God’s Love for the Beings on this Blue Dot
By the Rev. Malia Crawford
A few weeks ago, I went to the Museum of Science to watch the IMAX film, Deep Sky. It shows the story of how NASA’s Webb telescope was created and shares the beautiful images it has photographed from deep into outer space.
The museum website describes the film as follows:
“Deep Sky follows the high-stakes global mission to build [James Webb Space Telescope] and launch it into orbit one million miles from Earth, in an attempt to answer questions that have haunted us since the beginning of time. Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Are we alone?”
How fascinating! Science can address the questions of where we came from and how the universe began, but why were these important questions to ask? While this project was clearly scientific, the ultimate purpose behind it struck me as theological.
Having been educated scientifically as well as theologically, I was struck by the question, “are we alone?” The project involved research to determine whether there is life beyond earth. And yet, even if life is discovered elsewhere in the universe, will the discovery of that life ultimately quench our deepest longings? I kept wanting to yell at the screen, “I think you are actually seeking God!”
A few weeks earlier, I also saw a clip of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. From above our planet, the eye of a camera seems to step farther and farther back into space as Carl Sagan says:
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
How beautiful and true, I thought. And yet, one could draw the conclusion that humanity is so small in this universe that we don’t matter much—no more than a “mote of dust in a sunbeam.”
I wanted to respond to Dr. Sagan and say, “yes AND… God loved these tiny, frail beings on this blue dot so much that God came to dwell among us. We may be small, but we are loved by the creator of the entire universe. And that makes all the difference.”
In Christ's peace,
Malia