December 19th, Advent Day 23
Legend has it that a certain 16th century Protestant theologian and teacher was wont to walk through the woods on winter evenings, and that on one such walk, he came upon snow-covered evergreens with moonlight shimmering delicately upon their branches. Astounded by the beauty of the sight, he took it upon himself to create such a scene indoors—for would it not be a lovely setting for telling Bible stories to his children?
So it was that the tradition of decorating fir trees during Advent came to be. Even today, some five hundred years later, as we ready our hearts and minds to receive our Lord, we gather around a humble tree set atop by one guiding star, that it might be imagined to shine on us from the heavens.
We dare not take this wondrous experience for granted, for we stand at a precipice between two worldviews: one curious about infinite promises given in a guiding star, and another whose inquiries look to mathematical formulas to reveal creation’s story. Indeed, this second perspective was celebrated just a decade ago, when the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two most learned men, Adam Riess of the High-z Supernova Team at Johns Hopkins University and Saul Perlmutter of the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Our generation’s proclivity has been to argue over these two worldviews, and deem them competing. We may want to take pause, however, lest we miss the possibility that the work of eminent scientists informs our understanding of Advent. (Do we dare to bring science into divine contemplation? Indeed, we must!) For scientists Riess and Perlmutter discovered an incredible thing, explained thusly by their gifted colleague Brian Greene:
"We learned that our universe is not static, [but] that space is expanding . . . by carefully examining faint pinpoints of light coming to us from distant galaxies. Because the expansion is speeding up, in the very far future those galaxies will rush away so far so fast, we won’t be able to see them—not because of technological limitations, but because of the laws of physics: the light those galaxies emit, even traveling at the fastest speed—the speed of light—will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us. So, astronomers in the far future, looking out into deep space, will see nothing but an endless stretch of static, inky black stillness. And they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single central oasis of matter that they inhabit: a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong.
Now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era like ours, attesting to an expanding cosmos [that is] teeming with galaxies. But would those future astronomers believe such “ancient knowledge,” or would they believe in the black, static, empty universe that their own state-of-the-art observations reveal? I suspect the latter."
So, science posits that the very stars which astronomers rely upon today to tell us about the universe will one day no longer be visible. Indeed, the strongest telescopes will not discern the existence of stars, for even the speed of light will be slower than the galaxies’ expansion. The sky will be black. And the people of that age will think they are in the midst of . . . nothing.
Looking to future Advent seasons, then, we must ask: When biblical texts are read to our children’s children’s children (and here we would need many more children’s children if we were to be literal), will they not question the story of three magi who followed a guiding star to see a baby born in a manger? For our descendants will have no experience of stars! How will faithful people counter what we may presume
will be the prevailing wisdom of their time: that Advent texts are mere tales made up for children gathered around a fir tree brought into the house from the cold, that their thoughts and dreams might be diverted from their frigid circumstances on a wintry night. Must they put their trust in the darkness?
Or will our progeny allow that truth is not limited to facts and figures and things seen with the naked eye or even through telescopes, but more: that “ancient knowledge”—both biblical and scientific—reveals what Immanuel has done and is continuing to do, and which can be experienced, both today and in all of tomorrow’s tomorrows, when we open our hearts to that wondrous guiding star.