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Sunday, July 18, 2004
Sermon: “A Pocket Full of Stardust”
Scripture: Colossians 15:
Reverend Larry Gerber
If a single container of dust from a comet can tell us about the birth of our planet, then imagine what Jesus the Christ can tell us about the meaning of life and our relationship with God.
Some scientists call comets, those heavenly bodies that glide through the night sky like a Nike swoosh, with trailing, iridescent tails, undercooked leftovers from the vast cloud of gas and dust that formed our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
If it were possible to capture a comet sample, even just a few rocks, even just a thimbleful of dust, we could answer some fundamental questions, they say, about the birth of the planets and the origin of life on Earth.
Now, they’ve done it.
About seven months ago, a streaking spacecraft entered the bright halo of dust and gas surrounding Comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt 2), surviving a barrage of deadly debris that traveled at six times the speed of an assault rifle bullet. This armored NASA spacecraft was on a mission to collect a thimbleful of stardust, and then return this sample to earth for scientific study.
The back story here is that the spacecraft survived its mission at all. An astronaut in a spacesuit would have been sandblasted to pieces by such a furious assault. But the spaceship, protected by a series of carbon and ceramic curtains, approached the comet and then flipped open a cometary catcher’s mitt which it used to gather particles of leftovers from the formation of our solar system. This priceless treasure, sealed in a re-entry pod, will be delivered by parachute to a test range in the Utah desert sometime in January 2006, concluding a round trip journey with a $200 million price tag.
Researchers believe that comets played a major role in seeding the Earth with the building blocks of life, and they may also have helped to deliver the water that fills our oceans. Scientist Martha Hannerk explains that the comets we see today have been parked in cold storage for billions of years, so they are truly “frozen time capsules.”
And what have these time capsules been carrying? Now it’s possible that we’ll find out from a pile of dust smaller than a thumbnail. Years of research will be done on this little container of debris, and scientists will discuss and debate the role that comets have played in the formation of Earth and human life.
What’s fascinating here is that a tiny sample of material can tell us so much. A half teaspoon of space-stuff will serve as the basis for enormous and far-reaching conclusions about the origin of the universe. That’s what we’re thinking about when we approach this text, one of the great texts of Scripture, a christological hymn which lifts up what some — particularly the work of Teilhard de Chardin in The Divine Milieu, and former Dominican priest, Matthew Fox — have called the Cosmic Christ.
You have to wonder: If a single container of dust can tell us about the birth of our planet, then it’s not hard to believe that this single, solitary person called the Christ can tell us all we need to know about the meaning of life and our relationship with God.
Who is he? Jesus the Christ is our pocketful of stardust. We’re told that he is the firstborn of all creation, the “image of the invisible God” (1:15). Jesus is, for us, the human face of God, the One who appears in flesh and blood to communicate to us the character of an infinite and eternal Spirit. Or, to put it in the words of scientist Robert Oppenheimer, “The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person.”
John the Evangelist put it this way: “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” and we were able to see with our own eyes the glory of the Father’s only Son, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Ignatius explained it by saying that “by the incarnation God broke his silence.”
Perhaps a little school girl put it best when she said, according to John Yates, “Some people couldn’t hear God’s inside whisper, and so he sent Jesus to tell them out loud.”
In Jesus, we see God’s compassion — out loud. In Jesus, we feel God’s power — out loud. In Jesus, we get a sense of God’s personality — out loud.
He was present at creation, but was before creation (1:17). All things were created “through him and for him” (1:16). Therefore, how we treat the creation that was made through him and for him is a measure of how we understand our relationship with him.
The fish of the sea are dying because of polluted water.
Our rain forests are disappearing.
The Wal-martization of the world continues apace, displacing ethnic neighborhoods, open space, small shopkeepers and quality of life.
Six billion tons of topsoil are being destroyed every year due to improper agricultural practices.
As a species, we devote more time, energy and money to devising ways to destroy ourselves than any other species in the created world.
This litany could continue. The point is clear: Those who embrace the Christ of this Colossians text, embrace a Christ who was before creation, who made creation, and who made creation for himself. When we violate his creation, we strike against the one who made all this for himself!
He is the head of the church (1:18). All that we are and understand ourselves to be as a local community and as the universal church ultimately ends up in, and answers to, the head of the church, Jesus Christ. Our mission, our work, our love and compassion, our worship and praise — it all has a christocentric flow and direction. This same “Lord Jesus Christ” (1:3) is working to bless the poor in spirit, to comfort the grief-stricken, to show mercy to the merciful, and to fill all those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matthew 5:3-7). Jesus Christ is the same Jesus in whom “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell” (1:19 NIV) and who is the one on whose orders we act, by whom we have been commissioned, and to whom we give glory.
Who we are? We are a pocketful of stardust. We are the ones whom he has collected, and the ones he has commissioned, commissioned to be the ones who sprinkle the world with his wholeness and his mercy. We are the cosmic sample of Deity made flesh. We are those “who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, but now reconciled in his body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him” (1:21-22).
We were estranged. Now we are reconciled.
We don’t have to fret over issues of our relationship with God. It’s been settled. In another context, the apostle Paul writes, “If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life” (Romans 5:10).
We were enemies. Now we are friends.
We were lost. Now we are found.
We were imperiled. Now we are “saved.”
The long and short of it is that Christ is in us, the hope of glory (1:27).
This is what we must do. We must express this identity in the world.
If we were enemies, we now live as a community of reconciliation. Our relationship with the Cosmic Christ demands that we:
• Live “holy and blameless and irreproachable before him” (1:22);
• “Continue securely established and steadfast in the faith” (1:23);
• Do so “without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard” (1:23);
• Be willing to suffer for Christ’s sake (1:24);
• Live as servants (1:25);
• “Make the word of God fully known”(1:26);
• “Proclaim” Jesus Christ, “warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (1:28).
If all goes well, and the spacecraft Stardust lands in Utah in 2006, we’re going to learn a lot from a little.
When God landed on Earth in Jesus Christ, it didn’t seem like much, but in Jesus Christ we have learned who God is, who Jesus Christ is, who we are, and what we must do as those in whom the Christ of the cosmos inhabits.
We are indeed that pocketful of stardust that God has commissioned to go into all the world, spreading the news to the ends of the earth. We can make a difference. We do make a difference. We are the difference, the difference between a world of good and a world of evil, a world of peace and a world of war, a world of love and a world of hate.
We are God’s stardust, come from heaven, through Jesus Christ. We are the difference. Amen
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Sources:
Bridges, Andres. “Spacecraft collects particles from comet; NASA also hopes for close-ups of comet’s nucleus.” Associated Press, January 2, 2004.
Sawyer, Kathy. “NASA craft gets samples from a comet.” The Washington Post, January 3, 2004, A1.
Yates
II, John W. “Christ is the image of the invisible God.” December 2,
2001, The Falls Church Web Site. Thefallschurch.org.
Let me know what you think. The church Email is: SLUMC@att.net, Phone: 480.895.8766