One of the defining images of modernity occurs at the end of the film “The Wizard of Oz,” when Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow find themselves in the presence of “the great and powerful Oz.” Amid smoke and flame, thunder and flashing light, a booming voice addresses the petitioners who have made their perilous pilgrimage to the Emerald City to beseech the wizard to get Dorothy home to Kansas. It’s Toto the dog who pulls back the curtain to display a grey-haired man wearing a cravat, who’s pulling levers and switches, and shouting into a microphone. It becomes immediately clear that there is no wizard of Oz. He’s a fake wizard, a counterfeit guru, an artificial god. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” he says as his puny insignificance is revealed.
Many people suspect that just such a ruse of falsity can be found behind some curtain in any and every church: that there is no God, but that the machinations lit by candlelight, behind stained glass, obscured by the smoke of incense are nothing but the petty performances of puny people trying to play our parts in costumes we can’t ever really fit. They look at a place like this, at people like us, at me, I suppose, in particular, and say, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, there is no God. Whatever you think is going on here is fake, counterfeit, artificial.”
You might think that the release this week of spectacular images from outer space would tend to reinforce the cynical critique that a worldview shaped by religion is, by definition small, narrow, and in denial, since the universe is so much more vast than anything imagined at the altar or in the scriptures. How can we keep on telling stories of Adam and Eve, of Noah and his ark, or of Abraham and Sarah, when we know (or at least we should know, could know) that these stories never happened? Don’t these images pull back the curtain of our religious traditions, showing us a scientific explanation of the world? When we can see in vivid color the distant and mysterious past of the immensity of the universe and explain its origins scientifically? When we can see for ourselves what a teeny-tiny place we occupy in the vast expanse of interstellar space?
We should sit in silent awe when we look at the image that was released this week from NASA’s Webb telescope of SMACS 0723. The image shows us a speck of the sky as small as a grain of sand from where we stand: “a tiny sliver of the vast universe,” NASA says. SMACS 0723 is a galaxy cluster “as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, with many more galaxies in front of and behind the cluster.” Yes, we should sit in silent awe to contemplate the privilege of perceiving light that has travelled 4.6 billion years to reach us.
More profound silence when we consider that according to NASA, that same image revealed “light from one galaxy that traveled for 13.1 billion years.”* It’s a tiny speck on the image, but it’s there: a far-away galaxy that is a speck of light in a sand-speck of sky, many, many billions of miles and many, many billions of years away from us.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain; the scientific details of the expanse and origins of the universe might seem to put the lie to anything you’ll find in the pages of the Bible.
Here on earth, of a Sunday morning, we are asked to look back to Abraham, who, if he was a real person, might have lived around four thousand years ago. But neither science nor history can say whether or not Abraham was a historical figure who actually existed. It’s entirely possible that he did not. Abraham, might be a character assigned to represent the archetypal patriarch of monotheistic faith. He might be a mythical figure who stands-in for whomever it was to whom God first revealed his intention to be in a covenant relationship with at least some segment of humankind. Amen. So be it, I say. An archetypal, mythical Abraham is as real and true as a historical one, if you ask me, since the covenant with God is just as real and true.
The covenant that the Lord made was “to be God” to Abraham and to his offspring, to give Abraham the land of the Canaanites, and to make him the father of many nations. Two out of three clauses of such a covenant would seem problematic to me, since they involve real estate, on the one hand, and fertility, on the other; especially considering that Abraham was 99 years old at the time. If you ask me, the real substance of the matter is the “everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” (Gen. 17:7) But the matters of real estate and fertility were apparently of some concern to Abraham and his wife Sarah, too.
Now, we don’t really know how the Lord revealed himself to Abraham, who was first called Abram. Genesis says that the Lord spoke to him, that “the Lord came to Abram in a vision,” and that “the Lord appeared” to him. All of this is vague. But, then, it was, like, four thousand years ago. Except for this one day, recounted in the 18th chapter of Genesis, when “the Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre.”
Scholars tell us that Mamre was a real place, located near the city of Hebron, in what’s now the West Bank, south of Jerusalem. Abraham and Sarah were camping there for a while by the oaks at Mamre, for the shade, I suppose. And Abraham “looked up and saw three men standing near him.” And the text is clear that we are to understand that these three men are a theophany: a manifestation of the living God. Some people will tell you that they were three angels. Others say that it was the Lord and two angels. Our tradition sees in this moment an appearance of the triune God.
For reasons that I cannot fathom, the editors of the lectionary tell us to stop reading before the story of this appearance is over. What’s left out, as a result, is the account of Sarah laughing at the absurd promise that she, in her old age, would give birth to a son - the child she had much prayed for when she was younger. Sarah, who must have been in her 90s too, was listening from inside the tent to her husband’s conversation with the three men, and she heard the outrageous promise that she would at last become a mother, and she laughed when she heard it.
There is something wonky in the text here, but the divine visitor gets the last word when he asks pointedly and rhetorically, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” And then the Lord challenged Sarah on her insistence that she did not laugh. And the Lord said, “Oh yes, you did laugh.”
The scene, as it unfolds, is the near opposite of the scene from “The Wizard of Oz.” It is Sarah who hides herself behind the curtain of the tent flaps, hoping not to be noticed by an actual personification of the great and powerful Lord of the universe. Sarah can see for herself that there is nothing fake, counterfeit, or artificial about this divine visitor. God shows himself to be real and available, to the point of making house calls. Pay no attention to that lady behind the tent flap. Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?
Cast your eyes if you can from the oaks of Mamre, in their very specific spot not far from Hebron, something like four thousand years ago, to that other very specific spot: a tiny speck of light in a sand-speck of sky, many, many billions of miles and many, many billions of years away from us. In between these two, and beyond and all around them, is the domain of God’s creation. The same God who was at work in the world 13.1 billion years ago, was at work by the oaks of Mamre four thousand years ago, and is at work in us here today. The immensity and age of the universe does not in any way undermine the reality of the Lord who makes house calls, and who expresses his intention to establish an “everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” We’re much better off, it seems to me, if we can see the truth of both instances.
Another of the astonishing pictures that NASA released this week was of the group of galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet. NASA tells us that that image “contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files.” The complexity of these images and the sophistication required to produce them should not be understated. Science has given us a way to see things that, as far as we know, only God has ever seen before. No wonder we find these images jaw-dropping. But the complexity and sophistication, like the sheer immensity of the universe we can perceive, and the sheer age of the light we are perceiving - 13 billion years old! - could serve to discourage us from believing that the God who could create such a universe has any interest in paying attention to the likes of you and me.
To remind us that God does, indeed, regard the likes of you and me, we have the precise address of the oaks of Mamre, where the Lord was known to have visited, and chatted for a time with the father of faith, and with his wife, Sarah. Neither Abraham or Sarah could have imagined the expanse of the universe that was created by the Word of the Lord who sat with them by the oaks of Mamre. If you tried to tell them, they would surely have laughed at the absurdity of the thought that we can take pictures of light that is 13 billion years old; just as some may laugh at the suggestion that Abraham was 99 years old, and just as Sarah laughed at the suggestion that she would bear a child in her old age.
It’s easy to laugh. But it’s not that hard to believe in a God who makes house calls, even if he has been at work in the world for 13 billion years or more. It’s not really that hard to believe in a Lord who wants to establish an “everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you.”
Yes, NASA’s photos of the ancient universe do pull back the curtain, so we can see what’s really going on in the universe, and what’s gone on before us. And what we see behind the curtain is that there is no fake wizard there, no counterfeit guru, no artificial god. There is a universe that is billions and billions of years old.
And there are three men sitting by the oaks of Mamre: a manifestation of the divine, making a house call, and stopping long enough to ask, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
17 July 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
*All NASA quotations are from www.NASA.gov/webbfirstimages
SMACS 0723