The age of the Spirit (Sunday Reflections for June 7, 2009)

The day of Pentecost remembers the story of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the disciples following Jesus’ death and resurrection. Filled with the same Spirit that Jesus had, the disciples and the church are empowered to continue his mission of proclaiming the gospel and making real the presence of God’s kingdom. In Christian theology, the Spirit is the third person of the Trinity and, like the Pentecost festival, has tended to get short shrift. God the Father and Jesus the Son outshine the Holy Spirit, just as Christmas and Easter eclipse their lowly liturgical sibling, Pentecost.

In official church doctrine, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are equal members of the Trinity. Each person is a “face” (Greek persona = “mask”) of the one true God. In practice, of course, the church has had great difficulty keeping all three of these balls in the air in this theological juggling act. Theologians acknowledge the impossibility of fully explaining the concept and so dub it a “mystery”. To religious outsiders, including many Muslims and Jews, there is no mystery: Christians are really tri-theists rather than monotheists.

There is another way to think of the Christian Trinity. In this view, the Trinity says more about us and our attempts to understand God than it does about who or what God truly is. In this understanding the Trinity is more about chronology than ontology, more about humanity’s evolving experience and understanding of God over time than about God’s being or nature.

The adoption of monotheism is viewed as ancient Judaism’s great contribution to the world’s religious history. The idea that there was one supreme God was certainly developing in other places but Judaism embraced it most strongly and enthusiastically. The notion’s popularity spread quickly. The gods of the Greek pantheon, for example, while personal and understandable, nonetheless seemed too human. The tales about them often resembled contemporary soap operas, with humans often the innocent victims of their squabbles and game-playing. As for morality, the rules often seemed to be made up as they went along.

The God of the Jews—at first Yahweh and then simply "The Lord"—while often mysterious and inscrutable, nonetheless proclaimed his unending love for his people. The end goal of the grand drama of the Hebrew Bible was nothing less than the redemption of the world. God’s revealed Torah/Law was seen as a firm and (fairly) clear statement of how humans should live. It was the operating manual for human life and society.

Christianity continued and spread Jewish monotheism. This wasn't surprising since it was based on the teaching of a faithful Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. As indicated above, things did get complicated, however, because Christians insisted that Jesus wasn’t just a rabbi, indeed not just a normal human being. He was also God’s Son, though the church was never able to agree fully on what that meant.

A big part of Jesus popularity, however, was the result of church's giving him a divine nature. As the Son of God, second person of the Trinity, Jesus gave God a “human face”. The God of the Jews, while combining power and compassion, was still experienced as being rather distant and even frightening. Indeed, some have seen the growth of that distance in the Bible itself, moving from a God who walks with Adam and Eve, then talks but remains invisible to Abraham and Moses, then speaks only through prophets, and and in the latest stage not showing up at all in the book of Esther!

It wasn’t long, however, before this human face of God also began to drift away. The approachable Jesus of the gospels gradually was overwhelmed by “Christ the Lord” who ruled the world from his heavenly throne. At the same time, the mission of spreading the gospel was replaced by the church's bureaucratic dispensing of forgiveness and salvation. To compensate, popular piety developed the cult of Mary and the saints who became intermediaries not unlike the alderman who can get you a zoning variance. You offered your prayers and devotion in hopes they would put in a good word for you.

Throughout this time and to the present day there has also always been, to use a recently popular phrase, a “minority report”. Christians holding this view believed that not only did Jesus give God a human face, he also revealed God’s presence in humanity—gave humans a divine face, if you will. They took seriously Paul’s and the gospels’ teaching that the Spirit which empowered Jesus was also present in his followers. Even more fundamentally, this understanding reached back to Genesis’ creation stories which said that humans were made in God’s image and that God made Adam by breathing into (in-spirit-ing, inspiring) a lump of dirt (humus, human).

What happened to Jesus after his crucifixion? An argument can be made that the real point of the Easter/Ascension/Pentecost stories is not so much that Jesus went to heaven but that via the Spirit he entered his disciples. Hence, Paul declares we are each “temples of the Holy Spirit” and the church is “the body of Christ”. We live now by the power of “Christ in you, the hope of glory”.

The notion of Christ as an intermediary between humanity and God is fading. It was overused and abused by a church that kept people coming by convincing them of their depravity and sinfulness. Fear of hell seemed more motivating than teaching that Christ’s Spirit now lived inside his followers. Go to church, take the sacraments, pray, confess your sins, leave your offerings and maybe Jesus will intervene for you with the Big Guy.

Today most people just aren’t buying it. I often hear church leaders sneer at the increasingly common confession, “I’m not religious but I am spiritual”. While there are certainly varying degrees of sincerity behind such a statement, it actually sounds more in keeping with the Bible than many church creeds. And so, ironically, it may be that “average people” have come to a better understanding of what Jesus and the Bible were trying to teach than has today’s church. Rather than a prize to be earned by jumping through ecclesiastical hoops, the life of God and the Spirit is an already present reality needing to be discovered and embraced.

Perhaps then today we have entered an age where God as Spirit is the most meaningful and appealing “face” that God can have for us. Rather than trying to reach a God who is somewhere else, we now are challenged to be empowered by a God who is everywhere and even more importantly, right here—closer than we probably ever imagined. While this understanding may be new in some ways, it is also true that one of the first persons to demonstrate it in his own life was the Jesus we find in Paul and the gospels, a child of the ancient family of Abraham. Thus the wisdom of Ecclesiastes is affirmed again: “Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has already been, in the ages before us.”

Seeing with Hubble's Eye (Sunday Reflections for May 24, 2009)

When was the last time the service department came to you to change your oil and rotate your tires? Didn’t think so. But that essentially is what NASA did last week for the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble is now well into borrowed time and so no one is surprised that an assortment of its parts has worn out, broken down, or even become out-of-date. Hubble’s replacement is still some years away, however, so in order to prolong its life 5-10 years a billion dollar service call (compared to fixing the banks that’s like the change in your sofa cushions) seemed like a worthwhile investment.

A maintenance-and-repair mission via the space shuttle was put on the planning board a decade ago but it was cancelled after the Challenger disaster. “Too risky” NASA’s director decided. Hubble, however, is by far NASA’s biggest success story since the Apollo moon landings. After NASA got its confidence back (and a new director) it was decided to put a Hubble service visit back on the docket. While it will take some months of testing from the ground to be certain, at this point all the intended repairs and upgrades seem to have gone as planned.

The 1960s moon landing project was exciting to follow as it built to its ultimate goal. Once we got to the moon, however, public interest lagged (with the exception of the Apollo 13 near disaster). Getting there was indeed (at least) half the fun. There’s simply no hiding the fact that the moon is a big gray rock and, frankly, doesn’t make for very good TV. Hubble has been just the opposite. Getting relatively little attention during its development, it initially looked like a boondoggle when, after launch, it was discovered that its all-important mirrors had been ground incorrectly. Hubble’s first visit from the shuttle a couple years later, in effect, gave it a pair of glasses to correct its blurred vision. The fix worked and then the show began.

Hubble has performed beyond even its developers’ wildest dreams. Year after year it has sent a steady stream of jaw-dropping pictures of the planets and other objects in our own solar system and of mysteries out to the farthest reaches of the universe. The data Hubble has collected has enabled scientists’ to confirm numerous theories and propose new ones as our understanding of the universe has grown and, in some ways, gotten weirder (so that, for example, some now say we don’t live in a universe but rather a multiverse—a word, I see, is too new to be recognized by my spell checker).

Yet what Hubble has provided us is really only an appetizer, a tease. We are like Alice who watched the rabbit run through the door into the garden. She chases after him—but the door is locked! All she can do is look through the key hole. It’s such a lovely garden—how she wishes she could go there!

When put into human scale numbers, the universe’s statistics are simply mind boggling. Hubble’s pictures, however, even if we can’t really comprehend what we are looking at, provide us a hook with which we can connect ourselves to this vast and bizarre cosmic community in which we live. The thousands of hardly distinguishable points of light our ancestors have gazed at for millennia have now given way to dizzying, psychedelic colors and whirls. Even as we have been numbed by our awareness of the universe’s vast distances, Hubble has suddenly given it character, dimension, and even “personality”.

One suspicion confirmed by Hubble is that the universe’s “stuff” is not spread out evenly but rather is organized in clumps. Thus, there are vast stretches of little or nothing between those clumps. Hubble also showed, however, that beyond those gaps there is a whole lot more stuff. In one experiment Hubble was pointed at one of those empty patches and in a classic photographic trick took multiple long exposure shots of the same spot, thus allowing whatever light there was to accumulate over time. The resulting “Deep Field” photographs (example above) have forever changed our understanding of “empty space.” In Hubble’s gaze beyond this “empty lot” (about the size of a dime held at arm’s length against the night sky) appeared galaxies by the thousands.

It’s been less than a century since astronomers informed us that the Milky Way is not synonymous with the Universe. Only when the first large telescopes were built after World War I and they were able to get a closer look at those “smudgy” stars did they realize they weren’t stars at all but rather massive clusters of stars—in other words, other “Milky Ways”. (The man who demonstrated conclusively the existence of other galaxies? Edwin Hubble.) And yet our own galaxy is itself so enormous only science fiction writers can envision our exploring it. Inter-galactic travel is beyond even their imagination. To realize now that our galaxy is just one among billions of others in the universe is—well, we’ve kind of run out of superlatives.

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Our understanding of the heavens, and probably God as well (we’ve kind of just dropped “firmament” altogether), have changed quite a bit since the psalmist wrote those words over two millennia ago. We can’t know how literally they were originally intended and, then as now, different people probably interpreted them differently. In any case we now know “the heavens” go unimaginably far beyond that blue “firmament” over our heads and beyond the God who used to sit in his above-the-clouds palace.

For many current followers of the ancient biblical religions this has created an intellectual problem and often an emotional trauma. The fact is simply unavoidable that we can’t look at the sky in the same way our ancestors did, or at God. And yet the psalm’s old fashioned word “glorious” is not a bad one to sum up the incredible vision Hubble has given us of this universe in which we live—of “the Creation”, if you will.

“Where is God?” is the anxious question that vexes many modern believers (often forgetting the question is at least as old as the Bible). If the world’s religious traditions are right, that awe and wonder are universal human responses to experiencing the divine, then perhaps Hubble has given new depth and meaning to the psalmist’s experience. The heavens are even more “glorious” than he could ever have imagined.

The scientific search and the religious quest are often seen as being at odds but Hubble’s spectacular legacy may be to help us realize that they are not so different after all. Indeed Hubble may actually reaffirm one of the most common yet profound teachings of the great spiritual guides, that God and the holy are actually hidden all around us, as far as the eye can see.