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.
