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Trey Lyon
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soul - ache - ideas, sounds and images between the already and the not-yet

star of wonder, star of night (guide us to thy perfect Light)

I should warn you that when you get inspired to write a blog, you had better be prepared to find more information than you ever wanted to know on the inter-web.

That being said, it all started this morning with a modest story on CNN.com (that I can no longer find to link to!) showcasing some of the top pictures of the year from the Hubble telescope. Naturally, this led me to think about the Star of Bethlehem. I wondered what it was, when/where it appeared, who saw it and what it would have looked like if the Magi had the Hubble telescope.

It turns out there's all kinds of theories about this. There's even a Star of Bethlehem documentary/movement that appears to have been started by an evangelical attorney. If you're looking for a no-frills survey of the Star situation, this BBC article gives a cross-section of opinion, ranging from the classic trinitarian convergence of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, to a comet or possibly a spectacular supernova. This Wikipedia entry even has an animated picture showing the convergence of Saturn and Jupiter on November 12, 7 BC. For the reader dying to get to the bottom of this thing, this site is exhaustive, literally and figuratively.

In all honesty, I'm fine with not knowing all the particulars. We now know that Herod didn't reign when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and that throws the veracity of the Gospel narratives into something of a tailspin, particularly when trying to back-date ancient lunar events with records from antiquity. What fascinates me most isn't what it was, but why anything from the heavens would ever want to leave in the first place. 

Let me take some narrative liberties for a second and assume (as the ancients did) that God/Spirit/Jesus is somewhere up there. Literally, up. In the heavens, with the super-cool stars, supernovas, crazy cosmic light displays and imploding galaxies. Why would you ever leave that? Much less leave it for  all that's down here. It's tempting to have a very nice Victorian nativity scene with a Baby Jesus in a perpetually lily-white diaper, but most of us know that wasn't the scene.

On this Christmas Eve I find myself thankful for a God who was willing to work on our terms. Before that little kid in the feed-trough came we could say "You don't know what it's like! You don't know how hard it is! You're just up there, with your galaxies and your stars--you say a word and universes are born, but you don't know what it's like to get sick or watch your child suffer, or you mother get cancer!" In Jesus, God exchanges the paradise of limitless creativity to work with the material before him. As Kyle Matthews calls it "a blue-green tiny grain of sand, two-thirds water, one-third man."

I'm trying to think about this visually, and this is what came to mind.


What boggles my mind the most is that that Light would come down to this mess to "dwell among us." The one who was called "God with us" took on flesh and blood and came into this mess. In him was life, and that life was the light of humanity.

As we anticipate the perfect life, may we never forget the Good News.

That the Word
became flesh
and dwelt
among us.



Merry Christmas everybody. 

May the Light that the darkness could not comprehend/overpower/understand be yours this night.

                                   
Click here to download:
star_of_wonder_star_of_night_g.zip (823 KB)

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Filed under  //   advent   jesus   justice   spaces   stars  
Posted December 24, 2008
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stars and satellites (or backyards, Fomalhaut and divine creativity)

         
Click here to download:
stars_and_satellites_or_backya.zip (9995 KB)

Stars And Satellites by Steve Jones  
(download)

Preface: Hit "play" on the song above--it makes a nice soundtrack to this post!

"He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them."--Genesis 15:5


One of the best parts of living out in the sticks is the lack of "light pollution" at night. The stars and planets seem to jump off the purple-black dome of sky. Every time you look up, it seems like there's something that wasn't there before. You have to stand there for a minute to make sure it's not a plane or a satellite in orbit. Somewhere, somehow, you secretly know it has a name, but it's probably something like Zorbalflax 13 in the Aquinarius region. It's new to me, and for the moment that's all that really matters. I can't even take a picture of it, but the first one above is what Google Sky tells me my backyard looks like at night, and it looks pretty familiar. I can at least get Orion's Belt out of it.

Last week I heard a report that a recently observed star from another galaxy called Fomalhaut appears to have a planet orbiting it. The Hubble space telescope has noticed it's movement from 2004 to 2006. It's barely a reflective speck in the "star dust" on the image. If you look at the pictures above, you can barely see it. NASA did a whole write-up on it here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/fomalhaut.html
I love looking at the stars. There's something powerful and ancient about staring into the heavens, and knowing David did the same when he wrote about "He who brings out the starry hosts and calls them each by name." And every human being since the dawn of time has, at one point, considered them.

And as I stood there barefooted on my patio, freezing through my t-shirt I remembered it was 30 degrees. And somewhere in my head I heard a taunting echo from Genesis 15. Yahweh, the God of Israel has just promised Abram that he will be the father of many nations when he declares "Count the stars, if you can! So shall your offspring be." 

God dares us to count them, if we can. Ten-thousand years later we've built multi-million dollar satellites, theorized and conjectured on what still appears to be a limitless universe. 

Yesterday I was writing someone a message when I was reminded of something I'm still learning--"Our vision of God should always get bigger, not smaller."

To the infinitely creative God
who gives worlds their form,
galaxies their place and stars their radiance,

To the One who brings out the starry hosts
and is able to do exceedingly, abundantly
beyond all that we could ask or think-

To God be glory in the Church, in the Universe
and in Christ our Lord forever and ever.
Amen.

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Filed under  //   creativity   Psalms   spaces   stars   steve jones   universe  
Posted November 19, 2008
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on sacred space(s) (or when God leaves the building)

       
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on_sacred_spaces_or_when_God_l.zip (551 KB)


when I was in high school I was always fond of driving somewhere to sit and read my Bible in the morning. A lot could be said about how legalistic I was then and how I genuinely believed that level of my discipleship was proportionate to how long said "quiet time" was.
 
fortunately, nature has little perception of motive, and I found myself routinely staring at yet another sunrise from my 1985 Jeep Cherokee, scarfing down a Chick-fil-A biscuit as I opened my duct-taped Bible, which is sort of a portable white-washed tomb for a High-School Pharisee.
 
Every day I felt that I met something of the Divine in the sunrise. Frequently I drove to my church and parked in an obscure parking lot overlooking the ballfield--right where the sun was brightest. In the fall I could drive to a near-by park where we used to walk a trail down to throw rocks at the train cars after Sunday night church. The colors were lush, and in their death seemed to speak more verdantly of life then the spring.
 
By the time I went to college it was clear that I would have to stake out new territory. Berry College is still the largest college campus in the world with well over 10,000 acres. Even though I went to Shorter College, and Berry was a bitter rival, the campus held more of Creation than the ark. (There's a long-standing joke that there are more deer than students at Berry, which is cruel, but wholly accurate).
 
On the "Mountain Campus" down a three-mile paved road the only police to stop speeding were the frolicking deer which are prone to colliding with your car at any given second. Perched atop a quiet hill was a small building called Frost Chapel. Everyone knew about Frost. There was a deep and abiding sense of the holy in that place. Even though everyone knew about it, I only found another person there once--it was my own private place to read, sing, play my guitar and reflect. I can't think of it without feeling a deep sense of nostalgia. The above picture is the wall-paper on my cell-phone, just to remind me of the times when I felt the presence of God in that place.
 
After college I headed to Texas, I thought, for seminary. More could be said about that too, but suffice it to say that I was miserable. My oasis in the spiritual desert was a cross-shaped Baptist church that looked mroe like an Episcopal cathedral than the brick-Georgian buildings I'd grew up calling "sanctuaries". I longed for Sundays. I couldn't wait to enjoy the full-ness of worship in that space. The pastor at the time later told me that when he was called there he asked a prestigious former pastor of that church why he went there and was shocked when he said "I took it for the room." It seems shallow at first but once you sit in it, light beaming through stained glass, choir singing "Alleluia", bread and wine broken and passed between homeless men and PhD's--there aren't words to describe it.
 
And today I sit typing this blog from the "computer lab" of the seminary I attended. Jen and I are at a preview weekend as she prayerfully considers pursuing all that God's doing in her life (and ours). To be frank, there's not much attractive here. No stained-glass windows or ancient wooden timbers, though the Dean says there are plans in the works.. No remote hill-top locations that make me want to talk to birds and creatures like St. Francis.
 
Just cinder-blocks and concrete, a few bricks and geometric patterns. The "chapel" space looks ostensibly like a spaceship from afar, just waiting for the right "movement of the Spirit" to beam us all to somewhere far, far away. There is very little here that is aesthetically pleasing at all, and yet I'm flooded with the same emotions I feel when I glance at my cell-phone or here the word "Texas".
 
The scandal of the cross is that God in Christ left the building. Veils were torn, foundations were shaken--all because the Holy now invaded the hearts of all humanity. And still I find myself looking to the sacred space(s) to kindle it once more--to ignite some sense of passion, urgency, and calling to remind me that I am a Temple.
 
There's a wonderful, eclectic sanctuary in San Francisco that I read about a few years ago. When we went to California on vacation, I desperately wanted to visit the church. St. Gregory of Nyssa's church has a simple quote over it's door--"All that is prays to You."
 
And that simple thought is coming in and going forth, invocation and benediction, invitation and commissioning.
 
May our sacred spaces remind us that God has placed eternity in our hearts.
 
Amen.

 

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Filed under  //   broadway   frost chapel   mcafee   sanctuary   spaces   st. gregory of nyssa  
Posted November 17, 2008
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