our breath is taken away from us and all we can do is say, ‘Ah…Ah!’ That’s why no day is lost in which we marvel.”[i]
But, as Patrick points out, this “ah” of wonder often escapes us. We can get so busy, or get so preoccupied, that we don’t take the time to really notice God’s creation, or we don’t take notice of all that is going around us. Technology is great, but technology also offers the opportunity “of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.” (Max Frisch) We live in houses heated and cooled to offset the range of temperatures in the changing seasons. Most of us work inside. We can drive from one garage to another. Never in human history have humans been as freed from experiencing the natural world as we Americans living in 2024.
Experiencing the “ahs” of creation: it may mean getting unplugged from our screens. It may mean stepping out of our routines and taking time we don’t think we have, or be willing to do something that has no goals and cannot be counted by the world’s standards as being “productive.” It may mean gathering outside on a beautiful summer night for an informal Caring for Creation service and blessing of the animals as we did here this past Thursday night. The time and attention we give to God’s creation is always worth it.
As our Presbyterian founder, John Calvin, once put it, “the world is the theater of God’s glory.” Our Celtic Christian ancestors in Scotland liked to talk about the two books that reveal God: the book of creation and the book of the Bible. Creation testifies to the imagination, power, purpose, and beauty of God. The question we have to answer about the book of creation is the same we have to answer about the Bible: Will we open the book?
Paying attention to God’s creation is not intended by God to be something we dutifully do without enjoyment like taking a vitamin or getting our exercise. Instead, Psalm 104 is filled with words like “joy” and “celebrate” and “take pleasure in.” As one commentator on this text writes, “This is not an austere portrait of the ‘works’ of God. There is delight in the world God made and in contemplating it…The goal of creation, in all its details and in its whole is to provide pleasure and delight.”[ii]
Or, as Annie Dillard, the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, once put it, “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there…so that creation need not play to an empty house.”
Showing up for the show, enjoying God’s creation – it doesn’t require us to spend money. In some Southern rural settings a century or so ago, when entertainment options were of course much more limited, people sometimes went out to do what they called “marveling.” They would look for unusual flowers or rocks and bring them back o share with others. Perhaps it is time for us to rediscover “marveling.”
And while a long walk in the woods or a stroll on the beach are always nice ways to pay attention to what God is doing, we do not even have to move or leave our front stoop to pay attention to what God is doing. Another speaker we heard at Chautauqua is the novelist Amy Tan, who talked about the birds she intently watched and drew during a time of despair. Those reflections and drawings are in a book recently published that is on the New York Times best seller list. Do you remember what Cheryl Strayed’s mother told her in the movie, Wild? “There is a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there for it. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.” And there is no charge.
Through the book of creation, we see God at work. But as John Calvin reminds us, creation by itself is ambiguous when it comes to revealing God. After all, the natural world includes not only the stars in the sky and the creatures in the sea, but also earthquakes and tornadoes. That is why we Christians have always understand that our clearest understanding of who God is and what God is up to comes not through creation but through Jesus Christ as revealed in the scriptures. Whenever what we see in creation is ambiguous, we can look to Jesus Christ who came to give us life and give it abundantly. (John 10:10).
There is something else we need to remember when it comes to the book of creation: human beings are included: “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor,” Psalm 8 declares.
For many people, to enjoy creation you have to get away from people. Such sentiments are understandable: human beings are always flawed and broken and can be so frustrating. But for God – and therefore for us, human beings are part of God’s good creation. Despite our sins, despite our brokenness, despite our foibles and quirks, God still loves us and delights in us. And so it is that part of paying attention to creation is “people watching,” because when we do, compassion and kindness flow more naturally between us.
The second aspect that links scientists like Dr. Ozel to the psalms and Jesus is that, as a result of paying attention to creation, they find great wonder and awe. Dr. Ozel shared with us how she received a gift from her parents when she was in third grade that set her on her journey to becoming an astrophysicist. The book was a science encyclopedia, and in that book, she saw her first picture of an atom. The picture immediately filler her with wonder and a great desire to learn more about them.
Then, in the question and answer session that followed her talk, she shared about how much joy she had had on a recent family vacation at the beach. She had spent hours swimming around with her goggles looking at the fish and plants, and, in her words, the evidence of wave theory on the sand floor – she is an astrophysicist after all. Her 20 year-old daughter then said to her, presumably with more appreciation than disdain, “Mom, you are like a little kid. You can keep yourself occupied out there all day.”
Wonder and awe. As Albert Einstein, whose general theory of relativity was again proved by the work of Dr. Ozel’s team, said: “the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead.”
Indeed, how can anyone who takes time to really pay attention to the marvels and beauty of creation not have a sense of awe? Or as the Jesuit paleontologist Tielhard de Chardin once put it, “less and less do see any difference between research and adoration.” When it comes to that sense of wonder, the only difference that believers have from unbelievers is that our wonder leads us to give praise and thanksgiving for the One who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of this wondrous, beautiful, and mystifying creation.
And so, we gather to worship each week. As someone once put it, “I go to church because I need a place to take all of my gratitude.”
When we pay attention to creation, when we let ourselves be filled with a sense of wonder and awe, we discover one more thing. We not only want to worship; we can also enter into a sense of peace. As Jesus told the crowd 2000 years ago, we hear him tell us now: “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” The Creator, who has brought all of creation into being with love and delight, always has and always will, provide what we need for today.
I have found two groups of people which most consistently put me in touch with wonder and awe: scientists and poets. I began this sermon with the words and image of a scientist. Let us end with a witness to wonder from the poet, Wendell Berry. Perhaps you will want to close your eyes and go with him into this moment:
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I awake in the night at the least sound
in fear of why my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go down and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world and am free.” [iii]
[i] Louis Patrick, “The ‘Ah’ of Wonder,” in Sermons from Duke Chapel, Willim H. Willimon, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 235.
[ii] Patrick Miller, “The Poetry of Creation: Psalm 104,” in God Who Creates, William P. Brown and S. Dean McBride, Jr., eds. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000), 98.
[iii] Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things,” in The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982 (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), p. 69.
