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Sermon for Epiphany – January 6, 2008
The telescope most likely made its first appearance in the shop of a Dutch spectacle maker in about the year 1600. Two children, it is said, were playing with Hans Lippershey’s lenses, put two of them together, peered at a distant church tower, and, as if by magic, the image sprang closer. Hans looked for himself and, recognizing a business opportunity when he saw one, mounted the lenses together in a tube, creating what he called a “looker,” which he tried, without success, to sell to the Dutch army in 1608.
News of this wondrous invention quickly spread throughout Europe; soon they were being sold in Paris and Germany under the name of “Perspectives,” and “Cylinders.” When the idea hit the city of Venice in Italy, it was immediately picked up on by Signore Galileo Galilei, who had already made a name for himself when, at the university in Pisa, he dropped bodies of different weights off the famous Leaning Tower; refuting Aristotle’s claim that the speed of fall of an object is in proportion to how heavy it is. This discovery did not exactly endear Galileo to his colleagues, who held Aristotle in almost reverent regard, and Galileo’s contract at Pisa was not renewed. Still, once let loose in the darkness, light will find its own way.
Galileo’s patrons, fortunately, assisted in this process, securing him the mathematics position at the University of Padua, where he continued his research into the claims of Aristotelian physics, none of which had been subject to experimentation, all accepted solely on faith. Hearing of a new invention which showed distant objects as if they were close by, Galileo quickly figured out the instrument’s secret and, after teaching himself the art of lens grinding, soon made his own, much improved version, which was dubbed the “telescope,” from the Greek “Tele,” meaning “Far seeing.”
Presenting his new creation to the Venetian Senate, Galileo was rewarded with life tenure and a doubling of his salary at the university. Things were really looking up until Galileo decided to use the telescope actually to look up, not at church steeples, but at the sky.
Of course, people had been doing just that for centuries, looking up to the heavens, trying to get a better view of those strange lights from above. Ancient astronomers built temple-like towers, called ziggurats, believing they would bring them closer to the stars, which didn’t seem so far away.
“The skies of our ancestors hung low overhead,” writes astronomer Timothy Ferris of the University of California at Berkeley, who notes that the Greek sun was so nearby that in the famous legend of the boy who wanted to fly, Icarus only reached an altitude of a few thousand feet before the heat melted his wings and sent him plunging into the Aegean Sea, thereby teaching him a lesson about knowing his place.
Since ancient times people have been fascinated by the nighttime sky and have struggled to discern its nature and itsmeaning. Why? Part of the motive, says Professor Ferris, may have to do with the mysterious longing, still in evidence today, to express a sense of human involvement with the stars. They have something to teach us, we have long thought and still think, something about who we are and about our place in the overall scheme of things. Even Socrates, who cared little about astronomy, once said that the soul “is purified and kindled afresh” by studying the sky.
Yet, to the unaided eye, even on the clearest of nights, the sky reveals only a few thousand stars and, at most, five other planets. The viewwould change with Galileo. In the fall of 1609 he began observing the heavens with a telescope that magnified up to 20 times. In December he drew the phases of the Moon as seen through his invention, revealing that the surface is not smooth, as had long been thought, but rough and uneven, covered with craters. The next month he discovered many more stars than were visible to the naked eye, as well as four moons revolving around Jupiter; this latter discovery leading him to the conclusion that there had to be more than one center of motion in the universe, a key tenet of the theories of Copernicus, who had died some 70 years earlier, a tenet which challenged the long accepted view that the heavens revolved around the earth.
These discoveries were so monumental that Galileo outlined them in a little book he called “The Starry Messenger;” a tract which earned him notoriety as well as the disfavor of the Catholic Church which admonished him “not to hold, teach, or defend” Copernicus’s theories “in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.” Although silenced, Galileo would continue his sightings and his studies. Finally condemned by the Inquisition for heresy, he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest, eventually going blind, all the while working with a young student who was by his side when he died on January 8, 1642.
Let loose in the darkness, light will find its own way. In the centuries since Galileo, scientists have developed much better telescopes, capable of seeing further and further, and in the process widening the canopy that surrounds us; raising the sky above us.
In the first half of the 20thcentury, one of the astronomers who contributed most to improving the power of the telescope was George Ellery Hale who, in 1904, established the Mount Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California. At an altitude of just over one mile – higher than Icarus soared -affording a wonderful view of Pasadena, the observatory offers an even better view of what’s overhead.
Despite having no earned degree beyond a bachelor’s in physics from M.I.T., Hale became one of the leading astronomers of his day, dominating the newly created field of astrophysics. Along with his colleagues, he developed newer and more powerful telescopes and technologies, exploring the peculiar nature of distant objects. It was at Mount Wilson that astronomers first discovered what galaxies were and uncovered the workings of the sun. One historian writes, “From the point of view of raw scientific discovery, Mount Wilson Observatory may well be the most productive astronomical facility every built.”
And what was its foundation? What was its guiding principle? The same as it was for the obscure and the famous looking upward, from Hans Lippershey to Galileo to wise men riding camels craning their neck in the night; something that finds its way and guides the way, despite all the surrounding darkness; something that endures, and indeed prevails, through the distance and through the ages; from the furthest reaches of space to the smallest spark shining in a stable.
“More light!” George Ellery Hale famously cried out to his assistants, from his office in a building they called “The Monastery,” insisting on the need to build stronger and stronger telescopes capable of seeing deeper and deeper into the universe. And we have built them, too; telescopes which are no longer confined to earth;no longer limited to perceiving visible light but can scan the entire electromagnetic spectrum, revealing all sorts of previously unseen phenomena cloaked in gas clouds.
Let loose in the darkness, light will find its own way, even if that way is a bit more indirect than we are used to.
Thanks to our new ways of looking, ever since the 1970s, evidence has mounted that the Milky Way, our cozy little galaxy, is surrounded by an envelope of material which scientists refer to as “the halo,” for that, apparently, is what it looks like. Mostly invisible, this halo is comprised chiefly of what are called “dark matter objects,” objects which basically provide the gravitational glue holding the outer reaches of the galaxy together. They’re not quite sure what this dark matter is made of, but they are certain that its there. Why? You guessed it: light.
To search for dark matter, astronomers rely on a technique known as “gravitational lensing,” in which an object, whether visible or not, reveals its presence by bending and brightening the light emitted by a body behind it; a starry messenger predicted by Einstein who, like Galileo, knew that once let loose in the darkness, light will find its own way, bending around dark matter; light will find its way to us, the glory of God rising upon us, the leading of a star shining above us, a halo all the way from the outer reaches of creation to the reflected radiance of our own lives.
There’s a Greek word for this radiance – one spoken as a blessing to Israel in the starry desert: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you…” The word is epiphany, the shining of the face that comes when the glory of the Lord is seen – not far, far away through a powerful lens – but face to face, through the lenses of our own eyes.
“Arise, shine; for your light has come,” says Isaiah, “and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you…Lift up your eyes and look around…you shall see and be radiant.” Today is the feast of that radiance, the celebration of that shining, the end of a star-led journey that began long ago when the one who came to testify to the one coming into the world stood in the dark wilderness and, summoning the words of the prophet, told all who would listen: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!”
Today, at the feast of Epiphany – what some call the feast of the shining – we come to the end of that long walk, arriving along with the Magi, who some say were astrologers, following the starry messenger, stopping at the side of the child whose face is typically depicted as surrounded by a halo – as if the very first words spoken by God in creation – “Let there be light” – took visible form.
At the feast of Epiphany, we do more than proclaim that the Word was made flesh; we proclaim that the Word radiates from our eyes; that it shines through thebrightness of our dawn. As it lit the stable, as it guided the Magi, so it lights our days, so it guides us.
Guides us in different ways from those first Eastern seekers. These days, signs from above, while no less magnificent, are, indeed, less spiritually compelling than they used to be. For the people who first heard Matthew’s Gospel, the claim that a star rose to herald the birth of the king of the Jews and then guided astrologers in their quest to find him would have been well understood. Everyone knew that great events were marked by heavenly signs.
Today, other, subtler signs are required; we can no longer look above for something in the sky to show us the way; we need to find the way to shine ourselves, even if it means, as it often does, bending our way around the darkness in order to be seen by all who look for a glimpse of the glory of God face to face. As the edge of our universe gets further and further away, truly we need to get closer and closer together. Despite the fact that our halos may need some periodic polishing, we are let loose in the darkness, offering proof to everyone we meet that we know our place: we are indeed the light of the world.